Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson Page A

she answered.
    ‘Nels is working on that,’ said Kabuo.
    ‘Nels is going to move away,’ said Nels. ‘Deputy Martinson ought to do the same. Why don’t you stand where you can watch, Abel? But give these people some privacy.’
    ‘I can’t,’ replied Abel. ‘Art’d kill me.’
    ‘Art won’t kill you,’ Nels said. ‘You know darn well Mrs. Miyamoto isn’t going to slip Mr. Miyamoto any kind of weapon. Back off a little. Let them talk.’
    ‘I can’t,’ said Abel. ‘Sorry.’
    But he sidled back about three feet anyway and pretended not to be listening. Nels excused himself.
    ‘Where are they staying?’ asked Kabuo.
    ‘They’re at your mother’s. Mrs. Nakao is there. Everybody is helping out.’
    ‘You look good. I miss you.’
    ‘I look terrible,’ answered Hatsue. ‘And you look like one of Tojo’s soldiers. You’d better quit sitting up so straight and tall. These jury people will be afraid of you.’
    He fixed his gaze directly on hers, and she could see he was thinking about it. ‘It’s good to be out of that cell,’ he said. ‘It feels great to be out of there.’

    Hatsue wanted to touch him then. She wanted to reach out and put her hand on his neck or place her fingertips against his face. This was the first time in seventy-seven days that they had not been separated by a pane of glass. For seventy-seven days she’d heard his voice only through the filter of a microphone. During this time she had never once felt composed, and she had stopped imagining their future. At night she’d brought the children into her bed, then exerted herself fruitlessly toward sleep. She had sisters, cousins, and aunts who called mornings and asked her to come for lunch. She went because she was lonely and needed to hear the sound of voices. The women made sandwiches, cakes, and tea and chattered in the kitchen while the children played, and this is how the autumn passed, with her life arrested, on hold.
    Sometimes in the afternoons, Hatsue fell asleep on a sofa. While she slept these other women cared for her children, and she didn’t neglect to thank them for it; but in the past she would never have done such a thing, fall asleep, drop away in the middle of a visit while her children ran about recklessly.
    She was a woman of thirty-one and still graceful. She had the flat-footed gait of a barefoot peasant, a narrow waist, small breasts. She very often wore men’s khaki pants, a gray cotton sweatshirt, and sandals. It was her habit in the summer to work at picking strawberries in order to bring home extra money. Her hands were stained in the picking season with berry juice. In the fields she wore a straw hat low on her head, a thing she had not done consistently in her youth, so that now around her eyes there were squint lines. Hatsue was a tall woman – five foot eight – but nevertheless able to squat low between the berry rows for quite some time without pain.
    Recently she had begun to wear mascara and lipstick. She was not vain, but she understood that she was fading. It was all right with her, at thirty-one, if she faded, for it had come to her slowly over the years, an ever-deepening realization, that there was more to life than the extraordinary beauty she had always been celebrated for. In youth she had been so thoroughlybeautiful that her beauty had been public property. She had been crowned princess of the Strawberry Festival in 1941. When she was thirteen her mother had dressed her in a silk kimono and sent her off to Mrs. Shigemura, who taught young girls to dance odori and to serve tea impeccably. Seated before a mirror with Mrs. Shigemura behind her, she had learned that her hair was utsukushii and that to cut it would be a form of heresy. It was a river of iridescent onyx – Mrs. Shigemura described it in Japanese – the salient feature of her physical being, as prominent and extraordinary as baldness might have been in another girl of the same age. She had to learn that there were