Snow Falling on Cedars

by David Guterson

  ‘Geoduck,’ she said quietly.

  ‘A good one,’ Ishmael agreed.

  Hatsue bent forward and slipped a forefinger inside the siphon. They watched while the clam seized up around it and drew its neck into the mud. She followed its retreating path with the point of an alder stick; its two feet of length disappeared. ‘He’s way down there,’ she said, ‘and he’s big.’

  ‘My turn to dig,’ answered Ishmael.

  Hatsue handed him her shovel. ‘The handle’s coming loose,’ she warned. ‘Be careful it doesn’t break.’

  The shovel brought butter clams, sticks, and sea worms up with it. Ishmael built a dike against the turning of the tide; Hatsue bailed with the leaking pail, stretched out flat against the warm mud, the backs of her legs smooth and brown.

  When the alder stick fell over, Ishmael dropped down beside her and watched while she scraped with the hand spade. The clam’s siphon came into view; they saw the aperture through which its neck had retreated. They lay at the edge of the hole together, each with a muddy arm hung in, and excavated around it until a third of the shell showed. ‘Let’s pull it now,’ suggested Ishmael.

  ‘We’d better get under it,’ answered Hatsue.

  He had taught her to dig geoducks, and they had dug them for four summers, but in the end she’d surpassed him in it. There was this way she had of speaking with certainty that he found entirely convincing. ‘He’s still got a good grip,’ she pointed out. ‘He’ll break if we start pulling. Let’s be patient and dig some more. It’s better if we keep digging.’

  When the time came to pull he slid his hand down as far as he could so that the side of his face lay against the mud, turned toward Hatsue’s knee. He was close enough so that her knee was his whole view of things, and he smelled the salt on her skin.

  ‘Gentle,’ she urged. ‘Slow. Easy is the way. Don’t hurry it. Slow is best.’

  ‘He’s coming,’ Ishmael grunted. ‘I can feel him.’

  Afterward she took the clam from between his fingers and rinsed it off in the shallows. She rubbed the shell with the heel of her palm and cleaned the long neck and foot. Ishmael took the clam back and put it in the bucket. Clean and delicate, as large as any he had seen, it was approximately the size and shape of a turkey breast carved away from the bone. He admired it, turned it in his hand. He was always surprised at the thickness and heft of a geoduck. ‘We found a good one,’ he said.

  ‘He’s huge,’ answered Hatsue. ‘Enormous.’

  She stood in the shallows rinsing mud from her legs while Ishmael filled in the hole. The tide skated in over sun-heated flats, and the water was as warm as a lagoon. The two of them sat side by side in the shallows, facing out toward the expanse of the ocean, kelp draped across their legs. ‘It goes forever,’ said Ishmael. ‘There’s more water than anything in the world.’

  ‘It ends somewhere,’ answered Hatsue. ‘Or it just goes around and around.’

  That’s the same thing. It’s forever.’

  ‘There’s a shore somewhere right now where the tide is up,’ explained Hatsue. ‘And that’s the end of the ocean.’

  ‘It doesn’t end. It meets another one and pretty soon the water is back and it all mixes together.’

  ‘Oceans don’t mix,’ said Hatsue. ‘They’re different temperatures. They have different amounts of salt.’

  ‘They mix underneath,’ said Ishmael. ‘It’s all really just one ocean.’ He lay back on his elbows, draped a strand of seaweed across his thighs, and settled in again.

  ‘It’s not one ocean,’ said Hatsue. ‘It’s four oceans – Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. They’re different from each other.’

  ‘Well, how are they different?’

  ‘They just are.’ Hatsue lay back on her elbows beside him and let her hair fall behind. ‘Just because,’ she added.

  That’s not a good reason,’ Ishmael said. ‘The main thing is, water is water. Names on a map don’t mean anything. Do you think if you were out there in a boat and you came to another ocean you’d see a sign or something? It – ’

  ‘The color would change, I’ve heard that,’ said Hatsue. ‘The Atlantic Ocean is brown, sort of, and the Indian Ocean is blue.’

  ‘Where’d you hear that?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘It isn’t true.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  They were silent. There was the lapping of the water and no other sound. Ishmael was aware of her legs and arms. The salt had dried at the corners of her lips and left a residue behind. He noticed her fingernails, the shape of her toes, the hollow place at her throat. He had known her for six years and he had not known her. The detached part of her, the part she kept to herself, had begun to interest him deeply.

  It made him unhappy when he thought about her lately, and he had passed a lot of time, all spring long, mulling how to tell her about his unhappiness. He’d sat on top of the bluff at South Beach thinking about it in the afternoons. He’d thought about it during school. His thoughts, however, yielded no clue as to how to talk to Hatsue. Words evaded him completely. He felt in her presence that to reveal himself would be a mistake he might never correct. She was closed up and offered him no opening for talk, though for years now they had walked from the school bus together, met on the beach and in the woods to play, picked berries on the same nearby farms. They had played together as children in a group that included her sisters and other kids – Sheridan Knowles, Arnold and Bill Kruger, Lars Hansen, Tina and Jean Syvertsen. They had passed autumn afternoons when they were nine years old in the hollowed-out base of a cedar tree, where they sprawled on the ground looking out at the rain as it pummeled the sword ferns and ivy. At school they were strangers for reasons unclear to him, though at the same time he understood it had to be that way because she was Japanese and he wasn’t. It was the way things were and there was nothing to be done about such a basic thing.

  She was fourteen and her breasts were beginning to show beneath her bathing suit. They were small and hard, like apples. He could not put his finger on how else she had changed, but even her face was different. The texture of its skin had changed. He had watched her change, and when he sat close to her, as he did now in the water, he felt driven and nervous.

  Ishmael’s heart began the fretful pounding he’d experienced of late in her presence. There were no words for what he had to say and his tongue felt paralyzed. He couldn’t stand another moment without explaining his heart to her. A knot of pressure was building inside him to declare the love he felt. It was not only that her beauty moved him but that they already had a history together that included this beach, these waters, the very stones, and the forest at their backs, too. It was all theirs and always would be, and Hatsue was the spirit of the place. She knew where to find matsutake mushrooms, elderberries, and fern tendrils, and she had found them now for years at his side, and they had taken each other for granted, they had been as easy as friends about it all – until these last few months. Now he was in pain about her, and he understood that he would continue in his pain unless he did something about it. It was up to him. It took courage and it made him feel ill, this unasked-for thing. It was too hard. He shut his eyes.

  ‘I like you,’ he confessed with his eyes still shut. ‘Do you know what I mean? I’ve always liked you, Hatsue.’

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at him; she looked down. But having started it he moved into the warmth of her face anyway and put his lips against hers. They were warm, too. There was the taste of salt and the heat of her breathing. He pushed too hard, and she planted one hand beneath the water behind her to keep from falling over. She pushed back against him, and he felt the pressure of her teeth and smelled the inside of her mouth. Their teeth clashed a little. He shut his eyes and then opened them again. Hatsue’s eyes were tightly shut, she wouldn’t look at him.

  Just as soon as they were no longer touching she leapt up and went for her geoduck pail and ran away down the beach. She was very
fast, he knew that. He stood up only to watch her go. Then, after she had disappeared into the woods, he lay in the water for another ten minutes feeling the kiss many times. He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it. It made him feel better, though he felt perturbed, too, worried that this kiss was wrong. But from his point of view, at fourteen years old, their love was entirely unavoidable. It had started on the day they’d clung to his glass box and kissed in the sea, and now it must go on forever. He felt certain of this. He felt certain Hatsue felt the same way.

  For ten days after that Ishmael worked – odd jobs and stray chores, weeding and window washing – and worried about Hatsue Imada. She stayed away from the beach intentionally, it seemed to him in his fretfulness, and gradually he became dark and morose. He battened down the guy wires over which Mrs. Verda Carmichael’s raspberries were trellised, straightened out the contents of her shadowy toolshed, and bundled up her cedar kindling – all of it permeated by thoughts about Hatsue. He helped Bob Timmons scrape paint from his shed and weeded flower beds with Mrs. Herbert Crow, a woman who concerned herself with flower arrangements and treated Ishmael’s mother formally. Now, seated on a knee pad, Mrs. Crow worked beside Ishmael with a maple-handled claw, stopping every now and then to wipe sweat from her brow with the back of her forearm and to exclaim that he seemed blue. Later she decided they would sit on the back porch and sip tall glasses of iced tea and lemon wedges. She pointed to a fig tree and told Ishmael she’d planted it more years ago than she could remember; against all odds it had taken hold and produced enormous quantities of sweet figs. Mr. Crow greatly approved of figs, she added. She sipped her tea, then changed the subject: the families up and down South Beach, she said, were thought of by folks in Amity Harbor as self-styled aristocrats and malcontents, seclusion seekers and eccentrics – Ishmael’s family included. Did he know that his grandfather had helped to drive the pilings for the wharf at South Beach Bay landing? The Papineaus, she said, were dirt poor for a reason: none of them did any work. The Imadas, on the other hand, were consistently hard workers, including the five little girls. The Eberts hired professional gardeners and various domestic troubleshooters – plumbers, electricians, and handymen arrived in step vans to do their dirty work – but the Crows always hired neighborhood people. For forty years, she reminded Ishmael, she and Mr. Crow had lived right there at South Beach. Mr. Crow had been in coal mining and the manufacturing of pallet boards but had recently gone into the shipbuilding business and was right now in Seattle financing the construction of frigates and minesweepers for Roosevelt’s navy (though he didn’t care a lick for Roosevelt, she said) – but why was Ishmael so blue? Cheer up, urged Mrs. Crow, and sipped her tea. Life was wonderful.

  Fishing with Sheridan Knowles that Saturday – rowing the shoreline and worrying about Hatsue – Ishmael saw Mr. Crow, with his hands on his knees, peering into a telescope mounted on a tripod in the center of his terraced lawn. From this vantage point he jealously inspected the yachts of the Seattlites who cruised past South Beach on their way to anchorages in Amity Harbor. Mr. Crow was a man of uncertain temper with a high, severe forehead like Shakespeare’s. His vista of the sea was a wide and windy one; his gardens were planted with low azalea hedges, camellias, starina roses, and espaliered boxwoods, all framed by the white-caps on the shuffling waters and the annealed gray of the beach stones. His house turned a great, immaculate wall of shuttered windows to the sun, cedars surrounding it on three sides imperiously. Mr. Crow had entered into a sort of border war with Bob Timmons, his neighbor to the north, claiming that Bob’s grove of western hemlocks actually grew on his property. One morning when Ishmael was eight years old a pair of surveyors had showed up with their transits and alidades and knotted red flagging everywhere. This ceremony was repeated at odd intervals over the years, and while the faces of the surveyors changed nothing else did except that the hemlocks grew taller, their limber tips bent like green whips against the sky. Bob Timmons – a transplanted son of the New Hampshire uplands and a pale, wordless, determined man of puritanical sensibilities – looked on without expression, hands braced against his hips, while Mr. Crow grumbled and paced with his high forehead glistening.

  Ishmael worked, too, for the Etheringtons, who were vigorous summer people from Seattle. In June each year the summer people arrived en force to take up balmy residence along South Beach. Here they meandered in their tiny sailboats, tacking and coming about; they painted, hoed, swept, and planted when the mood for therapeutic work struck them, and lolled on the beach when they felt like it. In the evenings there were bonfires and steamer clams, mussels, oysters, and perch, the boats dragged up beyond the tide line, the shovels and rakes hosed off and put away. The Etheringtons drank gin-and-tonics.

  At the head of Miller Bay, beyond the mud flats, lived Captain Jonathan Soderland, who’d plied his decrepit windjammer, the C. S. Murphy, to the Arctic each year on trading expeditions. He had finally gotten too old for it and spent his time telling lies to the summer people – stroking his snowy beard, dressed in woolen long johns and ragtag suspenders – and posing for photographs at the wheel of the Murphy, which was permanently lodged in the mud flats. Ishmael helped him split firewood.

  The only viable profit-seeking concern on South Beach – other than the Imadas’ strawberry enterprise – was Tom Peck’s Great American Blue Fox Farm. On the far side of Miller Bay, in the shadows of madrona trees, Tom Peck tugged at his burnt-red goatee, sucked on his pipe stem, and raised American blue foxes for their varnished pelts in sixty-eight overcrowded breeding pens. The world left him thoroughly alone in this, although Ishmael and two other boys were hired that June to clean the cages with wire brushes. Peck had accumulated a personal mythology that included Indian wars, gold mining, and mercenary executions, and was known to carry a derringer pistol in a hidden shoulder holster. Farther up the bay, on the dead-water east arm known as Little House Cove, the Westinghouse family had built a Newport-style mansion on thirty acres of Douglas fir trees. Troubled by the general moral demise of the East – manifest, particularly, in the Lindbergh kidnapping – the well-known home appliance magnate and his high-born Bostonian wife had brought their three sons, a maid, a cook, a butler, and a pair of private tutors to San Piedro’s secluded shores. Ishmael, one long afternoon, helped Dale Papineau – self-appointed caretaker for half a dozen summer families – prune back the alder branches overarching their long drive.

  Ishmael worked with Dale, too, to clean the Etheringtons’ gutters. The Etheringtons mostly humored him, it seemed to Ishmael – for them he was a colorful island character, part of the charm of the place. After a freeze or two days of hard rain, Dale would plod from house to house with a flashlight in hand – limping because the hip he’d dislocated at the creosote plant ached when it was damp or cold or both together, and squinting because he was too vain to wear glasses – and poke around garages and basements, clearing mud from the drains. In the fall he burned brush piles and raked leaves for Virginia Gatewood, a stick figure at twilight in cloth gloves and a threadbare mackinaw coat ragged at the elbows. The veins in his cheeks were broken and smashed flat and appeared as a sort of blue paste beneath his skin; his Adam’s apple bulged like a toad’s. He looked, to Ishmael, vaguely like an alcoholic scarecrow.

  Four days after the kiss on the beach, just after dusk – it was dark in the woods, but the strawberry fields lay in twilight – Ishmael crouched at the edge of the Imadas’ farm and watched for half an hour. To his surprise no boredom overtook him and so he stayed for an hour more. It was a kind of relief to rest his check against the earth underneath the stars and to have some hope of seeing Hatsue. The fear of being discovered and labeled a Peeping Tom urged him to move on finally, and he had almost convinced himself to leave, was getting up in fact, when the screen door creaked open, light slipped across the porch, and Hatsue crossed to one of the corner posts. She lifted a wicker
basket to the cedar railing and began drawing in her family’s laundry.

  Ishmael watched Hatsue pull sheets from the line, standing in a pool of muted porch light with her arms illuminated and elegant. Clenching clothespins between her teeth, she folded towels, pants, and work shirts before dropping them into the wicker basket. When she finished she leaned against the corner post for a moment, scratching her neck and looking at the stars, then smelling the dampness in the fresh laundry. Then she took her basket of sheets and clothes and melted back into the house.

  Ishmael returned the following evening; five nights in a row he spied religiously. Each night he told himself not to return, but on the next he would take a walk at dusk, his walk would become a pilgrimage, he would feel guilt and shame, he would top the groundswell that buttressed her strawberries and pause before the sweep of her fields. He wondered if other boys did this sort of thing, if his voyeurism constituted a disease. He was sustained, though, by seeing her once more reel in laundry – elegant hand over elegant hand – drop the clothespins in a bucket on the railing, then fold shirts, sheets, and towels. Once she stood on the porch for a moment brushing the dust from her summer dress. She corralled the long sweep of her hair in deftly and knotted it before going inside.

  On the last night of his spying he saw her empty a bucket of kitchen scraps not fifty yards from where he crouched. She appeared in the porch light, as always, without warning and shut the door behind her gently. As she moved in his direction his heart lurched before freezing altogether in his chest. He could see her face now and hear the thock of her sandals. Hatsue turned down between strawberry rows and upended her bucket on the compost heap, glanced at the moon so that its blue light caught her face, then returned to the house by a different route. He caught a glimpse of her through the interstices of raspberry canes before she emerged in front of her porch with one hand knotting her hair at her neck and the bucket dangling from the other. He waited, and in a moment she was at the kitchen window with a nimbus of light around her head. Moving closer, keeping low, Ishmael saw her smoothing hair from her eyes while soapsuds ran from her fingers. There were young strawberries growing on the plants around him and their fragrance filled up the night. He moved closer until the Imadas’ dog came loping around the corner of the house and then he froze, prepared to bolt. The dog sniffed for a moment, whined, sidled toward him and allowed him to stroke her head and ears and licked his palm and lay down. She was a jaundiced, stain-toothed, and lopsided old hound, leathery looking and swaybacked, and her sad eyes wept miserably. Ishmael rubbed her belly. The dog’s gray tongue lolled in the dust and her rib cage pumped up and down.