Snow Falling on Cedars

by David Guterson

  The sheriff brought his left leg down from the piling, hitched his trousers at the thigh and brought his right up, then settled his elbow on his knees.

  ‘You see Susan Marie?’ asked Ishmael.

  ‘I did,’ said Art. ‘Boy.’

  Three kids,’ said Ishmael. ‘What’s she going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the sheriff.

  ‘She say anything?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Well, what’s she going to say?’ put in William Gjovaag. ‘What can she say? Jesus Christ.’

  Ishmael understood by this that Gjovaag disapproved of journalism. He was a sunburned, big-bellied, tattooed gill-netter with the watery eyes of a gin drinker. His wife had left him five years before; William lived on his boat.

  ‘Excuse me, Gjovaag,’ said Ishmael.

  ‘I don’t need to excuse nothing,’ Gjovaag answered. ‘Fuck you anyhow, Chambers.’

  Everybody laughed. It was all good-natured, sort of. Ishmael Chambers understood that.

  ‘Do you know what happened?’ he asked the sheriff.

  ‘That’s just what I’m trying to straighten out,’ said Art Moran. ‘That’s just what we’re talking about.’

  ‘Art wants to know where we all was fishing,’ Marty Johansson explained. ‘He – ’

  ‘Don’t need to know where everyone was at,’ Sheriff Moran cut in. ‘I’m just trying to figure out where Carl went last night. Where he fished. Who maybe saw him or talked to him last. That kind of thing, Marty.’

  ‘I saw him,’ said Dale Middleton. ‘We ran out of the bay together.’

  ‘You mean you followed him out,’ said Marty Johansson. ‘I bet you followed him out, didn’t you?’

  Younger fishermen like Dale Middleton were apt to spend considerable time each day – at the San Piedro Cafe or the Amity Harbor Restaurant – rooting for information. They wanted to know where the fish were running, how other men had done the night before, and where – exactly – they had done it. The seasoned and successful, like Carl Heine, ignored them as a matter of course. As a result he could count on being tailed to the fishing grounds: if a man wouldn’t speak he was followed. On a foggy night his pursuers had to run in close and were more apt to lose their quarry altogether, in which case they turned to their radios, checking in with various compatriots whom they invariably found to be checking in with them: hapless voices tuned to one another in the hope of some shred of knowledge. The most respected men, in accordance with the ethos that had evolved on San Piedro, pursued no one and cultivated radio silence. Occasionally others would approach them in their boats, see who it was, and turn immediately away, knowing there would be neither idle conversation nor hard information about the fish they pursued. Some men shared, others didn’t. Carl Heine was in the latter category.

  ‘All right, I followed him,’ said Dale Middleton. ‘The guy’d been bringing in a lot of fish.’

  ‘What time was that?’ asked the sheriff.

  ‘Six-thirty, around there.’

  ‘You see him after that?’

  ‘Yeah. Out at Ship Channel Bank. With a lot of other guys. After silvers.’

  ‘It was foggy last night,’ said Ishmael Chambers. ‘You must have been fishing in close.’

  ‘No,’ said Dale. ‘I just saw him setting. Before the fog. Maybe seven-thirty? Eight o’clock?’

  ‘I saw him, too,’ said Leonard George. ‘He was all set. Out on the bank. He was in.’

  ‘What time was that?’ said the sheriff.

  ‘Early,’ said Leonard. ‘Eight o’clock.’

  ‘Nobody saw him later than that? Nobody saw him after eight?’

  ‘I was outa there by ten myself,’ Leonard George explained. ‘There was nothing doing, no fish. I ran up to Elliot Head real slow like. A fog run. I had my horn going.’

  ‘Me, too,’ said Dale Middleton. ‘Most everybody took off’fore long. We came over and got into Marty’s fish.’ He grinned. ‘Had a pretty fair night there, too.’

  ‘Did Carl go up to Elliot?’ asked the sheriff.

  ‘Didn’t see him,’ Leonard said. ‘But that don’t mean nothing. Like I said, fog soup.’

  ‘I doubt he moved,’ put in Marty Johansson. ‘I’m just guessing on that, but Carl never moved much. He made up his mind …n’ stuck where he was. Probably pulled some fish off Ship Channel, too. Never did see him at the head, no.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Dale Middleton.

  ‘But you saw him at Ship Channel,’ said the sheriff. ‘Who else was there? You remember?’

  ‘Who else?’ said Dale. ‘There was two dozen boats, easy. Even more, but Jesus, who knows?’

  ‘Soup,’ said Leonard George. ‘Real thick fog. You couldn’t see nothing out there.’

  ‘Which boats?’ asked Art Moran.

  ‘Well, okay,’ said Leonard, ‘let’s see now. I saw the Kasilof, the Islander, the Mogul, the Eclipse – this was all out at Ship Channel I’m talking about – ’

  ‘The Antarctic,’ said Dale Middleton. ‘She was out there.’

  ‘The Antarctic, yeah,’ said Leonard.

  ‘What about over the radio?’ said Art Moran. ‘You hear anybody else? Anybody you didn’t see?’

  ‘Vance Cope,’ said Leonard. ‘You know Vance? The Providence? I talked with him a little.’

  ‘You talked with him a lot,’ said Marty Johansson. ‘I heard you guys all the way over to the head. Jesus Christ, Leonard –’

  ‘Anybody else?’ said the sheriff.

  ‘The Wolf Chief,’ answered Dale. ‘I heard Jim Ferry and Hardwell. The Bergen was out at Ship Channel.’

  ‘That it?’

  ‘I guess,’ said Leonard. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The Mogul,’ said Art. ‘Whose boat is that?’

  ‘Moulton,’ replied Marty Johansson. ‘He got it from the Laneys last spring.’

  ‘What about the Islander? Who’s that?’

  ‘The Islander is Miyamoto,’ said Dale Middleton. ‘Ain’t that right? The middle one?’

  ‘The oldest,’ Ishmael Chambers explained. ‘Kabuo – he’s the oldest. The middle is Kenji. He’s working at the cannery.’

  ‘Suckers all look alike,’ said Dale. ‘Never could tell them guys apart.’

  ‘Japs,’ William Gjovaag threw in. He tossed the stub of his cigar into the water beside the Susan Marie.

  ‘All right, look,’ said Art Moran. ‘You see those guys like Hardwell or Cope or Moulton or anybody, you tell them they ought to come talk to me. I want to know if anybody spoke with Carl last night, from all those guys – you got this? From every last one of them.’

  ‘Sheriff’s sounding like a hard-ass,’ said Gjovaag. ‘Ain’t this just a accident?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Art Moran. ‘But still, a man’s dead, William. I’ve got a report to write up.’

  ‘A gud man,’ said Jan Sorensen, who spoke with a hint of Danish in his voice. ‘A gud fisherman.’ He shook his head.

  The sheriff brought his leg down from the piling and with care repaired the tuck of his shirt. ‘Abel,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you square away the launch and meet me back up at the office? I’m going to walk up with Chambers here. Me and him’ve got things to discuss.’

  But it was not until they’d left the docks altogether and turned onto Harbor Street that Art Moran quit speaking idly and came to the point with Ishmael. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re gonna do an article that says Sheriff Moran suspects foul play and is investigating, am I right?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ said Ishmael Chambers. ‘I don’t know anything about it yet. I was hoping you’d fill me in.’

  ‘Well, sure, I’ll fill you in,’ said Art Moran. ‘But you got to promise me something first. You won’t say anything about an investigation, all right? If you want to quote me on the subject here’s my quote: Carl Heine drowned by accident, or something like that, you make it up, but don’t say anything about no investigation. Because ther
e isn’t one.’

  ‘You want me to lie?’ asked Ishmael Chambers. ‘I’m supposed to make up a phony quote?’

  ‘Off the record?’ said the sheriff. ‘Okay, there’s an investigation. Some tricky, funny little facts floating around – could mean anything, where we stand now. Could be murder, could be manslaughter, could be an accident – could be anything. Point is, we just don’t know yet. But you go telling everyone that on the front page of the Review, we aren’t ever going to find out.’

  ‘What about the guys you just talked to, Art? You know what they’re going to do? William Gjovaag’s going to be telling everyone he can you’re snooping around looking for a killer.’

  ‘That’s different,’ insisted Art Moran. ‘That’s a rumor, isn’t it? And around here there’s always going to be rumors like that even if I’m not investigating anything. In this case we want to leave it to the killer – if there is a killer, remember – to figure what he hears is just gossip. We’ll just let rumor work for us, confuse him. And anyway I’ve got to be asking questions. I don’t have much choice about that, do I? If people want to guess what I’m driving at it’s their business, I can’t help it. But I’m not going to have any announcement in the newspaper about any sheriff’s investigation.’

  ‘Sounds like you think whoever it is, he lives right here on the island. Is that what – ’

  ‘Look,’ said Art Moran, halting. ‘As far as the San Piedro Review is concerned there is no “whoever”, okay? Let’s you and I be clear on that.’

  ‘I’m clear on it,’ said Ishmael. ‘All right, I’ll quote you as calling it an accident. You keep me posted on what develops.’

  ‘A deal,’ said Art. ‘A deal. I find anything, you’re the first to know. How’s that? You got what you want now?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Ishmael. ‘I’ve still got this story to write. So will you give me a few answers about this accident?’

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ said Art Moran. ‘Fire away. Ask.’

  5

  After the morning recess had drawn to a close, Horace Whaley, the Island County coroner, swore softly on the courtroom Bible and edged into the witness box, where he seized the oak armrests between his fingers and blinked behind steel-rimmed spectacles at Alvin Hooks. Horace was by inclination a private man, nearing fifty now, with a sprawling portwine stain on the left side of his forehead that he often fingered unconsciously. In appearance he was tidy and meticulous, storklike and slender – though not so thin as Art Moran – and wore his starched trousers high on his narrow waist and his scant hair slicked from right to left with pomade. Horace Whaley’s eyes bulged – his thyroid gland was overactive – and swam, too, behind his spectacles. Something attenuated, a nervous caution, suggested itself in all his movements.

  Horace had served as a medical officer for twenty months in the Pacific theater and had suffered in that period from sleep deprivation and from a generalized and perpetual tropical malaise that had rendered him, in his own mind, ineffective. Wounded men in his care had died, they’d died while in his sleepless daze Horace was responsible for them. In his head these men and their bloody wounds mingled into one recurring dream.

  Horace had been at his desk doing paperwork on the morning of September 16. The evening before, a woman of ninety-six had died at the San Piedro Rest Home, and another of eighty-one had expired while splitting kindling wood and had been discovered sprawled across her chopping block, a milk goat nuzzling her face, by a child delivering apples in a wheelbarrow. And so Horace was filling in the blanks on two certificates of death, and doing so in triplicate, when the phone beside him rang. He brought the receiver to his ear irritably; since the war he could not do too many things at once and at the moment, busier than he liked to be, did not wish to speak to anyone.

  It was under these circumstances that he heard about the death of Carl Heine, a man who had endured the sinking of the Canton and who, like Horace himself, had survived Okinawa – only to die, it now appeared, in a gill-netting boat accident.

  The body, on a canvas stretcher, its booted feet sticking out, had been borne in by Art Moran and Abel Martinson twenty minutes later, the sheriff wheezing under his end of the load, his deputy tight-lipped and grimacing, and laid on its back on Horace Whaley’s examination table. It was wrapped by way of a shroud in two white wool blankets of the type issued to navy men and of which there was a great surplus nine years after the war, so that every fishing scow on San Piedro Island seemed to have half a dozen or more. Horace Whaley peeled back one of these blankets and, fingering the birthmark on the left side of his forehead, peered in at Carl Heine. The jaw had set open, he saw, and the vast mouth was a stiffened maw down which the dead man’s tongue had disappeared. There were a large number of broken blood vessels in the whites of the deceased’s eyes.

  Horace pulled the blanket over Carl Heine again and turned his attention to Art Moran, who stood immediately at his side.

  ‘Goddamn,’ he said. ‘Where’d you find him?’

  ‘White Sand Bay,’ Art replied.

  Art told the coroner about the drifting boat, the silence and the lights on board the Susan Marie and about bringing the dead man up in his net. How Abel went to fetch his pickup truck and the canvas stretcher from the fire station and how together, while a small crowd of fishermen looked on and asked questions, they’d loaded Carl up and brought him in. ‘I’m going over to see his wife,’ Art added. ‘I don’t want word to reach her some other way. So I’ll be back, Horace. Real soon. But I’ve got to see Susan Marie first.’

  Abel Martinson stood at the end of the examination table exerting himself, Horace observed, to grow accustomed to this idea of conversing in the presence of a dead man. The toe of Carl Heine’s right boot poked out of the blankets just in front of him.

  ‘Abel,’ said Art Moran. ‘Maybe you better stay here with Horace. Give him a hand, if he needs it.’

  The deputy nodded. He took the hat he held in his hand and placed it beside an instrument tray. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the sheriff. ‘I’ll be back soon. Half an hour to an hour.’

  When he was gone Horace peered in at Carl Heine’s face again – letting Art’s young deputy wait in silence – then washed his glasses at the sink. ‘Tell you what,’ he said at last and shut the water off. ‘You go on across the hall and sit in my office, all right? There’s some magazines in there and a radio and a thermos of coffee if you want it. And if it comes about I’ve got to shift this body around and I need your help, I’ll call for you. Sound fair enough, deputy?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘You call me.’

  He picked up his hat and carried it out with him. Damn kid, Horace said to himself. Then he dried his steel-rimmed glasses on a towel and, because he was fastidious, got his surgical gown on. He pulled on his gloves, removed the shroud of blankets from Carl Heine, and then, methodically, using angled scissors, cut away the rubber bib overalls, dropping pieces of them in a canvas bin. When the overalls were gone he began on the T-shirt and cut away Carl Heine’s work pants and underwear and pulled off Carl’s boots and socks, out of which seawater ran. He put all the clothes in a sink.

  There was a pack of matches, mostly used, in one pocket, and a small shuttle of cotton twine stuffed in another. A knife sheath had been knotted to a belt loop on his work pants, but no knife was in it. The sheath had been unsnapped and left open.

  In Carl Heine’s left front pocket was a watch that had stopped at one forty-seven. Horace dropped it into a manila envelope.

  The body – despite the two hours it had spent in transport from White Sand Bay to the dock east of the ferry terminal and from there in the back of Abel Martinson’s truck up First Hill and into the alley behind the courthouse (where the morgue and the coroner’s office could be found beyond a set of double doors that gave onto the courthouse basement) – had not thawed perceptibly, Horace noted. It was pink, the color of salmon flesh, and the eyes had turned back in the
head. It was also blatantly and exceedingly powerful, stout and thick muscled, the chest broad, the quadriceps muscles of the thighs pronounced, and Horace Whaley could not help but observe that here was an extraordinary specimen of manhood, six foot three and two hundred thirty-five pounds, bearded, blond, and built in the solid manner of a piece of statuary, as though the parts were made of granite – though, too, there was something apelike, inelegant, and brutish in the alignment of the arms and shoulders. Horace felt a familiar envy stirring and despite himself noted the girth and heft of Carl Heine’s sexual organs. The fisherman had not been circumcised and his testicles were taut and hairless. They had pulled up toward his body in the frigid seawater, and his penis, at least twice as large as Horace’s own, even frozen, lay fat and pink against his left leg.

  The Island County coroner coughed twice, dryly, and circum-navigated his examination table. He began, consciously, for this would be necessary, to think of Carl Heine, a man he knew, as the deceased and not as Carl Heine. The deceased’s right foot had locked itself behind the left, and Horace now exerted himself to free it. It was necessary to pull hard enough to tear ligaments in the deceased’s groin, and this Horace Whaley did.

  A coroner’s job is to do certain things most people would never dream of doing. Horace Whaley was ordinarily a family physician, one of three on San Piedro. He worked with fishermen, their children, their wives. His peers were unwilling to examine the dead, and so the job had fallen to him, by default as it were. Thus he’d had these experiences; he’d seen things most men couldn’t look at. The winter before he’d seen a crabber’s body recovered out of West Port Jensen Bay after two full months’ immersion. The crabber’s skin resembled soap more than anything; he seemed encased in it, a kind of ambergris. On Tarawa he had seen the bodies of men who had died facedown in shallow water. The warm tides had washed over them for days, and the skin had loosened from their limbs. He remembered one soldier in particular from whose hands the skin had peeled like fine transparent gloves; even the fingernails had come away. There were no dog tags, but Horace had been able to obtain excellent fingerprints and make an identification anyway.