The wind came up and tossed the tops of the alders, and she felt the odd fall warmth in it. Carl had told her more than once – he’d repeated it just the other day – how since the war he couldn’t
speak.
Even his old friends were included in this, so that now Carl was a lonely man who understood land and work, boat and sea, his own hands, better than his mouth and heart. She felt sympathy for him and rubbed his shoulder gently and waited patiently beside him. ‘Damn,’ Carl said after a while. ‘Anyway, I guess as far as you’re concerned I could hand the whole business over to him and let him do what he wants with it. I guess you don’t want to move out there anyway.’
‘It’s so beautiful here,’ replied Susan Marie. ‘Just look around for a minute, Carl.’
‘Look around out
there,’
he said. ‘That’s sixty-five acres, Susan.’
She understood that. He was a man who needed plenty of space, a vast terrain in which to operate. It was what he’d grown up with, and the sea, despite its size, was no substitute for green fields. Carl
needed
room, far more room than his boat could offer, and anyway in order to put his war behind him – the
Canton
going down, men drowning while he watched – he would have to leave his boat for good and grow strawberries like his father. She knew this was the only way for her husband to grow sound; it was what made her willing, ultimately, to follow him out to Island Center.
‘Supposing you sell him his seven acres,’ Susan Marie said. ‘What’s the worst your mother can do?’
Carl shook his head emphatically. ‘It doesn’t really come down to her,’ he said. ‘It comes down to the fact that Kabuo’s a
Jap.
And I don’t hate Japs, but I don’t like ’em neither. It’s hard to explain. But he’s a Jap.’
‘He’s not a Jap,’ Susan Marie said. ‘You don’t mean that, Carl. I’ve heard you say nice things about him. You and he were friends.’
‘Were,’ said Carl. ‘That’s right. A long time ago. Before the war came along. But now I don’t like him much anymore. Don’t like how he acted when I told him I’d think it over, like he expected me to just hand those seven acres to him, like I owed it to him or – ’
There was a boy’s cry from the back of the house then, a cry of pain instead of argument or upset, and Carl was already moving toward it before Susan Marie could stand. They found their older boy sprawled on a flagstone with his left foot gripped in both his hands; he’d sliced it open against the sharp edge of a strut on the overturned wheelbarrow beside him. Susan Marie knelt and kissed his face and held him closely while his foot bled. She remembered how Carl had looked at the wound, tenderly,
transformed. He was no longer a war veteran. They’d taken the boy in to Dr. Whaley, and then Carl had gone off fishing. The two of them hadn’t discussed Kabuo Miyamoto again, and Susan Marie soon recognized that the subject was somehow forbidden. It was forbidden in her marriage to open up her husband’s wounds and look at them unless he asked her to.
Their marriage, she understood after Carl was gone, had largely been about sex. It had been about sex right up to the end, until the day Carl went out of her life: that morning, while the children slept, they’d shut the bathroom door and pulled the latch and taken off their clothes. Carl showered, and Susan Marie joined him when the stink of salmon had been washed down the drain. She washed his large penis and felt it harden in her fingers. She put her arms around his neck, locked her feet at the small of his back. Carl held her up with his strong hands clenching the muscles in her legs and leaned the side of his face against her breasts and took to licking them. They moved that way, standing up in the bathtub with the water pouring over them and Susan Marie’s blond hair pasted to her face and her hands clutched around her husband’s head. They washed each other afterward, taking their time about it in the friendly way of certain married people, and then Carl got into bed and slept until one in the afternoon. At two, having eaten a lunch of fried eggs and Jerusalem artichokes, canned pears and bread spread with clover honey, he went out to change the oil in his tractor. She saw him from the kitchen window that afternoon gathering early windfall apples and dropping them in a burlap bag. At three forty-five he came up to the house again and said good-bye to the children, who were seated on the porch drinking apple juice and eating graham crackers and rolling pebbles back and forth. He came into the kitchen, wrapped himself around his wife, and explained that unless the fishing was excellent he was coming home early the next morning, would be home, he hoped, by four
A.M..
Then he left for the Amity Harbor docks, and she never saw him again.
Nels Gudmundsson stood at a distance from the witness stand when it was his turn to question Susan Marie Heine: he did not want to appear lecherous by placing himself in dose proximity to a woman of such tragic, sensual beauty. He was self-conscious about his age and felt that the jurors would see him as disgusting if he did not distance himself from Susan Marie Heine and appear in general detached from the life of his body altogether. The month before, Nels had been told by a doctor in Anacortes that his prostate gland had become moderately enlarged. It would have to be removed surgically and he would no longer be able to produce seminal fluid. The doctor had asked Nels embarrassing questions and he had been forced to reveal a truth about which he was ashamed: that he could no longer achieve an erection. He could achieve one briefly, but it would wither in his hand before he had a chance to take pleasure from it. The bad part was not really this so much as it was that a woman like Susan Marie Heine inspired a deep frustration in him. He felt defeated as he appraised her on the witness stand. It was no longer possible for him to communicate to
any
woman – even those his own age he knew in town – his merit and value as a lover, for he no longer had this sort of worth and had to admit as much to himself – as a lover he was entirely through.
Nels remembered as he watched Susan Marie Heine the finest years of his sex life, now more than a half a century behind him. He could not quite believe that this was so. He was seventy-nine and trapped inside a decaying body. It was difficult for him to sleep and to urinate. His body had betrayed him and most of the things he once took for granted were no longer even possible.
A man might easily be embittered by such circumstances, but Nels made it a point not to struggle unnecessarily with life’s unresolvable dilemmas. He had indeed achieved a kind of wisdom – if you wanted to call it that – though at the same time he knew that most elderly people were not wise at all but only wore a thin veneer of cheap wisdom as a sort of armor against the world. Anyway, the kind of wisdom younger people sought from old age was not to be acquired in this life no matter how many years they lived. He wished he could tell them this without inviting their mockery or their pity.
Nels’s wife had died from cancer of the colon. They had not gotten along particularly well, but nevertheless he missed her. Occasionally he sat in his apartment and wept in order to empty himself of self-pity and remorse. Occasionally he attempted unsuccessfully to masturbate in the hope of rediscovering that lost part of himself he deeply, achingly missed. He was convinced at rare moments that he could succeed and that his youth was still buried inside of himself. The rest of the time he accepted this as untrue and went about the business of consoling himself in various unsatisfying ways. He liked to eat. He enjoyed chess. He did not mind his work and knew himself to be quite good at it. He was a reader and recognized his habit of reading as obsessive and neurotic, and told himself that if he read something less frivolous than newspapers and magazines he might indeed be better off. The problem was that he could not concentrate on ‘literature,’ however much he might admire it. It wasn’t that
War and Peace
bored him exactly, but rather that his mind couldn’t
focus
on it. Another loss: his eyes provided him with only half a view of the world, and reading caused his neurasthenia to flare up and made his temples throb. His mind, too, was failing him, he felt – although one could not be sure of such a thing. Certainly his memory was not as good as it had been when he was younger.
Nels Gudmundsson tucked his thumbs in behind his suspenders and looked with studied detachment at the witness.
‘Mrs. Heine,’ he said. ‘The defendant here appeared on your doorstep on Thursday, September 9? Is that what I heard you say?’
‘Yes, Mr. Gudmundsson. That’s right.’
‘He asked to speak to your husband?’
‘He did.’
‘They walked outside in order to talk? They didn’t speak in the house?’
‘Correct,’ said Susan Marie. ‘They spoke outside. They walked our property for thirty or forty minutes.’
‘I see,’ said Nels. ‘And you didn’t accompany them?’
‘No,’ said Susan Marie. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Did you hear any part of their conversation?’
‘No.’
‘In other words, you have no firsthand knowledge of its content – is that correct, Mrs. Heine?’
‘What I know is what Carl told me,’ answered Susan Marie. ‘I didn’t hear their conversation, no.’
‘Thank you,’ Nels said. ‘Because that concerns me. The fact that you’ve testified about this conversation without having heard any part of it.’
He pinched the wattles of skin at his throat and turned his good eye on Judge Fielding. The judge, his head resting on his hand, yawned and looked back with detachment.
‘Well then,’ Nels said. ‘To summarize, Mrs. Heine. Your husband and the defendant walked and talked, and you stayed behind. Is that right?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘And after thirty to forty minutes your husband returned. Is that also right, Mrs. Heine?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘You asked him about the content of his conversation with the defendant?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he replied that the two of them had discussed the land in question? The land that your mother-in-law sold to Ole
Jurgensen more than a decade ago? The land on which the defendant’s childhood home sat? Is all of that right, Mrs. Heine?’
‘Yes,’ said Susan Marie. ‘It is.’
‘You and your husband had recently put down earnest money on this land. Is that correct, Mrs. Heine?’
‘Yes. My husband did.’
‘It must have been,’ said Susan Marie. ‘Wednesday the eighth sounds right.’
‘And the defendant visited the next day? On Thursday, the ninth of September?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, then,’ said Nels Gudmundsson. ‘You’ve testified that on the afternoon of the ninth the defendant presented himself at your door and that he and your husband walked and talked, but that you were not present during their conversation. Do I have that right, Mrs. Heine?’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘And furthermore,’ said Nels, ‘after the defendant left that afternoon you and your husband sat on the porch and had your own conversation?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your husband indicated an unwillingness to talk about the content of his conversation with the defendant?’
‘Correct.’
‘You pressed him?’
‘I did.’
‘He reported to you that he had indicated to the defendant a willingness to think matters over? That he would ponder whether or not he might sell the seven acres to Mr. Miyamoto? Or allow Mr. Jurgensen to do so?’
‘Yes.’
‘He reported to you a concern about how his mother might react if he sold to the defendant? Did I hear you say that, Mrs. Heine?’
‘You did.’
‘But he was pondering such a sale anyway?’
“That’s right.’
‘And he had indicated as much to the defendant?’
‘Yes.’
‘So in other words Mr. Miyamoto left your residence on the ninth having heard from your husband there was at least a possibility your husband would sell the seven acres to him.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Your husband reported to you that he had encouraged Mr. Miyamoto to believe in such a possibility?’
‘Encouraged?’ replied Susan Marie Heine. ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘Let me put it this way,’ Nels said. ‘Your husband did not state an unequivocal no? He did not lead the defendant to believe that no hope existed for the reclaiming of his family’s land?’
‘He did not,’ answered Susan Marie.
‘In other words, he encouraged Mr. Miyamoto to believe that at the very least a possibility existed.’
‘I guess so,’ said Susan Marie.
‘I guess you’d have to guess,’ said Nels, ‘having not been present at their conversation. Having to report to the court only, Mrs. Heine, what your husband reported to you. Words that might not be one hundred percent accurate, since your husband was aware of your disenchantment about the possibility of moving, as you’ve said, and may well have altered the tone and substance of his conversation with Mr. Miyamo – ’
‘Objection,’ put in Alvin Hooks. ‘Argumentative.’
‘Sustained,’ said the judge. ‘Stop rambling, Mr. Gudmundsson. Your purpose here is to ask questions of the witness that refer directly to her testimony. You must refrain from doing anything else – but you know this. Get on with it.’
‘Apologies,’ Nels replied. ‘All right, then. Mrs. Heine, forgive
me. Your husband and the defendant – do I have this right? – had grown up together as boys?’
‘As far as I know, yes.’
‘Did your husband ever mention him as a neighbor, an acquaintance from his youth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he tell you how they’d gone fishing together as boys of ten or eleven? Or that they’d played on the same high school baseball and football teams? That they rode the same school bus for many years? Any of that, Mrs. Heine?’
‘I suppose so,’ Susan Marie said.
‘Hmmm,’ said Nels. He pulled the wattles of skin at his throat again and gazed at the ceiling for a moment. ‘Mrs. Heine,’ he said. ‘You mentioned during the course of your testimony these “dirty looks” Mr. Miyamoto is supposed to have aimed at your mother-in-law. Do you remember mentioning that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t mention that the defendant had aimed similar looks at you. Is that right? Do I remember right?’
‘No. I didn’t.’