The Last Town on Earth
Thomas Mullen
Set against the dual backdrop of World War I and the devastating 1918 influenza epidemic, ‘The Last Town On Earth’ is a brilliantly drawn tale of morality and patriotism in a time of upheaval.Deep in the woods of Washington lies the mill town of Commonwealth, a new community founded on progressive ideals, and a refuge for workers who have fled the labor violence in the surrounding towns. When rumours spread of a mysterious illness that is killing people at an alarming rate, the people of the uninfected Commonwealth vote to block all roads into town and post armed guards to prevent any outsiders from entering.One day two guards are confronted with a moral dilemma. A starving and apparently ill soldier attempts to enter the town, begging them for food and shelter. Should the guards admit him, possibly putting their families at risk? Or should they place their lives above his and let him die in the woods? The choice they make – and the reaction it inspires in their town and beyond – sets into motion a series of events that threaten to tear Commonwealth apart.A sweeping cinematic novel, ‘The Last Town on Earth’ powerfully grapples with the tensions of individual safety and social responsibility, of moral obligation and duty in the face of forces larger than oneself.
THOMAS MULLEN
The Last Town on Earth
A NOVEL
HARPER PERENNIAL London, New York, Toronto and Sydney
Table of Contents
Cover (#uad3d01b5-d021-5a44-b478-ada7bfde2b46)
Title Page (#uf977a121-46bb-5d5a-af57-ad696ca0f324)
Prologue (#u1d49ca26-0ad2-5ecf-8613-8600a87c5b5b)
Part One COMMONWEALTH (#uf530099f-1843-55cf-b56e-d7d17f143436)
I (#u8465aed1-c11e-59cf-9c3d-d3aaf96afd20)
II (#u780ea0e6-7ede-5ef7-9768-469ce140eff4)
III (#u33bc0b00-6720-58d4-a913-edd7c3ebdd53)
IV (#u1b65af53-3d6f-5171-814c-2071f054ddc8)
V (#uce40f491-1d86-531a-b0d4-a5ec81fbf434)
VI (#uacb95c5d-c4aa-5045-a068-28e699f029fe)
VII (#u3a349930-1087-5512-8738-c853bab65260)
VIII (#u1ea80aa7-d61f-5a95-a7c0-1c3e79f75f8a)
IX (#ud168389c-e58a-514e-ab64-8aced2654532)
X (#u1a825e94-db17-5589-9f29-018246b2f050)
XI (#litres_trial_promo)
XII (#litres_trial_promo)
XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two PRISONERS (#litres_trial_promo)
I (#litres_trial_promo)
II (#litres_trial_promo)
III (#litres_trial_promo)
IV (#litres_trial_promo)
V (#litres_trial_promo)
VI (#litres_trial_promo)
VII (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
IX (#litres_trial_promo)
X (#litres_trial_promo)
XI (#litres_trial_promo)
XII (#litres_trial_promo)
XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
XIV (#litres_trial_promo)
XV (#litres_trial_promo)
XVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three SACRIFICE (#litres_trial_promo)
I (#litres_trial_promo)
II (#litres_trial_promo)
III (#litres_trial_promo)
IV (#litres_trial_promo)
V (#litres_trial_promo)
VI (#litres_trial_promo)
VII (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
IX (#litres_trial_promo)
X (#litres_trial_promo)
XI (#litres_trial_promo)
XII (#litres_trial_promo)
XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
XIV (#litres_trial_promo)
XV (#litres_trial_promo)
XVI (#litres_trial_promo)
XVII (#litres_trial_promo)
XVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
XIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four SPECTERS (#litres_trial_promo)
I (#litres_trial_promo)
II (#litres_trial_promo)
III (#litres_trial_promo)
IV (#litres_trial_promo)
V (#litres_trial_promo)
VI (#litres_trial_promo)
VII (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
From the reviews of The Last Town on Earth:
A subtle, robustly written novel of compelling contemporary resonance’
HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON, Observer
‘Thomas Mullen is an old-fashioned storyteller, and his epic novel dramatises the complex tensions between individual rights and group responsibilities … Mullen is both merciless and measured in his depiction of the natural forces that can drag idealism down to earth’
Daily Telegraph
‘In these days of anxiety over pandemics and terrorist “others” possibly in our midst, Thomas Mullen’s novel of the Spanish influenza epidemic during World War I and its particular effect on a Pacific Northwest town could not be more timely or relevant, and eerily so. I promise you, while you’re reading The Last Town on Earth, the mere sound of a cough will be enough to raise the hair at the back of your neck’
LARRY WATSON, bestselling author of Montana 1948
‘The Last Town on Earth wraps its reader in its quiet power. As the characters become trapped by their town, we become increasingly trapped by our own fears and hopes. Thomas Mullen’s debut is stirring, classic storytelling, with a deep resonance between the book’s moment in history and our own times’
MATTHEW PEARL, author of The Dante Club
‘In his remarkable first novel a brilliant series of plot twists is set in motion … Chilling parallels are overshadowed by the steady, nerve-shredding movement toward the story’s climax … Time and again, Mullen’s suspenseful storytelling pulls us forward. Time and again, his imagery … is devastatingly right’
New York Times
‘Thomas Mullen’s page-turner of a debut historical novel … [is] part morality tale, part coming-of-age yarn … Gripping … Psychological suspense, villains, victims, a conflicted hero or two, secrets and a mystery. In short, it’s a grabber’
Washington Post
‘Mullen provides a rich historical background and a well-drawn cast of characters … A fascinating account of a time and a place that most of us have never heard about’
Los Angeles Times
‘An engaging look at political and social isolation, and a vivid … study of human nature … The drama of the situation carries the book as inexorably forward as does the march of influenza through the area … If this novel teaches us something, it is that our history books can rarely portray the personal nature of political discourse in the past, or the sacrifices people make for their ideals’
The Lancet
‘Wonderful … Mullen has done a fine job with this, his debut novel, presenting an array of characters and showing with a deft hand their differing responses to the situation in which the town finds itself … [He] has created a fascinating microcosm and it’s enthralling to watch … What makes this novel compelling is not only its hint of allegory … but the broader questions it forces us to ask … What he manages to do is leave the reader interrogating themselves as to what their own response would be and should be if faced with these same ethical dilemmas. And that’s something to be valued in any novel’
Canberra Times (Australia)
Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.
—ALBERT CAMUS,
The Plague
An injury to one is an injury to all.
—Industrial Workers of the World slogan
Prologue (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
The sun poked out briefly, evidence of a universe above them, of watchful things—planets and stars and vast galaxies of infinite knowledge—and just as suddenly it retreated behind the clouds.
The doctor passed only two other autos during the fifteen-minute drive, saw but a lone pedestrian even though it was noon on Sunday, a time when people normally would be returning home from church, visiting with friends and family. The flu had been in Timber Falls for three weeks now, by the doctor’s best estimation, and nearly all traffic on the streets had vanished. The sick were condemned to their homes, and the healthy weren’t venturing outside.
“No one’s been down this street yet?” he asked the two nurses he was traveling with, both of whom had husbands fighting in France. He was a thin, older man with spectacles that had been dirtied by the wet coughs of countless patients.
“No,” one of the nurses said, shaking her head. Amid the swelling volume of the sick and dying, they hadn’t yet reached those this far outside of town, a lonely street where the poorest derelicts and most recent immigrants lived.
Neighbors had reported unnerving sounds coming from within one of the houses, but no one had been willing to go inside and check on the family.
The doctor parked beside the house, a two-story structure at the base of a slowly rolling hill. The ground was all mud, the wheels sinking a few inches. It even looked as if the house were sinking into the earth, its roof sloping to the right. The house was the last of five narrow buildings that seemed to lean against each other in their grief.
Before leaving the car, the visitors fastened gauze masks to their faces, covering their noses and mouths, and pulled on thin rubber gloves.
The doctor knocked on the door. There was no reply so he knocked again, harder this time, and identified himself.
“Look,” one of the nurses said. In the window to the left of the door they saw a face peering through the sheer curtain, a child no more than four years old. Her eyes were large and she appeared ghostlike, neither frightened of the masked strangers nor particularly interested in them. The nurse lifted a hand to wave but the child made no reply. The doctor knocked again, motioning to the door, but the child just stood there.
Finally the doctor turned the knob and walked inside. All the windows were shut, and the door clearly had not been opened in days. He noticed the smell immediately.
The little girl at the window turned to watch them. She was wearing an adult’s flannel shirt over her dirty nightgown, and her thick blond hair was uncombed. She was frighteningly thin.
The parlor was a disaster, clothes and toys and books strewn everywhere. A rocking chair was lying on its side, and a lamp had shattered on the floor. As the visitors stepped into the room two other girls emerged from the chaos, one younger and one slightly older than the girl in the window. They, too, were oddly dressed, dirty, wraithlike.
The doctor was about to ask where their parents were when he heard coughing, dry and hoarse. He and one of the nurses followed the sound down a short hallway and into a bedroom.
The other nurse stayed in the parlor with the children. She knelt on the floor and took some slices of rye bread from her bag. The girls raced toward her, hands extended, fingernails ripping into the food. In seconds there was nothing left, and all six eyes were again gazing at her expectantly.
In the bedroom, dark curtains were pulled over the window. The doctor could see the two beds, both occupied. Intermittent coughs came from the figure on the right, whose head rested on a pillow stained a dark red. The earlobes, nostrils, and upper lip were blackened with dried blood; the eyes were shut and the lids were a dark blue, as was the skin around them. The doctor saw a hand lying on top of the sheets, the fingers the color of wet ink. The small table beside the bed was streaked with blood, as was the Bible resting upon it.
The man coughed again and his eyes opened, unfocused, for no more than a second. The nurse knelt beside him to perform the meager duties her training dictated, even though she knew they were worthless now. It was better than looking at the figure in the other bed.
The woman lay on her side, facing her husband, her lips frozen in a rictus of pain. Her thin blond hair spilled across the pillow, some falling over the side of the bed and some caked in the dried blood on her face. It was impossible to tell how long she had been dead, as the Spanish flu’s corpses looked unlike any the doctor had seen. The blueness that darkened her husband had fully consumed her, making it impossible to guess her age or even her race. She resembled the burn victims the doctor had seen after a horrific mill fire years ago.
She was probably about the age of the nurses, the doctor wagered, for the flu seemed to be taking only those who were in the prime of their lives. The children may already have been recovering, but the flu had smothered their parents. This was entirely the opposite pattern of most influenzas.
They heard more coughing, from another room. The doctor and nurse looked at each other, surprised, then followed the sound into a bedroom on the opposite side of the hall. Here the window was curtainless, and as soon as they entered they saw two bodies lying on a large bed, both of them coughing. They were young adults, the sheets bloody near their heads. They sounded exactly like what they were: two people slowly suffocating to death.
There was a sudden movement between the bodies, tiny hands. A raven-haired child no more than three years old had been napping between her dying parents. She appeared tranquil for a moment, but the instant the girl opened her brown eyes, she started to scream. Whether terrified by the strangers in the masks or her nearly motionless parents, the nurse wasn’t sure. The girl kept screaming. It was as though the three silent children in the other room had found a voice in this one girl’s horror.
The doctor was already in the parlor, telephoning one of the exhausted undertakers, though he knew it would be hours before one could arrive. Even the operators were sick, and he stood there for what seemed an eternity, silence on the line, waiting for a voice to aid him, waiting for an answer. The dead seconds stretched out before him like the arms of the starved little girls, beseeching him.
Part One (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
I (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
The road to Commonwealth was long and forbidding, stretching for miles beyond Timber Falls and leading deep into the evergreen woods, where the trees grew taller still as if trying to reach the sun that teased them with the paucity of its rays. Douglas fir loomed over the rock-strewn road like two warring armies perched on opposing cliffs. Even those travelers who all their lives had been reminded of their insignificance felt particularly humbled by that stretch of road and the preternatural darkness that shadowed it.
Some number of miles into the woods, the road curved to the right and the trees backed off a bit, the brown dirt and occasional stumps evidence that the woods had been cleared out only recently, and only with extreme tenacity. The clearing rose along a gradual incline; at the base of the hill, a tree that had recently been chopped down blocked the road. Into its thick bark a sign was nailed: a warning to travelers who didn’t exist, a silent cry into deaf woods.
A crisp wind picked up atop the bare hill, carrying the combined exhalations of millions of fir and pine. Philip sucked in his breath.
“Cold?” Graham asked.
“I’m fine.”
Graham motioned back to the town. “You need to get yourself a warmer jacket, go ahead.”
“I’ll stay.”
“Suit yourself.” Philip did look cold in his thin jacket and khaki pants—pencil-pusher attire—whereas Graham was clad in his usual blue overalls and a thick wool coat.
“Look like it’s gonna snow to you?” Philip Worthy was sixteen, tall despite the limp that made people think he was shorter, but not as brawny as most of the men in that town of loggers and millworkers.
“It’s not going to snow.”
Graham, twenty-five, was what in many ways Philip aspired to be: strong, quietly wise, the man of his house. While Philip felt he needed to be polite and conversational to ingratiate himself with people, Graham seemed to say the minimum necessary and always won respect. Philip had known him for two years, and he still wanted to figure out how a fellow did that.
“Colder’n I thought it’d be,” Philip said. “Sometimes that means snow.”
Graham understood his companion’s dread of snow. He shook his head. “It’s cold, but it ain’t going to snow. It’s October.”
Philip nodded, shoulders hunched against the cold.
Graham laid his rifle on the ground, then took off his coat. “Here, put it on.”
“No, really, I’ll be all right. I don’t want you to get—”
“Put the damn coat on.” Graham smiled. “I’ve got more meat on my bones anyway.”
“Thanks.” Philip placed his rifle beside Graham’s. The jacket was big on him, the sleeves extending beyond his hands. He knew he looked foolish, but it was as good as wearing gloves. He wouldn’t be able to hold the rifle, but that seemed fine, since he didn’t expect he’d need to.
“Who do you think that was in the Model? on Sunday?” Philip asked.
“Don’t know.” Neither of them had been at the post on Sunday, when two other guards had seen a shiny new Ford drive as far as the fallen tree would allow. The guard post was too far away to get a good look at the driver, who never emerged from his automobile. The fedora told them it was a man, but that was all. The man had apparently read the sign, stopped to think for no longer than a moment, then turned around and driven away. It was the only sighting of an outsider since the town had closed itself off.
Commonwealth sat about fifty miles northeast of Seattle, or maybe a hundred—no one seemed to know except the town’s founder, Charles Worthy, and those who transported the town’s lumber. To the east were the jagged peaks of the Cascades, close enough to be seen on a clear day but far enough to disappear when the clouds were low and thick. On those days, the town seemed to be cut off from the rest of the earth. Miles to the west was the open sea, the confluence of Puget Sound to the south, the Strait of Georgia to the north, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the west, the point where all three combined and wrapped their cold embrace around the San Juan Islands. But the sea was just far enough away, blocked by the thick forest, that it might as well not have been there at all.
Commonwealth was no ordinary town, and that helped explain why it appeared on no maps, as if the rest of the civilized world preferred to ignore its existence. It had no mayor, no postmaster, no sheriff. It had no prison, no taxman, no train station, no rail lines. No church, no telephones, no hospital. No saloon, no nickelodeon. Commonwealth had pretty much nothing but a lumber mill, homes for the workers, plenty of land from which to tear down more trees, and the few trappings necessary to support the mill, such as a general store and a doctor’s office. To shop for items the store didn’t sell, to visit the moving pictures, or to attend traditional church services, people went to Timber Falls, fifteen miles to the southwest. But no one from town was allowed to leave anymore, and no one was allowed to come in.
“Think the driver will come back?” Philip asked. The wind blew his thin brown hair across his forehead.
Graham thought for a moment, his face appearing immovable as his blue-green eyes focused on the base of the hill. “No, not after he saw the sign. If it was someone who really wanted to come in, he would’ve tried. Probably just somebody on mill business who didn’t know about the quarantine.”
Philip nodded, appreciating Graham’s certainty.
Philip had grown up with neither father nor siblings, dragged throughout the West by an itinerant mother until the accident that left him in the Worthys’ care. And when his new family had moved to Commonwealth two years ago to start this bold experiment, he had quickly befriended Graham, who hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his own younger brothers until he met Philip.
Graham, like many millworkers, had run away from his home too young, chased off by a drunk father with whom he had violently clashed one time too many. He had been about Philip’s age when he’d left his home in Kansas, and sometimes when he looked at Philip, he was amazed that he himself had been so headstrong, so foolish, to venture out into the world at such an overwhelmed age. Somehow he had survived, survived bloody strikes and stints in jail and fights with cops, and here he was, a foreman at a respectable mill. Though he had his own family to care for now, he liked teaching Philip the things he’d learned from his older brother, to hunt his first deer, catch his first fish, navigate the trails that cut through the endless forest.
In truth, Graham didn’t feel so certain that the man in the automobile wouldn’t return, but the mere sound of his own calm voice was reassuring. This was why Graham had missed having younger brothers, he realized—they made you feel almost as strong as the image they looked up to.
Philip and Graham’s first stint as guards, four days earlier, had been uneventful. They had stood there for the ten long hours, silent for stretches and chatting when the boredom became too great. Wondering aloud how long the flu would last, swapping stories of past illnesses and ailments. Philip had even proposed a small wager as to how long the quarantine would last, but Graham had lightly chastised him for being indelicate. Philip regretted the comment, felt young and stupid. But other than that the time had passed slowly, the sky gradually darkening, the mists descending from the formless clouds above, leaving the two watchmen damp and tired and longing for their warm homes, where they would have nothing interesting to share with their families over the supper table.
“So how’s ‘class’ coming?” Graham asked, minutes or hours later.
“Class is fine. Ask me anything you’d like to know about interest payments.”
“I would like to know nothing at all, thank you very much.”
Philip was Charles Worthy’s apprentice, being trained in the business side of the mill, bred for the same job that Charles himself had held in his father’s mill, the one he had disgustedly turned his back on only two years ago.
“You honestly like sittin’ in a chair all day?” Graham asked.
“Wouldn’t know what else to compare it to.”
Philip wondered if Graham looked down on his desk work, but with his damaged body, Philip was a bad candidate for labor of a more physical nature. He gave a surreptitious glance at Graham’s missing finger, the one he’d lost in a mill accident some years ago, and figured his wasn’t such a bad lot to draw.
Just the other day, Philip had helped calculate what the mill would save if it switched over from gang saws to band saws, whose thinner blades would mean losing less of the lumber to sawdust. It had been challenging work, but when he was finished, he felt he’d contributed something of value to the mill, and his father’s soft-spoken compliment was still ringing in his ears.
“How’s your little girl doing?” Philip asked.
“She’s great,” Graham said with a slight smile. “Been crawlin’ all over the house lately. Amelia’s gotta keep her eyes on her all the time now.”
“How long till she talks?”
“A few months yet, at least.”
“How long till she chops down trees like her old man?”
“Till hell freezes over.”
“I don’t know,” Philip said, “she does look like a logger.”
“How’s that?”
Philip shrugged. “She drools a lot. Burps. Kinda smells sometimes.”
Graham nodded, smirking.
“So you get any sleep, or is she still up all night?”
“I sleep when I can.”
“Like when you’re out here standing guard.”
“I was not asleep last time. I was resting my eyes and ignoring you. It’s an important skill a man develops after he has a wife and kid. Trust me on this.
“Speaking of which,” Graham continued after a brief pause, looking at Philip from the corner of his eye, “I keep seeing you talking with that Metzger girl.”
Philip shrugged unconvincingly. “She’s my sister’s friend.”
“So how come I keep seeing you and her and no sister?”
It took an extra second for Philip to come up with a retort. “What, a guy can’t talk to a girl?”
Graham smiled. “Boy, I hope you’re less obvious with her than you are with me.”
Minutes of silence had passed before they saw someone at the base of the hill.
They saw him through the tree trunks first, hints of light brown and tan flashing every other second through that tangle of bark. Each of them stiffened, breath held, as they waited to see if a figure would emerge or if they had imagined it, if it was some trick of light.
The figure turned the corner and looked up the hill, saw the town in the distance. Between him and the town stood Philip and Graham, though he seemed not to notice them.
“You see that, too, right?” Philip asked.
“I see it.”
The figure started walking toward them.
“Read the sign,” Graham quietly commanded the stranger. “Read the sign.”
Indeed, after a couple of seconds, the figure reached the sign and stopped. Stopped for an unusually long time, as if he could barely read and there were one too many big words written there. Then the man looked up at them. Graham made sure his rifle was visible, standing up beside him, his hand under the barrel so that it was pointing away from him.
Philip hadn’t looked at the sign in days yet he had memorized what it said.
QUARANTINE ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY ALLOWED! On Account of the Outbreak of INFLUENZA This Town Under Strict QUARANTINE. This Area Under Constant Watch of ARMED Guards. Neither STRANGER Nor FRIEND May Pass Beyond This Marker. May God Protect You.
After reading the sign the man had some sort of brief spasm, one of his hands reaching to his face. Then he stepped up to the fallen tree and started climbing over it. It was an impressive tree, and it took him a moment to ascend its thick trunk. Then he was past it and walking toward them again.
“He’s still coming,” Philip said helplessly, trying not to panic. He hurriedly rolled up the sleeves of Graham’s coat, wondering why he felt fidgety and nervous when Graham seemed to become even more still than usual.
The man walked with a slight limp, wincing when he moved his right leg. It made his progress slower but somehow more definite. His clothes suggested a uniform of some kind, with stripes on one sleeve. As the man approached, Philip and Graham saw the back end of a rifle poking up over his right shoulder.
He’s a soldier, Philip thought, confused.
He was nearly halfway to them. No more than eighty yards away.
“Stop right there!” Graham shouted. “This town is under quarantine! You can’t come any closer!”
The man did as he was told. He had dark and uncombed hair that appeared somewhat longer than a typical soldier’s. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and there was a piece of cloth tied around his right thigh, colored black from what might have been dried blood. His uniform was dirty all over the legs and was smeared with mud across parts of the chest.
Then the soldier sneezed.
“Please!” The man needed to raise his voice in order to be heard over the distance, but the effort of doing so seemed almost too much for him. “I’m starving. I just need a little something to eat…”
What’s a soldier doing out here, Philip wanted to ask, but he kept the thought to himself.
“You can’t come up here, buddy,” Graham replied. “The sign said, we’re under a quarantine. We can’t let anyone in.”
“I don’t care if I get sick.” The man shook his head at them. He was young, closer in age to Philip than to Graham. He had some sort of an accent, not foreign but from some other part of the country. New England, or maybe New York—Philip wasn’t sure. The man’s jaw was hard and his face bony and angular, the type of face Philip’s mother would have told him you couldn’t trust, though Philip never knew why.
“I’m starving—I need something to eat. I’ve been out in the woods two days now. There was an accident—”
“It’s not you getting sick we’re worried about.” Graham’s voice was still strong, almost bullying. “We’re the only town around here that isn’t sick yet, and we aim to keep it that way. Now head on back down that road.”
The soldier looked behind him halfheartedly, then back at Graham. “How far’s the next town?”
“‘Bout fifteen miles,” Graham replied. Commonwealth was not on the way to or from any other town—the road led to Commonwealth and ended there. So where had the soldier come from?
“Fifteen miles? I haven’t eaten in two days. It’ll be dark in a few hours.”
He coughed. Loudly, thickly. How far does breath travel? Philip wondered.
Then the soldier started limping toward them again.
Philip was rigid with a new mixture of fear, apprehension, and a sense of duty, the knowledge that he had a job to do. Although his job had seemed perfectly clear and understandable earlier in the day, he was realizing how completely unsure he was as to how it should be carried out.
Graham exhibited no such confusion: he picked up his rifle and held it ready.
Philip reluctantly did the same.
“Stop!” Graham commanded. “You’ve come close enough!”
It wouldn’t be until later that evening, when he was trying to fall asleep, that Philip would realize he could have volunteered to fetch some food from town and thrown it down the hill for the soldier. Surely there could have been some way to help the man without letting him come any closer.
The soldier stopped again. He was about forty yards away.
“I don’t have the flu,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m healthy, all right? I’m not going to get anybody sick. Please, just let me sleep in a barn or something.”
“For a healthy man, you sure are sneezing and coughing a lot,” Graham said.
The man took another step as he opened his mouth to respond, but Graham froze him in place by raising his gun slightly. “I said that’s close enough!”
The soldier looked at Philip imploringly. “I’m coughing and sneezing because my ship capsized and I’ve been in the forest for two days.” He sounded almost angry, but not quite—he seemed to know better than to raise his voice with two armed men. It was more exasperation, fatigue. “I’m telling you, I do not have any flu. I’m not going to get anyone sick.”
“You can’t control that. If you could, I’d trust you, but you can’t. So I don’t.”
“I’m an American soldier, for God’s sake.” He eyed Graham accusingly. “I’m asking you to help me.”
“And I’m telling you that I would if I could, but I can’t.”
The soldier hung his head. Then he coughed again. It was thick and phlegmy, as if he’d swallowed something in the Sound and was having trouble dislodging it.
“I don’t suppose there’s a sheriff in this town I could talk to?”
“Nope.”
“What town is this?”
“Quit stalling, buddy. Hit the road. I’m sorry—I am—but my best advice is to head down that road fifteen miles, and when you do get to the next town, be mighty careful. Everybody’s sick over there.”
The soldier coughed again, then turned around. Finally. Philip closed his eyes for a moment, thankful. Already he had started imagining how he would retell this story to his family and friends.
But the soldier turned back around and faced them once again. Philip’s stomach tensed at the look of focus in the soldier’s eye, a focus that meant something had been set in motion. Philip tightened his grip on the rifle.
“So I guess you didn’t get drafted,” the soldier said to Graham bitterly, his eyes narrow.
“Guess not,” Graham replied.
The soldier nodded. “Lucky break for you.”
“Guess so.”
The soldier started limping forward again.
Philip, wide-eyed, looked to Graham.
“I said you’ve come close enough!” Graham yelled, aiming the rifle dead at the soldier’s chest. “Stop, now!”
The soldier shook his head awkwardly. His neck seemed rigid. “I’m not gonna die in the woods.”
Philip aimed his rifle, too. He’d never aimed at a human being before, and it felt wholly unnatural, a forbidden pose. He hoped and hoped the soldier would turn around.
“I am not bluffing!” Graham screamed. His voice was different, more panicked.
The soldier was getting closer. Philip thought he could smell the man’s stench, water-soaked and putrid from sleeping on mossy logs, lying atop damp twigs and slugs.
The soldier shook his head again, his eyes wet and red. He inched closer and closer to the two guards, to food, to a warm place to rest his weary bones, to salvation.
“Don’t make me do this!” Graham cried.
More steps. The soldier opened his mouth and barely mustered a “please.”
Graham shot him. The sound and the force of the shot made Philip jump, almost made him pull his trigger in a redundant volley. He saw the soldier’s chest burst open, cloth and something the color of newly washed skin flying forward. The soldier staggered back a step and dropped to his left knee.
Then two things happened simultaneously. The place where the soldier’s chest had exploded—which for a moment had looked slightly blackened—filled in with a dark red. And his right arm reached up over his shoulder and grabbed for the rifle slung on his back. Philip would remember in his haunted dreams the strangely mechanical motion of the man’s arm, as if his soulless body were simply executing one last order.
Graham shot him again, and this time the soldier was blown onto his back. One knee crooked up a bit, but the rest of his body was flat on the ground, facing a sky so blank in its grayness that in that last moment of life he might have seen anything projected upon it: his god, his mother, a lost love, the eyes of the man who had killed him. The grayness was anything and nothing.
Philip wasn’t sure how long he stared at the man, how long he kept his gun trained on the air that the man had once occupied. Finally, after several seconds, he managed to move his head and looked to his left, at Graham. Graham’s eyes were wide, full of electricity and life.
They were both breathing loudly, Philip realized. But Graham especially: he was sucking in gulps of air, each one larger and louder than the last. Philip lowered his gun, wondering if he should touch his friend’s shoulder, do something.
“Oh God,” Graham moaned. “Oh God.”
Philip didn’t know if Graham had ever shot a man. He’d heard about what had happened to Graham in the Everett Massacre, but he wasn’t sure if Graham had been a victim only, or an aggressor, too.
“Oh God.”
Graham’s breathing kept getting louder, and right when Philip was going to ask if he was all right, Graham swallowed. Held his breath and then swallowed that last bit of air, as if completely digesting the scene before him, the act he had just committed. When he started breathing again, he sounded almost normal.
A few seconds passed.
“We’re gonna have to talk to Doc Banes,” Graham said. Suddenly his voice was steady and serious, unlike his earlier cries. He might as well have been speaking about the condition of some of the machinery in the mill.
“I … I think he’s dead.” Philip’s voice cracked.
“Of course he’s dead!” Graham snapped, turning to face Philip for the first time. His eyes were furious, and Philip backed off a step. Then Graham’s eyes returned to the body, and he paused for a moment.
“We should find out how long we need to stay away from the body before we can bury it,” he said. “I don’t know if dead bodies can still be contagious, and if so, for how long. We’ll have to ask Doc Banes.”
Philip nodded, slowly. Despite the wind, the rifle no longer felt cold in his damp hands.
II (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
The residents of Commonwealth had blocked the road and posted the sign one week earlier, the morning after a town meeting at which Philip Worthy was the youngest attendee.
He had sat there beside his parents in the front row of the fir-scented town hall, a building that had served many roles in the two years since its construction: a church on Sunday afternoons; a dance hall on the first Friday night of each month; a bazaar where the town ladies sold or traded quilts, blankets, and other crafts a few times a year; and a makeshift school until the growing number of children in Commonwealth had necessitated the construction of a schoolhouse next door. Philips right knee bounced nervously as more men and women filed into the building. It had been cold when they had arrived in the early-evening darkness, but already it had grown warm in the room as people traded rumors and worries, the shuffle of feet and the twitches of fear.
Philip felt awkward at this meeting of adults, as if his presence would be questioned. But Charles had insisted, saying that as “a man of the mill,” Philip had an obligation to let his voice be heard on so vital a matter. Philip turned his head to look for Graham in the packed hall, but he couldn’t see his friend in the thick forest of faces.
Although Philip felt honored to be working in the mill office with Charles, he suspected the loggers and millworkers resented his easy ascension and looked down on him for his limp, for the wooden block in his left boot. He assumed they thought he wasn’t cut out for the arduous labor that kept the town running, that fed everyone and kept them alive out here in the wilderness.
His adopted mother, Rebecca, looked at him and smiled shortly, and he realized he must have been showing his nerves. He sat a bit taller in his chair and stopped bouncing his knee. She reached out and squeezed his hand, then let it go. Her smile seemed forced. The look in her light blue eyes was watchful, as ever.
“How do you think people are going to react?” Philip asked her quietly.
She shook her head, some gray tendrils falling from her hastily arranged bun. Rebecca had been to countless suffrage and political meetings, not only in Commonwealth but also in Timber Falls, in Seattle, and in dozens of towns and cities along the coast. She practically had been raised on such gatherings, accompanying her father, Jay Woodson, a fecund intellectual who had written tomes little read by any but the far-left intelligentsia, provocative disquisitions on the country’s coming economic collapse. Rebecca’s father had passed away before she married Charles, but she had done her part to build upon her father’s legacy, spearheading suffrage groups, antiwar organizations, and now this: the town of Commonwealth, a new hybrid of socialist haven and capitalist enterprise. And yet tonight’s meeting was less about politics than survival.
“I don’t know,” she admitted to Philip. “We’ll see.”
Graham sat several rows behind the Worthys, having arrived only a few minutes before the meeting was to start. Amelia had stayed at home with the baby—she was more tired than usual on account of her being two months pregnant, a fact the couple hadn’t yet revealed to their friends. He rubbed at his neck, the air too hot now that the room was filled to bursting, the movable wooden pews lined with men and women, the walls covered with people leaning, shifting their weight from foot to foot.
Finally, Rebecca whispered to her husband that he should get things started. Sometimes Charles still seemed uncomfortable in his role as head of the mill and de facto leader of the town, she noticed. All those years as the silent bookkeeper in his family mill, years of being overshadowed by his fast-talking older brothers and the domineering patriarch, had been difficult for him to overcome. He had learned how to emerge from the low expectations of others, had become an eloquent spokesman, rallying the faith of a town, but sometimes he needed his wife to remind him of this. Charles nodded without looking at her and stood up.
Charles’s hair and beard had gone completely white over the last few years. He was tall and had the broad shoulders of a lumberjack despite the fact that he had spent all his days inside an office. Anyone could have looked at his fingers and seen that they were too free of blemishes, his palms too soft. At fifty-two, he was one of the oldest residents in this town of workingmen, and his eyes were calm and benevolent. His white collared shirt and gray flannel pants were slightly worn in places that he had either failed to notice or chosen not to concern himself with.
He was followed to the podium by Dr. Martin Banes, the town’s sole medical authority, and as the two men looked out at the packed hall, voices quieted without a single raised hand or throat clearing. It occurred to Charles as he opened his mouth to speak that he had never heard so many adults so quiet. He stayed silent for an extra second or two, the first invisible syllable hiding somewhere beneath his tongue.
Charles was not the town mayor or its pastor, as Commonwealth lacked either civic or religious leaders. But the town was in many ways his creation, the realization of a dream he and Rebecca had shared years ago while suffering through the Everett general strike, its violence and madness.
Charles had been twenty-four when his father, lured to the great Northwest by stories of endless forests of Douglas fir, had uprooted his family from their home in Maine in 1890. Charles’s mother and his younger brother had been buried less than a year earlier, taken by that winter’s brutal pneumonia, and Reginald Worthy insisted that this new endeavor was exactly what he and his remaining sons needed. Their destination was the new town of Everett, established just north of Seattle with a well-situated port that, people said, would soon become the Manhattan of the Pacific.
The first years had been torture. Charles would remember with a pained wistfulness the busy streets of Portland—to say nothing of the crowded shops and festive parks of Boston—as he walked past newly constructed houses that looked like a strong gale might knock them down, the taverns whose floors were still covered with inches of sawdust, the streets thick with mud. And the stench of the place—the cows that townspeople kept in their yards as insurance against hard times, the sweat of the millworkers and loggers and carpenters, the poor experiments with plumbing. That far-western outpost of America was decades behind the New England that Charles sorely missed; it felt less like they had crossed the country and more like they had crossed back in time, slogging away in the preternatural darkness of a city without streetlights.
All the more reason to work ceaselessly, trying to forget the world around him by focusing only on what his father wanted him to master: the numbers, the cost of acreage, the price of lumber and the price of shingles, the pay of the millworkers. While his father and his elder brothers did the hobnobbing and the wooing, Charles remained at his desk in his small office, where the sounds of the mill would have made concentration difficult for a man less single-minded.
Still, to Charles, the great family narrative of amassing staggering wealth was a tainted one. He had never been comfortable with the way his family and all their rivals inflated their prices after the San Francisco earthquake of ‘06, profiting off the suffering and helplessness of others. But worse than that was the bust that had followed, when the mills miscalculated and felled too many trees. Prices had plummeted, men had been laid off by the hundreds, and accountants like Charles had searched desperately for ways to reverse the losses. It was busts like those that made his father’s and brothers’ unbridled avarice during good times a necessity, they told him: one needed to exploit advantages as a hedge against unforeseen calamities in the future.
To someone as conservative as Charles, this made sense in theory. What didn’t, especially when business was thriving, was firing workers who asked for better wages, failing to fix machines until after they had maimed forty or fifty men, and charging exorbitant prices in the general stores they had opened in the timber camps. Certain things simply were not right, Charles said. But his brothers scoffed. You’d understand if you had your own family to care for, they would tell him, shaking their heads. Their wives and children needed clothes, food, tutors, maids. Perhaps a single man could afford to worry about the finer points of worker treatment, but they could not.
Marriage, as it turned out, did not mellow Charles’s sentiments, especially since he had married Rebecca, an outspoken schoolteacher with radical leanings. The birth of their daughter only strengthened his belief in living a more moral life, both at the mill and at home. But it wasn’t until 1916 that a decade’s worth of family squabbles and jealousies finally exploded, as did the town where they resided.
It was the year of the general strike in Everett—the year the lines between the mill owners and the workers were drawn all the more starkly, even as the line between right and wrong was smudged. Charles found the unions’ requests not so unreasonable, and he said as much to his father, who threatened to disown his son if he ever repeated such sentiments. Reginald and the other mill owners were enraged by the various acts of skullduggery and sabotage being hatched by the nefarious Wobblies—the Industrial Workers of the World, radical unionists who had chosen Everett as the next stop on their road toward revolution. The brothers shook their heads at Charles, brainwashed by his socialist wife. Rebecca wanted to leave the town, arguing that this was no place for their twelve-year-old daughter to become a woman.
The so-called Everett Massacre forever destroyed whatever creaky bridge had remained between Charles and the other Worthy men. Of course, his father and brothers insisted that it was the strikers who had fired the first shot and most of the following volleys—damn reds will try to burn down the town and rape and pillage their way across the country if we don’t stop ‘em now. But Charles knew that most of the guns fired at the workers had been paid for by the Commercial Club, a businessmen’s group that his brothers chaired. If their fingers hadn’t been on any of the triggers, they had pulled the strings from a distance. As the backs of the strikers were broken, the men returned to their jobs and the town stumbled back onto the rocky road from which it had briefly wandered.
But Charles and Rebecca believed the general strike and its violence had brought everyone’s true colors to the fore. The couple made their decision. Charles let his brothers buy out his share in the Worthy mill, and he used the money to buy the land for Commonwealth—a distant plot that his father believed to be unworkable. Reginald, outraged by the defection and apoplectic at Charles’s plan to build homes for workers and offer them higher wages, never spoke to Charles again. He died one year later. Charles heard about the passing when he received a letter from one of his sisters-in-law three days after the funeral.
Now, barely two years after the Everett strike, Charles owned a successful new mill supporting a swiftly growing town where no one felt spat upon or cast aside.
Look at this, Rebecca, Charles thought. Look at what we’ve created—look at what we’ve done. It was amazing how people could toil so hard but only in extreme moments marvel at the accomplishment. He looked at the crowd, at the tense and nervous eyes—every person in the hall had risked so much by coming out to Commonwealth, taking a chance on a dream Charles had been foolish or stout enough to believe in. He would not let their sacrifices go for nothing.
“Thank you, everyone, for coming,” he began. “We need to discuss the influenza that has hit so many other towns so hard.”
By then everyone had indeed heard about the so-called Spanish flu, but it was hard to distinguish fact from rumor, truth from gossip, rational fear from paranoia.
What Charles told them was this: a plague that had apparently begun in eastern cities like Boston and Philadelphia had recently spread to the state of Washington. Dr. Banes added that he had received correspondence from a physician friend at an army base outside of Boston who attested to the disease’s extreme mortality, its speed of infection, and the strong possibility that it would spread via army bases as young men from all across the land were shuttled to various training cantonments. Fort Jenkins was only thirty miles away, Charles continued, and he had heard from several purchasers that the surrounding towns had been especially hard hit. Businesses had been closed and public gatherings were forbidden. Physicians and nurses were working all hours, but still the disease was spreading faster than could be believed.
“The best anyone can figure is that this is some new form of influenza,” Doc Banes told the crowd. He was fifty-six years old, with dark hair that had retained its color except for a shock of white at the front. He wore a bushy mustache that he once waxed into handlebars, but lately it had lapsed into a thick tangle. A good friend of Charles, he had abandoned the possibility of a comfortable but lonely retirement in order to join the Worthys here when they founded the town.
“It’s similar to the flu that you know in many of its symptoms—high fever, headache, body ache, cough,” the doctor explained. “It hits you quickly and can lead to pneumonia, and it’s incredibly contagious. But it’s far more severe than usual strains, and it’s killing people faster than any flu anyone’s ever seen.”
Charles said that in his last trip to Timber Falls, he’d talked to several buyers with knowledge of the disease’s spread. The flu seemed to have sneaked up on most cities and towns, but Charles could only speculate that Commonwealth had bought a temporary reprieve because it was so cut off from the rest of the country. They had been afforded a glimpse into the suffering of those around them while there was still time to defend themselves.
The hall was eerily silent as Charles and Doc Banes spoke. Many had heard rumors of such a flu but had hoped that the stories were embellished. Hearing the facts voiced by the soft-spoken Charles and the sober-minded Banes caused them to sit all the more still.
Charles told them he had heard that the War Department was even putting a halt to the draft because so many soldiers were sick, and that Seattle had passed a law mandating that anyone walking in public wear a gauze mask over his mouth and nose. Other towns had outlawed spitting and shaking hands.
Charles’s voice gradually strengthened, filling in the empty spaces that had been created by the people’s silence. “And as far as I’m concerned—as the manager of the mill but also as a man of this town, as a husband and father—we need to do whatever we can to make sure we stay uninfected.”
“How do we do that?” A man called out. “You got a cure for us, Doc?”
Banes shook his head, but Charles spoke for him. “The only way not to get sick is to prevent the flu from getting into Commonwealth.” He paused. “I propose we close the town to outsiders and halt all trips out of town. No more errands to Timber Falls or anywhere else, as that only makes it possible to catch the flu from people in those towns and bring it back here. No one leaves Commonwealth, and no one comes in, until the flu has passed.”
For a moment the crowd was silent. Then came the sounds of hundreds of voices—some of them low murmurs between spouses, others exclamations, some of them disbelieving laughter. Charles saw Philip turn around and glance at all those heads nodding or sternly shaking, all those brows furrowed or eyes widening.
“For how long?” someone shouted above all the others.
Charles opened his mouth and the voices grew quiet, awaiting his response. But Charles stopped himself, deferring to the doctor.
“We can’t be sure,” Doc Banes said. “Probably no longer than a month—the flu moves quickly, and I would guess that after a month, the surrounding towns would have returned to health.”
“You would guess?”
Banes looked back at Charles somewhat sheepishly. He wished he could be more certain, but he couldn’t. No one could. What was happening seemed unlike any epidemic he’d experienced. He was already afraid that he had said too much, that he had given voice to fears he didn’t fully understand. Now those fears would only be multiplied by the number of skeptical and frightened faces before him.
Charles held up his hands. “With the general store fully stocked, as it is now, we have enough provisions to keep the town closed off for nearly two months. If extreme measures need to be taken, some of us have livestock. Like all of you, I hope we won’t need to wait as long as two months, or even one. But I believe in being prepared and not taking senseless risks. If we don’t do something drastic, the flu will infect this town, and if it hits us as hard as it has other towns, there’s no way we could keep the mill operational until it passes. To say nothing of the lives lost.” He paused. “People, I believe that if the flu reaches Commonwealth, the mill will fail. And the town will follow.”
“What about our lumber buyers?” a man called. “Can they still come in the town?”
Charles shook his head. “No, and that means not selling any lumber until we reopen the town. I will contact all our buyers and explain. I know they won’t like it, but I also know that with the war demand for lumber being so high, they’ll still be waiting for us when we reopen. Closing the town will make the mill’s finances a bit tight, but it can survive.”
The only visitors remote Commonwealth received were the ships that snaked along the river to the mill, picking up lumber, as well as some buyers who rode or drove into town for meetings with Charles. Both could be halted indefinitely. With no bank in town, most people subsisted on bartering and trades, in addition to visits to the general store, where their purchases were deducted from their mill paychecks.
If Charles couldn’t travel to the banks in Timber Falls, he wouldn’t be able to pay the workers at the end of the month, but they would have his assurance that he would do so as soon as the flu passed. And hadn’t he already won their trust, giving each of them a house in return for the first few months of labor? Few residents had any savings, as most of their paychecks still went toward what they owed Charles for their homes, and those who did have bank accounts in Timber Falls would not have access to them during the quarantine. But to Charles, these seemed minor and necessary sacrifices.
“What if someone from Timber Falls comes in without hearing about the quarantine?”
Charles offered his idea about posting a sign, blocking the road, and stationing guards. He knew this might cause objections, so he tried to make light of it. “Guards would scarcely be necessary, as we have so few visitors. It would strictly be a precaution.”
After a brief pause, someone else stood. “Mr. Worthy, I appreciate all you’ve done for us, and you’ve cert’nly given me a fairer shake ‘n anyone else ever has. But, all due respect, havin’ guards is just a bit too similar to the kindsa work camps I came here to get away from.” The man sat down quickly, disappearing into the sea of heads, several of which were nodding in agreement.
Charles was unprepared for that remark. He had expected that some would oppose his idea, but hearing himself compared to the types of men who ran prisonlike factories wounded him. He felt his cheeks redden.
But before he could reply, a man in the row before Graham’s stood up to speak, wool cap in his hands. He had a thick brown beard and hair that his wife had tried to comb earlier that evening, barely succeeding. “I lost my first wife to typhoid thirteen years ago,” he told them. “Lotta people had it, and lotta people died. If something like that’s happening again, I say we close the town.” Several people murmured in response as he sat back down.
Charles nodded. He too lived with the memories of past epidemics, including the awful winter of ‘89, when he had lost his mother and his younger brother, Timothy. The sting of those deaths had faded, yet Charles had found himself thinking of Timothy more over the past few years, as the adoption of Philip had brought a boy of roughly the same age into his home. Soon Philip would be older than Timothy had ever lived to be.
A new speaker stood far in the back. “So if we close the town,” he said, his voice a deep bass, “I can’t see my family?”
There were a number of cautious husbands who’d initially come to work in the strange new mill but left their families behind, cared for by grandparents or friends in nearby towns. And some single men were courting women from Timber Falls, hoping to win their hearts and also their confidence in that mysterious hamlet deep in the woods.
“I understand your concern,” Charles said. “Any man in such a situation can of course leave Commonwealth if he wishes, and when the flu has passed, I promise you will have a job to return to. But until the flu passes, you will not be allowed back in.”
The man, who had remained standing, looked at Charles evenly. Charles knew, most likely, that he traveled to Timber Falls to see his family every Sunday, the most glorious day of his week. His choice was to abandon his family to possible sickness or turn his back on money that his family couldn’t afford to lose.
Graham stood up suddenly, then paused, as if realizing he’d never spoken to so large a group before.
“I don’t like the idea of being kept from coming and going as I choose,” he said. “But I like the idea of seeing my family fall sick even less.” Other men had sounded rushed, but Graham spoke slowly. Many heads nodded in agreement. “And I might not like the idea of guards either, but this ain’t a bunch of Pinkertons and cops we’re talking about—it’ll be us doing the guarding.” More nods. “I for one’ll be proud to protect this town.”
He sat back down. A man voiced a “Me, too.” As did another and another. The hall echoed with the pledges.
Philip nodded. “Me, too,” he was saying.
Rebecca saw Philip’s lips move and she looked away, at her husband, who again seemed calm as a snow-swept field. The two of them had already argued about this at home, behind the closed bedroom door. To her, closing the town seemed the antithesis of everything they had worked for. The founding of Commonwealth had not been an act of rejecting the world, she believed, but of showing the world how it could be improved, so that others could follow their example. If they closed their doors—if they approved this reverse quarantine—they would seal themselves off from that world. She also worried about her family’s health, and she had seen those haunted expressions of fear in Timber Falls when she accompanied Charles on his last trip to that suddenly desolate town. But she could not bring herself to support a quarantine.
She wanted to stand up. She wanted to say something, anything. She had spoken before larger crowds than this, crowds both supportive and hostile. But Charles had made his opinions plain, and the idea of making a marital disagreement public seemed untoward, if not downright wrong. She felt an uncharacteristic paralysis even as her heart raced.
Philip sat beside her silently as the meeting continued, more men and women voicing their concerns, but most of them in favor of a quarantine. After the silence between comments grew longer, Charles spoke again.
“I call for a voice vote,” he said.
Rebecca’s palms were sweaty; she rubbed one of them on her wool skirt. She wanted to stand. She wanted to stand. She stayed in her seat.
“All those in favor of the town closing its doors until the flu has passed,” Charles proclaimed, “say ‘aye.’”
The hall shook in response. Beside Rebecca, Philip voted quietly.
“All against, say ‘nay’”
In the hall were many dissenters, but they represented only a small fraction of the total in favor. The sound of the nays was heavy with defeatism, those voters having already realized that they were in the minority.
Rebecca voted nay, almost under her breath, aware that it barely mattered. The only person who heard her was Philip, who eyed her with concern.
Her husband nodded, the hall growing louder again as people spoke to one another, seemingly congratulating themselves on their decisiveness. To Rebecca, it was an empty happiness, for they had succeeded in an act of only ambivalent courage, some moral compromise whose weight, she feared, would begin to feel uncomfortable on their shoulders.
Next Charles discussed logistics: blocking the road and devising a schedule for the guards. After the meeting had adjourned and most people began exiting the stuffy building, a line formed in the left-hand aisle as men signed their names to volunteer for shifts. Rebecca wondered if as many men would have come forward if Graham hadn’t thrown the gauntlet at their feet. Perhaps some did so out of a sense of adventure, while others did so out of fear of what would happen if someone less trustworthy were given such a responsibility. She looked at some of the faces and guessed that they were driven by a sense of shame that they weren’t fighting in Europe. Some had registered for service but had been designated “essential war workers” owing to their duties at the mill; others had willfully turned their backs on what they considered a crooked war. Standing guard would prove to them and their families that they were indeed courageous men.
Beside her, Philip stood, and as he took his first step toward the line, Rebecca started to raise her hand instinctively to grab his shoulder, to pull him to his seat and tell him he was making a mistake. He was only sixteen! He should not stand out there and hold a gun against whoever might happen upon the town. But before she could grab him, he had stepped beyond her, into that long line, sidling up beside Graham, who nodded at his unofficial brother and patted him twice on the shoulder.
For many years Rebecca would remember that shoulder clasp and the way Philip’s back seemed to straighten under the weight of Graham’s hand.
III (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
What had the soldier’s name been? How old was he? Where did his family live, and how recently had he written to them? Were they reading his most recent letter now, trying not to tear up at the end of it, hoping that another would soon follow?
Philip’s mind raced. As much as he tried not to do this to himself, as much as he tried to focus on the supper on his plate, on his stepmother’s voice, he could not stop himself from wondering about the man whose life he had helped bring to a violent and completely unexpected halt.
“Are you all right?” Rebecca asked.
If everything were all right, Philip thought, then there would be no need to post armed guards by the town entrance. There would be no need for the rifles, and there would have been no need to shoot the soldier. The soldier would be sitting beside him right now, happily eating Rebecca’s cooking and telling them all for the tenth time how thankful he was for their hospitality.
“I’m fine.”
They’d ask the soldier about the war and he’d shrug, act uncomfortable with all the attention at first, but once he started talking about it, he’d find it difficult to stop. He’d tell them about his training and the rumors circulating through the camp about where they’d be deployed. He’d tell them he wasn’t in any hurry to get to the front but that once he got there, he’d be honored to do his duty for God and country.
Rebecca put her hand on Philip’s shoulder. “Try to eat some.”
“Sorry,” Philip said.
“Don’t be sorry. Just remember to take care of yourself. You have to eat.”
He ate. It took effort at first, but the first few bites awakened his stomach. The stew was warm and heavily salted, and dark enough for Philip to be less than sure whether there was any meat in it or if it was just vegetables. What day was today? Was it Wheatless Monday, Meatless Tuesday, Porkless Thursday? Every grocery store in America displayed those signs. Save food for the soldiers, everyone said. “Wheatless days in America make for sleepless nights in Germany.” Not that Philip would complain—he ate much better with the Worthys than he ever had with his own mother.
Outside it was already dark, the autumn sun chased away by the cold winds.
Philip tried not to think of the soldier. Instead, think of this house, the people inside it. Think of today.
“It’s Wednesday,” he blurted out.
“Yes?” Rebecca answered, her eyes watchful and warm.
He thought for a moment. “Are you sorry you can’t be at your meetings?” Typically, Wednesday evenings were when Rebecca would be meeting with fellow suffragists in Everett or Seattle, or maybe in some of the smaller towns, hoping to build up the movement with new recruits.
She nodded. “I am, but we’re all making sacrifices now.” Then she found a way to smile at the situation. “I’m sure the groups can survive without me for a few weeks.”
It was the second Wednesday since the quarantine had begun, so this would be the second week of meetings Rebecca had missed. She did not appreciate the forced inactivity; she sorely missed those suffrage meetings and rallies, as she had missed the rallies for the Woman’s Peace Party, rallies they’d held in the months leading up to America’s joining the war. She and other WPP members had made speeches and exhorted people to vote for the peace candidates, to fight against the pressures that the Preparedness Movement was exerting, those thinly disguised warmongers who wanted the country to build more warships and cannons and guns just in case. She missed those meetings especially, sitting with like-minded men and women, people who felt, like her, that no good could come of war, especially this war, fought for no justifiable reasons beyond those lies spread by the propagandists. But once Wilson had declared war and Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, suddenly the WPP was illegal—Americans weren’t allowed to preach peace anymore. Now everyone was supposed to sing happy songs about fighter pilots and doughboys, hate the kaiser and love their president.
Philip nodded at her. “Hopefully you’ll get to be out there again soon.”
“In the meantime, I can always write plenty of letters,” she said, smirking ruefully. “I just can’t mail them yet.”
“Maybe you’ll get suffrage anyway,” he said with a slight smile. “Maybe they’ll pass the law during the flu.”
She laughed. “That’d be nice, but I doubt it.”
The door opened, and in walked Laura, Philip’s adoptive sister. She was two years younger than Philip, with straight amber hair that might have been blonder had she lived someplace with more sunlight. She had brown eyes that could look incredibly mean when she wanted them to, which they often had in Philip’s first few years with the family. Laura wasn’t a bad person, Philip eventually learned, she was just used to being an only child. Having to accept an adopted brother—an older adopted brother, for goodness’ sake—at the age of nine had been a difficult task.
She sat down on a chair opposite Philip and looked at him carefully, showing more compassion than she usually permitted herself.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I was thinking about making a cake later,” Laura said.
Cake? This was something she did only on his birthday. Because everyone was conserving sugar until the war ended, the thought was downright treasonous. “Great. Why today?”
She looked away, as if uncomfortable with her own act of charity. “I just wanted to.” A pause. “I thought you’d want some.”
“Thanks.”
Laura had not been told about the dead soldier. Their mother had explained that a man had tried to enter the town but that Graham and her brother had persuaded him to leave, and that the confrontation had left Philip exhausted.
“Welcome,” Laura said. In the background, Rebecca tried to make herself invisible. “You don’t need to help me with my math tonight, either.”
“No, I said I would.” Philip was afraid of changing his routine. It was awkward enough eating supper alone, but his guard stint had lasted until eight, and Charles was at an emergency meeting with the rest of the guards at the town hall.
After Laura went back to her room, Philip forced himself to finish his food. This stew would have saved the soldier’s life, he thought. If it had been placed at the bottom of the hill moments before the soldier’s arrival, he would have eaten it and then continued down the road. If they had known he was coming, if they somehow could have anticipated the day’s events, he would be alive and his stomach would be full, and Philip’s wouldn’t be queasy.
When he finished, Rebecca told him she’d clean his bowl, which he politely tried to resist. Despite their years together, he still felt somewhat awkward around her. He had known that the way his own mother had raised him had been unconventional—taking him from town to town, scrounging for money, blaming him for their troubles—but he’d grown used to it over twelve years. Even the smallest acts of kindness from Rebecca left him somewhat unsure how to react, how thankful to be and how wary.
He sat back down at the dining room table as Rebecca cleaned the kitchen. The room was cold and quiet, and the windows strained against another gust of wind.
After waiting by the fallen soldier for nearly half an hour—long enough to determine that he didn’t have any accomplices lagging behind—Graham had told Philip to head back to town and find the doctor, but not to tell anyone else what had happened.
Commonwealth was a small town, and most people knew each other—nearly everyone knew Philip and whose son he was—but fortunately, not many realized he was on guard duty that day. The few people he passed merely nodded to him, and he nodded back without meeting their eyes. For most of his quick walk through town, he saw only the soldier, his chest exploding and his empty body toppling back.
Philip was rushing down unpaved streets that were still thick and muddy from the previous evening’s rain, past identical houses lining the road. Everything in Commonwealth was jarringly new. Due to the hastiness with which the town had been constructed, some porches leaned a bit too far to one side, and some buildings bore the spotty marks of a hasty paint job, but there were no dilapidated storefronts or vacant lots, no broken windows or collapsed roofs. The town was so freshly ensconced in the woods that it smelled strongly of the forest, the Douglas fir and red cedar, the salal and toadstools dotting the nearby riverbed. Mixed with this was the smell of so many men sweating in a stuffy mill, emerging at the end of the day breaded with sawdust, the scent of torn bark and wet wool. Moments ago the cicadalike thrum of mill saws would have echoed through the colonnades of trees, but the closing whistle had already sounded, and Commonwealth was so quiet Philip could hear the river dancing over moss-covered rocks.
And so quiet that Philip’s voice, when he entered Banes’s house and found the doctor alone, sounded deafening: “We shot a man trying to come to town. A soldier. He was sick. He’s dead.”
That was how it came out, the words a jumble, all the facts except the main one—we killed someone—seeming so unimportant. He was a soldier. He was young. He sneezed and coughed a lot. He said please. He started to cry right before Graham pulled the trigger. He had a limp, like me.
Banes followed Philip back to the guards’ post, a good distance beyond the front of the town, past a row of fir trees that all but concealed the buildings from view. The doctor nodded when he saw how far away the body lay. All of his experience told him to go forward, to kneel down beside the body, but he knew he couldn’t. He knew what the other people in his profession all across the country were going through right now, knew about the tired repetitions of futile acts, and he didn’t want this to happen to Commonwealth.
“We’ll leave him there for twenty-four hours,” Banes decided. “Then we can bury him.”
Philip was dreading the idea of burying the soldier, but at the same time, he wanted to be one of the ones to do it. He owed the soldier the respect of participating in a proper burial. Philip looked to his side, at the empty chair that the soldier could have been occupying, and he wondered what the man’s family would have said at his funeral.
“I guess you were right,” Philip said as he stood to leave the dining room. “I guess it was a mistake to go out there.”
“I never said that,” Rebecca answered after a pause.
“I know. I could tell you thought it, though.”
Rebecca dried her hands on her apron. “I never thought you made a mistake. I thought you had a very hard decision to make—we all do right now.”
Philip nodded, then excused himself to the bathroom, leaving her alone in the cold kitchen. She sighed, realizing she hadn’t responded as well as she could have. But she was angry, and would it have been right to try and conceal her anger, to coat it with maternal sympathy and false warmth?
She hadn’t believed what Charles had told her that afternoon about the soldier, had found it impossible to visualize Graham firing on another man—and with young Philip standing beside him! But then when she had seen the look in Philip’s eyes, she knew it was the truth.
How could this happen? Years ago her two elder sisters had run off to join a commune, and Rebecca had hated them for running away, for cutting themselves off and never responding to her letters, even when she wrote to them of their father’s illness. Rebecca and her younger sister, Maureen, had cared for their father in his dying days. Maybe their little commune had been beyond the reach of any postmaster, but that possibility did nothing to salve the pain she had felt, the loneliness she had seen in her father’s eyes as he realized he would never see his girls again. Rebecca had hated them for their disinterest in the rest of the world, their silent shrugging at other people’s plight. And now her own community was doing the same thing.
Rebecca wasn’t sure if she was letting her anger at the country—at Wilson, at this horrible war—turn into anger about the town; she wasn’t sure if they were separate issues or two sides of the same coin. She and her fellow suffragists had worked so hard, come so close, but they had failed. If only they had won the vote, used it in the 1916 elections, maybe they could have made the difference. Women never would have allowed this nation to turn to war, never would have let the politicians take their sons away for battles on the other side of the earth. All the letters they had written, the marches, the parades down the streets of Seattle, that feeling of absolute certainty that this was right. That incredible new word, feminism, still sounded strange to her ears but inspired her. It was a word she wanted her daughter to hold close to her heart as well. They had come so far and done so much, but they had still fallen short, and now this. The mothers were voteless and couldn’t stop their sons from being fed into the meat grinders of Belgium and France.
Then again, maybe their votes wouldn’t have mattered. After all, Wilson had promised not to drag America onto Europe’s battlefields, yet here the country was at war, and the advocates for peace were being branded unpatriotic, radical. People were being jailed simply for speaking the truth, for proclaiming that this was a rich man’s war, a war for the bankers who had loaned so many millions to the Allies that they couldn’t stand to see them lose, couldn’t risk the loans going into default. So feed us your workingmen, feed us your young boys who can barely read and write, and let us plug them into the trenches, let them die for J. P. Morgan.
Rebecca’s last trip to the post office in Timber Falls had yielded a letter from her younger sister, and Rebecca still seethed to think of what Maureen had written. Maureen met twice weekly with other ladies in Seattle to roll bandages and prepare comfort kits for the soldiers, and she helped with the Liberty Loan drives, posting enthusiastic signs all over the city. She went to grocery stores to tell people the importance of food conservation, and just the other day they had told the police about a woman who was clearly ignoring the call, hoarding meats and sugar. Maureen and her friends met each week and made lists of neighbors who hadn’t yet bought any Liberty Bonds, neighbors who might possibly be antiwar agitators, and turned the lists over to the authorities. Their lists had already led to seven arrests, she happily reported.
Ah, Maureen. Blessed with three daughters and a son not yet thirteen, thus safely insulated from the war. Of course Maureen was making sure her fellow ladies were enthusiastically in support of the war. Perhaps suffrage wouldn’t have changed a thing. Maybe the Maureens of the world far outnumbered the Rebeccas, and this Great War would lead only to more wars, to be repeated infinitely.
Rebecca stood at the kitchen window, gazing at her own reflection and the faint shapes of the houses lining the streets. In other houses on streets just like this, children were sick, parents were sick, and beds belonging to young men were empty, perhaps permanently so. This was America, she thought, tears welling up in her eyes. This was what America had become. She dug her fingernails into her palms, willing the tears away.
Charles opened the front door, unbuttoning his coat and leaning forward to peck his wife on the cheek. Philip entered the kitchen and said hello as Charles removed the bowler that had once been black but had faded to gray. Rebecca left the room, knowing that Charles would want to talk to Philip in private.
Charles asked Philip how he was doing and received a shrug in response.
“I’m sorry you had to be a part of that.” Charles had always had a soft voice, even when he was Philip’s age. It was as if the rest of his body had aged all these years just so it could catch up to his voice, its calm tenor and weathered hue.
“It’s all right,” Philip said, though he looked like he was thinking, It’s all wrong.
Charles nodded. He hadn’t seen Philip look so vulnerable since the first time he’d seen Philip’s eyes, in that hospital room nearly five years ago. Philip now sat at the kitchen table with his hands at his sides, as if he thought he might need to defend himself. His face was white and his eyes were slightly wider than usual, evidence that the shock of that afternoon hadn’t worn off. Would it ever? Charles was becoming an old man; he had lost loved ones to disease and seen millworkers cut down by grisly accidents, had seen severed limbs and had touched frozen corpses and had heard the choking last breaths of his own mother and younger brother, but he had never seen anyone murdered. He had fought in no wars, had never needed to defend himself from some malignant aggressor. Though his association with his father’s mill had caused him to feel somehow responsible for the violence of the Everett strike, he had never felt the punishing weight of an individual’s death on his conscience. Fathers were never supposed to say that they didn’t know what their sons were going through, but Charles was acutely aware of the fact that his son was stumbling through terrain where he himself had never trod.
So he nodded, closely watching Philip’s eyes, which were avoiding his. Had the quarantine been a mistake? Charles should have known when he helped sway the town into this decision that it would so quickly come to roost under his own roof. It seemed some odd type of justice, centered there in the middle of a situation that until then had seemed to lack any sense of justice or irony or symbolism whatsoever, nothing but chaos and death.
“You two did the right thing,” Charles said.
“I really didn’t do anything,” Philip replied. “Graham did everything. I was …” His voice trailed off.
“You may think so,” Charles said, “but you helped by being there. I’m sure you made it easier for Graham.”
Too late, he realized that was the last thing Philip wanted to hear.
“You did the right thing,” Charles started over. “The man was sick, and if you’d let him in, half this town would be sick within days.”
“He could’ve been sick just from sleeping outside all night. We don’t know for sure he had the flu.”
Charles shook his head, politely but firmly. “Right now nearly everyone in this country who’s sick has the flu. Especially in Washington. I’m sure he had it.”
I’m sure. Philip looked like he couldn’t understand the concept of certainty right then. “I hope he did,” he said.
“What you had to do out there was hard,” Charles acknowledged, as if he had any idea. “I wish it had been me instead of you. But just because it was hard doesn’t mean it was wrong.”
Philip nodded again.
When Charles opened his mouth to say something more, Philip stood up too abruptly. “I should go to the store—Rebecca asked me to fetch a few things for her.”
Philip clearly wanted to be alone. Charles waited a moment, feeling that he was abdicating some responsibility by letting his son leave before providing him with some nugget of paternal wisdom. But he let him go nonetheless because, God help him, he could think of nothing else to say.
IV (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
“And how is my favorite customer this evening?” That was how Flora Metzger greeted everyone who walked into Metzgers General Store, and she smiled at the sawyer who didn’t look a day over eighteen.
“Jus’ fine,” he said. He gave Flora his order—molasses, cornmeal, potatoes, and any fruit she had—and she rummaged through the back shelves, whistling to herself.
“You look thinner, young man,” she said when she returned. “Your wife ain’t feeding you well?” Flora herself was well fed, with curly gray hair that hung down around her fleshy cheeks, and matching gray eyes that saw all that transpired within her store.
“She’s a fine cook,” the man said, holding back a smile.
“I hope you lie better to her than you lie to me.” Flora chuckled as she scribbled a receipt. “Handsome man like you”—she winked at him—“I’m sure your wife has other skills.”
“Good night, ma’am,” the man said, blushing as he shuffled off.
Flora knew the way millworkers and loggers spoke among themselves—you could overhear quite a lot if you had a mind to—and she delighted in embarrassing them with the same sort of talk. Even the men who’d been shopping at her store for two years were hardly used to her banter; she always seemed to find the right comment for making the toughest of toughs turn red before he finished his transaction.
Up to the desk stepped Leonard Thibeault. Flora had known what he wanted as soon as she spotted his head looming behind the other customer. Leonard was a tall man, and he seemed to assume his height gave him an impressive air, that no one would think to doubt his strength or steadfastness. He had a long oval face and a bush of brown hair that added a couple of inches to his stature.
“How’s my favorite customer this evening?” Her voice was thinner this time. His wry and somewhat off-kilter smile was all the answer she needed.
“Bottle o’ whiskey, if y’ don’t mine.” He had a low and rolling voice, the edges of his words dampened by a French Canadian accent that thirty years in the West had not erased.
She nodded and went to the back shelves. When she returned with the bottle, she noticed that Leonard wasn’t wearing a jacket despite the cold, and that one of the buttons on his brown flannel shirt had been skipped so that the shirttails hung at different lengths. Such a sight normally would have won a gibe from Flora, but Leonard seemed beneath such remarks.
“You might want to slow down the frequency of these purchases,” Flora advised as she filled out the receipt. Her eyes were on the paper, but she felt him swaying like a lone pine on a windy day. How he managed to drink this much without losing a finger or an arm to one of the saws was a mystery to her, some enchanted luck of the foolish. “You know we aren’t getting any new shipments till the flu’s passed.”
She would’ve expected that someone who loved his liquor would learn to use it sparingly in times like these, to preserve the supply. But then again, someone like Leonard would probably figure a way to make moonshine out of pine needles if necessary.
When she looked back up at him, she saw him staring at one of the walls. He might have been reading a government flyer about sugar conservation if his eyeballs had been moving. He hadn’t heard a thing she’d said.
“Thanks, Flora,” he said, pocketing the slip and cradling the bottle as he swayed to the door.
Philip smelled alcohol on the breath of the tall man who nearly walked into him as he left the store. The man didn’t apologize or even seem to notice as he veered off, busily opening a bottle.
“How is my favorite customer this evening?” Flora asked as Philip approached the counter. Behind her, Alfred Metzger had emerged from the cellar and was rummaging about in the aisles. He was always stocking and restocking and counting and recounting what was left on the shelves while Flora presided over the store. His height and thin frame made him his wife’s opposite. Most customers saw his face only on the rare occasions when she wasn’t manning the place.
“Fine, ma’am, and you?”
“I’m two days older than when you saw me last. That ain’t good.”
“But you look at least two days younger.” Something about Flora Metzger brought out Philip’s brash side.
She smiled and put her hand to her breast in mock flattery. “You always know how to make a fat lady’s day.” This was part of why Philip had wanted to visit the store, so Flora’s forceful personality could make him forget about the soldier for a few moments.
“You look taller,” she said. “You grown in the last two days?”
“Haven’t checked. My pants still fit.”
“Well, when they stop fitting, you come in here and I’ll get you furnished right. I want my favorite customer looking sharp, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, what do you want?”
Philip enjoyed this banter. One of his tasks as mill accountant was to visit the general store to collect production numbers and sales slips; trading goodhearted jabs with Flora certainly beat discussing volume with the laconic foremen.
“Flour and cornmeal, please.”
She sighed mightily as she lifted herself from her chair. “How many?”
Philip thought. They really needed only one bag each, but with the town closed off, the store wouldn’t be replenishing its shelves anytime soon. “Two bags each, please.”
She heaved the bags onto the desk one at a time, then reclaimed her imperial position on the chair. After Philip signed his name by the cost in her book, she eyed him. “You preoccupied with something? You’ve already been in my store a full two minutes, and you haven’t asked after my daughter yet.”
Elsie Metzger was fifteen years old and one of the best-looking girls in town, as far as Philip was concerned. He tried to make his smile disappear, but it was impossible. “I … don’t always ask after her.”
“Oh, she’s not good enough for you?”
“No, that’s not what I—” He shook his head again, realizing he couldn’t win. “So how’s Elsie?”
“Lazy. She needs fresh air.” Flora leaned her head back and called out, “Elsie! Come help Philip Worthy carry his purchases home!”
Philip shook his head. “No, please, I’ll be fine.” Could there be anything more insulting than needing a girl’s help carrying groceries? He heard movement from one of the back rooms, so he started stacking the bags of flour and meal.
“Oh, hush. She’s just back there twiddling her thumbs anyway. The walk’ll do her some good.”
“Mrs. Metzger, really, I don’t need any help carrying this.”
Flora raised one eyebrow. “I think you need help in more ways than you realize.”
She’d barely finished saying that when Elsie came through the side door. Philip knew that most of the other young men in town didn’t share his high opinion of the tomboyish Elsie, but that didn’t make him question his judgment in the slightest. He knew her well because she was Laura’s best friend. He knew what types of jokes she found funny and which made her blush; he knew that when she was playing cards, any faint wrinkles on her forehead meant she had a good hand and that a strangely serene expression meant she was trying to mask a bad hand. She hadn’t been one of the prettier girls when she was younger, her thick eyebrows casting too dark a shadow over her eyes, her curly brown hair too disheveled. But she’d reached the age when some of the formerly overlooked were beginning to take their rightful places as the beauties they’d always been meant to be. Elsie’s eyes glowed with an intelligent, mysterious light, and she was becoming vain enough to keep her hair more or less under control. She’d always had an uncommonly deep voice, but nowadays it seemed softer.
Philip had started to lift the sacks from the counter when Flora clamped her hands upon them. “I said Elsie’s helping you, and that’s final. I don’t want anything falling and tearing open and going to waste—especially not while we’re under quarantine.”
He had once dropped a sack of flour, more than a year ago, and Flora had never forgotten it. But this was the first time she’d gone so far as making Elsie help him.
He finally accepted the inevitable. “I’ll get the flour,” he told Elsie, who lifted the meal.
“Tell Charles I said hello, and tell Rebecca she’s not giving my daughter enough homework,” Flora called after them.
With her back to her mother, Elsie rolled her eyes at Philip.
After Philip had followed her out the door, Alfred’s voice rose from deep in the aisles. “You playing matchmaker, Flora?”
“Do you have a problem with Philip Worthy?”
“I only have a problem with your meddling.”
“I don’t meddle. I instigate. Big difference.”
“My mom likes teasing you,” Elsie said as they walked along Commonwealth’s main street, dark except for the light emanating from people’s homes.
“She likes teasing everybody.”
Elsie nodded. “True, but you especially.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. ‘Cause you aren’t a logger or millworker, maybe. You’re not like most of the other fellows in town.”
Philip’s fingertips were already starting to tingle—they did that sometimes, a legacy of his accident five years ago. Damage he would have to live with, the doctor at the Everett hospital had said in an uninterested tone. At least the tingling meant they were still there, as opposed to his left foot, which had been amputated. The longer he carried the sacks, the more his fingertips tingled; soon the sensation would spread to his hands and up his arms, reaching his elbows. It didn’t happen as often as it used to, partly because he was stronger and partly because he had learned how to function within his new limitations. The feeling was something between pain and numbness, but he knew from experience that if he pushed himself too far, his arms would grow unresponsive and the bags would come crashing down.
“I really can take those sacks for you,” he told her. “You can head back if you want.”
When had he started getting so nervous around her? He’d known her for five years: when he’d first been adopted by the Worthys, he had wasted many afternoons with Laura and Elsie, playing card games and taking bike rides, wandering along the river to collect driftwood. The three of them would sit on the stones at the water’s edge, watching the river drivers walk across the gently bouncing logs as they floated down the river, calmly riding them like Aladdin on his carpet.
“Hey, this is my way to get away from my mother for a few minutes. Don’t deprive me of it.”
Philip nodded. “So my mom’s not giving you enough homework?”
“Don’t you dare tell her that. My mother calls me lazy if she catches me being idle for two seconds. Between school and the store, I do more work than she does, sitting there gossiping with everyone who walks in her door.”
Although he liked working with Charles at the mill, Philip missed school, because he missed being around Elsie. He missed talking to her, missed looking at her while she concentrated on a test or stared out the window, lost. There were few girls her age in town, but even if Commonwealth had been overrun with young maidens he still would have plotted ways to accidentally cross paths with Elsie.
“So what happened out there this afternoon?” For all her criticism of her mother, Elsie did share her mother’s hunger for gossip.
“What have you heard?” Because Mrs. Metzger hadn’t asked him about the soldier, Philip had assumed the news hadn’t gotten around. But maybe even she knew there were some things you shouldn’t joke about.
“I heard some men saying someone tried to get into town.”
Philip nodded. “Someone did. He was sick, so we made him leave—fired a couple warning shots, and he got the message.”
That was what they’d been told to say. Charles’s idea, and the doctor had agreed. No need to worry everyone, no need to complicate things. Only the guards needed to know. Charles had told Rebecca, so maybe it was assumed that the men would tell their wives and that their hushed and conspiratorial whispers would stay in the chamber of matrimonial secrets. But Philip sure wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. That he knew.
“How close did he get?”
“Not close enough to make us sick.” But Philip wasn’t sure—what if he was carrying around a tiny piece of the soldier right now, in his lungs, his blood, his heart?
“What was he doing here? He didn’t say if he was going to come back with more soldiers, did he?”
Philip and Graham had thought this question might arise, but Charles and Doc Banes had dismissed it. So Philip chose to belittle his own concern by smiling and lightly chiding Elsie. “I really don’t think any soldiers are trying to take over our town. He didn’t look like a Heinie.”
She smiled, even though her grandparents had come over from Germany. Her parents had assured her that the incessant anti-German comments of the day didn’t apply to them. “So who fired the shots?”
“We both did—Graham shot one, and I shot one.” He said that quickly, twitching his head before he said it.
“I’ve just never shot at anyone, is all.” Like many girls in Commonwealth, Elsie had fired a gun a few times, but she seemed to find the idea of firing at another person strangely thrilling.
Philip tried to clarify the lie. “We didn’t shoot at him. We shot into the air. Just as a warning.”
“Did he have a gun, too? He was a soldier, right?”
Damn, you have a lot of questions, he thought. “Mustn’t’ve had one with him, I guess.”
Elsie nodded. She planned on becoming a teacher in two years, when she finished her own schooling, and Rebecca had encouraged her to be curious and inquisitive, especially when things didn’t make sense.
They walked on in silence. Philip’s arms were aching, but he resisted the temptation to rearrange the bags and let Elsie see he was struggling.
“I heard in Seattle they aren’t even letting people go outside without masks on,” Elsie said. “If you don’t have a mask, the trolley won’t pick you up. You can even get arrested for it.”
“I heard that, too. Not about the arresting, but I guess that makes sense.”
“They’ve canceled school in most towns, and closed any other places people get together.”
Philip nodded. “I wonder what teachers are doing, then.”
“Getting sick, most likely. Or tending sick husbands and children.”
“I guess we’re lucky, huh?” But as his comment hung in the air, Philip thought how strange it sounded. He’d meant lucky that the flu hadn’t invaded their town yet, but the flu was still laying siege to it, so that didn’t seem so lucky. And what had happened today sure as hell wasn’t lucky.
She seemed to know what he’d been thinking. “It’s pretty rotten, isn’t it? First war, and now everybody sick.”
“They say we’re winning the war.” But by the time they could get another newspaper, Lord only knew what would be happening in Europe. Were the soldiers healthy? The one from that afternoon certainly was not. Philip had a sudden image of a gray battlefield bereft of explosions or gunfire but filled with the writhing bodies of the sick and dying.
“I know we’ll win, but still,” Elsie said. “Two rotten things happening at once. Makes you wish you could run away someplace where none of this is happening.”
“It’s happening pretty much everywhere, I think.”
“I know. I just wish there was someplace to escape.”
But as they walked in silence, they came to the same strange realization: the closed-off town of Commonwealth was precisely this place. There was no war, no pestilence. People around the globe were dying, dying from flu and pneumonia and aerial bombings and bayonets, but in Commonwealth, the last town on earth, people were safe. This was the place to run to, and they were already here. All they could do was wait.
By the time they reached his house, Philip’s hands were almost completely numb. “Well, my lady, thank you for your kind assistance.”
“You’re welcome.” He let her pile the cornmeal atop the stack he was barely holding on to. After a brief pause, he took a quick step toward the door right as she did the same. They smiled at each other awkwardly, and he stepped back to let her open the door for him.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sure. Be careful out at guard post, okay?”
“Okay.” Their eyes locked for what felt like an uncomfortable amount of time.
“And if something interesting happens again, you’d better come tell me about it.” She smiled again. “I don’t want to have to carry cornmeal across town just to hear all the good stories.”
She turned and hurried off.
Philip kicked the door shut and ran to the dining room table, dropping the bags with a heavy crash. He sat down and shook his hands to get the blood flowing.
It was quiet in the house. He sat there for a while, thinking about Elsie but also, inescapably, about what he and Graham had done. He looked at his hands and thought of Graham’s four-fingered hand, wondering if Graham ever stayed up at night worrying that he’d lose more fingers on the job. One lost finger you could deal with, you could accept. Carry things with the other hand, learn to give an extra 25 percent of strength and dexterity to the remaining four fingers. But losing a second or third would be tougher, surely. Philip had seen many such men in Everett and Commonwealth, had caught glimpses of their horrible claws in the rare moments when they let their hands out of their pockets and exposed them to the world and the amazed gazes of children. He wondered if there was some end point, some line in the dirt, some amount of pain and suffering beyond which one could never continue.
Philip sat there and massaged his sore arms with his numb fingers, waiting for the feeling to return.
V (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
The body only felt light because six of them were lifting it. On the doctor’s orders, they’d waited exactly twenty-four hours, unsure whether Banes had cold hard science as his reason or if he was just superstitious. Maybe this was how you were supposed to bury vampires or the possessed to make sure they wouldn’t rise again.
Philip had left the mill office to come down there, though Charles had told him he didn’t need to. He had dreamed of the soldier the night before and had been thinking of him all day, and he knew it would have been wrong to run from this last duty.
The other gravediggers were men who, in addition to their jobs as loggers and millworkers, were serving the town as guards: Rankle, Mo, Deacon, and Graham.
“Vultures didn’t get to it,” someone remarked.
“Deacon wouldn’t let them,” Rankle said softly.
Deacon just nodded.
“You shoot at the vultures?” asked Mo.
Deacon shook his head. “They stayed away,” he said in his raspy voice.
Indeed, Deacon, with his gaunt cheeks and flimsy limbs and coal-black eyes, looked like a scarecrow brought to wicked life. Philip could easily imagine wild, carnivorous birds keeping their distance from him—people did the same thing. Deacon had once trained to be a Catholic priest, so the story went, but he’d decided that God wasn’t calling out to him after all. He was a man who usually kept quiet, allowing the demons to fight out their arguments in his head. Others noticed that when he thought he was alone, he swore like a madman.
Philip had never dug a grave before, though he figured the others had. This couldn’t be the first burial for Doc Banes, nor could it be for Graham. And Deacon all but looked like an undertaker.
Jarred Rankle also had the air of a man who had dug his share of graves. A short but strong man whose brown hair had recently gone gray, he had eyes that looked as if they had been carved too deep into his granite face, and they seemed all the darker for hiding beneath those craggy brows. Rankle was one of Charles’s favorite foremen, both for his efficiency and for his intellect. A former Wobbly of high rank, he often visited the Worthy residence to write political letters with Rebecca or read from her evergrowing pile of radical journals. He was an uncle of sorts to Philip and Laura and an irregular guest for meals, as he had no wife of his own. Rebecca had told Philip once that Rankle had a family years ago but had “lost” them. She had offered no further explanation and Philip had not dared ask, but her comment helped explain a certain look that shadowed the man’s face at supper sometimes.
The earth was harder than Philip had feared. The first two shovelfuls were smooth and clean, as if the outermost layer of earth were a soft cushion to comfort all men, but after that it was dense, the tightly bound record of a million years barely held down by the trees and rocks. Philip’s muscles would be sore the next day; his weakened hands were already tingling.
No one asked Philip or Graham any questions about the soldier. Philip didn’t know if they were afraid of looking rude or if they simply didn’t want to know, but he was glad they didn’t ask.
The previous night, Charles and Doc Banes had called all the twenty-odd guards except for Philip to an emergency meeting at the town hall. They had told the guards about the soldier and asked that everyone keep quiet about it, but even they knew that some men were better at keeping secrets than others. Graham would certainly tell no one, except possibly his wife. But Mo, a talkative former boxer from Chicago, would probably find it difficult to keep quiet, as would some of the others.
Most of the guards were the same men who served as town magistrates, elected for one-year terms as members of a board that was the closest thing the town had to a police force. Four months ago the magistrates had met and voted to expel from the town two men who had been found to be thieves—the only expulsions in the town’s short history. Other than that, the magistrates—who currently included Graham, Rankle, and Charles, with a lifetime appointment as the mill’s owner—had spoken to a couple of violent husbands and the parents of some children who had pilfered from the general store, but nothing more. Everyone in Commonwealth seemed to want to be there badly enough that they did their best to live peacefully.
But now the guards were upholding an even greater responsibility, and the secretiveness surrounding the killing of the soldier struck some as wrong. Commonwealth wasn’t supposed to have secrets.
The gravediggers chose a spot far enough away from the road to be unseen. They didn’t want anyone to stumble upon the grave. None should know. No one needed to be killed to protect the town. All was well.
The trees here were close enough together to almost completely block the sun, but Rankle had managed to find a spot where they had enough room to dig without hitting unbreakable roots. In another hundred or thousand years, though, the surrounding roots would wrap themselves into the soldier’s remains, feeding and somehow drawing life from this dead husk.
The body didn’t smell yet, maybe because of the night’s cold. For that Philip was grateful. Doc Banes had been the first to approach, had leaned over the body and done something the rest couldn’t see. The body’s right knee was still sticking up, frozen in the position it had first fallen. That amazed Philip. He wondered if it meant the eyes were still open, too, still pleading with the sky.
Then Doc Banes had thrown a blanket over the body and nodded to them, and they had proceeded to the spot where Rankle had started digging the grave. Philip wanted to say something to Graham but he wasn’t sure what. He stole as many glances as he could at Graham’s tireless face, but Graham never looked back. Instead Graham dug faster and deeper than anyone. The rest of the men took an occasional break to unclench their fingers and roll their shoulders, but Graham kept digging, a man possessed.
The previous day, after they had shot the soldier and Philip had run for Doc Banes, Philip and Graham had completed their shift in near-total silence. It had passed in a strange blur, perhaps the adrenaline from the encounter acting with some kind of amnesiac force. As far as they were concerned, the final thing they had done out there was shoot someone.
The men carried the stiff body, each surprised at how light it felt, and placed it in the grave. The blanket never slid off and Philip never had to look at the soldier’s face again.
No one checked the body’s pockets for any identification or other trinkets. No one wanted to know his name, and there was no way they could report his death to his family. The gravediggers couldn’t afford to care about who the man was.
Mo, who normally found it difficult not to make conversation, whistled for a bit to break the silence. But even he seemed to realize it sounded disrespectful, and soon stopped.
Meanwhile, Deacon worked on the spot where the man had fallen, hacking at the earth with his shovel and turning it over and spreading the dirt around to cover the spots where blood had left its stain.
After the time-consuming and arduous digging, it was sobering how quickly they were able to fill the grave back up. “All right,” Rankle said when the last shovelful had been moved back into place.
Every man thought to himself about finding a rock or a large branch to mark the spot, a talisman that would stand in as a grave marker. And every one of them rejected the idea without voicing it.
Graham turned around first, without bidding anyone good day. He kept his back to the rest of them and walked toward the town, leaving the shovel behind so no one would ask him about it. Philip realized he hadn’t heard Graham speak a word all day. He followed Graham back to the mill, but fro n a distance.
Rankle joined Mo at the post, as they were on guard duty that day. When the others left and the two watchmen stared down the gentle slope of the road, the view before them was different than it had been before. Everything in their line of vision—the softly sloping hill and the dirt road and the thick forest beyond—was now forever defined by the fact that it was just a bit off to the left of the dead man’s grave.
VI (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
Philip never would have volunteered for guard duty if it hadn’t been for Graham. He wouldn’t have thought himself capable.
Growing up with only a mother, Philip was accustomed to not understanding jokes that the other boys told, jokes they had presumably overheard their fathers or older brothers telling. Dragged from town to town throughout his childhood, he was used to being behind in his studies, relegated to the back of a new classroom while the teacher lavished attention on her familiar students and ignored the new kid. By the time the Worthys had adopted him, whatever lessons Philip had learned from his travels were buried deep beneath his grief for his mother and his difficult recovery from the accident. In school he was silent and at home he was distant, as if so convinced that this new existence was a dream that he was simply waiting to wake up. By the time he accepted the reality of his situation, he had already adjusted to thinking that his missing foot and difficult past made him somehow lesser than everyone around him.
It was Graham who taught him to revise these expectations of himself. Charles and Rebecca had provided what support they could, but that was their job as parents. It meant more to Philip coming from a man who had no obligations to him. He had met Graham when Charles invited the Stones to dinner during those first days in Commonwealth. When everyone else had left the table, Graham had matter-of-factly showed Philip his maimed hand, which he’d caught Philip surreptitiously glancing at several times.
Graham had invited him along hunting one afternoon, teaching Philip, despite his weak arms, how to hold a rifle, how to load it, what to expect when he pulled the trigger. Back when new buildings were seemingly sprouting from the earth in Commonwealth, Graham also showed him how to work on the frame of a house. Although Philip worried about being a drag on Graham’s time, Graham seemed to enjoy teaching him all that he had been forced to learn from strangers on trains and in timber camps.
It had seemed perfectly natural to volunteer as a guard alongside Graham. But Philip wasn’t sure it had been the right decision—not anymore.
Which was why, after supper on the day they had buried the soldier, Philip walked the four blocks to Graham’s house. He needed to tell Graham his fear that standing guard had been a mistake. He had been dreading the thought of going back out to the guard post for his next shift, but he wasn’t sure if that was because standing guard was wrong or because he was simply scared of another conflict. All day long, the only thing Philip had thought about was the dead soldier, and as bedtime approached he found himself dreading sleep and the haunted dreams it would bring.
True to the town’s mission, the Stone and Worthy houses were nearly identical despite the gaping differences in the men’s backgrounds. Both houses were two stories tall, with tiny cellars and roofs that pointed skyward like fingertips in prayer. Their chimneys exhaled smoke barely visible in the night sky. Charles’s home was only somewhat larger, either a minor oversight in the town’s egalitarian vision or a utilitarian acknowledgment of the fact that Charles and Rebecca had adolescent children.
The windows on the first floor were illuminated. Philip knocked gently in case the baby was asleep.
Amelia smiled when she opened the door. A few strands of her brown hair had escaped her bun and were hanging before her blue eyes. She was thin and not tall, with the light skin of a lifelong Washingtonian. Cradled in her mother’s arms, the tiny head barely visible through the billows of blanket, was Millie.
“You here to get my husband involved in some kind of trouble?”
Philip hadn’t quite lived down the time he and Graham had gone hunting and had temporarily lost a couple of friends’ horses by failing to tie them down properly. The horses had panicked and fled after Philip fired his first shot. Of course, it was Graham who had taught Philip such troublemaking skills as firing a rifle and playing poker.
“Yeah, I was thinking of taking him by the saloon, maybe seeing if he wanted to rustle up some women.”
“What saloon would that be?”
“It’s a secret,” he said, following her in. “Only the millworkers know about it. They said if I told any of the wives about it, they’d feed me to the machines.”
“Um-hm.” The baby started crying. “And why would you want to rustle up any women? I thought you only had eyes for Elsie Metzger.”
“Boy, can’t a guy talk to a girl without the whole town gossiping?”
“Can’t a housewife gossip?”
Beyond the small parlor and the dining room, Philip could see that the kitchen was filled with jars—jars on the table, on the cutting board, jars crammed on the floor, leaving only a narrow path to walk through. Amelia was in the midst of the autumn canning frenzy, particularly important this year.
“Looks like you’ve been busy,” Philip said.
“Oh, no more so than usual,” she said, blowing a few strands of hair from her face. Amelia always seemed to be working on several projects at once—she was in charge of the town’s community gardens, in addition to the impressive one in her own backyard, and whenever Philip stopped by, she was making preserves, sewing or knitting clothes for her family, or tackling the type of home repair work that many women reserved for their husbands. Amelia had lost her mother when she was seven years old and had inherited early the homemaker role in her family, which had included three younger brothers. The immense amount of work necessary for sustaining her new family in a frontier town perhaps seemed, in contrast, quite manageable.
“Aren’t you happy to see your uncle Philip?” Amelia asked the baby, who was still crying.
“Doesn’t sound too happy.”
Amelia walked toward Philip and, too quickly for him to refuse, put the baby in his arms. “Cheer her up.”
In his arms, Millie stopped crying, gazing at him wide-eyed, her forehead furrowed.
“You did it again,” Amelia marveled. “You’re like magic. Quite an effect on the young females.”
“Last time she spit up on me.”
Amelia laughed. “I forgot about that. Anyway, Graham’s upstairs. I’ll go get him.” She stopped on the second stair and turned. “Oh, and no poker tonight. I don’t want him losing any more of our money to you.”
Philip smiled. Though a novice, he had picked up the game quickly. “We’ve only bet with real money once. I think we used walnuts last time.”
“That explains why I couldn’t find any when I was baking last weekend.”
As Amelia went upstairs, Philip walked the baby in small circles. Millie was five months now, still impossibly small to Philip’s eyes, but she felt heavy, as if a baby were somehow denser than other human beings. Her eyes were huge, and Philip wondered if the rest of her would grow into them or if she’d always have large eyes like her mother. She stared at him intently.
“So what are you looking at, exactly?” he said to her softly. Did she even recognize him, or had the event with the soldier changed him so much that even a baby could see the difference? He tried to laugh at himself when he realized he was reading too much into an infant’s blank expression, but the laughter wouldn’t come.
She was warm against his chest. His fingers had regained their feeling a few hours after burying the body, but they began to tingle slightly beneath the cotton enveloping the baby. It was with a disquieting chill that Philip realized he had held that day first a dead body and now a smiling infant.
He looked up, rocking the baby softly, and his eyes as usual were drawn to a crooked stair at the bottom of the staircase, which always reminded him of the days after Amelia’s stillbirth. At the time, the Stones had been living in a smaller house with two other families, as Commonwealth still hadn’t enough buildings. Whenever Graham wasn’t working at the mill, he was helping construct new houses, and he had encouraged Philip to join in. Graham taught him the basics, and Philip spent many hours that summer helping the older men build the town. After the stillbirth, Amelia was bedridden for days, and Graham barely spoke, his face a downturned mask of silent grief. He also barely slept, working late into the night on the new house, desperate to complete the job so he and his wife could move in and begin to grapple with the world that had just turned on them.
Every night for two weeks he was joined by Philip, who came after dinner and silently worked with Graham until his arms were too sore to continue. Philip’s inexperience was the reason one of the steps was crooked, but Graham had insisted it was fine, after issuing a short laugh. It was his first laugh since the loss of his baby. Other men in the town had seemed uncertain in Graham’s presence, never knowing what to say to a grieving man, but Philip had simply shown up and worked, usually in silence, as it was clear that Graham didn’t want to talk. Philip suspected Graham’s refusal to fix the stair was his way of thanking him for helping when no one else had known how.
Philip was stirred from his memories when Amelia and Graham descended those stairs. Graham looked groggy, but he was holding a pipe and smelled strongly of tobacco, so he obviously hadn’t been sleeping.
“I’ve been forbidden from playing poker with you,” Graham said as Amelia took the baby from Philip and laid her in the crib.
“Me, too. Maybe you need to teach me a new game.”
“You’ll just start beating him at that one, too,” Amelia said.
“I can hold my own, thank you very much,” Graham said. “He’s just a good bluffer. With that damn innocent face, you can never tell when he’s lying.”
“Watch the cuss words, husband.”
“Bluffing’s not lying,” Philip said. “I would never lie.”
Graham rewarded the lie with a mocking smile, then wandered to the fireplace, teasing the fire back to life with swift jabs from the poker.
“So how’s the family?” Amelia asked Philip while kneeling on the kitchen floor, scribbling labels for each jar. “I imagine staying inside the town must be hard on Rebecca, not being able to go to all those meetings and things.”
“It is,” Philip said, “so she’s been spending more time than usual at the school. Those poor kids are probably going crazy with all the extra work.”
Suddenly, Amelia coughed. A few times.
Philip felt himself stiffen and saw Graham temporarily stop rearranging the logs. Amelia reached for a cup with her free hand and sipped the water, and all seemed well.
Her coughing wasn’t entirely unusual, not anymore. After the stillbirth, she had lost a good deal of weight, and her subsequent pregnancy with Millie had been difficult—she had been bedridden for the last two months before the birth, as well as the first three weeks afterward. Considering how many times she’d been laid up with colds over the past two years, her coughing fit in the kitchen didn’t really mean anything unusual, Philip told himself.
“But the mill’s doing real well,” Philip said. “Charles keeps talking about it. Says we’ll prove his brothers wrong soon enough.”
“His brothers are wrong in a lot of ways,” Graham said.
“Once we can open up the town again, we’ll have plenty of good shingles and lumber to ship out,” Philip said.
To Philip, their banter felt somewhat forced, as if they were all concentrating on the charade that everything was normal. As he thought about this he looked at Graham, seeking some acknowledgment of what they’d experienced together, and when they made eye contact something flickered in Graham’s face.
“Help me bring in some wood,” Graham said.
Philip followed him out, closing the door behind him. Graham was already in the back, retrieving firewood from the shed. When Philip caught up to him, Graham turned around and faced him, though Philip could barely see his features in the dark.
“When are you out there guarding next?” Philip asked.
“Tomorrow night.”
“Overnight?”
“That’s right.”
Philip couldn’t imagine standing guard all through the night, surrounded by nothing but darkness and increasingly irrational thoughts. “Who with?”
“Deacon.”
Philip had heard that Deacon had volunteered to stand guard on many of the nights; the role of nocturnal sentinel seemed entirely in keeping with his Gothic demeanor. But Philip was surprised to hear that Graham, who usually turned in earlier than Philip did, would want to do the same.
“Are we still painting those porches Sunday morning?” Philip and Graham had planned on finishing some of the newer, as yet unoccupied houses in town.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t we be?” Graham finished stacking the pieces of wood in his other arm. Philip offered to help carry some, but Graham shook him off.
“I figured if you’d be staying up all night the night before, maybe you—”
“I can manage,” Graham insisted.
Philip nodded, backing away as Graham emerged from the shed with his arms full of firewood. Graham was about to unload some into Philip’s arms when their eyes met again, and Graham stopped.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” Graham asked.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m somebody you just met and don’t trust.”
Philip looked down instinctively. “I was just … wanting to make sure you were all right,” he replied weakly.
“Of course I’m all right.” Graham looked insulted. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
A few seconds passed as Philip fumbled with how to respond. “Because of … what happened yesterday.”
“I did the right thing yesterday.” Graham’s tone was strangely aggressive, and the dim light cast malevolent shadings on his face that Philip hoped weren’t truly there. “There’s nothing for me not to feel all right about.”
Philip nodded. “Okay.”
“I did what I had to do. If I hadn’t been there, you would’ve done the same. You know that.”
Philip stood there blankly.
“You know that,” Graham repeated.
“Yeah.” Philip nodded, though he didn’t know if he agreed. “I know. I just—I just wanted to see how you were.”
Philip had wanted to confide in Graham, tell him his confusion about standing guard, receive guidance from him. But now he was afraid to do so, afraid to admit his fear. Graham was right—they had done the right thing, surely. Philip was just scared. And fear was like the pain in his arm when he carried too much weight: something he simply had to accept and move beyond.
“It’s about time Amelia and the baby went to bed.”
Philip was being dismissed. “All right,” he said to Graham’s back. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Graham had never lashed out at Philip, though there had certainly been times when dark moods fell over him. Something about the sheer force of Graham’s will left Philip in awe of his friend, as if realizing anew the stark difference between himself and a true adult.
As Philip walked home, he thought about what had happened to Graham in Everett. What little he knew, he had heard from Charles. Graham wasn’t one to share those kinds of stories, and judging from what Philip had heard, he couldn’t blame him.
VII (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
Hours later Graham sat at his kitchen table, roused from sleep once again by the sound of the gunshots, by the look on the soldier’s face. He was breathing heavily and his fingers twitched—it was a miracle he’d been able to leave the bedroom without waking Amelia. He put his head in his hands, hoping to steady them.
Graham had never killed anyone before. Never even shot at anyone. He’d broken his share of noses and ribs, he’d tussled and come out on top more than a few times, but he’d never crossed that line. You did the right thing, he told himself. There are hundreds of people breathing right now who can thank you for those breaths. He told himself that the right thing was often hard, and confusing, and fraught with peril, but he damn sure had done the right thing, so he just needed to calm down, breathe slow.
Ain’t nothing a man has can’t be taken away. Damnedest truth there ever was. All that one has could vanish—whether in an instant, with frightening speed, or across a lifetime, with decay so slow no eye could detect it. But with Graham it had come as quick as a breathe, and he would never, ever let that happen again.
He had so much to protect. He thought of his wife and daughter, the warm weight of the baby in his arms. The way she slept so peacefully, it was as though all the strife that had preceded her birth had abruptly and forever ceased to exist.
He had never known what he wanted until that day on Puget Sound, with the sun reflecting off the waves and the mountains hovering like benevolent spirits in the background. He was twenty-three then, six years after he’d left home when a fight with his father had gotten out of hand. He’d been riding the rails for years, had picked fruit in California and seen the bowels of the earth in the Montana mines, had been beaten up by railroad bulls who thought he was at worst a Wobbly or at best another bum come to ruin their towns.
Not long after leaving his family in Kansas, he’d fallen in with a friendly bunch who taught him how to bum rides on the train, how to avoid the railroad bulls and the town cops, how to find out where the next job was and how to get there. Taught him which job sharks you could trust and which would only take your money and then drive you to some godforsaken field where there was no job at all, just a handful of other bindle stiffs who’d been shaken down. Taught him how to hide your money when you slept on a train car, how to protect yourself in a flophouse, how to keep the bedbugs from getting to those places you really didn’t want them. After only a couple years, it was as if Graham had been doing this all his life, and soon he was the one teaching the younger runaways and roustabouts, showing them how to survive, how to take the punches and keep on walking, grinning all the while.
But the romance wore off fast, as the bosses got meaner, the pay got lousier, and the food at the work camps got worse. Graham remembered the time he ran out of Spokane after a strike got ugly, remembered sitting on the train as the sun was rising over the Sawtooth Mountains, the air bracingly cold and so clean. He remembered sitting there and taking in all the beauty that God had laid out before him and wondering just what he was supposed to be doing in it. Surely he had a purpose, a reason for existing in a place as maddeningly beautiful as this, but what? His life had been a series of responses and reactions, nothing more. He’d hear about a job and take it. He’d get some jack and spend it. A strike would hit the town and he’d leave. Somebody’d call him a name and he’d throw a punch.
Until Everett. The playground of second-tier timber barons who thought they were industrial magnates of the highest order, Everett was a quickly growing town with no shortage of jobs. Time had passed in an almost seasonless blur. After a year or so, Graham’s buddy Matt told him how he could make more if he worked in a shingle-weaving plant; Matt could put in a good word with the foreman and teach him how to do the work without losing a finger or two. Graham was desperate to create something completely his own, and saving some money would be exactly that. So he made the switch to sawyer, but it was harder work, in its way. Rather than living out in the woods beneath the persistent rains and leaning in to his end of a crosscut saw, Graham was hunched in a stuffy building manipulating pieces of wood through those terrifying machines. Some days he manned the tall gang saws whose vertical blades ingested fat logs and spat them out as perfect strips of wood, and other days he navigated the band saws, long winding strips of metal thin as ribbon but topped with steel teeth that cut the strips down further. Just keep those teeth away, he’d think, while inhaling all that sawdust and getting it in his eyes and squinting and wanting to rub them clean but resisting because one false move would mean—
Losing a finger. One day he’d been seized by a dust-induced coughing fit so violent that his left arm flew out where he knew damn well not to let it go, and when his hand came back, it had only three fingers and the thumb. It wasn’t even his—it was someone else’s, some odd misshapen thing, the last knuckle looking so weirdly prominent. And then the knuckle spurted an explosion of red like some Cascade volcano erupting to hideous life, and the red ran down the rest of the hand and he finally recognized it—good Lord, that is my hand, and there ain’t no pinkie.
The man next to him, who should have been concentrating on his own work and was lucky he didn’t lose any fingers of his own, looked up and shouted something Graham didn’t hear. Matt came over from his usual station, wrapped a rag around Graham’s hand, and took him to see the doctor. Matt was saying things that Graham couldn’t hear—he’d shut down so that his body could concentrate on the feeling of shuddering pain, waves of pain, an entire hideous universe of pain that sucked itself thin and jammed itself into the tiny hole that his finger had left behind. The pain cut through his hand, his arm, it made his shoulder throb and his back ache. The doctor hit him with some morphine and finally he could think, could get beyond the strictly animal instincts to which his mind had become subordinated. He concentrated on breathing while the doc sewed him up and told him how to take care of the wound and what to expect from his new, three-fingered hand.
“This happens a lot, huh?” Graham had asked. It was the first thing he’d said since the finger flew off.
“To shingle weavers? Yeah.” The doc, an older guy who had sewn shut countless gaping knuckles, fidgeted with his glasses. “How long you been on the job?”
“Four months.”
The doc nodded. “Usually happens sooner than then. Law of averages catches up to you eventually.”
Graham didn’t know what the law of averages was, but he didn’t like how the doc was treating him as if the accident were something he deserved. Maybe it was just the morphine. Nothing seemed quite right, not the too-white pallor of the doc’s skin or the too-dark indigo of the midday sky beyond the windows or the lack of feeling beyond Graham’s left wrist.
The doc told Graham what he owed. It was roughly two weeks’ pay, which was more than he had. Graham stuttered a bit, but the doc had heard this before and cut him off. “How much can you pay at the end of the month?”
They worked out a deal, a payment plan on the finger Graham no longer had. With that settled, Graham bade the doctor good day and headed outside.
The doc’s house was on a paved road not far from the center of town, just a few blocks away from the rowdy saloons that had been the focal point of a town outcry a few years earlier, or so Graham had been told. What you need is a drink, Graham told himself, but he knew he needed to go back to the mill and explain himself. Find out how much pay he was going to be docked for leaving early.
“How’s your hand?” someone asked.
He turned around and found himself face-to-face with a woman whose stare could have knocked down a few trees; although she looked like she’d skipped one meal too many, she seemed huge in spirit. She had long soot-black hair that curled in the constant mists of Washington, and she wore a long skirt, a gray flannel shirt, and dark boots—a masculine outfit for a woman, particularly one as beautiful as she.
“How’s my hand?” Graham repeated her question, unsure how to respond. He lifted his arm a bit, as if to display the bandage. “It’s a little bit smaller than it was this morning.”
“They’ve been making you work faster lately, huh?”
“Guess so.”
She shook her head. “Miracle you still have nine fingers.”
They got to talking, Graham impressed with the fact that she had initiated a conversation with a man she didn’t know, a fairly bold thing for a woman to do. And he was glad she’d done it, giving him permission to study that face, to talk to a woman he didn’t have to pay, a woman who seemed to take some interest in him. It made him feel off balance, at first, but maybe that was just the morphine.
“You’re not a member, are you?” she asked. “You don’t have a red card?”
Graham held his tongue for a moment, the twin bodyguards of caution and self-preservation keeping him silent. He did not have a red card, but even the subject of Wobblies was so taboo that he was reluctant to discuss it with a stranger, albeit an attractive female one.
Turned out she was a Wobbly herself and had arrived in town only a few days ago from Chicago. There had been rumors of a planned general strike for a couple of weeks; the mill owners had announced pay cuts and the unions were not pleased. Graham knew all this but had been doing his best to ignore it. He hated the mill owners as much as anyone, he figured, but every time a strike flared up, he lost everything he had and eventually had to pull up stakes and move to a new job in a new state. He liked Everett—he liked the neighborhoods of family houses and the kids running around after school, he liked being a part of the armada of men heading to the mill in the morning as the sun rose before them, slowly illuminating the tops of the tall trees that loomed above every road, capping them with halos of light. This was a place where he could stay. He hadn’t worked out the math yet, but he figured with the higher pay he’d been getting as a shingle weaver, he might be able to save enough to get his own place. Maybe get married and start a family.
Graham said as much to his toothsome inquisitor, skipping the part about marriage.
“So you want to keep slaving away till you don’t have any fingers left?” she asked.
He looked at his right hand—then and henceforth known as his good hand—and extended his fingers. Then he looked her in the eye and said, “I just want to keep the other nine.”
She reached out and handed him a pamphlet. “If you change your mind, this tells you when we’re meeting next. Maybe we can help you hold on to what you’ve still got.” She smiled when she said that, for the first time.
“What’s your name?” he asked. She said it was Tamara. He told her his name and thanked her for the pamphlet, and she nodded and walked away, to someplace important, judging from the speed of her steps and the confidence of her stride.
It was worth losing a finger to meet her. He’d lose another one if that was what it took to see her again.
So it was neither political nor economic motives that inspired Graham to attend his first official meeting of the Industrial Workers of the World. As he sat in the crowd, listening to the speakers—some of whom were from Everett but many of whom were from Chicago and other distant locales, rebels imported from the sites of many a clash between worker and owner—he fixed his eyes mostly on Tamara, until she looked back at him and he switched his gaze to the floor, his cheeks reddening. It took a couple of minutes for him to work up the nerve to look at her again. Had he actually blushed? He was a man who had felled trees and even bigger men, and he was blushing because he had looked at some lady who dressed like a female logger? He put his left fist inside his other hand, massaging the knuckles.
He was nervous when he walked up to her afterward and told her he was buying that red card, and they talked more about the possibility of a general strike and what it might do to the town. He was nervous when he asked to walk her home; she declined because she’d come with friends, but thanked him just the same. And he was nervous at the next meeting when the situation pretty much repeated itself, except this time she accepted his invitation.
But strangely, Graham wasn’t nervous the first time he kissed her—on the cheek, after the third walk home—maybe because nerves know when something is right. He had finally figured out what it was he’d been running from, or running to.
Any hope for a normal courtship, however, was thwarted by the strike that commenced two weeks into Graham’s life as a nine-fingered man. And what a strike it was—nearly every mill in town halted, the saws stilled and the trees standing proud and tall as if perfectly confident that not another Douglas fir within the town’s borders would ever fall again. And all the men on the streets, men in lines, men holding signs, men shouting. And eventually men fighting: strikers fighting with scabs and with strikebreakers, strikers with no accent fighting strikers with thick accents, cops fighting strikers. Surrounding them.
Graham’s scant savings were near extinction when the violence escalated. Sheriff McRae had started hiring thugs who were friendly to the Commercial Club, the mill owners who wanted to see the strike broken and the outside agitators sent back from whence they’d come. Strikers like Graham soon learned which street corners to avoid after dark and how to steer clear of any man who wore a handkerchief tied around his forearm—the mark of McRae’s vigilantes, who wore them so the real cops would know who was who when fights broke out. Graham heard about how the cops were going to start arresting anyone who gave a public speech, which made him think of Tamara, who’d taken to doing exactly that.
“It ain’t worth it,” he told her. “They’ll arrest you, and then Lord only knows what they’ll do.” He almost added, I ain’t going to let no woman of mine be manhandled by a bunch of lousy cops, but he knew not to say that. She was only just barely “his woman,” and she was not the type who liked to think of it that way.
As he’d expected, she was defiant. “They can’t arrest me just for talking, and if they do, so be it.” She told him about her idol Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the original Rebel Girl and doyenne of “the cause.” Gurley Flynn had been put in jail more times than you could count, Tamara said, but she never gave up the fight. Tamara proudly declared herself a rebel girl as well, so bring on the cops.
Graham had to admire her fire, but he wondered what this educated Chicago woman—she’d been in college when she first joined the Wobblies, she told him—really knew about anything. She talked a good talk, and she sure as hell never acted scared, but just to be sure, Graham tailed her to the street corner where she’d told him she’d give her speech that night. It was dark and anything but quiet—people were milling all around, chatter that exploded into laughter now and then but always highly charged—when the speeches finally started. First it was a hulking fellow with a thick beard and some accent Graham figured was Hungarian. After the fellow’s final fist-shaking exhortations, Tamara took to the pulpit.
She started telling them about a recent strike in New Jersey and how things had looked bleak but everyone had stuck together. They had refused to submit to a few men in back rooms who controlled everything, and so will we, she said. The applause was so loud that it almost completely shrouded the sound of McRae’s goons moving in from the edge of the street and swinging their unimpressed clubs. Then the applause was gone and all that could be heard were the sounds of fighting, of dropped bottles popping when they hit the ground, of bones breaking and feet stomping and kicking, voices shouting and crying and grunting in an ever-tightening mass of enraged humanity. Graham pushed some folks out of his way and headed for the makeshift stage, where he grabbed Tamara by the wrists and pulled her through the crowd. An arm with a handkerchief tied around it got pretty close to them, but Graham jabbed a fist into the man’s nose and the goon dropped back. In a few frantic seconds they’d escaped not only the melee but also the notice of the cops who were standing beyond the crowd, supposedly to arrest anyone who tried to escape.
“This happen in New Jersey, too?” Graham asked after they’d walked a couple of blocks, heading in the direction of the rooming house where she boarded.
“Probably.”
“Probably? You weren’t there?”
She looked away, embarrassed. “It was three years ago. I was only seventeen.”
“This by any chance your first strike?”
She answered with silence.
“Well, it ain’t mine, and not one of ‘em that I’ve been around has ended well.”
“Then you’ve been around the wrong ones.”
He laughed softly. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as sure of herself as you are.”
She grabbed his hand, held it. “I wasn’t so sure of myself once the cops came. Thank you for coming to get me.”
This was an opportunity for him to say something romantic, to court her by telling her it would take more than a few cops to keep him from her. But he was unsure how she’d react, so he kept walking.
“We’ll win this,” she said. “I know it. The more people they arrest, the more we’ll send in.”
Graham nodded. He still wasn’t used to her penchant for using “we,” her constant and assured feeling of being part of some great and uplifting whole.
They were at the front door to the boardinghouse. The kindly old lady who owned it had no idea Tamara was involved with those awful Wobblies, and if she had, Tamara would have been out on the street in a minute. Nor would the old lady allow a man to visit one of her boarders in her rooms. Graham wondered if sometime he should propose walking Tamara back to his place instead, or if that would be too forward.
“You ever think about what’ll happen after the strike?” he asked.
“You mean if we win?”
“I mean either way.” He was trying to act nonchalant but finding it impossible.
She looked at him closely. He never studied anything—especially not her—like that. He’d only had to look at her once and he’d known all he needed to.
Then she smiled slightly, like she had the first time they’d met. “I wonder what it is you’re really asking me.”
He couldn’t help smiling back, either out of embarrassment or happiness or excitement, he wasn’t sure. “Does a rebel girl just follow the cause to the next strike? You off to Cheyenne or Coeur d’Alene or Walla Walla next?
“I haven’t thought that far ahead.” Still smiling.
“I used to be like that.”
“Then what?”
“I got smarter. And I met someone.”
She’d only let him kiss her on the cheek before, but that night she leaned toward him as if giving permission for more, to do what he’d been thinking about damn near constantly for days. They kissed for a longer time than was proper for two people standing beneath one of the few streetlights on that side of town. He held her and was amazed at how fragile she felt, despite the steel in her eyes and her voice and her posture. Despite his happiness, he thought how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable he was, to have something in his life other than himself that he needed to worry about, and protect.
The violence got worse, and fast. The night after the cops dragged a group of strikers to secluded Beverly Park and beat them nearly to death, Tamara told Graham that the IWW office wanted to send her down to Seattle to meet with the local chapter and recruit more people to Everett. That sounded like a safer idea than wandering around the violent streets of Everett, and Graham invited himself along.
With some of his few remaining coins, he paid for ferry tickets. A mid-western boy who’d spent all his adult life in the mountain states, he’d rarely been on a boat, and he didn’t know how to swim. As a storm moved toward them, the chop of the waves increased. By the time they neared Seattle, the skies had opened and it was pouring—the Sound an infinity of liquid explosions—and the boat was pitching from side to side. The moment they got off, Graham let out a long, slow breath and tried to steady himself. He was not looking forward to the ride home.
Tamara, who had apparently been on many a boat, not only in Lake Michigan but also on the Atlantic, as she had family in Boston and New York, was good enough not to tease him. Instead she told him more about her family, how she was the youngest of five sisters and had twelve nieces and nephews with more surely on the way. She loved and missed her parents, but the cause was worth the physical distance between herself and her family. Graham had nodded to all this, secretly wondering if one day he would meet this lawyer father and warmhearted mother, this gaggle of sisters and brothers-in-law with their Chicago and New York accents, their starched shirts and fancy cigars.
This was what he wanted. Not necessarily the family and their unimaginable strangeness, but the comfort of sitting beside Tamara and knowing she wanted to be with him. He would create a haven for the two of them, carve a better existence out of the strange land he’d been wandering through, create a more beautiful and rewarding world than the one they’d known.
In Seattle the rain continued to pour down, the city as gray and forbidding as a medieval fortress. Some Wobblies met them at the docks and escorted them to a ratty office located between the shipyards and some paper mills. All day it was conversation and strategizing about cops and jails, lawyers who’d helped out at past strikes, and how many folks could be recruited from Seattle to come north. Graham tried to make himself helpful, but mostly he felt like a laborer transported to a factory unlike any he’d ever seen, a revolution factory.
At six o’clock Tamara told him they’d need to stay till tomorrow, that dozens of folks were being rounded up and they’d all head back to Everett the following afternoon. One of the Wobblies had a room they could use, Tamara said. A room.
The Wobbly, a thin redheaded guy named Sam, with a similarly redheaded wife, lived in a small place in the eastern part of town. They made supper for Graham and Tamara and talked about the labor situation in Seattle. All evening Graham couldn’t stop thinking about sharing a bedroom with Tamara. Then Sam announced they’d best be getting some shut-eye, as tomorrow promised to be a helluva day.
It was all so strange, Graham thought, the way he and Tamara headed to the room without having spoken at all about the fact that they would be spending the night in the same bed. They just proceeded as if this were the rightest thing in the world. And it felt that way. She held his hand as they walked into the room and as soon as he’d shut the door she was in his arms, the two of them kissing before his hand had released the doorknob. Graham was conscious of the fact that he was in a moment he would remember till his dying day, so with every breath he concentrated on making sure that his future memories of that night would be forever untainted.
He did not awaken the next morning with Tamara in his arms because she was already up and dressed. He was a deep sleeper, she told him with a smile, and it was time to get going. She kissed him before leaving the room so he could dress in privacy, and this strange feeling of familiarity despite unfamiliar circumstances thrilled him. Waking up with a woman in the room, a woman he’d fallen in love with. He hadn’t quite thought this possible, yet there he was.
In a few hours they were back at the docks, along with about four hundred new friends. The IWW had hoped for a couple thousand, but this was an impressive number nonetheless. Two steamboats were needed to get them to Everett, the Verona and the Calista. Tamara and Graham and the Wobbly ringleaders got on board the Verona, which departed first, and though Graham hadn’t been looking forward to being on a boat again, he was relieved to see the bright sun in a perfectly cloudless sky, the water laid out so flat before him it was like a Kansan field, the tiniest of ripples shifting in the wind like stalks of corn. The boat ride was smooth, though so packed with bodies that it seemed to rock slightly just from the Wobblies’ singing, which grew louder with each verse. The Verona cut through Puget Sound, and the Wobblies serenaded the surrounding islands with their battle cries, their hymns of brotherhood and triumph, their odes to fallen leaders, and their righteous calls for a future of unity and peace. In the distance Mount Rainier watched over them like a mildly disapproving God, or so it seemed to Graham. But soon it and the wharves and cranes of Seattle faded into the distance.
The air over the Sound was cold, but there were so many people on board that few could feel it. The boat slowed as Everett came into view, all the mills silent, the sky above their smokestacks pure with inactivity.
But silent the dock wasn’t. As the Verona pulled nearer to Port Gardner Bay, Graham was one of the first to see the crowd. Even more people lined the streets and the hill just beyond, looking down at the dock and the approaching boat like spectators at a boxing match. These throngs were not singing, and Graham noticed that quite a few of them were wearing handkerchiefs on their forearms.
The passengers grew quiet, perhaps remembering broken noses and cut eyebrows suffered at the hands of McRae’s men, or similar assailants in some other town, different faces but always the same fists. The passengers who had knives in their pockets let their hands slip down and finger the steel as they watched the scene unfold before them. Waiting.
The songs started up again, this time even louder than before. “We meet today in freedom’s cause and raise our voices high! We’ll join our hands in union strong to battle or to die!” Hearts beat faster as the singers looked one another in the eye, trying to keep themselves from being intimidated by some two-bit thugs with a bottle of whiskey in one pocket and a .38 in the other.
Graham put an arm around Tamara and held her hip with his good hand. They were toward the bow, on the port side—the side that was lining up against that dock swarming with men. Graham couldn’t see any knives or clubs or shovels or guns on the dock, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
The boat pulled alongside the dock and one of the Wobblies reached across to tie it down, but an angry-looking man with dizzy eyes stepped out from the crowd. It was Sheriff McRae, Graham recognized, and the stories about him seemed to be true, as he walked with the slightly staggered shuffle of the raging and belligerent drunk.
“Who’s your leader?” McRae demanded.
“We’re all leaders!” a handful shouted back, voicing one of the IWW slogans.
Graham leaned down toward Tamaras ear to tell her they should take a few steps back, but before he could speak, McRae raised his voice.
“I’m sheriff of this town, and I’m enforcin’ our laws. You can’t dock here, so head on back to—”
“The hell we can’t!” someone shouted back.
Then a gunshot. It tore through the air and bounced off the still water, echoing throughout the harbor, off distant islands and near inlets. Everyone on the boat tried to move, but there was nowhere to go. People screamed and ducked for cover, tried to turn around, to escape. The shot echoed endlessly. But it wasn’t an echo—it was more shots, some coming from the dock and some coming from the boat. Who had fired first was as impossible to determine as it was irrelevant. Between the popping sounds of shots and ricochets were the hard slaps of limp bodies hitting the water, men disappearing into the depths below.
Graham slipped, whacking his knee on the deck and sliding forward, since no one was between him and the rail anymore. Everyone was running to the opposite side of the boat. Men on the dock were pointing and shouting and screaming and some of them were brandishing guns and firing still.
He realized he wasn’t holding Tamara—he must have lost his grip on her in the initial turmoil. He looked behind him at the Wobblies running to the starboard side, looked for long hair, for those black coils, for anything remotely female.
The boat started tipping. All the weight had shifted to starboard, and now the port side, where Graham stood, was lifting into the air. Two vigilantes who’d had clear shots at him missed when the deck beneath him rose, but Graham lost his footing again and stumbled back, sliding on the wet deck and tumbling back toward the cowering bodies on the far side.
The boat’s captain, who didn’t give much of a damn for either unions or mill owners, started hollering at them to disperse around the boat or it’d go under. He turned the wheel and hit the engines with a force he’d never before dared, and the Verona lurched away from the dock, a lopsided and badly wounded animal retreating from predators. The only people who obeyed the captain’s orders despite the bullets were Graham and a small handful of others hoping to get a closer look at the water.
The guns were still firing but were more distant now, less threatening. Graham leaned over the railing and screamed for Tamara. Was she in the water? Was she back on the other side of the boat?
Bodies floated beneath the dock, but none looked female. The water was so dark that the blood was completely absorbed into its deep indigo.
There. Over there, by the dock’s farthest pylon. Long dark hair, soot-black. Hair Graham had twisted his fingers in the night before. But no, it could be a woman who’d been on the dock, could be anyone.
Then a wave from the wake of the Verona’s quick retreat hit the body, roughly lifting it and turning its head. Graham screamed when he saw her face.
He pulled at the rail so tightly he nearly tore it from the ship’s deck. His scream echoed over the bay, over the Sound, over every island and with more force than the earlier anthems. Folks from Everett who were blocks away from the water heard that scream, marveled about it for days. He screamed so loudly the dead surely heard him, Tamara surely heard him, screamed so loudly he wouldn’t have been able to hear her answer even if she’d had one.
Then her face exploded. Two goons atop the dock were laughing themselves hysterical, hooting and hollering and stomping with glee as they fired round after round at the bodies floating in the water. They shot indiscriminately at every floating thing in human form, shooting the bodies of Wobblies but also shooting the occasional body of an Everett cop or vigilante, a body who only moments ago had been a man filled with pride for his town and hatred for these foulmouthed agitators and their foreign ideas about how the world should be run. One or two of those bodies had actually still been alive, but most had already been dead, and still the men fired as if they could somehow make them more dead.
Graham’s scream was cut off by this sight. His breath too fled—he stood there gripping the rail, watching in mute shock and rage.
The Verona pulled away with merciful speed and the scene dissolved into washes of gray and blue with streaks of red, blurring with the distance and with Graham’s tears. The sound of the engine soon overpowered that of the gunshots, of the bullets slamming into flesh and water. Graham crumpled to the deck.
Their safety ensured by distance, the passengers on the Verona began to fan out again as the boat headed back toward Seattle. Wounded men were tended, though the death toll would increase by the time they made landfall. There were men with broken bones, men who’d slipped or been crushed as they’d fled the path of the bullets. And there were men, their eyes still wide, who had seen their comrades fall.
Yet they all seemed to know that no one had lost as much as the man who lay in a heap by the front of the boat. His arms were wrapped around himself, his nine fingers digging into the thick muscles of his shoulders. The rest of the men kept a respectful distance, a wide circle of emptiness surrounding him.
I will never again permit myself to be in so powerless a position, Graham had long vowed.
Ain’t nothing a man has can’t be taken away.
He knew that then, knew how easy it would be for home and family and love to vanish forever. He thought of the dead soldier and he pitied him, pitied the randomness of fate that had placed him on that path in front of Graham, pitied him the way he had once pitied himself. But Graham had done what was necessary to protect Amelia and Millie. He lifted his head from his hands and wiped the tears from his eyes. No one and nothing would come into this town, into his home, to do harm to his family. And even if the devil himself should ride into town on a flaming beast breathing pestilence and death, then Graham would stand at that post, look him in the eye, and shoot him down.
VIII (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
“You know what I heard?”
What’s that?”
“I heard that maybe the reason Mr. Worthy wanted us to close off the town is to stop workers from moving on to other jobs.”
“What other jobs?”
“I hear they got lotsa jobs on the coast, on account of the war. Hear they’ll pay fucking shipbuilders more than we’re making here.”
“Nobody’s making more than we’re making here. They give you your own goddamn house at the shipyards?”
“How do we know they don’t?”
“I’m just saying I heard—”
“And we heard you just fine. Hell, didn’t we all vote on this? I didn’t see you raising any ruckus that night.”
“Just ‘cause I voted for something doesn’t mean I can’t change my mind. Ain’t a man free to do that?”
“Ain’t much free right now.”
“That’s my point. We ain’t free to move around and look for—”
“Goddammit, enough. If that’s the way you’re thinking, then as soon as the fucking quarantine’s over, you can take your goddamn self out to those shipyards and see how much those military folk’ll pay you. I for one don’t buy any of that.”
“I wasn’t saying I’m buying it. I just said I heard.”
“Elton’s been coughin’ a lot lately.”
“Elton’s always been coughin’.”
“But how do we know it ain’t from the flu?”
“Because he was coughing last year and there wasn’t any flu, and the year before that, and the year before that.”
“But how come that—”
“It ain’t the flu. He’s just a sick bastard.”
“Hey, Yolen. You been by the gen’ral store this week?”
“No. Jeanine’s fixing to go today, though.”
“Well, get this—there ain’t no alcohol left.”
“What?”
“The store’s all out.”
“Hell Jesus. You sure?”
“Otto said they’d just bought as much food an’ supplies as they thought they could handle before the quarantine, but they mustn’t’ve ordered much hooch.”
“Shit, Leonard. I only got one fucking bottle left at home.”
“I got less’n that.”
“Shit. You really sure there’s none left?”
“You ever have the flu?”
“Yeah, when I was ten. Kept me in bed more ‘n a month.”
“Damn. It killed all four of my grandparents in the same winter.”
“Kills everybody’s grandparents, if they’re lucky. Better’n wasting away slow with something else.”
“Don’t think flu is lucky.”
“How do you think that girl a yours in Timber Falls is doing?”
“Wasn’t sick last time I saw her. But some of her friends were.”
“Sure she’ll be fine.”
“You’re a lucky man, with your girl already here in town. This quarantine lasts much longer, I’m gonna go outta my goddamn head.”
“Can’t last much longer.”
“What the hell kind of man does this make me look like to her, hiding away because I’m scared of getting sick?”
“Don’t worry about that. She ain’t thinking down on you—she’s probably worried enough trying to stay healthy herself.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“Sorry … She’ll be fine.”
“Yeah … I get tired of waiting sometimes, you know?”
IX (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
“I heard someone say it came in a black cloud over the Atlantic,” Laura said as she and Philip ate some of the cake she’d made. It was the evening after Philip’s visit to Graham and Amelia.
“A black cloud?”
“Like a mustard gas cloud, only dark. Something the Germans released from a battleship, and the wind brought it to Boston. That’s why it started there.”
“Do you really think the Germans made it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Why not?”
“Then wouldn’t they all be sick, too?”
Laura shrugged. “Maybe they don’t get the flu.”
“Then I guess Elsie’s family has nothing to worry about.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just mean they’re German.”
“But they’re American now, Philip.” She paused. “You sure do bring her up a lot.”
That shut him up for a moment.
“Maybe it wasn’t from Germany,” she said. “I don’t know. It’s an idea, is all.”
Two weeks ago, just before the quarantine, they had journeyed to Timber Falls to see a moving picture at the new theater. Philip had been only a handful of times, and already he was anxious to get back to the theater and see whatever was playing. He loved the feel of the place, the plush carpets up the aisles and the sleepy usher not much older than he, wearing the funny hat and tearing their tickets as they walked in. The picture they had seen, The Phantom Operative, had been about the war, in a way. There were no soldiers in it, but plenty of spies: the plot centered on two American businessmen who had developed a secret serum that could counteract any disease within two hours of the patient’s ingesting it. But it turned out German operatives had developed the exact opposite—an odorless, colorless poison that could kill anyone who even came too close to it. The Germans had some crazy scheme to put the poison on the feet of houseflies and send the flies to the American heartland, where they would multiply and spread their lethal freight.
When the reels were changed, there was a message on the screen asking everyone to stay in their seats; a representative of the government was going to deliver an important message. Up on the stage jumped an older man, late forties or so, and before he even started, Philip realized he must be one of the so-called Four-Minute Men. The speaker looked snappy in his dark suit, and without introducing himself, he launched into his speech, starting out dark and sinister as he painted a picture of the Hun army and its senseless wrath. People say the war’s already swinging in our favor, he said, but that’s no reason for us to be letting our guard down. The German army is still a mighty force, and without all the efforts of the fine and hardworking American people, the Hun would have claimed Paris by now, would have pillaged all of France and would be aiming his Big Berthas at Big Ben.
Philip didn’t much mind these speeches, but he knew how Rebecca loathed them, so he viewed the man with a skeptical eye. Toward the end of the speech, the man reminded them of the importance of registration for all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, saying how it was a great honor to fight for their country and defend their women and children from the fierce Hun. Philip looked down at his missing foot, ashamed—even if the war continued until he turned eighteen, he would never be admitted. The Four-Minute Man closed by telling the crowd about the Fourth Liberty Loan and exhorted them to buy more Liberty Bonds, then walked off at a hurried pace, his footsteps chased by hearty applause.
Then the picture continued, and the virulent houseflies were let loose on the German operatives after a climactic fight scene, and all was right with the world.
“Where do you think the flu came from?” Laura asked Philip now. She almost never asked him questions like that, never wanted to defer to his opinion. Proud of her own intelligence and too acutely aware of the fact that he was older, she didn’t want him to start thinking that his age made him any brighter than she. It had stunned him a few months ago when she’d asked him to help her with some of the math problems, and soon they had developed a regular tutoring schedule. But for math only: it was understood that Laura was still smarter in other matters. Philip simply had the edge here thanks to his financial tutelage under Charles.
“I don’t know. Hadn’t really thought about it like that. It just is.”
“Have you ever had the flu?”
He thought. “Don’t think so. I was pretty healthy until the accident. My mom always said I had the constitution of a rhino.”
“A rhino?”
“I think she liked the way that sounded.”
“I think she was making fun of your nose.”
He touched his nose. “What?”
“I was kidding. Rhino.”
He smiled at her warily, hoping it really was a joke and that he hadn’t been walking around all this time, unbeknownst to himself, with a pointy nose. He couldn’t help looking at her nose more closely than usual, and at the rest of her face. This person is my sister now, he thought, yet we weren’t born of the same people. I don’t have her father’s nose, and she doesn’t have my mother’s eyes. Are related people more likely to catch the flu from each other? Would it come for both of us, or just one? How tightly connected are we? And I wish my hair was as blond as hers.
They sat there in silence, then Laura leaned forward a bit. She lowered her voice. “I wanted to ask you … if you would let me look at one of your books.”
“One of what books?” Philip too lowered his voice, though he wasn’t sure why.
“Your fighter-pilot books.”
A quizzical look. “I don’t have any fighter-pilot books.”
She rolled her eyes. “They’re in your closet. Under the box with your baseball glove.”
“… What were you doing in my closet?”
“Look, I could have just taken them and read them if I’d wanted to, but I’m being good enough to ask permission.”
“If Rebecca knew about them—”
“I know. I can keep secrets.”
“If she catches you, they’re yours.”
“Deal. But she won’t catch me.”
They left the table and walked to his bedroom, in the back corner of the house, directly below Laura’s room. He opened his closet door, reached down beneath a pile of extra blankets, and lifted out the box with his baseball glove and three baseballs, revealing the contraband beneath. The one on top was called Hunt for the Baron, and the cover bore an illustration of a plane with the German flag painted on its wings, firing its silver guns and leaving supernaturally blue and pink flames in its wake.
He handed them to her.
“Which one’s the best?” she asked.
He was surprised that she was interested in war stories—she was a girl, after all, and not one with a lot of tomboy traits. Philip himself had been somewhat embarrassed by reading them—wasn’t he too old for such stories? Somewhere in those European trenches, other sixteen-year-olds were fighting for their lives.
“I haven’t read them all yet,” he said. “I’ve read the bottom four so far. I liked Attack of the Flying Circus best, I think.”
He had bought a few of them in Timber Falls last month. They were in a stack by the front register of a general store, and the vivid covers had caught his attention, reminding him of the stories of cowboys and train robbers he had read when he was younger. He must have left dozens of those books behind in various boardinghouses during his childhood, as he and his mother always seemed to be moving unexpectedly, running from an angry landlord or a jealous boyfriend. He had reached for a couple of the war books, flipping through until the clerk politely suggested he be a good patriot and buy them.
As soon as Philip reached the Worthy home, he ferried them into his room, temporarily hiding them under his bed. Soldiers were not viewed as heroes in this household, he well knew.
Attack of the Flying Circus detailed the horrific exploits of the recently slain Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary Red Baron, whose so-called Flying Circus was still tearing holes through the skies above France, strafing Allied soldiers and civilians alike. It was a short book intended for somewhat younger readers, and it took Philip only forty minutes to reach the end, where brave American pilots shot down the baron and half of the Circus, chasing the dwindling armada back to German airways, from which it would surely regroup to terrify the skies another day. Philip didn’t know how much was true, but he knew the Baron had existed, knew there was real blood being spilled somewhere beyond these pages.
Another book, Spies in the Harbor, was about German spies who tried to blow up the Statue of Liberty. This one, too, though fiction, hewed closely to the truth: before the United States joined the war, German spies had set off a bomb in a New York harbor, blowing up a munitions facility with an explosion so great it scarred the Statue of Liberty and woke up people as far away as Philadelphia. Everyone in the country had been warned about spies by alarmed government announcements, excited newspapers, and the persistent Four-Minute Men. There were so many recent German immigrants, no one knew whom they could trust. According to the papers, spies were everywhere, keeping tabs on the soldiers at the camps and the workers in the shipyards, spreading wicked rumors of lost battles in France, hoping to discourage the lionhearted American people. Columnists wrote tips on how to spot a spy, on which behaviors were sure signs of the Hun, on what things not to talk about in public. There were even reports that Germany was sending spies to mill towns, hoping to sabotage one of the industries that was keeping American troops supplied for the war. But Charles had reassured Philip that such rumors were groundless fearmongering.
Still, Philip felt stupid for reading these kids’ books. “You can take all of them,” he said to Laura.
She looked at him strangely. “I don’t need all of them.” Besides, how would she sneak all of them to her room without risking being discovered by their mother?
He had offered because he didn’t feel like reading about soldiers anymore, or perhaps ever again. The mere thought of a soldier in the woods nauseated him.
“I’m going to go read it in bed,” Laura said. “I’ll put it back tomorrow.”
Holding the book in her right hand, she reached down through the waist of her skirt with her left. Then, in a motion so practiced Philip realized she must have done this before—and often—she passed the book from one hand to the other inside her dress. There she was, pinning the book there between her belly and the skirt.
“That’s disgusting,” Philip said.
“I’m wearing long johns.”
“Still.” He shook his head. “You can keep the book.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I’ll put it back tomorrow.”
They said good night and she was gone, and he was alone again. He sat down on his bed, hoping she wouldn’t think less of him when she saw how childish the books were.
All the soldiers and pilots in those stories had girls back home, sweethearts. The doughboys wrote them letters and received perfume-scented stationery in return, and at night they’d talk among themselves about how after they beat the kaiser, they’d head back home and marry Susie or Mary Ann or Fanny.
Philip lay down and imagined himself as a soldier with Elsie as his sweetheart. Would she write him letters? She would miss him terribly and roll bandages with the other Red Cross ladies as a way of being close to him; she’d think of him constantly. And what would she write to him? Something about how she missed him the most at night, when she was alone in the dark and the bed felt so big and empty without him. But that would mean they’d already shared the bed, and so he imagined this, too, imagined the two of them lying together, and his imagination continued to work backward, seeing himself sitting atop the bed and watching her undress before joining him. He lingered on that image for a while. Then he let her back into the bed and his imagination raced forward again, stopping at those moments any sixteen-year-old boy would fixate on and skipping past those he didn’t yet understand.
X (#uca71b0af-35fc-54fc-ac82-640faf717bce)
Charles was standing at the foot of his bed, looking in a small and faded mirror above his dresser as he removed his tie, when he heard the murmuring voices of his children coming from downstairs.
“I’m glad he’s talking to Laura,” Charles said to Rebecca. “He’s barely said a word at the mill the last two days.”
Rebecca stood up from the bed, putting down the journal she had been reading. “How is a person supposed to act after watching his friend shoot someone?”
Charles was still, surprised by her tone. Then he walked up behind her, wanting to put his hands on her shoulders to calm her, but thought against it.
“He never should have been out there,” Rebecca said.
Charles waited a beat. “He volunteered.”
She turned to face him. “You let him.”
“I was supposed to forbid him?” His voice grew louder, but he was still enough in control to keep the children from overhearing.
Rebecca began tidying the bed.
“Do you blame me for this?” he asked.
Her answer, when it came, seemed less important to him than the fact that she didn’t voice it for a full three seconds.
“No,” she said. “I know you didn’t want this to happen. I’m sorry. I’m just …” She shook her head. “I’m just angry that it happened.” She sat down on the bed again, her hands clasped in her lap.
Charles didn’t want any more arguments, any more debates. They had been arguing for months about the war, as his opinions were more moderate than hers. He had reminded her recently that the price of lumber was up thanks to the army’s need of spruce for fighter planes and Douglas fir for constructing cantonments, and then Rebecca had all but accused him of war profiteering. Have we moved deep into the woods and paid workers a better wage just so they could help the army kill more Germans?
“I’ll tell him he’s not to serve as a guard again,” Charles said. “It was a mistake to let him, you’re right.”
“I’ve already talked to him about that,” Rebecca replied, “and he doesn’t want to stop. He’s afraid he’d be letting Graham down if he did. And I think he really means that he’d be letting us down, too.”
That seems to make this argument moot, Charles thought. “So what do you want me to do?”
Maybe all she wanted was to hear that Charles did indeed have Philip’s pain on his conscience, have the death of the soldier on his conscience. Even so, he wasn’t sure he could say it, wasn’t sure he could give voice to all the pressures bearing down on him. He had that one life on his conscience, yes, but he also had the lives of every person in the town. Every man and woman he had encouraged to leave their previous jobs and homes, to whom he had promised a better way of life, for whom he had vowed a stronger community, a land of safety and hope. He had to remember that.
The town was bigger than Charles, bigger than his paternal instincts for Philip’s protection, bigger than his need to please his wife. He thought of his selfish brothers, how they had always used their families’ needs to justify their own petty actions—that was why the workers were badly paid, why the strikebreakers could knock heads. He would not allow himself to fall into that trap, to use his love for his family to justify a moral failing. It didn’t mean he didn’t love Philip, Rebecca, and Laura any less—it meant that he loved them so much he would not compromise his vision of love for all.
That this was so incredibly difficult to do only convinced him that it was right.
Rebecca said, “I don’t want you to do anything.”
Charles sat on the bed beside Rebecca, who was gazing ahead at the wall rather than at her husband’s large blue eyes. He put an arm around her and she did the same, and they sat there in a half embrace.
“I don’t blame you,” she said, hoping it was true.
Twenty minutes later, Charles had gone to pay a quick visit to Dr. Banes, and Rebecca was downstairs making tea. The pot was not yet whistling when there was a knock on the door.
Rebecca pulled the curtain aside to get a glimpse of the visitor: Jarred Rankle. She smiled and opened the door.
“Good evening, Jarred.” She backed away and left the door open. “You’re just in time for some tea.”
Rankle held a hat in his hands, as well as some papers. His heavy jacket only added to the thickness of his muscular frame, and the floor seemed to creak a bit more loudly when he walked on it than when Charles did.
“I’m finally getting around to returning these journals,” he told her. “They were very interesting—thank you.”
“Better start reading more slowly,” Rebecca said. “We’ll have to make every printed word last until the quarantine ends.”
“Is Charles in?”
“He’s visiting Doc Banes.”
Rankle blanched. “Is he all right?”
She smiled. “Not that kind of visit. Just to talk.”
He nodded.
“Join me for some tea. You look chilled.”
He paused, torn between decorum and perhaps something else. His heavy granite eyebrows shifted a bit, then he sat down at the table. “Thank you,” he said. “So how are your little charges at the school?”
She smiled as she carried two cups to the table and sat across from him. “They’re fine. I think I may have miscalculated, though. I thought the inactivity of having the town closed would bore them and lead to trouble, idle hands and all that. So I’ve been even stricter than usual lately, giving them extra work, but I wonder if I’ve gone a bit overboard. The more I give them, the more distracted they seem. I’m beginning to feel a bit guilty about it.”
“Ah, it’s good for ‘em.” He smiled. “I never did well at school, and look what became of me. Drive the little ones into the ground; they’ll thank you for it.”
They talked for a bit about one of the journal articles Rankle had read, something about the recent trial of the Wobbly leadership. Dozens had been sentenced to long jail terms for the crime of speaking out against the war.
“Wilson’s just using the war as an excuse to jail all the Wobblies,” Rankle said. “He’s in a panic about what happened to Russia—afraid of having his own Bolshevik Revolution on his hands.”
“Did you see some Democrats are calling the IWW ‘Imperial Wilhelms Warriors’?”
He smirked. “I saw it. I’d heard it before, too. They’ll blame ‘em for the war, blame ‘em for not fighting the war, blame ‘em after the war. It’s nothing new.”
He coughed then, a hoarse and forceful shudder that rocked the table. Rebecca didn’t worry, as she was used to his coughing. Like many men in town, Rankle had the asthmatic cough of the shingle weaver, his lungs scoured by years of sawdust.
Jarred Rankle had been a young husband and father living outside Missoula when the lack of jobs forced him to take a six-month stint felling timber three hundred miles from home. He had missed his family terribly during those months, reading letters filled with news of their two-year-old son’s progress. After four months, his wife’s letters stopped reaching him, and Rankle blamed the timber town’s crooked postmaster, to whom he had refused to pay kickbacks. After the job was finished, it was time to see if the situation back in Missoula had improved, but when he reached his house he found it empty. Some of their scant possessions had been left behind, but not many. He asked around but no one knew where his wife was, or his son. He contacted family but they didn’t know, either. Rankles wife and child had lived there only one year and had few acquaintances, so no one had noticed their sudden absence. The winter had been long and cold, and weeks had passed when people never saw their neighbors. He spent the next six months and every last penny he owned trying to find them, but there was no trail and no leads. He never saw them again.
After drinking away a couple of years and living in and out of small town prisons, Rankle made a friend, a Wobbly by the name of Rubinski. When he heard Rankle’s sob story, he both empathized and told him the story was all too common. You think you’re the only bum’s dragged himself to the ends of the earth to find a job to feed your family and come home to find ‘em gone? You think you’re the only one to wonder if they was killed by Injuns or horse thieves, or maybe they found a richer man and ran off with him, or maybe they died of the cold in the snow? You think you’re the only one who’s played by the rules and still had everything taken from him? A thousand invisible and brokenhearted men walked alongside him, kicking their empty bottles and holding on to old love letters with blistered, work-weary fingers. Rankle applied for his red card that week and never drank again.
Rankle spent the next ten years following jobs in the Northwest and organizing for the Wobblies. He had been in Everett for the general strike, where his position made him a marked man. He’d been outnumbered by thugs and beaten up at the Beverly Park ambush, and was in the hospital recovering when the ferries had taken their ill-fated voyage, though he lost two friends that day. Tired of the violence and overwhelmed by the disappearance of more loved ones, he had parted ways with the Wobblies after that. He left Everett and bounced from job to job until he heard about what Charles Worthy was doing in Commonwealth.
After a brief silence, he saw a preoccupied look take hold of Rebecca. “Are you all right?”
She placed her cup on its saucer. “Worried.”
“Once the war’s over, the unions’ll be back.”
She smiled. “Not about that. About Philip. About the quarantine.”
Rankle felt a bit uncomfortable, stepping into a family situation. “He won a lot of guys’ respect, volunteering as a guard.”
“I’m not much interested in him winning respect. I think some men around here overvalue that.”
Rankle’s heavy eyebrows shifted in acquiescence. “If it helps to know, he does seem to be in good spirits around the mill,” he said. “And people like working with him. He’s a good kid. I keep my eye on him.” He felt another cough coming but stifled it with a sip of hot tea. He could feel the sweat at his hairline.
“Thank you. He is a good young man. That’s why I worry—about him and Laura.”
“I’ll say this: if I could raise a family in any town in America, it would be in Commonwealth.”
She looked down for a short while, her brows knit.
“I voted against the quarantine,” she finally said. “I think it’s wrong. I don’t think we should shut the world out, cut ourselves off.” She stared at her hands, folded into a tense knot.
It was the first time she had confided in him this way. But she felt herself becoming as cut off as she feared the town had become; she was telling him because she had to tell someone.
“Things will work out,” he told her after a silence. An expression as confident as it was simple.
She shook her head again. “I wish I had done more to stop it—” Her voice broke, her eyes watering.
After a moment’s hesitation, he reached out and put one of his massive hands atop hers, squeezing it a bit. His palm felt warm on Rebecca’s fingers.
She looked up at him. He was a handsome man, the sharp edges of his jawline and cheekbone intimidating, perhaps, but the calmness of those gray eyes more than compensating. Surely he could have remarried, Rebecca figured—he probably could have had his pick of wives, even in towns where available women were greatly outnumbered by loggers. She didn’t know if he had ever stopped mourning his family or if he had never stopped believing they were alive. Perhaps he had allowed himself to become married to a cause, first to the Wobblies and now to Commonwealth. If so, it was not a complete marriage, for Rebecca still sensed the loneliness inside him.
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