Snow Falling on Cedars Read Online Free

there, Art,’ he said. ‘Now what?’
    For a moment they stared at one another. Then Art, with a sigh, sat down on the edge of Carl Heine’s short bunk.
    ‘Maybe he crawled in under the decking,’ suggested Abel. ‘Maybe he had some kind of engine trouble, Art.’
    ‘I’m sitting on top of his engine,’ Art pointed out. “There’s no room for anyone to crawl around down there.’
    ‘He went over,’ said Abel, shaking his head.
    ‘Looks like it,’ answered the sheriff.
    They glanced at each other, then away again.
    ‘Maybe somebody took him off,’ suggested Abel. ‘He got hurt, radioed, somebody took him off. That – ’
    ‘They wouldn’t let the boat drift,’ put in Art. ‘Besides, we’d a heard about it by now.’
    ‘This is bad,’ repeated Abel Martinson.
    Art tucked another stick of Juicy Fruit between his teeth and wished this was not his responsibility. He liked Carl Heine, knew Carl’s family, went to church with them on Sundays.Carl came from old-time island stock; his grandfather, Bavarian born, had established thirty acres of strawberry fields on prime growing land in Center Valley. His father, too, had been a strawberry farmer before dying of a stroke in ’44. Then Carl’s mother, Etta Heine, had sold all thirty acres to the Jurgensen clan while her son was away at the war. They were hard-toiling, quiet people, the Heines. Most people on San Piedro liked them. Carl, Art recalled, had served as a gunner on the U. S. S. Canton, which went down during the invasion of Okinawa. He’d survived the war – other island boys hadn’t – and come home to a gill-netter’s life.
    On the sea Carl’s blond hair had gone russet colored. He weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds, much of it carried in his chest and shoulders. On winter days, picking fish from his net, he wore a wool cap knitted by his wife and an infantryman’s battered field jacket. He spent no time at the San Piedro Tavern or drinking coffee at the San Piedro Cafe. On Sunday mornings he sat with his wife and children in a back pew of the First Hill Lutheran Church, blinking slowly in the pale sanctuary light, a hymnbook open in his large, square hands, a calm expression on his face. Sunday afternoons he squatted on the aft deck of his boat, silently and methodically untangling his gill net or knitting its flaws up patiently. He worked alone. He was courteous but not friendly. He wore rubber boots almost everywhere, like all San Piedro fishermen. His wife, too, came from old island people – the Varigs, Art remembered, hay farmers and shake cutters with a few stump acres on Cattle Point – and her father had passed away not so long ago. Carl had named his boat after his wife, and, in ’48, built a big frame house just west of Amity Harbor, including an apartment for his mother, Etta. But – out of pride, word had it – Etta would not move in with him. She lived in town, a stout, grave woman with a slight Teutonic edge to her speech, over Lottie Opsvig’s apparel shop on Main. Her son called at her door every Sunday afternoon and escorted her to his house for supper. Art had watched them trudge up Old Hill together, Etta with her umbrella turned against the winterrain, her free hand clutching at the lapels of a coarse winter coat, Carl with his hands curled up in his jacket pockets, his wool cap pulled to his eyebrows. All in all, Art decided, Carl Heine was a good man. He was silent, yes, and grave like his mother, but the war had a part in that, Art realized. Carl rarely laughed, but he did not seem, to Art’s way of thinking, unhappy or dissatisfied. Now his death would land hard on San Piedro; no one would want to fathom its message in a place where so many made their living fishing. The fear of the sea that was always there, simmering beneath the surface of their island lives, would boil up in their hearts again.
    ‘Well, look,’ said Abel Martinson, leaning in the cabin door while the boat shifted about.