Snow Falling on Cedars: Chapters 19–24

They had been sequestered on the second floor and had speculated before going to bed, said the foreman, that the snowstorm would interrupt the trial.

The coroner who examined the deceased in question included mention in his report of, if I remember it correctly, a ‘secondary and minor laceration of the right hand extending laterally from the fold between the thumb and forefinger to the outside of the wrist.’

Ship Channel, Leonard George explained, was like many other places island men netted salmon: a narrow and limited seafloor topography which forced you to fish within sight of other men and to move about with care lest, in the night fog general to Island County in early autumn, you motor across a set net and destroy it by winding it up in your propeller.

Sergeant Maples acquiesced to the inevitable and did combat with the defendant that afternoon.

He was, in Sergeant Maples’s experience, a man both technically proficient at stick fighting and willing to inflict violence on another man.

The men especially would not wish to betray such a woman with a not-guilty verdict at the end of things.

Susan Marie found his immobility disquieting and was about to suggest that he sit back and relax, make himself at home, get comfortable, when Carl came through the front door.

The woods were lit with lanterns, and far below in the bay, through the interstices of trees, she could make out the deck lights of moored pleasure boats.

She didn’t even want to think about that or to mull how one day they might have nothing except his silence and his obsession with whatever he was working on—his boat, their house, his gardens.

Carl generally fell silent when this happened, or agreed with her in a perfunctory fashion, afterward dismissing the subject.

He felt defeated as he appraised her on the witness stand.

He wished he could tell them this without inviting their mockery or their pity.

He was a reader and recognized his habit of reading as obsessive and neurotic, and told himself that if he read something less frivolous than newspapers and magazines he might indeed be better off.

“In fact,” he added, winking at Nels, “the timing of this power outage is even more propitious than my colleague for the defense suspects.

A Seattle doctor had suggested sympathetic denervation of the limb—doing away with its ability to feel—but Ishmael had balked for unfathomable reasons.

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.

Ishmael, a native, could not understand how such transitory and accidental occurrences gained the upper hand in their view of things.

Ishmael had hung on to it in part from sheer inertia, in part because driving it reminded him of his father.

Center Valley’s strawberry fields lay under nine inches of powder and were as fuzzy through the snowfall as a landscape in a dream, with no discernible hard edges.

The wind propelled the snow against the sides of barns and homes, and Ishmael could hear it whistling through the wing window’s rubber molding, which had been loose now for many years: it had been loose back when his father was alive, one of the car’s small idiosyncrasies, part of the reason he was loath to part with it.

After ten minutes of polite assistance Ishmael wondered aloud if his DeSoto wasn’t the answer and persisted in this vein for five minutes more before Hisao yielded to it as an unavoidable evil.

Two strands had escaped from their immaculate arrangement and lay pasted against her frozen cheek.

How, exactly, this might be achieved he could not begin to imagine, but he could not keep himself from feeling that he was waiting and that these years were only an interim between other years he had passed and would pass again with Hatsue.

Working without a single hard fact, islanders drew a variety of conclusions: pilot error, pilot inexperience, misread charts, crossed signals, fog, wind, tide, ineptitude.

It dawned on Ishmael, in the coast guard record room, that perhaps something pertinent to Kabuo’s case could be found right here among these files.

They were signed by the radioman’s assistant, a Seaman Philip Milholland—he’d transcribed the radio transmissions.

He had explained to his mother, when she asked him to say grace, that like his father before him he was an incorrigible agnostic and suspected God was a hoax.

The accused man sat so rigorously in his chair, so unmovable and stolid.

He was not averse to dying at war in the way Americans were.

They could have used his face for one of their propaganda films—he’s that inscrutable.

The room had gone dark and tranquil now, the one warm place in all the world, and he felt empty in it.

His parents’ grandfather clock still ticked away after all these years with a maniacal endurance.

On certain nights the moonlight had flooded through his dormer window and bathed everything in blue, beguiling shadows that prevented him from sleeping.

At lulls in the game he would stretch his legs out, twine his hands across his lap, and stare at the radio as it spoke to him.

By the late innings of the game the rest of the room—a few laggard coals glowed orange beneath the fireplace grate—lay sleeping in soft, quiescent shadows.

They were antique steel full moons, and when he put them on he invariably underwent a quiet transformation, becoming suddenly professorial, handsome in the way that some outdoorsmen are yet scholarly at the same time.

He had it in mind, though, to dig out the letter Hatsue had written him from Manzanar and read it again after all these years in the spirit of an indulgence.

He was a war veteran with a missing arm, and this fascinated a certain type of woman in her early twenties who fancied herself mature beyond her years and was serious about herself.

Tomorrow he would write the article she wanted him to write, in order to make her beholden to him, and then in the trial’s aftermath he would speak with her as one who had taken her side and she would have no choice but to listen.