The Last Town on Earth

by Thomas Mullen

  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 timber 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

  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 a
nnounced 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 lumberjack? He put his left fist inside his other hand, massaging the knuckles.