Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson Read Free Book Online

no matter how much he might not want it. It was his and he suffered from it numbly.
    Later, when he was no longer so young and back home on San Piedro Island, this view of things began to moderate. He learned to be cordial to everyone – a sophisticated and ultimately false front. Add to the cynicism of a man wounded in war the inevitable cynicism of growing older and the professional cynicism of the journalist. Gradually Ishmael came to view himself as a one-armed man with a pinned-up sleeve, past thirty and unmarried. It was not so bad, and he was not so irritated as he had once been in Seattle. Still, though, there were those tourists, he thought, as he walked down Hill Street toward the docks. All summer they looked at his pinned-up sleeve with the surprised, unaccustomed faces his fellow islanders had stopped making. And with their ice cream and clean faces they elicited in his gut again that bilious, unwanted irritation. The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn’t find a way to do it.
    His mother, who was fifty-six and lived alone in the old family house on the south end of the island – the house where Ishmael had lived as a child – had pointed out to him when he’d come home from the city that this cynicism of his, while understandable, was on the other hand entirely unbecoming. His father before him had had it, she said, and it had been unbecoming in him, too.
    ‘He loved humankind dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings,’ she’d told Ishmael. ‘You’re the same, you know. You’re your father’s son.’
    Art Moran was standing with one foot up on a piling, talking to half a dozen fishermen, when Ishmael Chambers arrived that afternoon on the Amity Harbor docks. They were gathered in front of Carl Heine’s gillnetter, which was moored between the Erik J and the Tordenskold – the former a bow-picker owned by Marty Johansson, the latter an Anacortes purse seiner. As Ishmael came their way a south breeze blew and caused the mooring lines of boats to creak – the Advancer, the Providence, the Ocean Mist, the Torvanger – all standard San Piedro gill-netters. The Mystery Maid , a halibut and black cod schooner, had fared badly of late and was in the process of being overhauled. Her starboard hull plate had been removed, her engine dismantled, and her crankshaft and rod bearings lay exposed. On the dock at her bow by a pile of pipe fittings, two rusted diesel barrels, a scattering of broken plate glass, and the hulk of a marine battery on which empty paint cans were stacked. A sheen of oil lay on the water just below where scraps of rug had been nailed down to act as dockside bumpers.
    Today there were a lot of seagulls present. Normally they foraged around the salmon cannery, but now they sat on drag floats or buoy bags without stirring a feather, as if made of clay, or rode the tide in Amity Harbor, occasionally flaring overhead, riding the winds with their heads swiveling. Sometimes they alighted on unattended boats and scavenged desperately for deck scraps. Fishermen sometimes shot duck loads at them, but for the most part the gulls were given free rein on the docks; their gray white droppings stained everything.
    An oil drum had been turned onto its side before the Susan Marie, and on it sat Dale Middleton and Leonard George, dressed in mechanics’ grease suits. Jan Sorensen leaned against a plywood garbage Dumpster; Marty Johansson stood with his feet planted wide, his forearms folded across his bare chest, his T-shirt tucked into his pants waist. Directly beside the sheriff stood William Gjovaag with a cigar lodged between his ringers. Abel Martinson had perched himself on the bow gunnel of the Susan Marie and listened to the fishermen’s conversation with his boots dangling above the waterline.
    San Piedro fishermen – in those days, at least – went out at dusk to work the seas. Most of them were gill-netters, men who traveled into solitary