Snow Falling on Cedars

by David Guterson

  He knew a little about drowning. He had seen a fisherman in ’49 who had been eaten about the face by crabs and crayfish. They’d fed steadily on the softest portions – the eyelids, the lips, to a lesser extent the ears – so that in these areas the face was intensely green. This he had seen in the Pacific war, too, along with other men who had died in tidal pools, astonishingly intact beneath the waterline but entirely eaten – to the bone – by sand flies wherever flesh lay exposed to air. And he had seen a man half-mummy, half-skeleton, floating in the waters of the China Sea, eaten from below while his back side, sun dried, gradually turned brown and leathery. After the sinking of the Canton there were parts of men floating around for miles that even the sharks had forsaken. The navy had not taken time to collect these parts; there were living men to attend to.

  Carl Heine was the fourth deceased gill-netter Horace had examined in five years. Two others had died in a fall storm and washed up on the mud flats of Lanheedron Island. The third, recalled Horace, was an interesting case – the summer of ’50, four years earlier. A fisherman named Vilderling – Alec Vilderling. His wife typed for Klaus Hartmann, who sold real estate in Amity Harbor. Vilderling and his partner had set their net and underneath the summer moon had shared in the lee of their bow-picker’s cabin a bottle of Puerto Rican rum. Then Vilderling, it seemed, had decided to empty his bladder into the salt water. With his pants undone he had fallen in and, to his partner’s horror, had thrashed once or twice before disappearing altogether beneath the surface of the moon-addled sea. Vilderling, it appeared, could not swim.

  His partner, a boy of nineteen named Kenny Lynden, hurled himself in after him. Vilderling, hung up in his net, struggled as the boy tried to free him. Though bleary with rum, Kenny Lynden somehow managed to cut Vilderling loose with a pocketknife and haul him back to the surface. But that was all he could do. Vilderling had ceased to live.

  The interesting thing, Horace Whaley recalled, was that in the purely technical sense Alec Vilderling had not drowned. He had inhaled a large volume of seawater, yet his lungs were entirely dry. Horace had at first offered the conjecture in his notes that the deceased’s larynx had clamped down – a spastic closure – to prevent liquid from reaching the deeper air passages. But this could not explain the clear distension of the lungs, which had to have been caused by the pressure of the sea, and so he revised his initial hypothesis and entered in his final report that the salt water swallowed by Alec Vilderling had been absorbed into his blood-stream while he yet lived. In this case the official cause of death, he wrote, was anoxia – a deprivation of oxygen to the brain – as well as an acute disturbance to the composition of the blood.

  Chief among his current considerations as he stood brooding over Carl Heine’s naked form was to determine the precise cause of Carl’s demise – or rather to determine how the deceased had become the deceased, for to think of the slab of flesh before him as Carl, Horace reminded himself, would make doing what he had to do difficult. Only the week before, the deceased, in rubber boots and a clean T-shirt – perhaps the T-shirt just now cut to pieces with a pair of angled surgical scissors – had carried his eldest, a boy of six, into Horace’s office in Amity Harbor and pointed out a cut on the boy’s foot, sliced open against the metal strut of an overturned wheelbarrow. Carl had held the boy against the table while Horace put in the sutures. Unlike other fathers to whom this task had fallen, he gave no instructions to his son. He did not allow the boy to move, and the boy cried only when the first stitch went in and thereafter held his breath. When it was over Carl lifted the boy from the table and held him in the cradling manner one holds an infant. Horace had said that the foot must be elevated and went for a set of crutches. Then, as was his habit, Carl Heine paid for the work in cash, taking neat bills from his wallet. He was not profusely thankful and there was that silence about him, that bearded, gruff, and giant silence, that unwillingness to engage the protocols of island life. A man of his size, Horace thought, must take it as a duty to imply no menace or risk that his neighbors will be wary of him. Yet Carl did little to assuage the natural distrust an ordinary man feels for a man of physical stature. He went about his life deliberately instead, taking no time and making no gestures to suggest to others his harmlessness. Horace remembered seeing him one day flicking his lock blade open and then shutting it against the flank of his leg, flicking and shutting it again and again, but as for whether this was a habit or a threat, a nervous tic or an announcement of his prowess, Horace Whaley couldn’t tell. The man seemed to have no friends. There was no one who could insult him in jest or speak lightly with him about unimportant matters, though on the other hand he was on courteous terms with almost everyone. And furthermore other men admired him because he was powerful and good at his work, because on the sea he was thoroughly competent and even in his rough way elegantly so; still, their admiration was colored by their distrust of his size and his brooding deliberation.

  No, Carl Heine was not amiable, but neither was he a bad sort. He had once, before the war, been a boy on the football team, like other schoolboys in most ways: he’d had a large group of friends, he’d worn a letterman’s jacket, he’d spoken when there was no reason to speak, for fun. He had been that way and then the war had come – the war Horace himself had been to. And how to explain? What could he say to others? There was no longer any speaking for the hell of it, no opening one’s mouth just to have it open, and if others would read darkness into his silence, well then, darkness was there, wasn’t it? There’d been the darkness of the war in Carl Heine, as there was in Horace himself.

  But – the deceased. He must think of Carl as the deceased, a bag of guts, a sack of parts, and not as the man who had so recently brought his son in; otherwise the job could not be done.

  Horace Whaley placed the heel of his right hand against the solar plexus of the dead man. He placed his left hand over it and began to pump in the manner of someone attempting to resuscitate a drowning victim. And as he did so a foam, something like shaving cream though flecked with pink-hued blood from the lungs, mushroomed at the deceased’s mouth and nose.

  Horace stopped and inspected this. He leaned down over the deceased man’s face, scrutinizing the foam closely. His gloved hands were still clean, they had touched nothing except the chilled skin of the deceased’s chest, and so he took from beside his instrument tray a pad and pencil and noted for himself the color and texture of this extruded foam that was abundant enough to cover the deceased’s bearded chin and his mustache almost entirely. It was a result, Horace knew, of air, mucus, and seawater all mingled by respiration, which meant the deceased had been alive at submersion. He had not died first and then been cast beneath the waves. Carl Heine had gone in breathing.

  But anoxia, like Alec Vilderling, or a waterlogged, choking asphyxiation? Like most people, Horace felt the need not merely to know but to envision clearly whatever had happened; furthermore it was his obligation to envision it clearly so that in the official register of Island County deaths the truth, however painful, might be permanently inscribed. Carl Heine’s dark struggle, his effort to hold his breath, the volume of water that had filled the vacuum of his gut, his profound unconsciousness and final convulsions, his terminal gasps in the grip of death as the last of the air leaked out of him and his heart halted and his brain ceased to consider anything – they were all recorded, or not recorded, in the slab of flesh that lay on Horace Whaley’s examination table. It was his duty to find out the truth.

  For a moment Horace stood with his hands linked across his belly and debated silently the merits of opening the deceased man’s chest so as to get at the evidence in the heart and lungs. It was in this posture that he noted – how had he missed it before? – the wound to the skull over the dead man’s left ear. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said aloud.

  With a pair of barber’s shears he cut hair out of the way until the outlines of this wound emerged cleanly. The bone had fractured and caved in considerably over an area of about
four inches. The skin had split open, and from the laceration of the scalp a tiny strand of pink brain material protruded. Whatever had caused this wound – a narrow, flat object about two inches wide – had left its telltale outline behind in the deceased man’s head. It was precisely the sort of lethal impression Horace had seen at least two dozen times in the Pacific war, the result of close-in combat, hand to hand, and made by a powerfully wielded gun butt. The Japanese field soldier, trained in the art of kendo, or stick fighting, was exceptionally proficient at killing in this manner. And the majority of Japs, Horace recalled, inflicted death over the left ear, swinging in from the right.

  Horace inserted a razor into one of his scalpels and poked it into the deceased’s head. He pressed the razor to the bone and guided it through the hair, describing an arc across the top of the deceased’s skull literally from ear to ear. It was a skillful and steady incision, like drawing a curved line with a pencil across the crown of the head, a fluid and graceful curve. In this manner he was able to peel back the dead man’s face as though it were the skin of a grapefruit or an orange and turn his forehead inside out so that it rested against his nose.

  Horace peeled down the back of the head, too, then lay his scalpel in the sink, rinsed his gloves, dried them, and brought out a hacksaw from his instrument cupboard.

  He set about the work of sawing through the dead man’s skullcap. After twenty minutes it became necessary to turn the body over, and so with reluctance Horace crossed the hall to Abel Martinson, who sat in a chair doing nothing at all, his legs crossed, his hat in his lap.

  ‘Need a hand,’ said the coroner.

  The deputy rose and put his hat on his head. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Glad to help.’

  ‘You won’t be glad,’ said Horace. ‘I’ve made an incision across , the top of his head. His skull is exposed. It isn’t pretty.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the deputy. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  They went in and without speaking turned the body over, Abel Martinson pushing from one side, the coroner reaching across and pulling from the other, and then, with his head hung over the sink, Abel Martinson vomited. He was dabbing his mouth with the corner of his handkerchief when Art Moran came through the door. ‘Now what?’ asked the sheriff.

  Abel, in answer, pointed a finger at Carl Heine’s corpse. ‘I puked again,’ he said.

  Art Moran looked at Carl’s face turned inside out, the skin of it peeled back like a grape, a bloody foam that looked like shaving cream clinging to his chin. Then he turned away from seeing it.

  ‘Me, too,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘I got no stomach for this neither.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you,’ the sheriff answered. ‘Jesus H. Christ. Jesus Christ.’

  But he stood there watching anyway while Horace, in his surgical gown, worked methodically with his hacksaw. He watched while Horace removed the dead man’s skullcap and placed it beside the dead man’s shoulder.

  ‘This is called the dura mater.’ Horace pointed with his scalpel. ‘This membrane here? Right under his skull? This right here is the dura mater.’

  He took the dead man’s head between his hands and with some effort – the ligaments of the neck were extremely rigid – twisted it to the left.

  ‘Come over here, Art,’ he said.

  The sheriff seemed aware of the necessity of doing so; nevertheless, he didn’t move. Certainly, thought Horace, he had learned in his work that there were distasteful moments about which he had no choice. In the face of these it was best to move quickly and without reservations, as Horace himself did as a matter of principle. But the sheriff was a man of inherited anxieties. It was not really in him to go over there and see what was under Carl Heine’s face.

  Horace Whaley knew this: that the sheriff did not want to see what was inside of Carl Heine’s head. Horace had seen Art this way before, chewing his Juicy Fruit and grimacing, rubbing his lips with the ball of his thumb and squinting while he thought things over. ‘It’ll just take a minute,’ Horace urged him. ‘One quick look, Art. So you can see what we’re up against. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

  Horace indicated for Art Moran the blood that had clotted in the dura mater and the tear in it where the piece of brain protruded. ‘He got hit pretty hard with something fairly flat, Art. Puts me in mind of a type of gun butt wound I saw a few times in the war. One of those kendo strikes the Japs used.’

  ‘Kendo?’ said Art Moran.

  ‘Stick fighting,’ Horace explained. ‘Japs are trained in it from when they’re kids. How to kill with sticks.’

  ‘Ugly,’ said the sheriff. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Look away,’ said Horace. ‘I’m going to cut through the dura mater now. I want you to see something else.’

  The sheriff turned his back deliberately. ‘You’re pale,’ he said to Abel Martinson. ‘Why don’t you go sit down?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ answered Abel. He stood looking into the sink with his handkerchief in his hand and leaned hard against the counter.

  Horace showed the sheriff three fragments of the deceased’s skull that had lodged in the tissue of his brain. ‘That what killed him?’ Art asked.

  ‘That’s complicated,’ answered Horace Whaley. ‘Could be he took a hit to the head, then went over the side and drowned. Or maybe he hit his head after he drowned. Or while he was drowning. I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Can you find out?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I have to look inside his chest, Art. At his heart and lungs. And even that might not tell me much.’

  ‘His chest?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What’re the possibilities?’ said the sheriff.

  ‘Possibilities?’ said Horace Whaley. ‘All kinds of possibilities, Art. Anything could have happened, and all kinds of things do happen. I mean, maybe he had a heart attack that pitched him over the side. Maybe a stroke, maybe alcohol. But all I want to know just now is did he get knocked in the head first and then go over? Because I know from this foam’ – he pointed at it with his scalpel – ‘that Carl went in breathing. He was respiratory when he hit the water. So my guess right now is that he drowned, Art. With the head wound an obvious contributing factor. Banged himself on a fairlead, maybe. Setting his net and got a little careless – hung up his buckle and went over. I’m inclined to put all that in my report just now. But I don’t know for sure yet. Maybe when I see his heart and lungs everything is going to change.’

  Art Moran stood rubbing his lip and blinked hard at Horace Whaley. ‘That bang to the head,’ he said. ‘That bang to the head is sort of … funny, you know?’

  Horace Whaley nodded. ‘Could be,’ he said.

  ‘Couldn’t it be somebody hit him?’ asked the sheriff. ‘Isn’t that a possibility?’

  ‘You want to play Sherlock Holmes?’ asked Horace. ‘You going to play detective?’

  ‘Not really. But Sherlock Holmes isn’t here, is he? And this wound in Carl’s head is.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Horace. ‘You got that part right.’

  Then – and afterward he would remember this, during the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, Horace Whaley would recall having spoken these words (though he would not repeat them on the witness stand) – he said to Art Moran that if he were inclined to play Sherlock Holmes he ought to start looking for a Jap with a bloody gun butt – a right-handed Jap, to be precise.

  6

  Horace Whaley scratched the birthmark on his forehead and watched the falling snow beyond the courtroom windows. It was coming harder now, much harder, wind whipped and silent, though the wind could be heard pushing against the beams in the courthouse attic. My pipes, thought Horace. They’ll freeze.

  Nels Gudmundsson rose a second time, slipped his thumbs behind his suspenders, and noted with his one good eye that Judge Lew Fielding appeared half-asleep and was leaning heavily on the palm of his left hand, as he had throughout Horace’s testimony. He was listening, Nels kn
ew; his tired demeanor shielded an active mind from view. The judge liked to mull things soporifically.

  Nels, as best he could – he had arthritis in his hips and knees – made his way to the witness stand. ‘Horace,’ he said. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Morning, Nels,’ answered the coroner.

  ‘You’ve said quite a bit,’ Nels Gudmundsson pointed out. ‘You’ve told the court in detail about your autopsy of the deceased, your fine background as a medical examiner, and so forth, as you’ve been asked to do. And I’ve been listening to you, Horace, like everybody else here. And – well – I’m troubled by a couple of matters.’ He stopped and pinched his chin between his fingers.

  ‘Go ahead,’ urged Horace Whaley.

  ‘Well, for example, this foam,’ said Nels. ‘I’m not sure I understand about that, Horace.’

  ‘The foam?’

  ‘You’ve testified to having applied pressure to the deceased’s chest and that shortly thereafter a peculiar foam appeared at his mouth and nostrils.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Horace. ‘I would say this is usually the case with drowning victims. It may not appear when they’re first recovered from the water, but almost as soon as someone starts removing their clothing or attempting resuscitation there it is, generally in copious amounts.’

  ‘What would cause that?’ Nels asked.

  ‘Pressure brings it up. It results from a chemical reaction in the lungs when water mixes with air and mucus.’

  ‘Water, air, and mucus,’ said Nels. ‘But what causes them to mix, Horace? This chemical reaction you speak of – what is it?’

  ‘It’s caused by breathing. It happens in the presence of respiration. It – ’

  ‘Now this is where I got confused,’ interrupted Nels. ‘Earlier, I mean. When you were testifying. You say this foam is only produced when you’ve got water, mucus, and air all mixed together by a person’s breathing?’