Snow Falling on Cedars

by David Guterson

  Nels Gudmundsson tucked his thumbs in behind his suspenders and looked with studied detachment at the witness. ‘Mrs. Heine,’ he said. ‘The defendant here appeared on your doorstep on Thursday, September 9? Is that what I heard you say?’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Gudmundsson. That’s right.’

  ‘He asked to speak to your husband?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘They walked outside in order to talk? They didn’t speak in the house?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Susan Marie. ‘They spoke outside. They walked our property for thirty or forty minutes.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nels. ‘And you didn’t accompany them?’

  ‘No,’ said Susan Marie. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you hear any part of their conversation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In other words, you have no firsthand knowledge of its content – is that correct, Mrs. Heine?’

  ‘What I know is what Carl told me,’ answered Susan Marie. ‘I didn’t hear their conversation, no.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Nels said. ‘Because that concerns me. The fact that you’ve testified about this conversation without having heard any part of it.’

  He pinched the wattles of skin at his throat and turned his good eye on Judge Fielding. The judge, his head resting on his hand, yawned and looked back with detachment.

  ‘Well then,’ Nels said. ‘To summarize, Mrs. Heine. Your husband and the defendant walked and talked, and you stayed behind. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘And after thirty to forty minutes your husband returned. Is that also right, Mrs. Heine?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘You asked him about the content of his conversation with the defendant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he replied that the two of them had discussed the land in question? The land that your mother-in-law sold to Ole Jurgensen more than a decade ago? The land on which the defendant’s childhood home sat? Is all of that right, Mrs. Heine?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Susan Marie. ‘It is.’

  ‘You and your husband had recently put down earnest money on this land. Is that correct, Mrs. Heine?’

  ‘Yes. My husband did.’

  ‘It must have been,’ said Susan Marie. ‘Wednesday the eighth sounds right.’

  ‘And the defendant visited the next day? On Thursday, the ninth of September?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Nels Gudmundsson. ‘You’ve testified that on the afternoon of the ninth the defendant presented himself at your door and that he and your husband walked and talked, but that you were not present during their conversation. Do I have that right, Mrs. Heine?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘And furthermore,’ said Nels, ‘after the defendant left that afternoon you and your husband sat on the porch and had your own conversation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your husband indicated an unwillingness to talk about the content of his conversation with the defendant?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘You pressed him?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘He reported to you that he had indicated to the defendant a willingness to think matters over? That he would ponder whether or not he might sell the seven acres to Mr. Miyamoto? Or allow Mr. Jurgensen to do so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He reported to you a concern about how his mother might react if he sold to the defendant? Did I hear you say that, Mrs. Heine?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘But he was pondering such a sale anyway?’

  “That’s right.’

  ‘And he had indicated as much to the defendant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So in other words Mr. Miyamoto left your residence on the ninth having heard from your husband there was at least a possibility your husband would sell the seven acres to him.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Your husband reported to you that he had encouraged Mr. Miyamoto to believe in such a possibility?’

  ‘Encouraged?’ replied Susan Marie Heine. ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ Nels said. ‘Your husband did not state an unequivocal no? He did not lead the defendant to believe that no hope existed for the reclaiming of his family’s land?’

  ‘He did not,’ answered Susan Marie.

  ‘In other words, he encouraged Mr. Miyamoto to believe that at the very least a possibility existed.’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Susan Marie.

  ‘I guess you’d have to guess,’ said Nels, ‘having not been present at their conversation. Having to report to the court only, Mrs. Heine, what your husband reported to you. Words that might not be one hundred percent accurate, since your husband was aware of your disenchantment about the possibility of moving, as you’ve said, and may well have altered the tone and substance of his conversation with Mr. Miyamo – ’

  ‘Objection,’ put in Alvin Hooks. ‘Argumentative.’

  ‘Sustained,’ said the judge. ‘Stop rambling, Mr. Gudmundsson. Your purpose here is to ask questions of the witness that refer directly to her testimony. You must refrain from doing anything else – but you know this. Get on with it.’

  ‘Apologies,’ Nels replied. ‘All right, then. Mrs. Heine, forgive me. Your husband and the defendant – do I have this right? – had grown up together as boys?’

  ‘As far as I know, yes.’

  ‘Did your husband ever mention him as a neighbor, an acquaintance from his youth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he tell you how they’d gone fishing together as boys of ten or eleven? Or that they’d played on the same high school baseball and football teams? That they rode the same school bus for many years? Any of that, Mrs. Heine?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Susan Marie said.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Nels. He pulled the wattles of skin at his throat again and gazed at the ceiling for a moment. ‘Mrs. Heine,’ he said. ‘You mentioned during the course of your testimony these “dirty looks” Mr. Miyamoto is supposed to have aimed at your mother-in-law. Do you remember mentioning that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t mention that the defendant had aimed similar looks at you. Is that right? Do I remember right?’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  ‘Or at your husband? Did I hear you say he aimed dirty looks at your husband? Or is it just something your mother-in-law reported as having occurred?’

  ‘I can’t speak for either of them,’ answered Susan Marie. ‘I don’t know what they experienced.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Nels. ‘And I wouldn’t want you to speak for them, either. It’s just that earlier – when Mr. Hooks was questioning you? – you seemed happy to do so, Mrs. Heine. So I thought I’d take a flyer myself.’ He smiled.

  ‘All right,’ Judge Fielding interrupted. ‘That’ll do, Mr. Gudmundsson. Get on with your questioning or sit down at once.’

  ‘Judge,’ replied Nels. “There’s been a lot of hearsay admitted as evidence. That bears pointing out.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the judge. ‘A lot of hearsay – hearsay you didn’t object to, Mr. Gudmundsson. Because you know that Mrs. Heine is entitled under statute to report the nature and content of a conversation held with her deceased husband. The unfortunate fact is that he cannot do it himself. Mrs. Heine is under oath to tell the truth. As a court of law, we have no choice but to trust that what she tells us is accurate.’ He turned slowly toward the jurors. ‘For want of a gentler title, the legal institution in question here is known as the Deadman’s Statute,’ he explained. ‘Normally it prohibits evidence from being entered into the record – it allows me to rule it inadmissible as hearsay – because the individual in question is deceased. In criminal cases, however, the Deadman’s Statute does not bar such evidence from being presented, as Mr. Gudmundsson well knows. Nevertheless, and quite frankly, the Deadman’s Statute creates a … shady legal area. This is, I believe, what Mr. Gudmundsson seeks to
point out.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Gudmundsson. ‘It is precisely what I seek to point out.’ He bowed his head to the judge, glanced at the jurors, then turned and looked fully at Kabuo Miyamoto, who still sat erectly in his place at the defendant’s table with his hands folded neatly in front of him. It was at this moment that the courtroom lights fickered in the storm, flickered again, and went out. A tree had fallen on Piersall Road and knocked the power wires down.

  22

  Well timed,’ Nels Gudmundsson said when the lights went out in the Island County Courthouse. ‘I have no further questions for Mrs. Heine, Your Honor. As far as we’re concerned, she may step down.’

  The four tall windows, frosted with vapor from the steam radiators, allowed a gray snowfall light to descend into the courtroom. Its timbre replaced that of the overhead lights and cast a subtle pall across the citizens in the gallery, who sat looking at one another and at the ceiling.

  ‘Very well,’ Judge Fielding replied. ‘One thing at a time now. Patience, patience. Let’s proceed methodically, lights or no lights. Mr. Hooks, will you redirect?’

  Alvin Hooks rose and told the court that the prosecution had no further questions. ‘In fact,’ he added, winking at Nels, ‘the timing of this power outage is even more propitious than my colleague for the defense suspects. Mrs. Heine is our last witness. The state rests at the same moment the county’s power supply does.’

  The jurors – some of them – stirred and smiled. ‘The state rests,’ repeated Lew Fielding. ‘Very well, then. Very good. I was at any rate going to call for a lunch recess. We will get a report from the power company and take matters from there. We shall see what we shall see. In the meantime, I would like to ask Mr. Hooks and Mr. Gudmundsson to visit with me in my chambers.’

  The judge picked his gavel up and dropped it again listlessly against its walnut plate. ‘Go have lunch,’ he advised. ‘If we begin again at all, we’ll begin at one sharp – one P.M. according to my watch, which now reads’ – he peered at it – ‘eleven fifty-three. The electric clocks in this building are useless, incidentally. Pay no attention to them.’

  Ed Soames held the door open for him, and Judge Fielding disappeared into his chambers. The citizens in the gallery filed out; the reporters picked up their notepads. Soames followed the judge with the intention of lighting a pair of candles he knew to be lodged in the back of a desk drawer. Judge Fielding would need them, after all. It was dark in his chambers, darker than dusk, with only a pale light seeping through the windows. Ed had the candles lit by the time Nels Gudmundsson and Alvin Hooks had arrived and situated themselves across the desk from Judge Fielding. The candles sat between them so that they looked like three men preparing for a séance – the judge in his silk robe, Nels in his bow tie with its touch of the theatrical, Alvin Hooks dapper and elegant, his legs crossed, one knee over the other. Ed made his way to the door and excused himself for interrupting; was there anything more the judge required? If not, he would see to the jurors.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Judge Fielding answered. ‘Go and check on the boiler room, won’t you? Find out how it looks to keep the radiators perking. And ring the power company and get a report. And, let’s see, scare up as many candles as you can find around.’ He turned his attention to the attorneys in front of him. ‘What am I forgetting?’ he added.

  ‘The hotel,’ Alvin Hooks answered. ‘You’d better ask about their boiler, too, or the jurors aren’t going to make it. They didn’t fare well last night, recollect, and with the power out things will be worse.’

  ‘Right,’ Ed Soames said. ‘Will do.’

  ‘Very well, Ed,’ the judge returned. Then: ‘Quite solicitous of you, Alvin.’

  ‘I’m a solicitous man,’ Alvin Hooks replied.

  Soames went out, grimly. The courtroom was empty except for Ishmael Chambers, who sat in the gallery with the look on his face of a man willing to wait forever. Eleanor Dokes had tended to the jurors; they were gathered in the anteroom getting coats on. ‘The judge will be conferring throughout the lunch recess,’ Ed told Ishmael Chambers. ‘There’s no point in waiting around to speak to him. An announcement will be made at one o’clock.’

  The newspaperman stood and stuffed his notepad in his pocket. ‘I’m not waiting,’ he said softly. ‘I was just thinking about things.’

  ‘You’ll have to think about them elsewhere,’ said Ed. ‘I’m going to lock up the courtroom.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ishmael. ‘Excuse me.’

  But he left slowly, preoccupied. Ed Soames watched him impatiently. A strange bird, he told himself. ’Bout half the man his father was. Maybe the missing arm had something to do with it. Ed remembered Ishmael’s father and shook his head, disconcerted. He and Arthur had been friendly enough, but the boy was not someone you could speak to.

  Ishmael, with his shoulders hunched, his collar turned up, his pinned coat sleeve whipping in the wind, slogged through the snow to his office. The wind blew from off the water to the northwest and swept raucously down Hill Street. Ishmael had to keep his head lowered; when he raised it needles of snow lashed his eyes. He could see, nevertheless, that there were no lights anywhere in Amity Harbor; the power was out entirely. Four cars had been abandoned at haphazard angles along Hill Street, and one near the intersection of Hill and Ericksen had slid into a parked pickup truck, crumpling the driver’s-side rear panel.

  Ishmael pushed the door to his office open and shut it again with his shoulder. In his overcoat and snow-flecked hat he picked up the telephone to call his mother; she lived alone five miles from town, and he wanted to see how she was faring in the storm and find out if the south end was in as bad a state as Amity Harbor just now. If she stoked it up – and hung a curtain across the pantry door – the cookstove in the kitchen should keep her warm enough.

  The phone in his office was dead, however, and gave him back only a hollow silence; so was his printing press dead, for that matter, he realized now with a start. The office, furthermore, was quickly going cold, giving up its electric heat, and he sat for a moment with his hand in his coat pocket and considered the snow whirling past his window. The stump of his amputated arm throbbed, or more precisely it was as if the arm were there again but half-numb, a phantom limb. His brain apparently did not fully grasp – or still disbelieved – that the arm was gone. At times past, just after the war, his missing arm had caused him a great deal of pain. A Seattle doctor had suggested sympathetic denervation of the limb – doing away with its ability to feel – but Ishmael had balked for unfathomable reasons. Whatever there was to feel in his arm, pain or anything else, he wanted to feel it, he didn’t exactly know why. Now he reached up inside his coat, cupped the stump of his arm in his right hand, and thought of all he had to do on account of the power being out. He must see to his mother, first of all; he must use Tom Torgerson’s ham radio set and put in a call to Anacortes about printing the paper there. He wanted to talk to Nels Gudmundsson and Alvin Hooks. He wanted to find out if the Anacortes ferry was running and if the power company would project a time for getting the wires up again. It would be good to find out where the lines were down and to go out to wherever it was for pictures. It would be good to drive out to the coast guard station, too, and get a full storm report, the speed of the wind, the height of the tides, the rate of snowfall. He should probably take his mother food from town and a can of kerosene. There was a kerosene heater in the shed she could use to keep her bedroom warm, but it needed a new wick. He’d have to stop in at Fisk’s.

  Ishmael slung his camera around his neck and shoved out into Hill Street to take pictures. Even in good conditions it was not easy for him, a one-armed man, to steady his camera in the way he would like. 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. When he had a choice he bolted it to a tripod; when he didn’t he propped it on the stump of his missing arm, turned his head to look over his left shoulder, and got his
pictures as best he could. Doing this always embarrassed him. Twisted and turned, the camera perched precariously beside his ear, he felt like a circus grotesque.

  Ishmael took three shots of the car that had plowed into the pickup truck. It was impossible to keep the snow off the lens, and after a time he gave up trying. He felt certain that he should carry his camera, though, since a blizzard like this one did not come along often – the last had hit in ’36 – and was sure to do the sort of damage that constituted island news. Nonetheless, from Ishmael’s perspective this inclement weather should not be allowed to overshadow the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, which was an affair of a different sort entirely and of a greater magnitude. In the hearts of his fellow islanders, though, weather of this sort overwhelmed absolutely everything, so that even when a man stood trial for his life it was no doubt the destruction of docks and bulkheads, the trees fallen on homes, the burst pipes, the stranded cars, that would most interest San Piedro’s citizens. Ishmael, a native, could not understand how such transitory and accidental occurrences gained the upper hand in their view of things. It was as if they had been waiting all along for something enormous to enter their lives and make them part of the news. On the other hand the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto was the first island murder trial in twenty-eight years – Ishmael had looked it up in back issues of the Review – and unlike the storm was a human affair, stood squarely in the arena of human responsibility, was no mere accident of wind and sea but instead a thing humans could make sense of. Its progress, its impact, its outcome, its meaning – these were in the hands of people. Ishmael intended to lead with it – with the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto – if somehow he could get Thursday’s edition printed despite the storm.