Snow Falling on Cedars Read Free

homes, ran the circumference of San Piedro, an endless series of pristine anchorages.
    Inside Amity Harbor’s courthouse, opposite the courtroom’s four tall windows, a table had been set up to accommodate the influx of newspapermen to the island. The out-of-town reporters – one each from Bellingham, Anacortes, and Victoria and three from the Seattle papers – exhibited no trace of the solemnity evident among the respectful citizens in the gallery. They slumped in their chairs, rested their chins in their hands, and whispered together conspiratorially. With their backs only a foot from a steam radiator, the out-of-town reporters were sweating.
    Ishmael Chambers, the local reporter, found that he was sweating, too. He was a man of thirty-one with a hardened face, a tall man with the eyes of a war veteran. He had only one arm, the left having been amputated ten inches below the shoulder joint, so that he wore the sleeve of his coat pinned up with the cuff fastened to the elbow. Ishmael understood that an air of disdain, of contempt for the island and its inhabitants, blewfrom the knot of out-of-town reporters toward the citizens in the gallery. Their discourse went forward in a miasma of sweat and heat that suggested a kind of indolence. Three of them had loosened their ties just slightly; two others had removed their jackets. They were reporters, professionally jaded and professionally immune, a little too well traveled in the last analysis to exert themselves toward the formalities San Piedro demanded silently of mainlanders. Ishmael, a native, did not want to be like them. The accused man, Kabuo, was somebody he knew, somebody he’d gone to high school with, and he couldn’t bring himself, like the other reporters, to remove his coat at Kabuo’s murder trial. At ten minutes before nine that morning, Ishmael had spoken with the accused man’s wife on the second floor of the Island County Courthouse. She was seated on a hall bench with her back to an arched window, just outside the assessor’s office, which was closed, gathering herself, apparently. ‘Are you all right?’ he’d said to her, but she’d responded by turning away from him. ‘Please,’ he’d said. ‘Please, Hatsue.’
    She’d turned her eyes on his then. Ishmael would find later, long after the trial, that their darkness would beleaguer his memory of these days. He would remember how rigorously her hair had been woven into a black knot against the nape of her neck. She had not been exactly cold to him, not exactly hateful, but he’d felt her distance anyway. ‘Go away,’ she’d said in a whisper, and then for a moment she’d glared. He remained uncertain afterward what her eyes had meant – punishment, sorrow, pain. ‘Go away,’ repeated Hatsue Miyamoto. Then she’d turned her eyes, once again, from his.
    ‘Don’t be like this,’ said Ishmael.
    ‘Go away,’ she’d answered.
    ‘Hatsue,’ said Ishmael. ‘Don’t be like this.’
    ‘Go away,’ she’d said again.
    Now, in the courtroom, with sweat on his temples, Ishmael felt embarrassed to be sitting among the reporters and decided that after the morning’s recess he would find a more anonymous seat in the gallery. In the meantime he sat facing the wind-drivensnowfall, which had already begun to mute the streets outside the courthouse windows. He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth.

2
    The first witness called by the prosecutor that day was the county sheriff, Art Moran. On the morning Carl Heine died – September 16 – the sheriff was in the midst of an inventory at his office and had engaged the services of the new court stenographer, Mrs. Eleanor Dokes (who now sat primly below the judge’s bench recording everything with silent implacability), as an aide in this annual county-mandated endeavor. He and Mrs. Dokes had exchanged surprised glances when Abel Martinson,