Snow Falling on Cedars

by David Guterson

  A moment later Hatsue’s father came onto the porch and called to the dog in Japanese. He called again, a low guttural command, and the dog raised her head, barked twice, sprang to her feet, and limped away.

  That was the last time Ishmael spied at the Imada place.

  At the start of the strawberry season, at five-thirty in the morning, Ishmael saw Hatsue on the South Beach wood path underneath silent cedars. They were both of them going to work for Mr. Nitta – he paid better than any berry farmer on the island – for thirty-five cents a flat.

  He walked behind her, his lunch in hand. He caught up and said hello. Neither said anything about their kiss on the beach two weeks before. They walked the path quietly, and Hatsue suggested there was a chance they’d see a black-tailed deer out feeding on fern tendrils – she’d seen a doe the previous morning.

  Where the path met the beach the madrona trees leaned out over the tidal water. Slender and sinuous, olive green, mahogany red, scarlet, and ash, they were weighted with broad, gleaming leaves and velvet berries and shaded the beach stones and mud flats. Hatsue and Ishmael flushed a roosting blue heron with feathers the hue of beach mud; it squawked once and, elongated wing tips wide, graceful even in sudden flight, crossed Miller Bay at a soaring angle to perch in the dead top of a far tree.

  The path looped around the head of the bay, then down into a swale known as Devil’s Dip – ground fog shrouded its thimbleberry and devil’s club, such was the clammy, low wetness of the place – then climbed among cedars and the shadows of spruces before descending into Center Valley. The homesteads here were old and productive ones – the Andreasons, the Olsens, the McCullys, the Coxes; oxen had been used to cultivate their fields, descendants of the oxen brought to San Piedro in the old, log-skidding days. They were enormous, pungent, and hoary beasts, and Ishmael and Hatsue stopped to stare at one rubbing his hindquarters against a fence post.

  At Nitta’s farm the Canadian Indians were already busy when they arrived. Mrs. Nitta, a small woman with a waist no larger than a soup tin, darted up and down the rows like a hummingbird beneath her straw picking hat. Her mouth – like her husband’s – was full of gold fillings and when she smiled the sun glinted in among them. In the afternoons she sat beneath a canvas umbrella with a pencil between her fingers, her accounts laid out on a cedar crate before her, one palm laid against her forehead. Her handwriting was impeccable – small, soft, and elegant numbers filled the pages of her account book. She wrote with the quiet deliberation of a court scribe, sharpening her pencil often.

  Ishmael and Hatsue went their separate ways to pick among their friends. The farm was so large that a leased, battered school bus carried workers to its dusty gate at the height of picking season. An aura of manic purpose hung over the fields, for in them went forward a gleeful harvest performed by children only just freed from school. San Piedro children delighted in their field toil in part because of the social life it provided, in part because it furnished the illusion that a job had been included in the summer’s proceedings. The rich heat, the taste of berries on the tongue, the easy talk, and the prospect of spending money on soda pop, firecrackers, fishing lures, and makeup all seduced them toward Mr. Nitta’s. All day the children knelt beside one another in the fields, hunkered down close against the earth beneath the heat of the sun. Romances began and ended there; children kissed at the verges of fields or walking home through the woods.

  Ishmael, from three rows off, watched Hatsue at her work. Her hair soon came loose from its arrangement, and a sheen of sweat appeared against her collarbones. She picked deftly and had a reputation for speed and efficiency; she filled two flats in the time it took other pickers to fill one and a half. She was among friends – a half-dozen Japanese girls squatting in the rows together, their faces shrouded by straw hats – and would not acknowledge that she knew him when he passed her with his own flat mounded high. He passed her again with his emptied flat and saw how intent she was on her picking, never hurrying but never stopping. He squatted again in his spot three rows distant and tried to concentrate on his own work. When he looked up she was sliding a berry into her mouth, and he stopped to watch her eat it. Hatsue turned and met his eyes, but he could not discern in this her feelings and it seemed to him wholly an accident; she meant nothing by it. Looking away, she ate another berry with no embarrassment, slowly. Then, adjusting herself on her haunches for a moment, she went back to her methodical work.

  Late in the afternoon, at about four-thirty, heavy clouds shadowed the strawberry fields. The clean June light went softly gray and a breeze came up in the southwest. It was possible, then, to smell the rain coming and to feel the cool pause before the first drops fell. The air turned thick; sudden gusts caught the cedars at the edge of the fields and flailed their tops and branches. The pickers hurried their last flats in and waited in line while Mrs. Nitta put marks beside their names and paid them from underneath her umbrella. The pickers craned their necks to watch the clouds and held their palms out to check for rain. At first just a few drops raised tiny wisps of dust around them and then, as if a hole had been punched in the sky, an island summer rain poured hard against their faces, and the pickers began moving toward shelter of any kind – the doorway of a barn, the inside of a car, the berry storage sheds, the cedar woods. Some stood with flats held over their heads and let their picked strawberries catch the water.

  Ishmael saw Hatsue cross the Nittas’ upper fields and slip into the cedar woods, going south. He found himself following, slowly at first, letting the rain pound him as he moved through the strawberries – he was already soaked so what difference could it make?; the rain was warm and felt good on his face – and then he was trotting through the forest. The South Beach trail, with its canopy of cedars, was as good a place as any in a rainstorm, and he wanted to walk it home with her, saying nothing if that was what she desired. But when he caught sight of her below the McCullys’ farm it occurred to him to slow to a walking pace and follow along at fifty yards. The rain would cover any noise he made and besides, he didn’t know what to say. It would be enough merely to see her, as it had been in the fields or when he’d hid behind the cedar log and watched her fold her family’s laundry. He would follow along behind, listening to the rain pelt the trees, and watch her wind her way home.

  Where the trail hit the beach on Miller Bay – there was a wall of honeysuckle just past blossom, salmonberries hanging in among it and a few last wild roses blooming – Hatsue cut into the cedar woods. Ishmael followed her through a dell of ferns where white morning glory blossoms dotted the forest floor. A fallen cedar log hung with ivy bridged the dell; she slipped under it and turned up a side path that followed a shallow creek where three years before they’d sailed driftwood boats together. The path made three bends, and then Hatsue crossed the water on a log, hiked halfway up the cedar hillside, and ducked into the hollow tree they’d played in together when they were only nine years old.

  Ishmael squatted beneath branches in the rain and watched the tree’s entry for half a minute. His hair hung wet in his eyes. He tried to understand what had brought her here; he himself had forgotten about the place, which was a good half mile from his home. He remembered, now, how they’d packed moss underneath their legs and lolled in the tree looking up. It was possible to kneel but not to stand, though on the other hand the room inside the tree was wide enough to lie down in. They’d gone there with other kids and imagined they were hiding out, sharpening alder sticks with pocketknives to be used in their defense. The inside of the tree had been filled with a stock of arrows to be used in a fantasy battle at first, then in a battle fought amongst themselves. From twine and yew wood they’d made miniature bows; they’d used the hollow cedar as a kind of fort and run up and down the hillside shooting at each other. Ishmael squatted there remembering playing war on this hillside and how that had ultimately driven the Syvertsen girls away, and then the Imada sisters, and then he saw that Hatsue was looking at him from the entry of the hollo
w cedar tree.

  He looked back; there was no point in hiding. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘It’s wet.’

  ‘All right,’ he answered.

  Inside the tree he knelt on the moss with water dripping beneath his shirt. Hatsue sat on the moss in her damp summer dress, her broad-rimmed picking hat beside her. ‘You followed me,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ Ishmael apologized. ‘It just happened, sort of. I was going home. You know what I mean? I saw you turn off and … it just happened, sort of. Sorry,’ he added. ‘I followed you.’

  She smoothed her hair back behind her ears. ‘I’m all wet,’ she said. ‘I’m soaked.’

  ‘So am I. It feels good, sort of. Anyway it’s dry in here. Remember this place? It seems smaller.’

  ‘I’ve been coming here all along,’ said Hatsue. ‘I come here to think. Nobody else comes around. I haven’t seen anybody here in years.’

  ‘What do you think about?’ Ishmael asked. ‘When you’re here, I mean. What do you think about?’

  ‘I don’t know. All sorts of things. You know, a place to think.’

  Ishmael lay down with his hands propping up his chin and looked out at the rain. The inside of the tree felt private. He felt they would never be discovered here. The walls surrounding them were glossy and golden. It was surprising how much green-tinted light entered from the cedar forest. The rain echoed in the canopy of leaves above and beat against the sword ferns, which twitched under each drop. The rain afforded an even greater privacy; no one in the world would come this way to find them inside this tree.

  ‘I’m sorry I kissed you on the beach,’ said Ishmael. ‘Let’s just forget about it. Forget it happened.’

  There was no answer at first. It was like Hatsue not to answer. He himself was always in need of words, even when he couldn’t quite muster them, but she seemed capable of a brand of silence he couldn’t feel inside.

  She picked up her straw hat and looked at it instead of him. ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said with her eyes down. ‘I’m not sorry about it.’

  ‘Me, neither,’ said Ishmael.

  She lay down on her back beside him. The green-tinted light caught her face. He wanted to put his mouth against hers and leave it there forever. He knew now that he might do so without regretting it. ‘Do you think this is wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Other people do,’ said Ishmael. ‘Your friends would,’ he added. ‘And your parents.’

  ‘So would yours,’ said Hatsue. ‘So would your mother and father.’

  ‘Yours more than mine,’ said Ishmael. ‘If they knew we were out here in this tree together …’ He shook his head and laughed softly. ‘Your father’d probably kill me with a machete. He’d slice me into little pieces.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Hatsue. ‘But you’re right – he would be angry. With both of us, for doing this.’

  ‘But what are we doing? We’re talking.’

  ‘Still,’ said Hatsue, ‘you’re not Japanese. And I’m alone with you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ answered Ishmael.

  They lay beside each other in the cedar tree talking until half an hour had gone by. Then, once again, they kissed. They felt comfortable kissing inside the tree, and they kissed for another half hour. With the rain falling outside and the moss softly under him Ishmael shut his eyes and breathed the smell of her fully in through his nostrils. He told himself he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never again happen in just this way no matter how long he lived.

  9

  lshmael found himself sitting in the courtroom where Hatsue’s husband was on trial for murder. He found he was watching her as she spoke to Kabuo, and he exerted himself to look away.

  The jurors returned, and then Judge Fielding, and Carl Heine’s mother took the stand. Despite living in town a full ten years she retained the look of a farmer’s wife: stout, faded, and wind worn. Etta adjusted her girth in the witness chair so that the hitching and sliding of her undergarments was heard – heavy nylons, a girdle purchased in Lottie Opsvig’s shop, a back brace prescribed by a doctor in Bellingham for the sciatica she attributed to her farm days. For twenty-five years she had worked in all weather beside her husband, Carl senior. Winters, with steam puffing from her mouth, she’d worn mud boots, a greatcoat, and a scarf over her head firmly knotted below her heavy chin. In fingerless wool gloves knitted late at night – sitting up in bed while Carl snored – she’d perched on a stool, milking cows. In summer she’d sorted berries, cut runners, pulled weeds, and kept one eye on the Indians and Japanese who yearly picked on the Heine farm.

  She’d been born in Bavaria – still carried its accent – on a dairy farm near Ingolstadt. She’d met her husband when he came to her father’s wheat farm near Hettinger, North Dakota. They’d eloped on the Northern Pacific to Seattle – she remembered eating breakfast in the dining car – where he worked for two years in a Harbor Island foundry and for one loading lumber on the waterfront. Etta, a farmer’s daughter, found Seattle to her liking. She was a seamstress on Second Avenue and made Klondike coats at piece rate. The strawberry farm on San Piedro, where they visited at Christmas, belonged to Carl’s father, a portly man; Carl’d left it at seventeen, seeking adventure in the world. When his father died he migrated back, bringing Etta with him.

  She tried to like San Piedro. It was damp, though, and she developed a cough, and her lower back began to bother her. She had four children and raised them to work hard, but the oldest went off to Darrington to set choker cables, and the second and third went off to war. Only the second – Carl junior – returned. The fourth was a girl who, like Etta herself, eloped and went off to Seattle.

  Etta grew tired, gut weary, of strawberries: she didn’t even like to eat them. Her husband was a true lover of the fruit, but Etta couldn’t feel anything for it. To him strawberries were a holy mystery, jewels of sugar, deep red gems, sweet orbs, succulent rubies. He knew their secrets, the path they took, the daily responses they made to sunlight. The rocks between the rows collected heat, he said, and kept his plants warmer at night than they would otherwise have been – but to this sort of thing she made no answer. She brought him his eggs and went to the barn for milk. Threw feed from her apron pockets to the turkeys and chickens. Scrubbed the field muck from the mudroom floor. Filled the hog trough and walked through the pickers’ cabins to see that they hadn’t relieved themselves in pilfered canning jars.

  Carl’s heart failed him one dear October night in 1944. She’d found him on the toilet with his head against the wall, his pants clumped around his ankles. Carl junior was away at the war, and Etta took advantage of this circumstance to sell the farm to Ole Jurgensen. That gave Ole sixty-five acres in the middle of Center Valley. It also provided Etta with enough money to get by on, if she was mindful of her pennies. Fortunately this mindfulness accorded with her nature: it brought her the same depth of pleasure Carl had derived from nurturing his strawberries.

  Alvin Hooks, the prosecutor – he appeared more nimble than ever in her presence – was keenly interested in Etta’s finances. He paced in front of her with his left elbow cradled in his right palm neatly and his chin resting on his thumb. Yes, she said, she’d kept the books for the farm. No, it had never been very profitable, but the thirty acres had gotten them by for twenty-five years – better some years than others, she added: depended what the cannery was paying out. They’d cleared their debts by ’29, that helped, but then the Depression came along. The price of berries dropped, the Farmall needed a rod bearing from Anacortes, the sun didn’t shine every year. One spring a touch of night cold ruined the fruit, another you couldn’t get the fields to dry out and the low-hanging berries rotted. One year the fungus got you, another you couldn’t keep the spit bugs down. On top of all that Carl broke his leg in ’36 and spent his time hobbling up and down the rows, chasing after posts or buckets he couldn’t carry on account of his homemade crutches. The
n he went and put five acres into raspberries and dumped money into that experiment – wire and cedar posts, labor to build trellises – it set them back until he figured how to cull the canes and train them to produce. Another time he tried a new variety – Rainiers – that wouldn’t take because he used too much nitrogen: lots of green, plants high and fluffy, but small hard fruit, a piddling harvest.

  Yes, she’d known the defendant, Kabuo Miyamoto, for a good long time, she figured. It was more than twenty years since his family came to pick – the defendant, his two brothers, his two sisters, his mother and father – she remembered them well enough. They were hard workers, kept to themselves mostly. They brought their caddies in mounded up, she marked them off and paid out. They lived in one of the pickers’ cabins at first: she could smell the perch they cooked there. She saw them some evenings sitting under a maple tree eating rice and fish off of tin places. They would have their laundry strung between two saplings in a field of fireweed and dandelions. They had no automobile for getting about, she didn’t know how they did it. In the mornings, early, two or three of their children went down to Center Bay with hand lines and fished from the pier or swam out to the rocks and tried for cod. She’d seen them on the road at seven in the morning coming home with their strings of fish or with mushrooms, with fern tendrils, butter clams, searun trout if they got lucky. They walked barefoot; they kept their faces down. All of them wore woven straw pickers’ hats.