The Last Town on Earth (34 page)

I

V
iolet Merriwhether couldn’t look at her husband anymore. If she did not look at him—if she stayed in her room behind a locked door, the drawn curtains keeping her in darkness and protecting her from any evidence that there was a world beyond—then she could exist there quietly, alone. It would be the saddest existence possible, a woman in a dark room slowly starving to death, yet it would somehow be bearable. If, however, she looked at J.B., she would remember her husband and the love between them, would remember the existence of love, the possibility of hope, would recall mornings when the two had sat on their porch holding hands and playfully bickering over what to name their children one day. If she looked at J.B., she would remember that she had once been a mother, that she’d once had two children, that there had been a part of her that was beautiful and alive but fragile, so painfully and worryingly fragile, and that this part of her had ventured into the unforgiving world and been struck down. And this she could not accept, could not even fathom.

If she looked at J.B., she would shatter. She had already shattered at the sight of Gwen suffocating to death, and again at the sight of that telegram lying on the kitchen table. She had shattered so many times that each minuscule piece had itself shattered, her former core becoming bits of dust blown through the air. At Gwen’s wake, Violet had heard some of her friends asking one another how she was holding together, and regardless of what they thought, Violet knew that she was not held together anymore, that the pieces of her had long since dispersed. Yet she still existed—how could that be? She stayed in that room, in the dark, and whenever her husband knocked at the door she pretended not to hear him. She knew the sound of the knocks would eventually fade away, and they always did.

J.B. was sitting at the dining room table when he saw Joseph Miller park in front of his house. He sat at the table even though it reminded him of the day the telegram came, the telegram he had placed on the table unread and had stared at, message side down, for what seemed hours. It had been a Saturday afternoon and Violet was out visiting with friends, well-intentioned friends who were trying to keep her mind off the death of her daughter, however briefly. J.B. didn’t know if he should wait for her return before reading it. How do you face death, how do you face tragedy? Alone or with your beloved by your side? What can a man say when he faces things he cannot protect his wife from, cannot protect his family from? He had been the smallest man in the world, sitting at the table on that Saturday.

Every night since James had been sent to France, J.B. had prayed to God, asking that the Lord spare his son.
Please protect James and keep him safe always
were the words J.B. used night after night. But he had been raised to be a caring and empathetic man, and he realized how shallow it seemed to ask the Lord to protect only
his
son, realized it meant putting James’s life above the lives of all those other boys who had been sent into the chaos of war. So J.B. would follow those words with a plea that God spare all the other boys as well.
Please keep all the boys safe,
J.B. prayed. But that meant he was asking God for something impossible. This was madness, and he felt that God in heaven was shaking His head at J.B., at the smallness of a man who wants one thing but asks for a larger thing instead, a wish that he cannot have. And the Lord had punished him for it.

J.B. had slept the last two nights in the parlor, lying on the cold floor and staring at the ceiling. Above him was the bedroom where his wife was hiding. He had woken up each morning with that same awful feeling, the dawning realization that those recent horrors were not dreams, that they were real and had followed him into this next day. Each morning his son and daughter died again, Gwen in his arms, her body flailing while tears streamed down his face, and James simply disappearing before his eyes.

Gwen had been the most beautiful young woman in town; the suitors had already been lining up. J.B. would never again turn away one of those eager young men from his door, would never again see the look of disappointment in their eyes, never again hear the stammers and see the dashed hopes of young invulnerability that so reminded him of himself long ago, of young James Barrows Merriwhether knocking on the door of the beautiful Violet Casey’s parents. The Merriwhether porch would never again host such excitement, such unbridled enthusiasm.

Yet now Joseph Miller was standing on the porch. He looked at J.B. through the window, but J.B. did not rise to admit him. Miller motioned to the door as if to let himself in, and J.B. nodded.

Miller entered the dining room, and J.B. hoped that the man would not offer any condolences, but those hopes were dashed immediately. J.B. nodded and looked away, tired of seeing men appear so deeply uncomfortable in his presence. It was the way he had once felt around people like the foreman Hightower, father of the two dead sons in France. J.B. hated that he had anything in common with that man, hated that the two of them were now confined to the same circle of Hell.

Miller cleared his throat, as if the unpleasant air around them could be so easily dispelled. Then he told J.B. of his plan. He asked if J.B. would come with them.

J.B. nodded. “Just tell me when.”

II

W
hen exactly Philip woke, he wasn’t sure. He knew only that the painful and fuzzy transition from sleep to wakefulness was accompanied by a striking pain in his head, starting from his temples and burrowing deep into the back of his skull. His eyes had been open for a while and his room was slowly coming into focus when he realized what this meant. He gingerly lifted his head from the pillow and propped himself into a sitting position, leaning on the cold wall behind him. This only made his head throb more. He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling and beg God that this wasn’t happening, but tipping his head that far triggered something inside and he lurched forward again, coughing violently. He leaned over the side of the bed, hoping that position would clear his throat or his lungs or whatever it was that had become so polluted while he’d slept.

He sat up again, still coughing, his eyes tearing up from the pain and the fear and from something in the back of his mouth that seemed to be drying out his throat but flooding his chest. He reached out for a glass of water but found none there. He’d retired to bed so hurriedly the night before that he hadn’t brought any water with him—hadn’t even changed out of his clothes, he now realized. Even in his flannel shirt and wool pants, he still felt cold beneath the thick blankets, and although leaning against the wall made him colder, he lacked the strength to move, or the necessary drive to force his body to rearrange itself, or the capacity for rational thought that such a decision required. So he just sat there coughing until someone opened his door.

It was Rebecca. The concern in her eyes was altogether different from the usual maternal empathy. Instead, it was a mixture of fear and denial.

“Are you all right?” She asked that quietly, as if she knew noise would pain him, which it did. She took a couple of steps into the room.

“My head hurts,” he squeezed out between coughs.

She nodded, and the furrows in her forehead grew more pronounced. She told him she’d be right back with some water, and he closed his eyes and opened them again and there the glass was, with the water whose coldness was both soothing and oppressive. He drank and it eased his throat a bit, but it caused him to shiver all the more. Rebecca, seeing this, said she’d make him some hot tea. She reached for his forehead and asked if he felt hot or cold. Both, he said. She asked if he was hungry and he thought about this as if it were some abstract question, something he had never before considered, then uttered a no. He coughed again.

Rebecca rearranged his pillows so he could sit up without pressing against the cold wall, then she went out to get him another blanket. In the hallway she met Charles, who had been in their bedroom but had been stirred by the ominous sound of coughing from below.

“Get Dr. Banes,” she told him, whispering in the hall. “He looks terrible.”

Philip’s head was pounding, and the aspirin Rebecca had given him didn’t seem to be working. It was like throwing a glass of water on a forest fire. He felt weak and his legs ached. At first he had tried to rearrange them, to keep them perfectly straight or bend them just so, but he soon determined that no matter how they lay, they would ache as if they were being pummeled with hammers.

He tried to cough harder and dislodge something in his throat, but the coughs only made the something hurt more intensely. He wanted so badly to reach into his own mouth and find the something, to scrape around at the back of his palate and appease it. But gradually he realized the something was nothing—or perhaps it was his throat itself. It wasn’t going anywhere, and he had to breathe around it, breathe despite it. He sipped at the tea, which was now lukewarm, and tried not to choke.

“Is it flu?” he asked Doc Banes weakly as Charles and Rebecca looked on with worried eyes that seemed so large, since the rest of their faces were covered by gauze masks. The doctor said yes, it was influenza. Flu had a habit of taking you by surprise, he said, so maybe if Philip had felt himself coming down with something the day before, then it could be just a bad cold. But Philip had felt fine—physically, at least—the day before, and then woken as if someone had poisoned him while he slept. Rebecca started to ask what they could do for him and Philip coughed so she stopped midsentence, as if the exact cadence and tenor of his coughing were something they needed to heed and study. Then he was silent and she finished her question. Philip missed the doctor’s answer, ignoring it because his head hurt and Banes’s voice was grating. Philip closed his eyes because he was angry at the doctor’s sad and tired demeanor, angry at the gauze mask that served only to accentuate the distant look in the man’s eyes. Philip sat there with his eyes shut and concentrated on breathing. When he opened his eyes again his mug was filled with steaming tea and his visitors had fled.

What time was it? His watch was atop his bureau, and the headache had left him further disoriented. There was light peeking in through his drawn curtains, but not much. Still sitting up, he drifted off, his coughs mercifully subsiding.

He was dreaming about standing at the post with Graham when his eyes opened and he saw his tiny room before him, a sliver of light escaping from between the curtains and bisecting his bureau. Graham had been standing beside him a moment ago, telling him about Amelia and the baby. The first soldier had been there too, had said he’d like to meet Graham’s family. Graham had nodded awkwardly at the man’s polite comment, had looked away because he didn’t know how to tell the man that he was already dead. Philip hadn’t known how to tell the man, either. The man—the C.O., Philip now knew—had then looked at Philip inquiringly, his soft and wounded eyes searching for an answer to Graham’s sudden coldness. Philip tried so hard to think of an answer that the pressure forced his eyes open and woke him up.

He had to see Graham. He felt lucid for a moment, more so than he had all day. But he did not feel better—his head pounded every time the blood vessels grudgingly expanded to let his virus-infested blood through, and his legs ached as he kicked off the blankets. It was cold outside of the bed so he needed a sweater, but his journey over to the bureau took a while, the movement broken down into small, discrete steps: stand up; wait; step forward twice; wait; close eyes; swallow and try not to cough; cough; step forward and grip bureau; wait; open drawer, grab sweater; collapse in sitting position back onto bed, holding thick sweater between sweaty fingers.

As he pulled the sweater over his weak frame he reeled at the soreness in his arms and neck, a pain he’d never felt before, not even after the recovery from his accident. This was excruciating, but he would rather collapse in the street than sit in that bed any longer and wonder what his friend had done.

He opened the door and walked into the hallway. Not until that moment did it occur to him that his parents would stop him from going. He tried to be quiet, stifling a cough even though it nearly made him double over in pain. No one was in the hallway or the kitchen. He heard soft voices murmuring from the parlor, Laura and Rebecca reading to each other or telling stories or doing something to keep the horror at bay. Would he get them sick? He had not thought of this before, either—the realization had been buried beneath the difficulties he’d faced in simply lifting his head from his pillow. He wondered how common it was for one person in a house to have the flu without passing it on.

When Philip passed the small mirror in the hallway, he averted his eyes.

His hands were in his gloves and on the doorknob, turning it as slowly and silently as possible, and then he was outside. The light hurt. It was startlingly light out—blue sky! Perfectly blue with no clouds in sight, as if some long-earthbound angels had flown up to the clouds with glinting rapiers, slashing away at that underbelly of gray. Philip normally would have appreciated the sun, but the light seemed so strong that he squinted and looked down at the dirt. He walked slowly, momentum gradually taking control.

If it had seemed cold in his room, it felt arctic outdoors. The air was impossibly cold. Surely there was something wrong—and there was: him. He knew his body wasn’t working right, and he told himself it was just in his head, that the shivers sending his spine into spasms were not real, that the wind that seemed to cut through his clothes—the strangely aggressive cold—was not real. It was only a couple blocks more, and his legs were still working, and the dizziness he had felt at first was subsiding.

He felt frail and damaged, but he had to do this. He was scared of Graham, the man who had seemed like his big brother these last two years. But he needed to confront him.

There was Graham’s house, right in front of him. It stood facing the main street, strong and proud as the day they’d built it. The curtains were drawn on the second-floor windows but not on the first, and through one of those he saw Amelia gazing outside. She must have been sitting on a chair, and as Philip walked forward, he saw the baby in her arms, little Millie perched between her mother’s legs and staring wide-eyed into the world where nothing was happening. No one else on the streets, no sounds from church services at the town hall three buildings away, no children laughing. But the baby stared transfixed as if before her were colorful parades and painted dancers, elephants and zebras marching past. Death and desolation could still seem beautiful to eyes that didn’t know what more to expect from the world.

Then Amelia wasn’t there anymore and Philip was even closer to the house, almost at the steps in front of the porch, when the front door opened. Graham was not wearing a coat or gloves, yet he didn’t look cold in the wind that was so mercilessly assaulting Philip.

“Philip,” Graham said simply, letting it hang there while he stared. “What’s wrong?”

Philip swallowed and concentrated on not coughing. Graham stood on the porch, and Philip stopped before the first step.

“What happened to Frank?” Philip asked.

Graham looked like he didn’t understand; Frank was a meaningless name to him.

Philip said, “What happened to the soldier, the spy?”

Graham’s expression changed. “Good God, Philip,” he said softly. “You sick?” He raised his right hand to cover his mouth.

“What happened to Frank, Graham?”

“I let him go.” Graham’s body was rigid. “Philip, you should be in bed. You gotta rest.”

“Why didn’t he take his girl’s picture?”

“I don’t know.” Graham turned back around to ensure that he had closed the door behind him. His hand still covered his mouth.

“Why was there blood on the ground?” Philip was seized with a wrenching cough. When it abated, he demanded, “What did you
do
?”

Graham stepped forward despite his desire to be as far away from this sick person as possible.

“I undid what you did!” he screamed through gritted teeth. He had looked so controlled at first, his shirt tucked in and his hair neatly parted. But now that they were closer and Philip was focusing better, Graham did seem a bit puffy in the face, a bit red in the eyes, and his face grew tainted by the emergence of feelings he had been trying to stifle.

The door began to open behind Graham, who twirled around to shout at it, “Stay inside, please!” His voice was harsh and strong, and the door shut before Philip could even see a person behind it.

“Where’s Frank?” Philip asked again. He walked up a step. “Where’s Frank?”

“You know where he is.”

Philip could hear Graham’s breathing as loudly as he could hear his own tortured gasps. Breathing was becoming more difficult, his chest tighter, and whether this was some new symptom or the price of exerting himself, he wasn’t sure.

“How could you just—” Philip cut himself off. His eyes were tearing up again.

“Go home, Philip. Please.” Graham had lowered his hand after warning Amelia not to come out, but again he lifted it to his face. “You need to rest.”

“Don’t tell me what I need to do!”

Graham’s apparent desire to change the subject, to pretend that Frank had never existed, enraged Philip. He kept shaking his head, and when he finally stopped, when he looked into Graham’s eyes, he shouted:

“You’re a murderer!”

“
You’re
the murderer!” Graham stepped forward again, the two of them separated only by a couple of feet. His hand-mask fell away and there was his full face again, his red cheeks and his lips curled back in a snarl. “You’ve killed this whole town from letting him in here! I did what I had to do to keep everyone safe, no thanks to you!”

Philip launched himself forward without thinking, and then he was upon Graham, his gloved hands reaching for Graham’s neck or his face or his heart, he wasn’t sure which. He only wanted to shake at Graham’s certainty until all the events of the last few weeks could somehow return to the way they once were, when he and Graham had been friends and they both knew what they wanted out of life and it was the same thing.

Graham pushed him back easily and Philip fell, slipping back and hitting against one of the porch posts. They looked at each other for a moment, amazed to be fighting. Then Philip lurched forward again, this time leading with his fist, which caught Graham on the side of the face and swung him to the right. But Graham turned back and grabbed Philip’s collar with his left hand to hold him in place, and he was about to sock him with his stronger hand, his full-fingered right hand, when something seized inside Philip’s chest and he coughed in Graham’s face. Graham froze and looked as if Philip had just poured a bucket of his warm blood over Graham’s head.

They realized they were being screamed at from two directions.

Amelia had been watching from the window with Millie in her arms, and though she hadn’t been able to hear the conversation until they had started shouting, she had hurriedly put down the baby and rushed to the door when she’d seen Philip attack her husband. She had started screaming for Graham as her hand grasped the doorknob.

“Stay inside, Amelia, please,” Graham tried to shout, but it came out as a whimper. “He’s sick—don’t come out.”