Read Online Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson - Free Book Online

manhood, six foot three and two hundred thirty-five pounds, bearded, blond, and built in the solid manner of a piece of statuary, as though the parts were made of granite – though, too, there was something apelike, inelegant, and brutish in the alignment of the arms and shoulders. Horace felt a familiar envy stirring and despite himself noted the girth and heft of Carl Heine’s sexual organs. The fisherman had not been circumcised and his testicles were taut and hairless. They had pulled up toward his body in the frigid seawater, and his penis, at least twice as large as Horace’s own, even frozen, lay fat and pink against his left leg.
    The Island County coroner coughed twice, dryly, and circum-navigated his examination table. He began, consciously, for this would be necessary, to think of Carl Heine, a man he knew, as the deceased and not as Carl Heine. The deceased’s right foot had locked itself behind the left, and Horace now exerted himself to free it. It was necessary to pull hard enough to tear ligaments in the deceased’s groin, and this Horace Whaley did.
    A coroner’s job is to do certain things most people would never dream of doing. Horace Whaley was ordinarily a family physician, one of three on San Piedro. He worked with fishermen, their children, their wives. His peers were unwilling to examine the dead, and so the job had fallen to him, by default as it were. Thus he’d had these experiences; he’d seen things most men couldn’t look at. The winter before he’d seen a crabber’s body recovered out of West Port Jensen Bay after two fullmonths’ immersion. The crabber’s skin resembled soap more than anything; he seemed encased in it, a kind of ambergris. On Tarawa he had seen the bodies of men who had died facedown in shallow water. The warm tides had washed over them for days, and the skin had loosened from their limbs. He remembered one soldier in particular from whose hands the skin had peeled like fine transparent gloves; even the fingernails had come away. There were no dog tags, but Horace had been able to obtain excellent fingerprints and make an identification anyway.
    He knew a little about drowning. He had seen a fisherman in ’49 who had been eaten about the face by crabs and crayfish. They’d fed steadily on the softest portions – the eyelids, the lips, to a lesser extent the ears – so that in these areas the face was intensely green. This he had seen in the Pacific war, too, along with other men who had died in tidal pools, astonishingly intact beneath the waterline but entirely eaten – to the bone – by sand flies wherever flesh lay exposed to air. And he had seen a man half-mummy, half-skeleton, floating in the waters of the China Sea, eaten from below while his back side, sun dried, gradually turned brown and leathery. After the sinking of the Canton there were parts of men floating around for miles that even the sharks had forsaken. The navy had not taken time to collect these parts; there were living men to attend to.
    Carl Heine was the fourth deceased gill-netter Horace had examined in five years. Two others had died in a fall storm and washed up on the mud flats of Lanheedron Island. The third, recalled Horace, was an interesting case – the summer of ’50, four years earlier. A fisherman named Vilderling – Alec Vilderling. His wife typed for Klaus Hartmann, who sold real estate in Amity Harbor. Vilderling and his partner had set their net and underneath the summer moon had shared in the lee of their bow-picker’s cabin a bottle of Puerto Rican rum. Then Vilderling, it seemed, had decided to empty his bladder into the salt water. With his pants undone he had fallen in and, to his partner’s horror, had thrashed once or twice before disappearing altogether beneath the surfaceof the moon-addled sea. Vilderling, it appeared, could not swim.
    His partner, a boy of nineteen named Kenny Lynden, hurled himself in after him. Vilderling, hung up in his net, struggled as