The Last Town on Earth (16 page)

Frank eyed him a bit. “Yeah,” he finally said. “A lot.”

“How bad is it?”

Frank shifted positions, sitting more upright. “It’s damn awful. They say you go to bed feeling fine but wake up in the morning feeling like you’ve been hit by a train. Headaches, guys so weak they can barely sit up. A buddy of mine heard someone say it feels like you’ve been shot through both knees and both elbows. And you cough like hell.” He stared off to the side. “You hear a lot of people coughing at night. Like wolves howling at the moon.”

Philip imagined this plague visiting his town, imagined lying in his bedroom at night to the sounds of everyone around him slowly dying in their homes.

“Nobody too close to me has been sick. Guys in my barracks have had it, but no one from any of the beds near mine, none of the guys I eat with or drill next to. Folks are worried, though, and it’s kinda gotten the sergeants to go easy on us. I think they’re afraid of pushing us too hard.”

“Sounds bad.”

“It is bad. But it’s not just at the base—it’s everywhere. My mom wrote me a letter, said everybody back in Missoula’s sick as the devil. It started one day with a few people and then just exploded. She said she was keeping my sister home from school until it’s over, and that letter was written about two weeks ago.”

“So how can you blame us for keeping people out?”

“I didn’t say I blamed you. I just called you a bunch of crazy lumberjacks.” He grinned. “So, you born in this town?”

Philip shook his head. “I was born in Los Angeles.”

“Long ways away. Ever been out to Missoula?”

“Nope.”

“Well, after this war is over, I’ll send you an invitation to Montana’s finest victory celebration. I’ll introduce you as the man who defended the fair hamlet of Commonwealth from a villain more feared than the wicked Hun: me.”

“Now you’re joshing me.”

But Frank hadn’t really sounded like he’d been joking—Philip had heard a curious edge in the man’s voice. Frank looked back at the fire, his eyes narrow, and made no reply.

VIII

C
harles was alone in his office when Graham knocked on the door.

Graham did not look well. The muscles around his eyes seemed taut, as if he was forcing them to stay focused despite his apparent exhaustion. Then again, Charles knew he didn’t look his best, either. He had been barely able to sleep the night before. Twice in the night he had risen from his bed, resolved to march to the storage building and tell the guard to release Philip. Both times he had remembered his commitment not just to his own son but to everyone else in town. Beside him Rebecca tossed and turned, perhaps unaware how similar his struggles were to her own.

They had spoken to Philip that morning, standing a few feet away from Deacon, who had stood sentinel throughout the night. Doc Banes had arrived at the same time to call out questions, and Philip’s answers had been encouraging: he still felt fine, no aches, no cough, no pain.

Charles had been pleased that Philip seemed in good spirits, but Rebecca said it was probably an act. “He wants to look good in your eyes, Charles. He may be terrified, but he won’t let you see it.”

Rebecca was the one who was terrified, Charles tried to tell himself. But in truth, so was he. He was terrified Philip would be made a martyr for the town. Charles would readily lock himself in a prison and give up his own life for this town—he would let the flu eat him away, let it satiate its ravenous hunger on his body. Give up his own life, yes. But could he give up his family for the town?

After telling Philip they would come again in the afternoon, Charles and Rebecca had separated, she to her school and he to the mill. Charles tried to lose himself in work but could not. He thought of his absence from church services the last few months and regretted it even more sharply now that the quarantine barred the traveling minister from the town. Charles had subjugated his will to that of the town, to his dream, but he felt an almost nostalgic need to subjugate his fears to something even greater, if such a thing existed.

“How are you, Graham?” There was an empty chair next to Charles, but Graham ignored it, as if he had too much energy to be still, or as if he dared not sit, lest he fall asleep.

Graham nodded shortly. “I’m fine.”

“How are things on the floor? Does everyone know about…Philip?”

“Word’s spreading.” There had been no official announcement about the quarantine inside the quarantine, but neither had there been any attempt to keep things secret.

Charles was worried about people’s reactions. If Philip were blamed for letting the man in, then Charles would be implicated too, either by family bond or by the simple fact that he had allowed his son to stand guard despite his age.

“I think I should stop working in the mill for a while,” Graham said. “Now that there are two places to keep our eyes on, we need more guards. And I figure I can be more of a help by spending all my time guarding instead of working in here.”

Charles frowned. “Do you really want to do that?”

“Wanting’s got nothing to do with it.”

Graham was right. Keeping the town safe and protected was more important than the amount of work slippage that would result from Graham’s absence from the mill—the other foremen could cover for him. If the soldier got loose or someone else stole in and infected the town and all the workers became bedridden, where would the mill be then? As a result of the quarantine, the mill was accumulating a vast amount of wood waiting to be shipped; there were stacks fifty feet high in the yards beyond the mill, and they were growing taller with every passing day. The trees were still falling deep in the woods, the timber was still rolling into the river and floating along, the river drivers were still breaking up logjams and guiding the logs into the mill, the sawyers were still cutting planks and crafting shingles. Once the quarantine ended, the shipping companies would need to send out all their vessels for days just to get everything out of Commonwealth. But all would be resolved. The town would survive this financial bottleneck—if it stayed healthy.

Charles said, “All right. I can find a way to cover for your absence.”

“Thank you. And maybe we can try talking more men into standing guard. We’re getting stretched thin.”

“Yes, of course.” Charles should have thought of that. Things were threatening to spiral beyond his control, and being distracted about his son was not helping.

“I was thinking I’d head over to the storage building now. Deacon has been guarding it all night and this morning—he’s probably falling asleep on his feet.”

“But…” Charles paused, surprised Graham was willing to stand guard on Philip. There were other guards for whom the task wouldn’t feel so personal. But he saw no recognition in Graham’s eyes of the dilemma. Finally, Charles nodded.

Graham turned to leave. Charles felt for him, seeing the weariness in his eyes, the vigilance, the obvious sense he had of himself as the town’s protector. But Charles was haunted by the thought of Graham and Philip divided from each other.

“I spoke to Philip this morning,” Charles said as Graham put a hand on the doorknob. “He sounds perfectly healthy, and doing quite well, considering.”

Graham turned around. “That’s good. He say why he let the soldier in?”

“We can ask for explanations later. I’m sure he had his reasons.”

Graham just stood there, and Charles felt that he had somehow insulted him.

“I’m sure”—Charles spoke hesitantly now—“he’ll be happy to know it’s you out there.”

“I don’t plan on talking to him.”

Charles was entirely unfamiliar with the coldness in Graham’s voice.

“Graham, if the foremen are able to recruit more guards, then it might not be necessary for you to stand watch all the time.”

“I’m not worried about me,” Graham said. “And other guards haven’t done such a great job.” Before Charles could respond, Graham went on. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to let them out after only two days?”

“Dr. Banes said it would be.”

Graham looked away dismissively. “Banes is your friend, Charles, and he’s a good man. But I don’t have a lot of confidence in him.”

Charles was not surprised by the comment—he had observed the quiet that descended upon Graham whenever Doc Banes was in his presence, or even mentioned, ever since Amelia’s first child had been stillborn.

“I trust the doctor’s judgment on this, Graham, more than I would trust yours or mine.”

“He’s said himself that this ain’t like a regular flu, so how do we know two days is enough? Even if he does know everything there is about flu, this could be something different.”

Charles shifted in his seat. So far he had been careful to speak calmly, trying to loosen the tension, but this was too much. “What are you suggesting? We leave them in there for weeks? This is Philip we’re talking about!”

Graham seemed to realize he had pushed too far. “All right. I should be going. Thanks, Charles.”

Charles sat motionless, staring at the doorway. The anger and fear pressed down on his chest. It was a good while before he was able to return to his account books.

IX

R
emote as it was, Commonwealth had been shaken by America’s entrance into the Great War.

The town was less than a year old in April 1917 when Wilson implored Congress to declare war and make the world safe for democracy. But everyone in Commonwealth felt they had finally found a place that was safe and democratic, so the thought of heading off to distant Europe to fight for the rights they had just established was perplexing at best. Because the town was so cut off from the rest of the state, there were no visits from the Four-Minute Men, no posters on street poles advertising the draft or advocating the purchase of Liberty Bonds. People got news from the papers they brought back from their trips to Timber Falls or Everett, but it was as though the articles were printed in ink that faded the farther from civilization it traveled, until it could barely be seen in the Commonwealth rains. The sounds of those war rallies and parades, the speeches and marching bands, echoed off so many trees, weakening to a murmur by the time they reached the town.

But the army needed lumber, and plenty of it. It needed wood for the new fighter planes that would hopefully swing the balance in the Great Powers’ favor; it needed even more wood for the cantonments to be constructed all across the country. Ten months into its existence, the Commonwealth mill had been performing barely well enough to support its workers and to convince buyers to keep returning. But when war was declared and representatives from Uncle Sam began showing up at the mill—pockets overflowing with Liberty Loan–funded dollars, practically begging for more lumber regardless of the price—the mill had taken the bold leap that Charles had always known it could.

The draft threatened to ruin everything. In June 1917, Uncle Sam began conscripting men to the new army. Charles couldn’t afford to lose his workers right when demand had shot up, but he soon learned that men designated as “essential war workers” could be spared from military duty. The draft boards would make exceptions for mill workers, and Commonwealth could continue to run at peak efficiency.

The men still needed to go through the formality of enlisting, though, and even that was no small task. Commonwealth was populated almost entirely by two types of people: workers who had fled the constant harassment of bosses, union busters, and cops; and fellow travelers like Rebecca. These two groups sometimes overlapped but just as often did not. Many were intellectual greenhorns who, never having worked at hard labor, had required careful training and strict oversight by men like Graham. What the groups did have in common was a reticence to join up with what many were calling a rich man’s war.

Like a doting father oblivious to all but his children’s finest qualities, Charles chose to believe that most of the men in town had followed the law, enlisting for the war and securing worker deferments.

Philip had been not quite fifteen when all the men about town were talking about the draft and whether they should enlist. Many didn’t even want to add their names to the draft rolls, didn’t want to dignify the process with their participation. Out here, they felt safely insulated from the rest of the country, cloaked in invisibility.

Philip, who was three years younger than the draft age, had asked Graham if he intended to enlist. They were sitting on Graham’s porch at the time, while Amelia was inside.

“No,” Graham had said after a pause, taking the pipe from his mouth. He told Philip that if he were a single man, he may well have, but he had responsibilities now. At the time, Amelia had been in the midst of her first pregnancy.

Philip had been glad to know that the war would be over soon, that by the time he turned eighteen, this debate would be moot.

The issue of the war had been broached in a Sunday sermon that summer. A traveling Unitarian minister named Inston, who had befriended Rebecca years ago during a suffrage march in Seattle, had volunteered to serve as the town’s spiritual leader. Because he led services in a town thirty miles away, he didn’t make it to Commonwealth until two in the afternoon most Sundays, an unlikely time for church. To the more devout residents, who previously had either traveled into Timber Falls on Sundays or guiltily abstained, Minister Inston’s visits were a revelation, a sign that just because this town had a different way of going about business didn’t mean it had to be godless. Of course, many of the town’s socialists were indeed godless and were a bit ruffled by the minister’s presence, but Charles, who had been brought up a strict Presbyterian, had raised Laura and then Philip accordingly and had happily accepted Inston’s offer.

Those who silently grumbled about the Unitarian minister’s lack of fealty to their particular denomination assumed that in ten or five or perhaps even two years, when Commonwealth had become the strongest mill in the Northwest, the town surely would be filled with the music of dozens of different church bells on Sunday mornings.

Inston was a portly older man with a thick mane of chestnut-brown hair and a youthful exuberance. The day of the war sermon, he’d begun by talking about the day’s Gospel reading. Jesus, in reply to a snare laid by the wicked Pharisees who had asked him what he thought of Caesar’s taxation, had told his disciples to give to Caesar what was Caesar’s but to give to God what was God’s. Inston veered off into commentary on the war. His was a conversational preaching style, in which he asked questions of his congregation. With a group of listeners who were used to sitting in participatory union meetings and labor rallies, this style often caused his sermons to degenerate into freewheeling, boisterous sessions.

“But how can we give to Caesar when what he asks of us is our very lives?” Inston said, his voice filling every inch of the hall. “Not coins but blood. Is Caesar asking us for something we can rightly give, or is he really asking for something that is God’s?”

These words had not been planned, and they surprised the minister himself. He knew as soon as he uttered them that they likely would have landed him in a bit of trouble, perhaps even led to his arrest, had he done so in any other town. But Commonwealth was different.

“How could God want us to give our lives to a crooked war?” one man called out, unofficially beginning the participatory portion of the day’s service.

“We need to ask ourselves why God might want that. Perhaps—”

“To protect the rest of God’s children,” said a tall, bearded redhead named Walsh. His forebears were Irish, but his grandfather had moved to England and renounced the Catholic Church. When Walsh had moved to America he’d left behind many friends and relatives. “To protect those who can’t protect themselves.”

“It’s somebody else’s war,” a man in the middle intoned loudly and with a dismissive shake of the head. “It’s not God’s war, and it’s not America’s, either. It’s Europe’s war, and just ’cause Caesar Wilson wants in on it doesn’t make it God’s.”

Walsh sat in silent anger, his face nearly the color of his hair, as Inston regained control. The minister talked for a long while, straying away from the war and back into Scripture, words safely written thousands of years before that day’s contradictions. The voices from the congregation ceased, and the remainder of the service passed without event. But the die had been cast.

As people filed out after the service, Walsh sought out the men who had made the antiwar comments. He walked up to a tall Swede who worked in the mill just as his father had in Scandinavia.

“So you’re fixing to hide here while the real men protect our country?” Walsh challenged. The two men were pinned together by the crowd squeezing through the narrow doors.

“I ain’t doing any hiding,” the man said, “but the boys in the army aren’t protecting any Americans. It ain’t our war.”

“Any man that don’t enlist is yellow,” Walsh said, scanning the men’s faces. “Essential worker or no, every man should enlist.”

“Speak for yourself, buddy,” muttered someone whose back was turned.

“The Germans are out there killing babies while everybody here is all proud of themselves for living in this nice new town,” Walsh went on. “They did it to Belgium, and they’re doing it to France, and next they’ll do it to England, then they’ll come for us. You all heard about them raping nuns and little girls, but you don’t care. You heard about—”

“Those are lies!” barked Alfred Metzger. “No German boy would do anything like that.”

“I didn’t know I’d come to work in a German town,” Walsh said. “German town and German yellowbellies.”

Jarred Rankle, who only recently had started attending services—he still had not forgiven God for stealing his family—slid through the crowd up to Walsh, eying him carefully. “I’m not German, Walsh, and I sure as hell ain’t yellow. But that doesn’t make me agree with a thing you just said.”

Inston had been standing by the door shaking hands, but like everyone else’s, his attention had been stolen by the war debaters.

“Gentlemen, you are in the house of God,” he reminded them.

The stone-faced Rankle was one of the few men Walsh wouldn’t want to spar with, so he cooled down a bit.

“I got cousins fighting for England,” he said to Rankle in a softer tone.

“And Metzger’s got cousins fighting for Germany,” Rankle said. “I don’t care to see you two fight your own little war here, all right?”

“That’s why I’m going to fight in the real war.” Walsh said that as if voicing it for the first time. Like anyone else in Commonwealth, he had been deeply conflicted about fighting. But here, in the house of God, he had made his decision. He stepped back a bit, as the crowd had thinned somewhat. “I’m enlisting, and essential worker or no, I’m fighting. If I have to quit the mill and leave this town, I will.”

Other men nodded in agreement. Some shook their heads. Some just stood there looking at him, or at their feet, or away.

“I can’t imagine I’m the only man who’s gonna uphold his duty,” Walsh said.

Metzger glared at Walsh but said nothing. Maybe Commonwealth was a safer place to show support for your distant relatives than other American towns—where they were attacking people with German accents or even German surnames, where they had renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage”—but you could never be too sure. Metzger kept his head down and walked out of the church, hurrying to catch up with his wife and daughter, who had made their way out of the building before the tensions had risen.

Metzger was followed by Rankle, who had already seen his fill of violence and would never enlist in any damned army, deferment or no.

After most of the other men had filed out past the still-nervous Inston, Walsh was greeted by ten other congregants, some of whom he knew well and some he did not. They told him they appreciated what he’d said and they shook his hand. Inston watched all this quietly.

Those eleven men became fast friends. One of them would quickly change his mind about the war, but Walsh and the other nine would enlist in Timber Falls and would all specify to the suit-wearing gentlemen of the enlistment board that they wanted no deferral on account of their jobs.
Move us up to the top of the list,
they said,
we want to fight.
Most of them had no families, but the four who did—among them Walsh, with a wife and two young sons—found friends who could help provide for them or were confident that the monthly government check would be enough. God would make a way, they decided.

They were indeed drafted. The single men had moved their meager possessions into one of Commonwealth’s unused storage buildings, telling Mr. Worthy not to waste their houses, to let other men move into them. They would take new ones when they returned. Walsh and the three other men with families moved their wives and children out of Commonwealth, disgusted by their fellow residents’ avoidance of their duties. The summer of ’17 soon cooled into a surprisingly dry fall and the ten men were gone, training in Fort Jenkins as they awaited deployment.

No one had heard from them since.