‘No,’ she’d said. ‘It can’t be. You’ll have to find some other way. I’m not going to hold you, ever.’
‘I’m not talking about love,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking you to try to love me. But just as one human being to another, just because I’m miserable and don’t know where to turn, I just need to be in your arms.’
Hatsue sighed and turned her eyes from his. ‘Go away,’ she’d said. ‘I hurt for you, I honestly do, I feel terrible for your misery, but I’m not going to hold you, Ishmael. You’re going to have to live without holding me. Now get up and leave me alone, please.’
The years had passed, and now her husband was on trial for the murder of a man at sea. It dawned on Ishmael, in the coast guard record room, that perhaps something pertinent to Kabuo’s case could be found right here among these files. And suddenly he put aside his weather records and began to search the cabinets, and a strange excitement grew in him.
It took Ishmael all of fifteen minutes to find what it was he wanted. It was in a file cabinet to the right of the door, near the front of the third drawer down – records for September 15 and 16 of 1954. No wind, moderate tides, thick fog, balmy. One ship through at 0120 hours, the S.S. West Corona, Greek owned, Liberian flag; she’d called in her position from out to the west, headed southbound toward Seattle. The radio transmissions were in shorthand: the Corona had put in a call from northwest of sounding board 56, looking for a fix from the lighthouse radio signal. She’d come down the strait plotting soundings as she went, but the pilot would not put his faith in this, and at 0126 hours that morning, in heavy fog, had radioed the lighthouse for assistance. There was interference and the signal was weak, so the radioman on duty had advised the Corona’s navigator to take a reading off sounding board 56, which lay on the north shore of Lanheedron Island, and to plot his position accordingly. The Corona’s navigator had ordered a whistle blast and timed the interval of the echo. He did his division and his multiplication and relayed his position to the radioman. The Corona was out of the lane, he reported, somewhere south of buoy 56, and would have to dogleg to the northeast, bisecting Ship Channel Bank.
Ship Channel Bank. Where Dale Middleton, Vance Cope, and Leonard George had all seen Carl Heine with his net out on the night he went into the sea. On that night an enormous freighter had plowed right through the fishing grounds, throwing before it a wake large enough to knock even a big man overboard.
At 0142, on pilot’s orders, the Corona made its corrective dogleg while the navigator fixed twice more on the sounding board. Later the navigator took three more insurance readings – boards 58, 59, and 60. It seemed to the Corona’s radioman that they were safely back in the shipping lane. In the vicinity of White Sand Bay he picked up the lighthouse’s radio beacon and, gaining confidence by the moment, made the big swing to the south. The Corona locked onto the lighthouse radio signal and made headway for Seattle.
Everything was in triplicate – military standard carbon copies. They were signed by the radioman’s assistant, a Seaman Philip Milholland – he’d transcribed the radio transmissions. Ishmael slipped three center pages of Seaman Milholland’s notes free and folded them into quarters. The pages fit neatly into his coat pocket, and he let them sit there, feeling them, composing himself a little. Then he grabbed one of the lanterns and went out.
At the bottom of the stairs, in an anteroom, he found Levant slowly paging through the Saturday Evening Post beside a kerosene floor heater. ‘I’m done,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s just one more thing. Is Philip Milholland around somewhere? I want to talk to him.’
Levant shook his head and put the magazine on the floor. ‘You know Milholland?’ he said.
‘Sort of,’ said Ishmael. ‘An acquaintance.’
‘Milholland’s gone. He got transferred out to Cape Flattery, Milholland and Robert Miller. That’s when we moved up.’
‘We?’ asked Ishmael. ‘Who’s we?’
‘Me and Smoltz, the two of us, we started in together. Smoltz.’
‘When was that? When did Milholland leave?’
‘That was back in September,’ said Levant. ‘Me and Smoltz started in September 16 as dogwatch radio team.’
‘Dogwatch? Like at night?’
‘Night shift, yes,’ Levant said. ‘Me and Smoltz work the night shift.’
‘So Milholland’s gone,’ said Ishmael. ‘He left September 15?’
‘He couldn’t have left the fifteenth,’ said Levant. ‘’Cause he worked the night of the fifteenth. So he must have left on the sixteenth – that’s it. He and Miller went out to Flattery the sixteenth of September.’
Nobody knows, thought Ishmael. The men who’d heard the Corona’s radio transmissions had gone somewhere else the next day. They’d done their watch on the night of the fifteenth, slept through the morning of the sixteenth, and then they’d left San Piedro. The transcribed transmissions had gone into a manila folder, and the folder had gone into a file cabinet in a room stuffed full of coast guard records. And who would find them there? They were as good as lost forever, it seemed to Ishmael, and no one knew the truth of the matter: that on the night Carl Heine had drowned, stopping his watch at 1:47, a freighter plowed through Ship Channel Bank at 1:42 – just five minutes earlier – no doubt throwing before it a wall of water big enough to founder a small gillnetting boat and toss even a big man overboard. Or rather one person, he himself, knew this truth. That was the heart of it.
24
Ishmael’s mother had the woodstove in the kitchen going – he could see the smoke rising thick from the chimney, a ghostly white against the hard-falling snow – and was standing at the sink in her overcoat and scarf when Ishmael passed in front of her window carrying his can of kerosene. A fog of condensation had formed on the inside of the pane, so that her image appeared to him as a kind of silhouette, a vague impression of his mother at the sink, refracted and fragmented, a wash of color. As he passed by, peering through the window mist and snowfall, he saw her hand work with sudden clarity to wipe a circle of the pane dry, and then her eye met his and she waved. Ishmael held up the can of kerosene, still moving steadily toward the kitchen door. His mother had shoveled clear a path to the woodshed, but the snowfall was already covering it. Her shovel stood propped against the fence railing.
He stood in the kitchen doorway, set the kerosene down, and felt the place in his coat pocket where Philip Milholland’s coast guard notes lay folded against his leg. He took his hand out and then returned it and touched the notes again. Then he picked up the kerosene and went in.
His mother had on rubber boots, unbuckled, and had used small finishing nails to tack a wool blanket across the entry to the living room. The light in the kitchen came opaquely through the wet windows; the room was warm, and on the table, neatly arranged, lay a collection of candles, a kerosene lantern, two flashlights, and a box of wooden matches. His mother had set a soup kettle full of snow on the woodstove; it hissed and snapped as Ishmael shut the door behind him. ‘I’ve got some food in the car,’ he said, setting the can of kerosene against the wall, ‘and a new wick for the heater.’ He put it on the table beside the candles. ‘Did you freeze last night?’ he asked.
‘Not at all,’ replied his mother, ‘I’m really glad to see you, Ishmael. I tried to call, but the phone is out. The lines must all be down.’
‘They are,’ said Ishmael. ‘Everywhere.’
She finished pouring snowmelt water from a second kettle into jugs in the sink, then dried her hands and turned to him.
‘Are people stranded?’ she said.
‘I must have seen fifty cars along the roads between here and town,’ said Ishmael. ‘I saw Charlie Torval’s car upside down in the blackberry stickers up on Scatter Springs. Trees are down all over the place; there’s no power anywhere. They’re trying to get town back up by morning – they’re doing town first, like always. If they do get it lit again you should come stay with me; we’ll shut this place up and move to town, there’s no need to
stay out here and freeze to death. I – ’
‘I’m not freezing,’ his mother said, pulling the scarf from her head. ‘In fact, it’s a little too hot just now. I just got done shoveling and bringing stove wood around. I’m perfectly comfortable except for my worry about what’s going to happen when the plumbing thaws out. The last thing I need is a burst pipe.’
‘We’ll open the taps,’ answered Ishmael. ‘You shouldn’t have any problems. There’s a pressure valve in the line on the east wall in the cellar – Dad put it in, remember?’ He sat down at the table and cupped the stump of his amputated arm in his hand, then rubbed and squeezed it gently. ‘Thing aches when it gets this cold,’ he said.
‘It’s twelve degrees,’ said his mother. ‘Are those groceries up in your car going to freeze? Maybe we should go for them.’
‘All right,’ said Ishmael. ‘Let’s.’
‘When your arm is ready,’ said his mother.
They brought the two bags of groceries down, as well as Ishmael’s camera. His mother’s flower beds were all covered over, and the snow was lining up on her holly trees and mulberry and frosting the tops of her rhododendrons. She was, she said, worried about her flowers, whether the less hardy of them would survive the freeze – she’d lost flowers in lesser weather, she pointed out. Ishmael saw where she had worked with the wheelbarrow at bringing cordwood from the shed to the kitchen door; there were splinters around the wood block where she’d cut kindling.
His mother, at fifty-six, was the sort of country widow who lives alone quite capably; he knew that she rose at a quarter after five every morning, made her bed, fed her chickens, showered, dressed, cooked herself a poached egg and toast, steeped strong tea and sipped it at the table, then got immediately at her breakfast dishes and whatever housework needed doing. By nine o’clock, he speculated, there was nothing left she felt obligated to do, and so she read or tended her flowers or drove in to Petersen’s Grocery. It was unclear to him, though, exactly how she passed her time. He knew she read incessantly – Shakespeare, Henry James, Dickens, Thomas Hardy – but he did not think this could fill her days. On Wednesday evenings twice a month she attended a meeting of her book circle, five other women who enjoyed discussing Benito Cereno, Flowers of Evil, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Jane Eyre. She was on friendly terms with Lillian Taylor, with whom she shared a passion for flowers and for The Magic Mountain and Mrs. Dalloway. The two of them would stoop or stand in the garden picking the seeds from the feathery spires of astilbes a few weeks past their prime, then sit at a garden table shaking the seeds clean and collecting them in small manila packets. They drank lemon-scented water and ate sandwiches with the crusts cut off at three o’clock in the afternoon. ‘We’re dainty old ladies,’ he heard Lillian exclaim once. ‘We’ll wear painters’ smocks and blue berets and do watercolors next – what do you say to that, Helen? Arc you ready to be an old biddy with her paints?’
Helen Chambers was homely and dignified in the manner of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her homeliness composed a form of beauty; she was quite impressive to look at. Her nose was broad and her forehead stately. For her shopping trips to town she wore a camel’s-hair coat and a boater festooned with ribbon and striped lace. Her husband’s death had inspired in her a greater attentiveness to her books and flowers and a greater need for people. Ishmael had stood beside her at church while she greeted her friends and acquaintances with the sort of cordiality and genuine feeling he couldn’t muster in himself. Often he ate lunch with her afterward. He had explained to his mother, when she asked him to say grace, that like his father before him he was an incorrigible agnostic and suspected God was a hoax. ‘Suppose you had to choose right now,’ his mother had once replied. ‘Supposing somebody put a gun to your head and forced you to choose, Ishmael. Is there a God or isn’t there?’
‘Nobody has a gun to my head,’ Ishmael had answered her. ‘I don’t have to choose, do I? That’s the whole point. I don’t have to know for certain one way or the other if – ’
‘Nobody knows, Ishmael. What do you believe’
‘I don’t believe anything. It isn’t in me. Besides, I don’t know what you mean by God. If you tell me what he is. Mom, I’ll tell you if I think he exists.’
‘Everybody knows what God is,’ said his mother. ‘You feel what God is, don’t you?’
‘I don’t feel what God is,’ answered Ishmael. ‘I don’t feel anything either way. No feeling about it comes to me – it’s not something I have a choice about. Isn’t a feeling like that supposed to happen? Isn’t it just supposed to happen? I can’t make a feeling like that up, can I? Maybe God just chooses certain people, and the rest of us – we can’t feel Him.’
‘You felt Him as a child,’ his mother said. ‘I remember, Ishmael. You felt Him.’
‘That was a long time ago,’ Ishmael answered. ‘What a child feds – that’s different.’
Now, in the twilight, he sat in the kitchen of his mothers house with Philip Milholland’s notes in his coat pocket and tried to feel that intimation of God he had felt as a younger person. It was not something he could conjure up again. After the war he had tried to feel God, to take solace in Him. It hadn’t worked, and he had dismissed the attempt when he could no longer ignore that it felt like a pathetic falsehood.
The wind shuddered against the window behind him and the snow outside fell fast. His mother had a soup they could eat, she said: five kinds of beans, onions and celery, a ham shank, two small turnips. Was he hungry now or did he want to wait? She was happy cither way, she could eat or not eat, it didn’t matter to her. Ishmael pushed two slabs of fir heartwood into the fire in the cook stove. He put a kettle of water on, then sat down again at the table. ‘It’s plenty warm in here,’ he pointed out. ‘You don’t have to worry about-getting cold.’
‘Stay,’ replied his mother. ‘Spend the night. I’ve got three extra comforters. Your room will be cold, but your bed should be fine. Don’t go back out into all of that snow. Stay and be comfortable.’
He agreed to stay and she put the soup on. In the morning he would see about printing his newspaper, for now he was warm where he was. Ishmael sat with his hand in his coat pocket and wondered if he shouldn’t just tell his mother about the Coast Guard notes he had stolen from the lighthouse and then drive carefully back into town to hand the notes over to Judge Fielding. But he did nothing. He sat watching the twilight fade beyond the kitchen windows.
‘That murder trial,’ his mother said finally. ‘I suppose you’ve been busy with that.’
‘It’s all I think about,’ said Ishmael.
‘It’s a shame,’ said his mother. ‘I have to think it’s a travesty. That they arrested him because he’s Japanese.’
Ishmael made no reply to this. His mother lit one of the candles on the table and placed a saucer under it. “What do you think?’ she asked him. ‘I haven’t been there listening, so I’m interested in what you have to say.
‘I’ve covered every minute,’ Ishmael answered. And he felt himself growing cold now, and the depth of his coldness was not a surprise, and he closed his hand around Milholland’s notes.
‘I have to think he’s guilty,’ lied Ishmael. ‘The evidence is very solidly against him – the prosecutor has a good case.’
He explained to her about the blood on the fishing gaff, the wound on the left side of Carl Heine’s head, the sergeant who had testified that Kabuo Miyamoto was an expert when it came to killing with a stick. He told her about Ole Jurgensen’s testimony and the long dispute over land. He told her how three different fishermen had reported seeing Kabuo Miyamoto fishing near Carl Heine on the night the murder happened, and he told her about the length of mooring rope. The accused man sat so rigorously in his chair, so unmovable and stolid. He did not appear remorseful. He did not turn his head or move his eyes, nor did he change his expression. He seemed to Ishmael proud and defiant and detached from the possibility of his own death by hanging. It reminded him, he told his mother, of a trai
ning lecture he’d listened to at Fort Benning. The Japanese soldier, a colonel had explained, would die fighting before he would surrender. His allegiance to his country and his pride in being Japanese prevented him from giving in. He was not averse to dying at war in the way Americans were. He did not have the same feeling about death on the battlefield that American soldiers felt. To the Japanese soldier a life in defeat was not for a moment worth living; he knew he could not return to his people having suffered the humiliation of losing. He could not meet his Maker afterward, either – his religion demanded he die with honor. Understand, the colonel added: the Jap preferred to die with honor intact, and in this the infantryman should indulge him. In other words, take no prisoners: shoot first and ask questions later. The enemy, you see, has no respect for life, his own or anyone else’s. He doesn’t play by the rules. He’ll put up his hands, pretend to surrender, and all the while he’s rigged himself to booby-trap as you approach. It’s characteristic of the Jap to be sly and treacherous. He won’t show what he’s thinking in his face.
‘It was all propaganda,’ added Ishmael. ‘They wanted us to be able to kill them with no remorse, to make them less than people. None of it is fair or true, but at the same time I find myself thinking about it whenever I look at Miyamoto sitting there staring straight ahead. They could have used his face for one of their propaganda films – he’s that inscrutable.’
‘I know who he is,’ said Ishmael’s mother. ‘He’s a striking man, his face is powerful. Like you, Ishmael, he served in the war. Have you forgotten – that – that he fought in the war? That he risked his life for this country?’
‘All right,’ said Ishmael, ‘he served. Is that a fact pertinent to the murder of Carl Heine? Is it relevant to the case at hand? I grant you the man is “striking”, as you say, and that he served in the war – are those things relevant? I don’t understand what makes them relevant.’
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