‘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. Each juror should listen, with a disposition to be convinced, to the opinions and arguments of the other jurors. It is not intended under the law that a juror should go into the jury room with a fixed determination that the verdict shall represent his opinion of the case at that moment. Nor is it intended that he should close his ears to the discussions and arguments of his fellow jurors, who are assumed to be equally honest and intelligent. You must, in short, listen to one another. Stay objective, be reasonable.’
The judge paused and let his words sink in. He let his eyes meet the eyes of each juror, holding the gaze, momentarily, of each. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he sighed. ‘Since these are criminal proceedings, understand, your verdict – whether guilty or not so – must be a unanimous one. There is no call for haste or for anyone to feel that they are holding up the rest of us as you deliberate. The court thanks you in advance for having served in this trial. The power has gone out and you have passed difficult nights at the Amity Harbor Hotel. It has not been easy for you to concentrate on these proceedings while you are worried about the conditions of your homes and the welfare of your families and loved ones. The storm,’ said the judge, ‘is beyond our control, but the outcome of this trial is not. The outcome of this trial is up to you now. You may adjourn and begin your deliberations.’
30
At three o’clock in the afternoon the jurors in the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto filed out of the courtroom. Two of the reporters tipped their chairs back precariously and sat with their hands clasped behind their heads, speaking casually to one another. Abel Martinson handcuffed the accused man, then allowed his wife to speak to him once before urging his prisoner toward the basement. ‘You’re going to be free,’ she said to Kabuo. ‘They’ll do the right thing – you’ll see.’
‘I don’t know,’ her husband replied. ‘But either way, I love you, Hatsue. Tell the kids I love them, too.’
Nels Gudmundsson gathered his papers together and slid them into his briefcase. Ed Soames, in a generous mood, kept the courtroom open to the public. He understood that the citizens in the gallery had no warm place to go. Many of them sat languidly along the benches or milled in the aisles discussing the trial in hushed and speculative tones. Ed stood with his hands behind his back beside the door to Judge Fielding’s chambers in the obsequious pose of a royal footman, watching everything impassively. Occasionally he checked his watch.
In the gallery Ishmael Chambers mulled over his notes, looking up every now and again to take in Hatsue Miyamoto. Listening to her testify that morning he’d been keenly aware of his private knowledge of this woman: he’d understood what each expression suggested, what each pause signified. What he wanted, he realized now, was to drink in the smell of her and to feel her hair in his hands. It was all the more acute for not having her and wanting, like the wish he had to be whole again and to live a different life.
Philip Milholland’s notes were in Ishmael’s front left pants pocket, and it was just a matter of standing up, crossing over to Ed Soames, and asking to see Judge Fielding. Then bringing the notes out and unfolding them, and watching the look on Soames’s face, then taking them back from Soames again and pushing his way into the judge’s chambers. Then Lew Fielding blinking down through his glasses, pulling the candelabra on his desk a little closer – the flickering taper dancing left and right – and at last the judge peering over his glasses at him as the weight of Philip Milholland’s notes began to press against his mind. The freighter began its dogleg at 1:42. Carl Heine’s pocket watch stopped at 1:47. It spoke for itself.
What was it Nels Gudmundsson had said in closing? ‘The counsel for the state has proceeded on the assumption that you will he open, ladies and gentlemen, to an argument based on prejudice … He is counting on you to act on passions best left to a war of ten years ago.’ But ten years was not really such a long time at all, and how was he to leave his passion behind when it went on living its own independent life, as tangible as the phantom limb he’d refused for so long to have denervated? As with the limb, so with Hatsue. Hatsue had been taken from his life by history, because history was whimsical and immune to private yearnings. And then there was his mother with her faith in a God who stood at the wayside indifferently while Eric Bledsoe bled to death in the surf, and then there was that boy on the deck of the hospital ship with the blood soaking his groin.
He looked at Hatsue again where she stood in the midst of a small group of Japanese islanders who whispered softly to one another and peered at their watches and waited. He examined her knife-pleated skirt, the blouse she wore with long darts through the shoulders, her hair bound tightly to the back of her head, the plain hat held in her hand. The hand itself, loose and graceful, and the way her ankles fit into her shoes, and the straightness of her back and her refined, true posture that had been the thing to move him in the beginning, back when he was just a child. And the taste of salt on her lips that time when for a second he had touched them with his own boy’s lips, clinging to his glass-bottomed box. And then all the times he had touched her body and the fragrance of all that cedar …
He got up to leave, and as he did so the courtroom lights flickered on. A mute kind of cheer went up from the gallery, an embarrassed, cautious island cheer; one of the reporters raised his fists into the air, Ed Soames nodded and smiled. The gray, sullen hue that had hung over everything was replaced by a light that seemed brilliant by comparison to what had gone before. ‘Electricity,’ Nels Gudmundsson said to Ishmael. ‘Never knew I’d miss it so much.’
‘Go home and get some sleep,’ answered Ishmael. ‘Turn your heater up.’
Nels snapped the clasps on his briefcase, turned it upright, and set it on the table. ‘By the way,’ he said suddenly. ‘I ever tell you how much I liked your father? Arthur was one admirable man.’
‘Yes,’ said Ishmael. ‘He was.’
Nels pulled at the skin of his throat, then took his briefcase in his hand. ‘Well,’ he said, with his good eye on Ishmael, the other wandering crazily. ‘Regards to your mother, she’s a wonderful woman. Let’s pray for the right verdict in the meantime.’
‘Yes,’ said Ishmael. ‘Okay.’
Ed Soames announced that the courtroom would remain open until such time as a verdict was reached or until six P.M., whichever came first. At six he would let the gathered court know about the current status of things.
In the cloakroom Ishmael found himself beside Hisao Imada as they both struggled into their overcoats. ‘Many thanks for giving to us a help,’ Hisao greeted him. ‘It make our day much better than walking. We have our many thanks to you.’
They went out into the hallway, where Hatsue waited against the wall, her hands deep in her coat pockets. ‘Do you need a ride?’ asked Ishmael. ‘I’m going out your way again. To my mother’s house. I can take you.’
‘No,’ said Hisao. ‘Thank you much. We have made for us a ride.’
Ishmael stood there buttoning his coat with the fingers of his one hand. He buttoned three buttons, starting at the top, and then he slipped his hand into his pants pocket and let it rest against Philip Milholland’s notes.
‘My husband’s trial is unfair,’ said Hatsue. ‘You ought to put that in your father’s newspaper, Ishmael, right across the front page. You should use his newspaper to tell the truth, you know. Let the whole island see it isn’t right. It’s just because we’re Japanese.’
‘It isn’t my father’s newspaper,’ answered Ishmael. ‘It’s mine, Hatsue. I run it.’ He brought his hand out and with some awkwardness sli
pped another button into place. ‘I’ll be at my mother’s,’ he told her. ‘If you want to come speak to me about this there, that’s where you can find me.’
Outside he found that the snow had stopped – only a few scattered flakes fell. A hard winter sunlight seeped through the clouds, and the north wind blew cold and fast. It seemed colder now than it had been that morning; the air burned in his nostrils. The wind and the snow had scoured everything clean; there was the sound of snow crunching under Ishmael’s feet, the whine of the wind, and nothing else. The eye of the storm, he knew, had passed; the worst of it was behind them. And yet there was still a blind chaos to the world – cars turned front first to the curbs, abandoned where they had skidded unpredictably; on Harbor Street a white fir fallen against the snow, its branches snapped off at splintering angles, some of them piercing the ground. He walked on and found two cedars across the road, and beyond that the town docks were mostly swamped and under water. The outermost pilings had broken loose, the wind had shoved against the outside piers, and two dozen boats had piled up against one another and finally up onto the sunken piers, where they listed against their mooring ropes.
The white fir’s root wad had pulled out of the ground and stood now like a wall more than twenty feet high with a tuft of snow-laden ferns and ivy sprouting over the top of it. Whitecaps roiled among the capsized boats and caused them and the docks to surge and roll, and the tops of the cabins and drum reels and gunnels were loaded down with snow. Occasionally sea foam broke across the boats and water washed through their cockpits. The tide and the wind were pushing in hard now, and the current funneled through the mouth of the harbor; the green boughs and branches of the fallen trees lay scattered across the clean snow.
It occurred to Ishmael for the first time in his life that such destruction could be beautiful.
The reckless water, the frenzied wind, the snow, the downed trees, the boats dashed against their sunken docks – it was harsh and beautiful and disorderly. He was reminded for a moment of Tarawa atoll and its seawall and the palms that lay in rows on their side, knocked down by the compression from the naval guns. It was something he remembered too often. He felt inside not only an aversion to it but an attraction to it as well. He did not want to remember and he wanted to remember. It was not something he could explain.
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. For twelve years, he knew, he had waited. He had waited without knowing he was waiting at all, and the waiting had turned into something deeper. He’d been waiting for twelve long years.
The truth now lay in Ishmael’s own pocket and he did not know what to do with it. He did not know how to conduct himself and the recklessness he felt about everything was as foreign to him as the sea foam breaking over the snowy boats and over the pilings of the Amity Harbor docks, now swamped and under water. There was no answer in any of it – not in the boats lying on their sides, not in the white fir defeated by the snow or in the downed branches of the cedars. What he felt was the chilly recklessness that had come to waylay his heart.
* * *
It was a boat builder who lived out on Woodhouse Cove Road – a gray-bearded man named Alexander Van Ness – who was primarily responsible for holding up a verdict in the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto. For three hours – until six o’clock – he persisted in the same inexorable vein: that Judge Fielding’s admonitions should be heeded with the utmost seriousness and that reasonable doubt existed. The twelve jurors had argued over the meaning of the word doubt, then over the meaning of the term reasonable, then over both put together. ‘Well,’ Alexander Van Ness had concluded, ‘I guess it comes down to a feeling, doesn’t it? If I feel uncertain, if I feel that I doubt, that’s all that matters, right?’
It had seemed to the others that he would not budge, and they had prepared themselves, by five forty-five, for another long night at the Amity Harbor Hotel and for the necessity of taking the matter up with Alexander Van Ness at eight o’clock the next morning.
‘Now look here,’ Harold Jensen argued desperately. ‘Nobody ain’t ever sure about nothing. It’s unreasonable to be so dog-headed stubborn. What’s reasonable comes out of the rest of us, right here. You’re what’s unreasonable, Alex.’
‘I can see what you’re driving at,’ Roger Porter added. ‘I know what you’re trying to say, Alex, and I’ve thought that way about it myself. But look here and think about the straight-off evidence. That mooring line come off his boat. That blood was on his fishing gaff. Mostly he lied about replacing his batt’ry, things like that, it was fishy. He just didn’t show me nothin’.’
‘Me neither,’ put in Edith Twardzik. ‘Didn’t show me a thing, either. It was just suspicious how he sat there like that and said one thing about it to the sheriff one time and then later changed his melody. A person can’t go changing his tune ’thout the rest of us thinking on it, Mr. Van Ness – don’t you believe that man’s a liar?’
Alex Van Ness agreed amiably; the defendant had indeed lied. But that made him a liar, not a murderer. He wasn’t accused of lying.
‘Now look again,’ said Harold Jensen. ‘What do you figure drives a man to lie? You think a man’s got to go and lie when he ain’t done nothin’ worth lying about? A lie’s a cover-up every time, it’s something a man says when he don’t want the truth out. The lies that man’s been telling about this, they tell us he’s got to be hiding something, don’t you agree with that?’
‘All right,’ answered Alexander Van Ness. ‘Then the question is, what’s he hiding? Is he necessarily hiding the fact he’s a murderer? Does that follow for sure and nothing else? I’m telling you I have my doubts, and that’s all I’m trying to tell you. Not that you’re wrong, just that I have my doubts.’
‘Now listen to this,’ snapped Edith Twardzik. ‘Supposing a man’s got his gun to your son’s head and ’nuther one at your wife. He tells you to take yourself exactly one minute and decide whether he ought to shoot your son or your wife, which should he shoot, and if you don’t decide, he’ll shoot them both. ’Course you’re going to have some doubts no matter which way you decide. There’s always something to fret about. But meanwhile, while you’re fretting, the man’s getting ready to pull both triggers, and that’s all there is to it, all right? You aren’t ever going to get past your doubt so you have to face it head-on.’
‘It’s a good example,’ answered Alex Van Ness. ‘But I’m not really in that situation.’
‘Well, try looking at it another way, then,’ said Burke Latham, a schooner deckhand. ‘A big old comet or a chunk of the moon could come crashing down through the roof just now and fall on top of your head. So maybe you’d better move yourself case such a thing might happen. Maybe you’d better have your doubts ’bout whether your chair is safe. You can doubt everything, Mr. Van Ness. Your doubt ain’t reasonable.’
‘It’d be unreasonable for me to move to another chair,’ Alex Van Ness pointed out. ‘I’d run the same risk anywhere in the room – same risk you run from your seat, Burke. It’s not worth worrying about.’
‘We’re not talking about the evidence anymore,’ Harlan McQueen told them. ‘All these hypothetical examples aren’t getting us anywhere. How’re we going to convince him what’s reasonable without talking about the facts presented by the prosecutor, step by step, each one? Now, look here, Mr. Van Ness, don’t you think that mooring line has to tell you something?’
‘I think it does,’ said Alex Van Ness. ‘It tells me that Kabuo Miyamoto was probably on board Carl Heine’s boat. I don’t have much doubt about that.’
‘That’s one thing,’ noted Edith Twardzik. ‘That’s something, anyway.’
‘That fishing gaff,’ said Harlan McQueen. ‘It had a man’s blood on it, Carl Heine’s blood type. Can that slip past your doubt?’
‘I don’t much doubt it was Carl’s blood,’ Alex Van Ness agreed. ‘But chances are it came fro
m his hand. I think there’s a chance of that.’
‘There’s a chance of everything. But you add a chance from here and a chance from there, too many things get to being a chance, they can’t all be that way. The world ain’t made a coincidences only. If it looks like a dog and walks like a dog,’ Burke Latham asserted, ‘then most prob’ly it is a dog, that’s all there’s going to be to it.’
‘Are we talking about dogs now?’ asked Alex Van Ness. ‘How did we get on to dogs?’
‘Well, what about this?’ said Harlan McQueen. ‘The defendant heard about Carl’s body being found, but did he go to the sheriff and tell him how the night before he’d seen Carl out fishing? Even after they arrested him, he just kept saying he didn’t even know a single thing about it. Then, later, he changed his story, came up with this battery explanation. Then he even altered that, said he put in a spare battery, but only on cross-examination. At this point it’s his story against the prosecution’s, and I’m finding him a little hard to believe.’
Snow Falling on Cedars Page 40
