Nels Gudmundsson, in the beginning, had been satisfied with this and seemed to take him at his word. But then he came again on the following morning with a yellow legal pad tucked beneath his arm and, a cigar between his teeth, settled down on Kabuo’s bed. The cigar ashes fell into the lap of his pants, but he did not seem to mind or notice, and Kabuo felt sorry for him. His back was bent and his hands trembled. ‘The sheriff’s report,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I read it, Kabuo. The whole thing.’
‘What does it say?’ Kabuo asked.
‘It contains a few facts I’m concerned about,’ said Nels, pulling a pen from his coat pocket. ‘I hope you won’t mind if I ask you, once more, to give me your side of the story. Can you do that for me, Kabuo? Tell me everything all over again? Your story about the seven acres, et cetera? Everything that happened?’
Kabuo moved to the door of his cell and put his eye to the opening. ‘You don’t believe what I’ve told you,’ he said softly. ‘You think I’m lying, don’t you.’
‘The blood on your fishing gaff,’ Nels Gudmundsson replied. ‘They had it tested in Anacortes. It matches Carl Heine’s blood type.’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Kabuo. ‘I told that to the sheriff and I’m telling it to you. I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Another thing,’ insisted Nels, pointing his pen at Kabuo. ‘They found one of your mooring lines on Carl’s boat. Wrapped around a cleat on the Susan Marie. One of your lines, clearly, they say. Matched all your other lines with the exception of a new one. That’s in the report, too.’
‘Oh,’ said Kabuo, but nothing more.
‘Look,’ said Nels Gudmundsson. ‘I can’t help you with this unless I know the truth. I can’t build a case around an answer like “oh” when I’ve brought to your attention such damning evidence as your mooring line being found by the sheriff of Island County on the boat of a suspiciously dead fisherman. What good can I do you if all I get is “oh”? How am I going to help you, Kabuo? You’ve got to level with me, that’s all there is to it. Otherwise, I can’t help you.’
‘I’ve told you the truth,’ said Kabuo. He turned around and faced his attorney, an old man with one eye and trembling hands, appointed to his case because he, Kabuo, had refused to honor the prosecutor’s point of view by purchasing his own defense. ‘We talked about my family’s land, I argued with his mother years ago, I went to see Ole, I went to see Carl, and that was the end of it. I’ve said what I have to say.’
‘The mooring line,’ Nels Gudmundsson repeated. ‘The mooring line and the blood on the fishing gaff. I – ’
‘I can’t explain those things,’ insisted Kabuo. ‘I don’t know anything about them.’
Nels nodded and stared at him, and Kabuo held his gaze. ‘You could hang, you know,’ Nels said bluntly. ‘There’s no attorney in the world who can help you with this if you’re not going to tell the truth.’
And the next morning Nels had come yet again, carrying a manila folder. He smoked his cigar and paced the length of the cell with the folder tucked beneath his arm. ‘I’ve brought you the sheriffs report,’ he said, ‘so you can see exactly what we’re up against. Problem is, once you read the thing, you may decide to concoct a new story – you may pretend you want to level with me by concocting a more defensible lie. Once you’ve read this report, Kabuo, you can make something up that’s consistent with it and I’ll go ahead and work with that, mainly because I’ll have no choice. I don’t like that. I’d rather it didn’t turn out that way. I’d rather know I can trust you. So before you read what’s in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sheriff right off the bat, when it wasn’t too late, when the truth might still have given you your freedom. When the truth might have done you some good.’
Kabuo, at first, said nothing. But then Nels dropped the manila folder on the mattress, dropped it and stood directly over him. ‘It’s because you’re from Japanese folks,’ he said softly; it was more a question than a statement. ‘You figure because you’re from Japanese folks nobody will believe you anyway.’
‘I’ve got a right to think that way. Or maybe you’ve forgotten that a few years back the government decided it couldn’t trust any of us and shipped us out of here.’
‘That’s true,’ said Nels. ‘But – ’
‘We’re sly and treacherous,’ Kabuo said. ‘You can’t trust a Jap, can you? This island’s full of strong feelings, Mr. Gudmundsson, people who don’t often speak their minds but hate on the inside all the same. They don’t buy their berries from our farms, they won’t do business with us. You remember when somebody pitched rocks through all the windows at Sumida’s greenhouses last summer? Well, now there’s a fisherman everybody liked well enough who’s dead and drowned in his net. They’re going to figure it makes sense a Jap killed him. They’re going to want to see me hang no matter what the truth is.’
‘There are laws,’ said Nels. ‘They apply equally to everyone. You’re entitled to a fair trial.’
‘There are men,’ said Kabuo, ‘who hate me. They hate anyone who looks like the soldiers they fought. That’s what I’m doing here.’
‘Tell the truth,’ Nels said. ‘Decide to tell the truth before it’s too late.’
Kabuo lay down on his bed with a sigh and twined his fingers behind his head. ‘The truth,’ he said. ‘The truth isn’t easy.’
‘Just the same,’ Nels said. ‘I understand how you feel. There are the things that happened, though, and the things that did not happen. That’s all we’re talking about.’
It seemed to Kabuo a lushly textured dream, fogbound, still, and silent. He thought about it often in his darkened cell, and the smallest details were large for him and every word was audible.
On the night in question he’d checked the Islander’s engine oil and quickly greased the net drum’s reel drive before putting out for Ship Channel Bank in the hour just before dusk. Ship Channel, he’d understood, had been fished hard and happily on two consecutive evenings. He’d spoken to Lars Hansen and Jan Sorensen about it and made the decision to fish at Ship Channel on account of their information. The silvers were running in immense schools, they said, mostly on the flood tide. There were fish to be had on the ebb tide, too, though nowhere near as many. It would be possible to take two hundred or more working the flood alone, Kabuo hoped, and perhaps a hundred more on the ebb if he was lucky – and luck, he knew, was what he needed. Elliot Head, on the previous night, had barely covered his costs. He’d come away with eighteen fish and had furthermore set his net in the dark beside a large and labyrinthine kelp island. The tide drift had taken him down into the kelp, and he’d wasted four hours extricating himself so as not to rip his gill net. Now, tonight, he would have to do better. He would need to have fortune on his side.
In the blue light of dusk he’d made the turn out of the harbor and run for open water. From his vantage point at the wheel of the Islander he saw the soft cedars of San Piedro Island, its high, rolling hills, the low mist that lay in long streamers against its beaches, the whitecaps riffling its shoreline. The moon had risen already behind the island and hung just over the big bluff at Skiff Point – a quarter moon, pale and indefinite, as ethereal and translucent as the wisps of clouds that traveled the skies, obscuring it. Kabuo, his radio on, checked his barometer; it still held steady despite talk of rough weather, cold squalls of sleet reported to the north, out of the Strait of Georgia. When he looked up again a raft of seabirds was scattering, gray silhouettes off the chop a hundred yards out, rising and then skimming over the surface of the waves in the manner of surf scoters, though there were too many to be surf scoters – he didn’t know what they might be, maybe murres, he couldn’t tell. Steering wide of Harbor Rocks, bucking the sea wind head-on at seven knots, he ran with the tide race pushing hard behind him and fell in with the Kasilof, the Antarctic, and the Providence, all of which were making for Ship Channel, too: ha
lf the fleet was headed there. Half the fleet was spread out before him, running hard for the fishing grounds at dusk and throwing wide silver wakes.
Kabuo drank the green tea in his thermos and ran through the radio channels. It was his habit to listen but not to speak, to gather what he could about men by the manner in which they expressed themselves, and to discern what he could about the fishing.
At full dusk or thereabouts he ate three rice balls, a slab of rock cod, and two windfall apples from a wild tree behind Bender’s Spring. The night mist hovered on the water already, so he backed the throttle down and ran with his spotlight broadcasting over the waves. The prospect of a blind fog, as always, concerned him. A fisherman could become so lost in a blind fog he’d set his own net in a circle without knowing it or end up working the middle of the shipping lane where the big freighters ran toward Seattle. It was better in such conditions to fish Elliot Head, since the head by far from the shipping lane and well to the lee side of Elliot Island, out of the big water breezes.
But by eight-thirty he’d idled his engine at the bank and stood in the cockpit beside the net drum, listening, with the fog settling all around him. From the lighthouse station far to the east he could hear the low, steady intonation of the fog signal diaphone. It was the sound he associated with blind nights at sea – lonely, familiar, hushed, and so melancholy he could never listen without emptiness. Tonight, he knew, was what old-timers called ghost time, with fog as immobile and dense as buttermilk. A man could run his hands through such a fog, separating it into tendrils and streamers that gathered themselves languidly once more into the whole and disappeared seamlessly, without a trace. Drifting on the tide, a gill-netter moved through it as though it composed its own netherworld medium halfway between air and water. It was possible on such a night to become as disoriented as a man without a torch in a cave. Kabuo knew that other fishermen were out there, drifting as he was and peering into the fog, blindly gliding across the bank in the hope of establishing their locations. The shipping lane boundaries were marked by numbered buoys, and the hope was to stumble across one fortuitously so as to orient oneself.
Kabuo, giving up, propped a buoy bag between the stern fairleads and lit a kerosene lantern with a wooden kitchen match. He waited until the wick held strong, pumped in some air, adjusted the fuel, then set the lantern carefully in its life ring and bent down over the Islander’s, transom to place the buoy bag on the water. With his face so close to the surface of the sea he imagined he could smell the salmon running. He shut his eyes, put a hand in the water, and in his own manner he prayed to the gods of the sea to assist him by bringing fish his way. He asked for good luck, for a respite from the fog; he prayed that the gods would clear the fog away and keep him safe from the freighters in the shipping lane. Then he stood again in the stern of the Islander, square-knotted his buoy bag line to his net line, and released the brake on the net drum.
Kabuo laid his net out north to south by motoring away from it on a true blind heading as slowly as was possible. It seemed to him the lane lay to the north, though he couldn’t be certain about that. The tidal drift, running east, would keep his net taut, but only if he laid it on the right bearing; if he quartered to the current, even slightly, on the other hand, he’d end up having to tow all night just to keep his net from collapsing. There was no way of knowing in dense fog how true a net lay; he couldn’t see twenty corks down his line and would have to run it every hour or so with his spotlight seeking it out. Kabuo could not see the surface of the sea more than five yards beyond the bow of his boat from his place at the wheel in his cabin. The Islander, in fact, divided the fog, the bow literally peeling it open. The fog was dense enough to make him ponder running for Elliot Head before long; for all he knew he was setting his net in the Seattle-bound shipping lane. Besides, he had to hope no one had set due south, particularly at an angle to his own set. In this fog he’d no doubt miss the man’s jacklight and twist his net up in the Islander’s prop, a long diversion from the night’s fishing. Any number of things could go amiss.
In the stern the net slipped free from the drum and rolled over the fairleads easily toward the sea until at last the whole of it was out of the boat, three hundred fathoms long. Kabuo went back and hosed the net gurry out the scupper holes. When he was done he shut the engine down and stood on the hatch with his back against the cabin, listening for the blasts of passing freighters. Nothing, though – there was no sound now but lapping water and the distant sound from the lighthouse. The tidal current carried him gently east, just as he’d predicted. He felt better about things with his net in. He could not be certain he was not in the shipping lane, but he knew he was drifting at the same speed as every other gill-netter fishing these fogbound waters. He imagined there were thirty or more boats out there, all hidden and silent in the dense sea fog, moving to the same tidal rhythm that moved under him, keeping everyone equi-distant. Kabuo went in and flicked his mast light on: red over white, the sign of a man night fishing, not that it did any good. Not that the light was worth anything. But on the other hand he’d done all he could about matters. He’d set his net as well as possible. There was nothing to do now but be patient.
Kabuo brought his thermos into the cockpit, then sat on the port gunnel and sipped green tea, listening into the fog uneasily. Farther south he could hear someone idling, the sound of net unraveling from a drum, a boat under way at a crawl. There was an occasional dim crackle from his radio set, but other than that nothing. In the silence he sipped tea and waited for the salmon: as on other nights he imagined them in motion, swift in pursuit of the waters they’d sprung from, waters that held both past and future for them, their children and their children’s children and their deaths. 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. Their rich silver flanks would feed his dreams and for this he was thankful and sorrowful. There was something tragic in the wall of invisible mesh he’d hung to choke the life from them while they traveled to the rhythm of an urging they could not deny. He imagined them slamming against his net in astonishment at this invisible thing that finished their lives in the last days of an urgent journey. Sometimes, hauling net, he came across a fish thrashing hard enough to elicit a cracking thump when it banged off the Islander’s transom. Like all the others, it went into the hold to die over the course of hours.
Kabuo put his thermos together and took it into the cabin. Once again he flipped through the radio channels, and this time he caught a voice – Dale Middleton’s – chattering away in a slow island drawl: ‘I done just got the bug out of my squelch,’ it said, and then someone answered, ‘What for?’ Dale replied he’d had just about enough of setting by the shipping lane in soup fog for a dozen silvers, a few dogfish, a couple of hake, and what’s more taking flack off his radio. ‘I near can’t see my own hands,’ he said. ‘I near can’t see the nose on my own face.’ Somebody, a third party, agreed the fishing had gone sour, the bank seemed all dried up real sudden, he’d been thinking on fishing at Elliot Head, couldn’t tell but maybe things was better there. ‘Leastwise off this shipping lane,’ replied Dale. ‘One good swing I got laid out now, that’ll do it for me here. Hey, Leonard, your net coming up clear? Mine here’s lookin’ like a oil rag. Damn thing’s darker ’n burnt toast.’
The fishermen on the radio discussed this for a while, Leonard saying his net was fairly clean, Dale asking him if he’d greased it lately, Leonard claiming to have seen a buoy marker, number 57, off to port. He’d worked off it for a half hour or so but never came on to 58 or 56, never fixed himself properly. Far as he was concerned he was lost in the fog and intended to stay that way – leastwise ’til his net was up, then he’d think about matters. Dale asked him if he’d picked once yet, and Leonard sounded disappointed. Dale described the fog again and said he guessed it was as thick as it gets, and Leonard, agreeing, said he remembered one las
t year at Elliot Head in rougher seas – a bad scene, he’d added. ‘The Head’d be good about now,’ replied Dale. ‘Let’s fog-run our way on down there.’
Kabuo left his radio on; he wanted to hear about it if a freighter came down the strait and put in a call to the lighthouse. He slid the cabin door open and stood listening, and in time came the air blasts, both muted and melancholy, of boats moving off the fishing grounds, the fog whistles of gill-netters running blindly east, farther off all the time and so less audible. It was time to pick, he decided, and then if necessary to make his own fog run to the fishing grounds off Elliot Head – a run he preferred to make alone. The boats out there now were moving on blind bearings, and he didn’t necessarily trust their skippers. He’d wait an hour more, then pick and run if he came up short on fish.
At ten-thirty he stood on the beaver paddle in the cockpit, picking his net and stopping now and then to throw strands of kelp into the water. The net, under tension, rained seawater onto the deck along with sticks and kelp. He was happy to find there were salmon coming up as well, big silvers mostly over ten and eleven pounds, a half-dozen ten-pound chums, too, even three resident black-mouth. Some dropped to the deck coming over the transom, others he deftly maneuvered free. He was good at this part of things. His hands found their way through the folds of the net to the long flanks of dead and dying salmon. Kabuo lofted them into the hold along with three hake and three pale dogfish he intended to take home to his family. There were fifty-eight salmon, he counted, for this first set, and he felt grateful about them. Kneeling for a moment beside the hold, he looked down at them with satisfaction and calculated their worth at the cannery. He thought of the journey they’d made to him and how their fives, perhaps, would buy his farm back.
Kabuo watched for one long moment – an occasional fish flaring at the gills or jerking – then pulled the hatch cover over them and sprayed sea slime out the scupper holes. It was a good haul for a first set, enough to keep him fishing the bank – there was no reason for him to go elsewhere. Chances were that, fog and all, he’d made his drift dead center by happenstance; he’d had the luck he’d prayed for earlier. So far everything had gone right.
Snow Falling on Cedars Page 37
