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Excerpt from Snow Falling on Cedars (book)
At the intersection of Center Valley Road and South Beach Drive Ishmael
spied, ahead of him in the bend, a car that had failed to negotiate the
grade as it coiled around a grove of snow-hung cedars. Ishmael recognized
it as the Willys station wagon that belonged to Fujiko and Hisao Imada; in
fact, Hisao was working with a shovel at its rear right wheel, which had
dropped into the roadside drainage ditch.
Hisao Imada was small enough most of the time, but he looked even smaller
bundled up in his winter clothes, his hat pulled low and his scarf across
his chin so that only his mouth, nose, and eyes showed. Ishmael knew he
would not ask for help, in part because San Piedro people never did, in
part because such was his character. Ishmael decided to park at the bottom
of the grade beside Gordon Ostrom's mailbox and walk the fifty yards up
South Beach Drive, keeping his DeSoto well out of the road while he
convinced Hisao Imada to accept a ride from him.
Ishmael had known Hisao a long time. When he was eight years old he'd seen
the Japanese man trudging along behind his swaybacked white plow horse: a
Japanese man who carried a machete at his belt in order to cut down vine
maples. His family lived in two canvas tents while they cleared their newly
purchased property. They drew water from a feeder creek and warmed
themselves at a slash pile kept burning by his children--girls in rubber
boots, including Hatsue--who dragged branches and brought armfuls of brush
to it. Hisao was lean and tough and worked methodically, never altering his
pace. He wore a shoulder strap T-shirt, and this, coupled with the
sharp-honed weapon at his belt, put Ishmael in mind of the pirates he'd
read about in illustrated books his father had brought him from the Amity
Harbor Public Library. But all of this was more than twenty years ago now,
so that as he approached Hisao Imada in the South Beach Drive, Ishmael saw
the man in another light: hapless, small in the storm, numb with the cold
and ineffective with his shovel while the trees threatened to come down
around him.
Ishmael saw something else, too. On the far side of the car, with her own
shovel in hand, Hatsue worked without looking up. She was digging through
the snow to the black earth of the cedar woods and throwing spadefuls of it
underneath the tires.
Fifteen minutes later the three of them walked down the road toward his
DeSoto. The Willys station wagon's rear right tire had been perforated by a
fallen branch still wedged up under both axles. The rear length of exhaust
pipe had been crushed, too. The car wasn't going anywhere--Ishmael could
see that--but it took Hisao some time to accept this truth. With his shovel
he'd struggled defiantly, as if the tool could indeed change the car's
fate. After ten minutes of polite assistance Ishmael wondered aloud if his
DeSoto wasn't the answer and persisted in this vein for five minutes more
before Hisao yielded to it as an unavoidable evil. He opened his car door,
put in his shovel, and came out with a bag of groceries and a gallon of
kerosene. Hatsue, for her part, went on with her digging, saying nothing
and keeping to the far side of the car, and throwing black earth beneath
the tires.
At last her father rounded the Willys and spoke to her once in Japanese.
She stopped her work and came into the road then, and Ishmael was granted a
good look at her. He had spoken to her only the morning before in the
second-floor hallway of the Island County Courthouse, where she'd sat on a
bench with her back to an arched window just outside the assessor's office.
Her hair had been woven then, as now, into a black knot against the nape of
her neck. She'd told him four times to go away.
"Hello, Hatsue," said Ishmael. "I can give you a lift home, if you want."
"My father says he's accepted," Hatsue replied. "He says he's grateful for
your help."
She followed her father and Ishmael down the hill, still carrying her
shovel, to the DeSoto. When they were well on their way down South Beach
Drive, easing through the flats along the salt water, Hisao explained in
broken English that his daughter was staying with him during the trial;
Ishmael could drop them at his house. Then he described how a branch had
hurled down into the road in front of him; to avoid it he'd hit his brake
pedal. The Willys had fishtailed while it climbed the snapped branch and
nudged down into the drainage ditch.
Only once, driving and listening, nodding politely and inserting small
exclamations of interest--"I see, I see, yes, of course, I can
understand"--did Ishmael risk looking at Hatsue Miyamoto in the
rectangle of his rearview mirror: a risk that filled all of two seconds. He
saw then that she was staring out the side window with enormous
deliberation, with intense concentration on the world outside his car--she
was making it a point to be absorbed by the storm--and that her black hair
was wringing wet with snow. Two strands had escaped from their immaculate
arrangement and lay pasted against her frozen cheek.
"I know it's caused you trouble," Ishmael said. "But don't you think the
snow is beautiful? Isn't it beautiful coming down?"
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by David Guterson
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