Snow Falling on Cedars (37 page)

‘Or at your husband? Did I hear you say he aimed dirty looks at your husband? Or is it just something your mother-in-law reported as having occurred?’

‘I can’t speak for either of them,’ answered Susan Marie. ‘I don’t know what they experienced.’

‘Of course not,’ said Nels. ‘And I wouldn’t want you to speak for them, either. It’s just that earlier – when Mr. Hooks was questioning you? – you seemed happy to do so, Mrs. Heine. So I thought I’d take a flyer myself.’ He smiled.

‘All right,’ Judge Fielding interrupted. ‘That’ll do, Mr. Gudmundsson. Get on with your questioning or sit down at once.’

‘Judge,’ replied Nels. “There’s been a lot of hearsay admitted as evidence. That bears pointing out.’

‘Yes,’ said the judge. ‘A lot of hearsay – hearsay you didn’t object to, Mr. Gudmundsson. Because you know that
Mrs. Heine is entitled under statute to report the nature and content of a conversation held with her deceased husband. The unfortunate fact is that he cannot do it himself. Mrs. Heine is under oath to tell the truth. As a court of law, we have no choice but to trust that what she tells us is accurate.’ He turned slowly toward the jurors. ‘For want of a gentler title, the legal institution in question here is known as the Deadman’s Statute,’ he explained. ‘Normally it prohibits evidence from being entered into the record – it allows me to rule it inadmissible as hearsay – because the individual in question is deceased. In criminal cases, however, the Deadman’s Statute does
not
bar such evidence from being presented, as Mr. Gudmundsson well knows. Nevertheless, and quite frankly, the Deadman’s Statute creates a … shady legal area. This is, I believe, what Mr. Gudmundsson seeks to point out.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Gudmundsson. ‘It is precisely what I seek to point out.’ He bowed his head to the judge, glanced at the jurors, then turned and looked fully at Kabuo Miyamoto, who still sat erectly in his place at the defendant’s table with his hands folded neatly in front of him. It was at this moment that the courtroom lights fickered in the storm, flickered again, and went out. A tree had fallen on Piersall Road and knocked the power wires down.

Well timed,’ Nels Gudmundsson said when the lights went out in the Island County Courthouse. ‘I have no further questions for Mrs. Heine, Your Honor. As far as we’re concerned, she may step down.’

The four tall windows, frosted with vapor from the steam radiators, allowed a gray snowfall light to descend into the courtroom. Its timbre replaced that of the overhead lights and cast a subtle pall across the citizens in the gallery, who sat looking at one another and at the ceiling.

‘Very well,’ Judge Fielding replied. ‘One thing at a time now. Patience, patience. Let’s proceed methodically, lights or no lights. Mr. Hooks, will you redirect?’

Alvin Hooks rose and told the court that the prosecution had no further questions. ‘In fact,’ he added, winking at Nels, ‘the timing of this power outage is even more propitious than my colleague for the defense suspects. Mrs. Heine is our last witness. The state rests at the same moment the county’s power supply does.’

The jurors – some of them – stirred and smiled. ‘The state rests,’ repeated Lew Fielding. ‘Very well, then. Very good. I was at any rate going to call for a lunch recess. We will get a report from the power company and take matters from there. We shall see what we shall see. In the meantime, I would like to ask Mr. Hooks and Mr. Gudmundsson to visit with me in my chambers.’

The judge picked his gavel up and dropped it again listlessly against its walnut plate. ‘Go have lunch,’ he advised. ‘If we begin again at all, we’ll begin at one sharp – one
P.M.
according to
my
watch, which now reads’ – he peered at it – ‘eleven fifty-three. The electric clocks in this building are useless, incidentally. Pay no attention to them.’

Ed Soames held the door open for him, and Judge Fielding disappeared into his chambers. The citizens in the gallery filed out; the reporters picked up their notepads. Soames followed the judge with the intention of lighting a pair of candles he knew to be lodged in the back of a desk drawer. Judge Fielding would need them, after all. It was dark in his chambers, darker than dusk, with only a pale light seeping through the windows. Ed had the candles lit by the time Nels Gudmundsson and Alvin Hooks had arrived and situated themselves across the desk from Judge Fielding. The candles sat between them so that they looked like three men preparing for a séance – the judge in his silk robe, Nels in his bow tie with its touch of the theatrical, Alvin Hooks dapper and elegant, his legs crossed, one knee over the other. Ed made his way to the door and excused himself for interrupting; was there anything more the judge required? If not, he would see to the jurors.

‘Oh, yes,’ Judge Fielding answered. ‘Go and check on the boiler room, won’t you? Find out how it looks to keep the radiators perking. And ring the power company and get a report. And, let’s see, scare up as many candles as you can find around.’ He turned his attention to the attorneys in front of him. ‘What am I forgetting?’ he added.

‘The hotel,’ Alvin Hooks answered. ‘You’d better ask about their boiler, too, or the jurors aren’t going to make it. They didn’t fare well last night, recollect, and with the power out things will be worse.’

‘Right,’ Ed Soames said. ‘Will do.’

‘Very well, Ed,’ the judge returned. Then: ‘Quite solicitous of you, Alvin.’

‘I’m a solicitous man,’ Alvin Hooks replied.

Soames went out, grimly. The courtroom was empty except for Ishmael Chambers, who sat in the gallery with the look on his face of a man willing to wait forever. Eleanor Dokes
had tended to the jurors; they were gathered in the anteroom getting coats on. ‘The judge will be conferring throughout the lunch recess,’ Ed told Ishmael Chambers. ‘There’s no point in waiting around to speak to him. An announcement will be made at one o’clock.’

The newspaperman stood and stuffed his notepad in his pocket. ‘I’m not waiting,’ he said softly. ‘I was just thinking about things.’

‘You’ll have to think about them elsewhere,’ said Ed. ‘I’m going to lock up the courtroom.’

‘All right,’ said Ishmael. ‘Excuse me.’

But he left slowly, preoccupied. Ed Soames watched him impatiently. A
strange bird
, he told himself.
’Bout half the man his father was.
Maybe the missing arm had something to do with it. Ed remembered Ishmael’s father and shook his head, disconcerted. He and Arthur had been friendly enough, but the boy was not someone you could speak to.

Ishmael, with his shoulders hunched, his collar turned up, his pinned coat sleeve whipping in the wind, slogged through the snow to his office. The wind blew from off the water to the northwest and swept raucously down Hill Street. Ishmael had to keep his head lowered; when he raised it needles of snow lashed his eyes. He could see, nevertheless, that there were no lights anywhere in Amity Harbor; the power was out entirely. Four cars had been abandoned at haphazard angles along Hill Street, and one near the intersection of Hill and Ericksen had slid into a parked pickup truck, crumpling the driver’s-side rear panel.

Ishmael pushed the door to his office open and shut it again with his shoulder. In his overcoat and snow-flecked hat he picked up the telephone to call his mother; she lived alone five miles from town, and he wanted to see how she was faring in the storm and find out if the south end was in as bad a state as Amity Harbor just now. If she stoked it up – and hung a curtain across the pantry door – the cookstove in the kitchen should keep her warm enough.

The phone in his office was dead, however, and gave him back only a hollow silence; so was his printing press dead, for that matter, he realized now with a start. The office, furthermore, was quickly going cold, giving up its electric heat, and he sat for a moment with his hand in his coat pocket and considered the snow whirling past his window. The stump of his amputated arm throbbed, or more precisely it was as if the arm were
there
again but half-numb, a phantom limb. His brain apparently did not fully grasp – or still disbelieved – that the arm was gone. At times past, just after the war, his missing arm had caused him a great deal of pain. A Seattle doctor had suggested sympathetic denervation of the limb – doing away with its ability to feel – but Ishmael had balked for unfathomable reasons. Whatever there was to feel in his arm, pain or anything else, he wanted to feel it, he didn’t exactly know why. Now he reached up inside his coat, cupped the stump of his arm in his right hand, and thought of all he had to do on account of the power being out. He must see to his mother, first of all; he must use Tom Torgerson’s ham radio set and put in a call to Anacortes about printing the paper there. He wanted to talk to Nels Gudmundsson and Alvin Hooks. He wanted to find out if the Anacortes ferry was running and if the power company would project a time for getting the wires up again. It would be good to find out where the lines were down and to go out to wherever it was for pictures. It would be good to drive out to the coast guard station, too, and get a full storm report, the speed of the wind, the height of the tides, the rate of snowfall. He should probably take his mother food from town and a can of kerosene. There was a kerosene heater in the shed she could use to keep her bedroom warm, but it needed a new wick. He’d have to stop in at Fisk’s.

Ishmael slung his camera around his neck and shoved out into Hill Street to take pictures. Even in good conditions it was not easy for him, a one-armed man, to steady his camera in the way he would like. It was a large box camera with an accordion apparatus for the lens, unwieldy and as heavy as a stone around his neck, and he disliked it thoroughly. When he
had a choice he bolted it to a tripod; when he didn’t he propped it on the stump of his missing arm, turned his head to look over his left shoulder, and got his pictures as best he could. Doing this always embarrassed him. Twisted and turned, the camera perched precariously beside his ear, he felt like a circus grotesque.

Ishmael took three shots of the car that had plowed into the pickup truck. It was impossible to keep the snow off the lens, and after a time he gave up trying. He felt certain that he should carry his camera, though, since a blizzard like this one did not come along often – the last had hit in ’36 – and was sure to do the sort of damage that constituted island news. Nonetheless, from Ishmael’s perspective this inclement weather should not be allowed to overshadow the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, which was an affair of a different sort entirely and of a greater magnitude. In the hearts of his fellow islanders, though, weather of this sort overwhelmed absolutely everything, so that even when a man stood trial for his life it was no doubt the destruction of docks and bulkheads, the trees fallen on homes, the burst pipes, the stranded cars, that would most interest San Piedro’s citizens. Ishmael, a native, could not understand how such transitory and accidental occurrences gained the upper hand in their view of things. It was as if they had been waiting all along for something enormous to enter their lives and make them part of the news. On the other hand the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto was the first island murder trial in twenty-eight years – Ishmael had looked it up in back issues of the
Review –
and unlike the storm was a human affair, stood squarely in the arena of human responsibility, was no mere accident of wind and sea but instead a thing humans could make sense of. Its progress, its impact, its outcome, its meaning – these were in the hands of people. Ishmael intended to lead with it – with the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto – if somehow he could get Thursday’s edition printed despite the storm.

He picked his way down to Tom Torgerson’s filling station, where a half-dozen battered cars stood lined up along the fence,
gathering snow on their hoods and roofs while Tom backed yet another into place – ‘They’re everywhere,’ he told Ishmael from the wrecker’s window. ‘I’ve seen fifteen alone on Island Center Road and a dozen more up on Mill Run. It’ll take me three days just to get to ’em.’

‘Listen,’ answered Ishmael. ‘I know you’re busy. But I need to get chains on my DeSoto. It’s parked up on Hill Street and I can’t bring it down to you. There are four stranded cars up there you’ll need to move anyway. What do you say to heading up there next? I’ve got the chains sitting on the floor in the backseat. On top of that I’ve got to raise Anacortes on your radio, unless I can find a phone that’s working. I’ve got no power to print my paper.’

‘Whole island’s down,’ Tom Torgerson answered. ‘Nobody’s got power or phone anywhere. There’s trees across lines in twenty different places. Crew’s over on Piers all now trying to bring town back up – maybe by morning would be my guess. Anyway, okay, I’ll get somebody on the DeSoto, but I just can’t do it myself. We’ve got two high school kids working for us, I’ll send one of ’em up, okay?’

‘That’s fine,’ said Ishmael. ‘The keys are in it. Any chance I can use your radio?’

‘Took it home last week,’ Tom answered. ‘You want to head out to the house, that’s fine. It’s set up there – Lois’11 show you.’

‘I’m heading up to the coast guard station. Maybe I’ll get them to put a call through for me if your radio isn’t handy.’

‘Either way,’ Tom said. ‘You’re welcome to have at it, like I said. Just go on out to the house.’

Ishmael made his way down Main Street to Fisk’s, where he bought a one-gallon can of kerosene and a wick for his mother’s heater. Fisk had sold all of his size D batteries and all but one of his snow shovels. Three-quarters of his stock of candles had gone out the door and four-fifths of his supply of kerosene. Fisk, Kelton Fisk, had a highly developed sense of civic duty that had led him, at ten o’clock that morning, to refuse to sell more than
a gallon of kerosene to any one island household. He stood with his feet planted wide beside the potbellied stove, polishing his glasses on the hem of his flannel shirt and, without having been prompted by Ishmael to do so, recited in detail an inventory of items that had gone out his door since eight o’clock. He also reminded Ishmael that the wick he had purchased would have to be cut after six uses.