The Last Town on Earth (41 page)

Charles embraced him. Philip forgot the anger and disappointment he had felt over the last few weeks, and for a moment he held on to his father tightly.

Charles stepped back and promised to send Philip a telegram in two days with news.

Graham and Philip looked at each other, and Graham nodded abruptly, clapping him on the shoulder a little too hard. Then they were gone.

Graham and Charles spoke little during the journey home. Graham saw that Charles was affected by sending away his son, so much that he didn’t notice how close Graham had come to breaking down. Time passed slowly as the car’s tires struggled over the slushy roads, the heavy branches of the white-and-green-striped trees swaying above.

The fact that the roads had been impassable had afforded Graham time to think, to deliberate, but now he no longer had that luxury. Men bent on avenging Bartrum’s death were free to return; the red-bearded man with the sons dead in France surely would never forget Graham’s face. Graham had chosen not to enlist lest the war tear him from his family; staying in Commonwealth to await possible arrest would mean running that same risk. Charles sounded optimistic that the situation could be resolved, but to Graham that was like hoping the tornado before you might be just a horribly beautiful cloud crafted by a creative but benign God. Graham knew what those storm clouds meant.

With his right hand, he massaged the knuckles of his left, feeling even through his gloves the contours of his bones and the awkward slope where the final finger should be. Amelia had knit the gloves herself, giving the left only three fingers because Graham had hated the way the empty finger of his old gloves had dangled there, purposeless.

To take his baby and his pregnant wife and run from Commonwealth to some other town would be to start with nothing. Some clothes, a scant amount of money to buy lodging and food for a few weeks, but little else. He would be as vulnerable as he had once been, but a thousand times more so because now he had a family. He remembered how difficult it had been to start over after Everett. But this time, he reminded himself, he would not be alone.

Last night, after telling Amelia about the second soldier, and after her long walk and the many silent hours that had passed between them, he had retired to bed. When she slipped into the bed much later, he was still awake, lying on his side and facing the wall. In the dark, she had wrapped an arm around him. “Rest,” she said to him softly, knowing his eyes were open. She put her left hand on his, and his outnumbered fingers interlocked with hers. She kissed him on the back of the neck. “Rest.” He lay there for a good while before falling asleep, not because he couldn’t but because he wanted to revel in that feeling. Hours later, he woke to the baby’s crying, and he left the bed before his wife to pick up his daughter and pace through the cold house. There in the dark the building felt hollow, empty, something that could be abandoned. He was so tired of running, yet so tired of holding his ground. And so before accompanying Philip to the train station that morning, he had told Amelia his decision, ready to hear any objections. But she’d had none, simply expressing the hope that their sojourn would be only temporary.

Outside, the trees shook in the wind. The road curved deeper into the woods and beside them was the river, harsh and cold, but still running.

The wait for the train seemed too long. Philip thought about how back in Commonwealth the recovering men were testing their strength by chopping firewood, and women were visiting neighbors they had not seen in days, knocking on doors hesitantly for fear of having those knocks go unanswered. The undertaker was consulting his list of interned bodies and writing a letter to Inston, requesting the minister’s presence for a memorial service, and Doc Banes was tending to those still too sick to leave their beds. Commonwealth was staggering to its feet, and Philip was leaving yet another town.

After years of fearing abandonment, he realized he had never been truly alone until that moment. Yet as he stood there in the stunned silence of the outside world—a world he hadn’t seen in weeks—he felt curiously unafraid. Perhaps it was the flu clouding his mind; perhaps he was too dazed to appreciate the uncertainness of his fate. But something about what Charles had said, and his tone, made Philip feel glad to stand there by himself, away from the town and all the disasters that its failed decisions had wrought.

Philip wasn’t sure when his head would feel right, but part of him wanted that never to happen. His recovery from the flu seemed to be occurring in another world, someplace wholly separate from Commonwealth, so it felt natural that he had not seen Elsie in days. Once he felt right, he would have to confront Elsie. Perhaps it would be better to never again see those riverbeds where they had collected driftwood, never again visit the lonely general store. Better simply to venture to his next destination and any beyond it, to drift on, stripped of so many things that he thought had defined who he was. And what would be left of himself, and who he would be while he gathered the fleeting pieces as they tried to drift away, was something he would somehow have the strength to accept, and build something anew.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

Nearly a decade ago I read a magazine article about an infectious disease expert that briefly mentioned the 1918 influenza epidemic. The article also made reference to the fact that some uninfected towns in the western United States were so terrified of the flu that they blocked all roads leading into town and posted armed guards to prevent anyone from entering. I immediately imagined a scene that would become the seed of a novel: two guards confronted with the dilemma of a cold, hungry outsider seeking shelter.

I read what books I could find on the 1918 epidemic but didn’t find many. And I could find no information about any of the healthy towns that had supposedly imposed reverse quarantines. Finally, because I am a fiction writer and not a historian, I decided to stop searching for more about the mysterious towns. The fact that I was unable to unearth anything was probably for the best, as it released my imagination from any historical shackles.

Only as I was nearly finished with my rough draft was John M. Barry’s definitive work,
The Great Influenza,
published. He reports that Gunnison, Colorado, was one such town that emerged unscathed from the epidemic by completely isolating itself from neighboring towns in the San Juan Mountains. Some other towns’ similar attempts were not so successful, he notes.

Although Commonwealth is a fictional creation, had it been real, it would not have been entirely unique in its progressive mission. The vast forests of Washington sheltered numerous communes, collectives, and other gathering places of the radically inclined. Half a thousand socialists lived at the Equality Colony, founded in 1896 on the banks of the Skagit River; Whidbey Island was home to a farmer’s cooperative known as Freeland; and across the Sound from Tacoma’s paper mills was Home, an anarchist community gleefully practicing free love.

Graham’s character was fleshed out by research into the labor violence of the era. The tensions between business owners trying to carve out an existence in the forbidding West and workers trying to earn a solid enough living to settle permanently created an often combustible environment. Though the labor needs of wartime and the coming red scare would soon put most unions on the defensive, the prewar era was rife with violent strikes. The so-called Everett Massacre of 1916 was the apogee of a bitter timber strike, as a gunfight broke out when two vessels carrying strikers and sympathizers from Seattle attempted to dock at an Everett harbor. Although many members of the Industrial Workers of the World were put on trial, they were ultimately acquitted, and historians have been unable to establish who fired the first shots: Wobblies, strikers, McRae’s deputies, or town vigilantes. At least seven people (five strikers and two deputies) died in the massacre, though some sources believe an even higher number of strikers may have perished.

Few people today realize it, but World War I had its own strong antiwar movement. President Wilson realized that the war would be a hard sell to a nation in which nearly one quarter of the citizens were of German ancestry. To that end, he formed the Committee on Public Information, which launched a propaganda campaign unprecedented in size and scope. The character of Uncle Sam was born, and countless patriotic tunes hit the airwaves (“Save Your Kisses Till the Boys Come Home,” “Hello Central! Give Me No Man’s Land”) and Four-Minute Men unleashed their impassioned oratory in movie theaters and taverns.

Many on the political left felt betrayed by President Wilson—who had campaigned on an antiwar platform—when he decided to enter the Great War. Unionists called it a rich man’s war, arguing that America was only fighting because its wealthy bankers had lent so much money to Britain and France that, if those countries fell, America’s financial markets would be in peril. To silence such critics, Congress turned its back on the First Amendment by enacting laws that criminalized criticism of the war or the government. This was war, after all; surely the citizens wouldn’t mind giving up a few civil liberties as they sacrificed for victory. Rebecca stands in for the thousands of Americans who felt muzzled during that time, who loved their country but felt unable to debate or rectify its policies for fear of imprisonment.

“Everybody is either loyal or not loyal at a time like this,” one government announcement explained. The Department of Justice therefore sponsored the American Protective League, a group of patriotic civilians who rounded up draft dodgers, looked for suspected spies, and made sure their fellow citizens were acting with sufficient loyalty. APL branches spread across the country, encompassing a membership of 300,000, and some vigilante “superpatriots” were known to break into immigrants’ homes and demand they kiss the flag or buy Liberty Bonds.

Secretary of War Newton Baker did allow men to declare themselves conscientious objectors if they had “personal scruples against war,” and approximately sixty-five thousand men requested noncombatant service, such as driving ambulances, serving as orderlies, and performing electrical or agricultural work. But such C.O.s faced enormous pressure to recant—including outright torture at army cantonments—and as many as 80 percent folded under the pressure, agreeing to bear arms. At least seventeen C.O.s died from the treatment they received for expressing their beliefs.

The 1918 influenza epidemic killed as many as 100 million people worldwide in one year. It would ultimately kill more people—and five times as many Americans—than the Great War, which drew to its close in November 1918, while the flu was still raging.

The flu had an amazingly disabling effect on nearly all societies that suffered it, and it left its mark on the outcome of the war. Some historians believe that had the flu not infected so many German soldiers, a massive German offensive in the spring of 1918 would have forced France to capitulate before American aid arrived to turn the tide. Others believe that President Wilson, sick before the conference at Versailles, was slowed by the curiously lingering mental aftereffects of the flu. Some speculate that had he been his steadfast self, the European Allies wouldn’t have imposed the harsh conditions on Germany that Hitler later used to rally his citizens to the Nazi party.

Fear of spies at home, the loss of loved ones overseas, and the sense that the country’s very way of life was under attack combined to form a volatile environment. Into this tense mix the flu appeared. Newspapers cowed by the government into reporting only good news initially denied or downplayed the flu’s existence, yet citizens could see their neighbors’ bodies being carted off, could hear the baleful church bells. Radio jingles told people to be brave, mayors reminded everyone they need only wash their hands to avoid infection, yet the corpses piled up on street corners.

This is the world, in all its tensions and complexities, that slowly formed itself in my imagination as I sat down and began to write
The Last Town on Earth
.

Thomas Mullen

January 2006

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a work of fiction. Although some uninfected towns did endeavor to fend off the 1918 flu pandemic by means of reverse quarantines, this book is not an attempt to retell their stories.

I am indebted to several historians in the research for this book. Anyone wishing to learn more about the 1918 pandemic should read John M. Barry’s
The Great Influenza
. Alfred W. Crosby’s
America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918,
Allen Churchill’s
Over Here! An Informal Re-creation of the Home Front in World War I,
Frances H. Early’s
A World Without War: How U.S. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I,
Meirion and Susie Harries’s
The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917–1918,
Robert H. Zieger’s
America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience,
and Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present
all were helpful in re-creating the tenor of the times.

Patrick Renshaw’s
The Wobblies: The Story of the IWW and Syndicalism in the United States,
Len De Caux’s
The Living Spirit of the Wobblies,
and Joseph Robert Conlin’s
Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement
provided details on the labor movement and violence of the era, and the author could not have done without William S. Crowe’s
Lumberjack: Inside an Era in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
or Norman H. Clark’s
Mill Town: A Social History of Everett, Washington, from Its Earliest Beginnings on the Shores of Puget Sound to the Tragic and Infamous Event Known as the Everett Massacre
.

Big thanks to several friends who read past drafts of this and other works: Brent Wincze, Demos Orphanides, Rick Runyan, Erin Core, Matt Power, Brad Dececco, Geoff Sharpe, Deneb Meketa, Brian Dawson, Hadyn Dick, Candace Sady, Chetan Rao, Shauna Sutherland, and Becky Givan. Overdue thanks to Gus Muller and Dom Ambrose for early encouragement.

My agent, Susan Golomb, provided sound advice, tirelessly edited rough drafts, and encouraged me to tackle a book I initially intended to put off for a few years. Thanks also to Rich Green, Amira Pierce, John Mozes, Anna Stein, and Casey Panell.

My editor, Jennifer Hershey, knew which trees to chop down, which to prune, and which to give more light. Her hard work and dedication have probably spoiled this first-time novelist. She and Laura Ford, Sanyu Dillon, Tom Perry, Jack Perry, Janet Wygal, Sally Marvin, Jennifer Jones, and everyone else at Random House helped make a lifelong dream into reality.

Grateful and loving thanks to my parents and family, who never once suggested I might want to abandon the whole novel-writing idea in favor of something a tad more practical.

And, of course, Jenny, for everything.