Snow Falling on Cedars (12 page)

‘I don’t want to make a lot of noise,’ she said. ‘Even with the radio. My sisters are listening.’

‘Okay,’ said Kabuo. ‘Quietly.’

He unbuttoned his shirt, stripped it off, and set it on the end of the cot. He pulled his undershirt off. He was very strong. She could see the muscles flowing in his abdomen. She was glad to have married him. He, too, came from strawberry farmers. He was good with the plants and knew which runners to cut. His hands, like hers, were berry stained in the summer months. The red fruit mingled with his skin and scented it. She knew that in part because of this smell she wanted to tie her life to his; it was something she understood in her nose, finally, as odd as that might seem to others. And she knew that Kabuo wanted what she wanted, a San Piedro strawberry farm. That was all, there was nothing more than that, they wanted their farm and the closeness at hand of the people they loved and the scent of strawberries outside their window. There were girls Hatsue’s age she knew very well who felt certain their happiness was something other, who wanted to go to Seattle or Los Angeles. They could not say in any precise way exactly what it was they sought in the city, only that they wanted to go there. It was something Hatsue herself had once felt but had since emerged from as if from a dream, discovering the truth of her private nature: it was in her to have the composure and tranquillity of
an island strawberry farmer. She knew in her bones what she wanted, and she knew why she wanted it, too. She understood the happiness of a place where the work was clear and there were fields she could enter into with a man she loved purposefully. And this was what Kabuo felt, too, and what he wanted from life. And so they made plans together. When the war was over they would return to San Piedro. Kabuo was rooted there just as she was, a boy who understood the earth and the working of it and how it was a good thing to live among people one loved. He was precisely the boy Mrs. Shigemura had described for her so many years ago when she’d spoken of love and marriage, and now she kissed him, hard, because of that. She kissed his jaw and forehead more softly, and then she put her chin against the top of his head and held his ears between her fingers. His hair smelled like wet earth. Kabuo put his hands against her back and pulled her deeply to him. He kissed the skin just over her breasts and put his nose against her bra.

‘You smell so good,’ he said.

He drew away and stripped his pants off and laid them next to his shirt. They sat there beside each other in their underwear. His legs shone in the light from the window. She could see beneath the fabric of his underpants how his penis stood erect. The end of it pushed his shorts into the air.

Hatsue brought her feet up onto the bed and propped her chin on her knees. They’re listening,’ she said. ‘I know they are.’

‘Could you turn the radio up?’ Kabuo called. ‘We can’t hear it so well in here.’

The country-and-western music grew louder. And they were very quiet at first. They lay on their sides and faced one another, and she felt his hardness against her belly. She reached down and touched it beneath the fabric of his shorts, the tip of it and the ridge just below. She could hear the coal burning in the potbellied stove.

She remembered how she had kissed Ishmael Chambers, clinging to that wooden box. He was a brown-skinned boy who lived down the road – they’d picked blackberries, climbed
trees, fished for perch. She thought of him while Kabuo kissed the undersides of her breasts, and then her nipples through the fabric of her bra, and she recognized Ishmael as the beginning of a chain, that she had kissed a boy when she was ten years old, had even then felt something strange, and that tonight, soon, she would feel another boy’s hardness deep inside of her. But it was not difficult for her, on her wedding night, to then cast Ishmael out of her mind completely; he had only crept in by accident, as it were, because all romantic moments are associated willy-nilly – even when some are long dead.

In a little while her husband took off her slip and underpants and unhooked her bra, and she pulled down his shorts. They were naked, and she could see his face in the starlight from the window. It was a good face, strong and smooth. The wind was blowing hard outside now, and the sound of it whistled between the boards. She put her hand around Kabuo’s hardness and squeezed it, and it pulsed once in her hand. Then, because she wanted it this way, she fell onto her back without letting go, and he was on top of her with his hands on her buttocks.

‘Have you ever done this before?’ he whispered.

‘Never,’ answered Hatsue. ‘You’re my only.’

The head of his penis found the place it wanted. For a moment he waited there, poised, and kissed her – he took her lower lip between his lips and gently held it there. Then with his hands he pulled her to him and at the same time entered her so that she felt his scrotum slap against her skin. Her entire body felt the tightness of it, her entire body was seized to it. Hatsue arched her shoulder blades – her breasts pressed themselves against his chest – and a slow shudder ran through her.

‘It’s right,’ she remembered whispering. ‘It feels so right, Kabuo.’

‘
Tadaima aware ga wakatta
,’ he had answered. ‘
I understand just now the deepest beauty.
’

Eight days later he left for Camp Shelby, Mississippi, where he joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. He
had
to go to
the war, he told her. It was necessary in order to demonstrate his bravery. It was necessary to demonstrate his loyalty to the United States: his country.

‘You can die demonstrating all of that,’ she told him. ‘
I
know you are brave and loyal.’

He went despite these words of hers. She had spoken them many times before their wedding, often she’d urged him not to go, but he had not been able to bring himself to stay away from the fighting. It was not only a point of honor, he’d said, it was also a matter of having to go because his face was Japanese. There was something extra that had to be proved, a burden this particular war placed on him, and if he would not carry it, who would? She saw that in this he would not be swayed and recognized the hardness buried in him, the part of her husband that was attracted to the fighting and wanted to enter it desperately. There was a place in him she could not reach where he made his choices in solitude, and this made her not only uneasy about him but afraid for their future, too. Her life was joined to his now, and it seemed to her that every corner of his soul should be opened to hers because of this. It was the , war, she persistently told herself, it was the prison of camp life, the pressures of the times, their exile from home, that explained his distance. Many men were going off to the war against the wishes of women, a lot of them leaving the camp each day, droves of young men going. She told herself she must endure it in the way her mother and Kabuo’s mother counseled her and not struggle against those larger forces that could not be struggled against. She was in the stream of history now, as her mother before her had been. She must travel in it easily or her own heart would devour her and she would not endure the war unwounded, as she still hoped to do.

Hatsue settled into missing her husband and learned the art of waiting over an extended period of time – a deliberately controlled hysteria that was something like what Ishmael Chambers felt watching her in the courtroom.

Ishmael Chambers, watching Hatsue, remembered digging geoduck dams with her below the bluff at South Beach. Hatsue, carrying a garden shovel and a metal pail rusted through in its bottom, dripped water behind her as she walked the tide flats; she was fourteen and wore a black bathing suit. She went barefoot, avoiding barnacles, picking her way along the flats with the tide drawn out and the salt chuck grass sleek against the mud in sun-dried fans. Ishmael wore rubber boots and clutched a gardener’s hand spade; the sun struck his shoulders and back as he walked and dried the mud on his knees and hands.

They wandered for nearly a mile. They stopped to swim. At the turning of the tide the geoducks emerged, shooting jets of water like miniature geysers hidden among the eelgrass. Down the mud flats small fountains erupted, dozens of them, spurting two feet or more, then again, then lower, then dwindling and stopping. The geoducks raised their necks from the mud and aimed their lips at the sun. The siphons at the ends of their necks glistened. They blossomed delicately white and iridescent out of the tidal morass.

The two of them knelt beside a dam siphon to discuss the particulars of its appearance. They were quiet and made no sudden movements – movement inspired shyness among clams and encouraged them to withdraw. Hatsue, her bucket beside her, her shovel in one hand, pointed out the darkness of the exposed clam’s lip, its size, its hue and tone, the circumference of its watery dimple. She decided they’d stopped beside a horse clam.

They were fourteen years old; geoducks were important. It was summer and little else really mattered.

They came to a second siphon and knelt again. Hatsue, sitting on her ankles, twisted the salt water out of her hair so that it dripped along her arm. She lofted her hair out neatly behind her and let it spread against her back to catch the sun.

‘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.