Snow Falling on Cedars: Chapters 25–32

The wife of the accused man appeared, briefly, as if she might turn in his direction and go to him, but instead she proceeded without hurry toward Ed Soames, who stood in front of the witness stand proffering the Old Testament patiently.

Hatsue wanted to move from the dilapidated cottage they rented at the end of Bender’s Spring Road, but Kabuo had convinced her the better move was to purchase a gill-netting boat.

On every night that he did not catch fish he felt his dream recede before him and the strawberry farm he coveted moved further into the distance.

Susan Marie Heine has testified under cross-examination that Carl did not give your husband an unequivocal no answer regarding the purchase of these seven acres, Carl did not lead your husband to believe no hope existed for reclaiming his family’s property.

It was Carl’s heart that was now in question, whether he wanted to redress a wrong his own mother had perpetrated.

But later that day, at one o’clock in the afternoon, a clerk at Petersen’s—it was Jessica Porter—told Hatsue about the terrible accident that had befallen Carl Heine while he fished the preceding evening.

“In your estimation, as a veteran gill-netter, as president of the San Piedro Gill-Netters Association, it isn’t possible that the defendant boarded Carl Heine’s boat for the purpose of committing murder?"

I want you to ponder this matter of murder—of first-degree murder, premeditated.

No, sir, if there’s anyone in this court thinks Kabuo Miyamoto there boarded Carl Heine’s boat against his will, bashed him in the head with a fishing gaff, and tossed him overboard—well, they’re just daft, that’s all.

Now, sir, even with all of this—with this atmosphere of isolation, of competition, of disregard for the company of others—is it fair to say that a gill-netting man will always help another in an emergency?

“I’ll ask you to imagine another scenario—you tell me if it sounds plausible."

“And at this point, sir, in the scenario, could the defendant not—a trained kendo master, remember, a man proficient at killing with a stick, lethal and experienced at stick fighting—could the defendant not have leapt aboard and killed Carl Heine with a hard blow to the skull, hard enough to crack it open?"

They were habituated to the sea winds that blew across the island each spring when the mud was up and the rain fell steadily, but a wind of this magnitude, so frigid and elemental, remained foreign to them.

It was the sound he associated with blind nights at sea—lonely, familiar, hushed, and so melancholy he could never listen without emptiness.

It was possible on such a night to become as disoriented as a man without a torch in a cave.

When he picked his net and held them pinched at the gills he felt in their silence how desperate their sojourn was, and he was moved in the manner a fisherman is moved, quietly, without words.

Not even in the face of imminent arrest did you offer any sort of explanation.

You wish to retract the story of complete ignorance you told Sheriff Moran in the wake of your arrest and replace it with this new one you’ve just now told us?

The man before them was noble in appearance, and the shadows played across the planes of his face in a way that made their angles harden; his aspect connoted dignity.

Imagine, Alvin Hooks implored the jurors, leaning toward them with his hands outstretched like a man petitioning God—imagine this good man stopping to help his enemy in the middle of the night at sea.

Your task as you deliberate together on these proceedings is to ensure that you do nothing to yield to a universe in which things go awry by happenstance.

Having never presided over a trial of murder in the first degree before, he felt himself in a precarious position: if the jury returned a guilty verdict the decision would be his alone as to whether the accused man should hang.

That it did not happen in the heat of the moment or as the accidental result of escalating violence but was rather an act planned and executed by a man with murder on his mind.

“You were selected as jurors in this case,” Judge Lew Fielding continued, “in the belief that each of you could, without fear, favor, prejudice, or sympathy, in sound judgment and clear conscience, render a just verdict on evidence presented in conformity with these instructions."

The very object of our jury system is to secure a verdict by comparison of views and discussion among jurors—provided this can be done reasonably and in a way consistent with the conscientious convictions of each.

He stood there looking at the destruction of the harbor and knew he had something inviolable that other men had no inkling of and at the same time he had nothing.

Ishmael knew his father had come to logging with a romantic’s sense of grandeur, viewing it at first as grandly heroic, in keeping with the spirit of manifest destiny.

The tug-of-war, sack hop, and three-legged races were over, and a languidness had inevitably crept over things, so that here and there grown men slept in the grass with newspapers over their faces.

The odor of baked salmon hung stale in the air, slightly bitter and slightly acrid from the long smoldering smoke of burning alder leaves, and lay like an invisible pall over the exhausted revelers.

Working its way along the cracks in his face, it would eventually end as a shine against his cheekbones, which were prominent high points in an otherwise gaunt set of features.

It was late now, the room very warm, the world outside frozen and bathed in starlight, and Ishmael told Hatsue and Hisao and Fujiko that as a reporter who had covered the courthouse in Seattle he felt comfortable offering a present conjecture: that Philip Milholland’s notes would force Judge Fielding to call for retrying the case.

She nodded and rubbed her hands together, then looked out at the sun-dappled snow.

Maybe it had seemed to Kabuo Miyamoto, alone on the sea shortly afterward, a fortuitous thing to have come across Carl Heine in circumstances such as these.

Oldest son of the Miyamotos, great-grandson of a samurai, and the first of his lineage to become an American in name, place, and heart, he had not given up on being who he was; he had never given up on his family’s land or the claim they had to it by all that was right, the human claim that was bigger than hate or war or any smallness or enmity.

And so he paid for his fastidious nature, his compulsion to keep things perfect.

He climbed it and in so doing opened the palm wound he’d incurred banging against the battery well’s metal flange with Kabuo Miyamoto’s fishing gaff.

The fog closed it in, muffling it, and the freighter’s note went deep enough so that it seemed otherworldly, not a steam whistle but a cacophony of bass notes rising from the bottom of the sea.

Finally it merged with the lighthouse signal so that the two of them sounded at the same moment, a clash of sound, discordant.

There was a dissonance, faint, every two minutes across the water, and finally even that disappeared.