Snow Falling on Cedars (52 page)

At nine o’clock his mother kissed his cheek and said she was going to bed. Ishmael returned to his tea in the study, where he pondered his father’s books. His father had been, like his mother, a reader, though his idea of good literature differed from hers; he was far less given to novels, in the main, though he read his fair share of them, too. His books stood neatly along the glassed-in shelves of four vaultlike oak bookcases: the collected Shakespeare, Jefferson’s essays, Thoreau, Paine, Rousseau, Crèvecoeur, Locke, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Dickens, Tolstoy. Henri Bergson, William James, Darwin, Button, Lyell, Charles Lamb, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord
Chesterton. Swift, Pope, Defoe, Stevenson, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch. Plato, Sophocles, Homer, Dryden, Coleridge, Shelley, Shaw.
A History of Washington State, A History of the Olympic Peninsula, A History of Island County, Gardens and Gardening, Scientific Agriculture, The Care and Cultivation of Fruit Trees and Ornamental Shrubs.

His father had loved his fruit trees. He’d tended quietly to his apples and rhododendrons, his chinaberries and mulberry hedges, his rows of vegetables and flowers. He could be found on fall afternoons with a rake in hand, or a splitting maul perhaps. One year he’d painted the eaves and dormers, the clapboards and the deep-shaded summer porch, taking his time, finding pleasure. He never hurried. He did not appear to wish for something else. There were his evenings reading and dozing by the fire or working slowly at his desk. In his study lay two large Karastan rugs, woven in a mountain village in Turkey, the gift of a soldier he’d fought beside at Belleau Wood long ago. Each had knotted, carefully combed tassels, fleur-de-lis borders, ornate medallion designs, and minute scalloping amid a motif of connected eight-spoked wheels, all in rust and fire orange. The desk, too, was pleasing – his father had built it himself. It was a vast expanse of cherry wood the size of an English baron’s dining table; smoked glass covered most of its surface. Ishmael recollected his father at work here, his neatly arranged manila folders spread out before him, his yellow legal pad laid off to his right, an array of heavily scrawled index cards, onionskin typing paper in both goldenrod and white, a thick dictionary on a stand, a thicker thesaurus, and a heavy black Underwood typewriter, the desk lamp pulled down low over the keys and his father blinking through his bifocals, slow and expressionless, absorbed in his words, afloat in that pool of soft light. He’d had a cordial, lonely, persevering face, and Ishmael turned now to stare into it, for there was a portrait of Arthur hung on the wall just to the left of a bookcase. There he sat in his high, stiff collar, no more than twenty or twenty-one, a young logger on his day off from the woods. Ishmael knew his father had
come to logging with a romantic’s sense of grandeur, viewing it at first as grandly heroic, in keeping with the spirit of manifest destiny. He’d come to outgrow this with the passing of time, and then he passed his evenings reading; sleep had seized him like a dark claw while other boys drank their hearts out. He’d educated himself in his spare time, had saved his money with the earnestness of a Horatio Alger, started his own newspaper, gone to war, come home, pressed on, moved forward. He’d built his own house, hauling river stone, milling lumber, a man prominently and wondrously strong far into his forties. He did not mind writing garden club features, school board reports, horse show notices, golden anniversary announcements – he pruned them as carefully as he pruned his hedges, rounding them toward perfection. He’d been, at best, an anguished editorialist; he was incapable of fully indulging himself when it came to condemnation. For he’d recognized limits and the grayness of the world, which is what endeared him to island life, limited as it was by surrounding waters, which imposed upon islanders certain duties and conditions foreign to mainlanders. An enemy on an island is an enemy forever, he’d been fond of reminding his son. There was no blending into an anonymous background, no neighboring society to shift toward. Islanders were required, by the very nature of their landscape, to watch their step moment by moment. No one trod easily upon the emotions of another where the sea licked everywhere against an endless shoreline. And this was excellent and poor at the same time – excellent because it meant most people took care, poor because it meant an inbreeding of the spirit, too much held in, regret and silent brooding, a world whose inhabitants walked in trepidation, in fear of opening up. Considered and considerate, formal at every turn, they were shut out and shut off from the deep interplay of their minds. They could not speak freely because they were cornered: everywhere they turned there was water and more water, a limitless expanse of it in which to drown. They held their breath and walked with care, and this made them who they were inside, constricted and small, good neighbors.

Arthur confessed to not liking them and at the same time loving them deeply. Was such a thing even possible? He hoped for the best from his fellow islanders, he claimed, and trusted God to guide their hearts, though he knew them to be vulnerable to hate.

Ishmael understood, sitting in his father’s place, how he’d arrived at the same view of things. He was, it occurred to him, his father’s son, and now he brooded in the same spindle-back Windsor chair his father had brooded in.

Ishmael remembered following his father one afternoon as he roamed the grounds of the Strawberry Festival in search of photographs and winning quotes. By three o’clock the sun had swung down over the west goalposts of the high school football field. The tug-of-war, sack hop, and three-legged races were over, and a languidness had inevitably crept over things, so that here and there grown men slept in the grass with newspapers over their faces. Many of the picnickers had eaten to excess and now sat heavy and dulled in the sun, which poured over the scene a clear, clean radiance, a piercing island summer light. The odor of baked salmon hung stale in the air, slightly bitter and slightly acrid from the long smoldering smoke of burning alder leaves, and lay like an invisible pall over the exhausted revelers.

Ishmael walked beside his father past the concession booths where shortcake, bagged popcorn, and caramel apples were sold and down toward the displays of strawberries. And then his father stopped to bring his camera to his eye and photograph the fruit that was the point of it all, and at the same time, peering through his lens, he held up his end of a conversation: ‘Mr. Fukida,’ he’d called out. ‘A banner year for strawberries. How are prices holding up?’

Mr. Fukida, a leathery old farmer in overalls and a billed cap, answered in English that was too precise, too perfect. ‘Prices are very good,’ he said. ‘In fact, excellent, berries selling very well. Mrs. Chambers just now purchased sixteen crates.’

‘I see,’ said Arthur. ‘Sixteen crates. No doubt I’ll be asked to help with them, then. Can I trouble you, Mr. Fukida, to move
a little to your left? This should make an excellent photograph, you and your beautifully displayed strawberries.’

Mr. Fukida, Ishmael recalled, seemed to have no eyes. His lids had sealed themselves nearly together; occasionally a thin tear trailed out. Working its way along the cracks in his face, it would eventually end as a shine against his cheekbones, which were prominent high points in an otherwise gaunt set of features. He smelled of ginger and onion root tonic and, when he smiled – teeth large as old beach stones – of powdered garlic, too.

‘Mrs. Chambers will put up some excellent jam,’ Arthur had said, without pride. He shook his head now, admiring with genuine avidity the spread of fruit before him; strawberries arranged in turned-up cedar flats, heavy and pungent, deeply crimson and firm, a regal abundance of them. ‘Fit for a queen,’ Arthur had said. ‘My hat is off to you.’

‘Good soil. Good rain. Sunshine. Six children.’

‘There must be a secret you’re not mentioning. I’ve tried growing strawberries myself, a few times, and with most of the same ingredients.’

‘More children,’ said Mr. Fukida, and grinned so that his gold crowns glinted in the sun. ‘More children, yes, that is the secret. That is important, Mr. Chambers.’

‘Well, we’ve tried,’ said Arthur. ‘We’ve tried hard, Lord knows. But Ishmael here, my boy Ishmael here – he’s a match, easily, for two lads, for three! We have high hopes for him.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Mr. Fukida had said. ‘We wish good fortune for him, too. We believe his heart is strong, like his father’s. Your son is very good boy.’

Ishmael went up the worn-out stairs to the room he’d slept in for so many years and dug the book on boatmanship out of its box in the closet. There was the envelope with Kenny Yamashita’s return address, the upside-down stamp, her smooth handwriting. There was the letter written on rice paper, fast fading after all these years, as brittle as old leaves in winter. With his one hand it would be possible in seconds to squeeze Hatsue’s
letter into motes of dust and obliterate its message forever.
I don’t love you, Ishmael … . When we met that last time in the cedar tree and I felt your body move against mine, I knew with certainty that everything was wrong. I knew we could never be right together
… ’

He read the letter a second time, gravitating now toward its final words:
‘I
wish you the very best, Ishmael. Your heart is large and you are gentle and kind, and I know you will do great things in this world, but now I must say good-bye to you. I am going to move on with my life as best I can, and I hope you will too.’

But the war, his arm, the course of things – it had all made his heart much smaller. He had not moved on at all. He had not done anything great in the world but had instead reported on road-paving projects, garden club meetings, school athletes. He had coasted along for years now, filling the pages of his newspaper with words, burying himself in whatever was safe, typesetting the ferry schedule and the tide table and the classified advertisements. So perhaps that was what her eyes meant now on those rare occasions when she looked at him – he’d shrunk so thoroughly in her estimation, not lived up to who he was. He read her letter another time and understood that she had once admired him, there was something in him she was grateful for even if she could not love him. That was a part of himself he’d lost over the years, that was the part that was gone.

He put the letter away in its box and went down the stairs again. His mother, he found, was asleep in her bed, snoring a little, a rough rattling in her throat; she looked very old in the light from the hallway with her cheek buried against her pillow, a sleeping cap pulled low on her forehead. Her face was a map of wrinkles, and looking at them he felt more deeply how he would miss her when she was gone. It did not matter whether he agreed with her about God. It was only, instead, that she was finally his mother and she had not given up on loving him. His trips to South Beach, he understood now, were as much for his own heart as they were for hers; he had fooled himself for years into
thinking otherwise. He had acted as if her death someday – for someday he would have to face the fact that her death would leave him alone in the world – would not pose a problem for him.

Beneath the stars, with his overcoat on, he wandered out into the cold. His feet took their own direction through the cedar woods and underneath the canopy of branches he smelled the old fragrance of the place of his youth and the clean scent of the newly fallen snow. Here under the trees it was fresh and untouched. The branches of the cedars were hung with it and beyond them the sky lay immaculate and decembral, the stars chilled points of light. He followed his feet to where the path met the beach – where a wall of honeysuckle bloomed in summer, intertwined with salmonberries and wild roses – and cut through the dell of snow-covered ferns to the hollowed cedar tree of his youth.

Ishmael sat inside for a brief time with his coat wrapped tightly around him. He listened to the world turned silent by the snow; there was absolutely nothing to hear. The silence of the world roared steadily in his ears while he came to recognize that he did not belong here, he had no place in the tree any longer. Some much younger people should find this tree, hold to it tightly as their deepest secret, as he and Hatsue had. For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.

He got up and walked and came out of the woods and into the Imadas’ fields. The way was clear between the rows of buried strawberries and he followed it with the starlight striking off the snow, bathing everything in an aqueous light. And finally he was on the Imadas’ porch and then in the Imadas’ living room, sitting with Hatsue and her mother and father where he had never been before. Hatsue sat beside him, just beside him, close, wearing a nightgown and her father’s old bathrobe, her hair awash in light along her back, falling in cascades around her hips, and he reached into his pocket and unfolded the
notes Philip Milholland had written on September 16, and Ishmael explained what the shorthand meant and why he had come at ten-thirty in the night to speak to her after all these years.

There was no way to call Lew Fielding with the news because the phones were all dead along South Beach. So the four of them, cups of green tea in hand, the barrel stove murmuring and clicking in its corner, spoke quietly about the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, which was for them the only subject possible, as it had been for many days. It was late now, the room very warm, the world outside frozen and bathed in starlight, and Ishmael told Hatsue and Hisao and Fujiko that as a reporter who had covered the courthouse in Seattle he felt comfortable offering a present conjecture: that Philip Milholland’s notes would force Judge Fielding to call for retrying the case. That the judge would declare a mistrial.

Hatsue recalled that in the course of his testimony the sheriff had described finding a coffee cup – tipped on its side, the sheriff had explained – on the floor of Carl Heine’s cabin. It meant, she said, that Carl’s gill-netting boat had been rocked by a freighter in the middle of the night –
something
had knocked that coffee cup down, and since Carl had never picked it up it had-to be that the very same something had knocked
him
down as well. It
had
to be, she repeated. Her husband’s case should be thrown out.