The Last Town on Earth

by Thomas Mullen

  Because who but a socialist or red sympathizer—which J. B. Merriwhether of Merriwhether’s First Bank most certainly was not—would dare say anything the least bit favorable about Charles Worthy? A man who had made all the lumber barons of Timber Falls and Everett roll with laughter when he suggested he could run a successful mill by paying his workers more, by sharing with them equally? A man who had started a mill miles from a viable port, on a tract of land that his own father had deemed unworkable?

  But J.B. had known Charles before all that, had handled the banking for the Worthy family’s mill in Everett before starting a new bank in Timber Falls. He knew the calm and quiet Charles Worthy was craftier than he received credit for, and though Charles was overshadowed by his guffawing, handshaking, cigar-smoking brothers, J.B. suspected the Worthy family mill in Everett would undergo a decline now that Charles was no longer the caretaker of its financial fortune. If anyone could make a mill like Commonwealth succeed, it was probably Charles.

  And wasn’t his son, Philip, only a year or two from draft age? Philip was the other reason J.B. liked Charles. A man who adopts an orphaned boy like that, a complete stranger—that’s not a bad man. J.B. wanted to be the first to sell some Liberty Bonds in that crazy town, to shake Charles’s hand one more time.

  After the long drive deep into the woods, however, J.B.’s journey had come to an end at the tree that blocked the road and the sign warning him off. He had sat there for a good two minutes, his engine idling, his foot on the brake, as he tried to make sense of it. The sign had said ON ACCOUNT OF THE OUTBREAK, not ON ACCOUNT OF OUR OUTBREAK. Was the town healthy and hiding? And though his eyes weren’t as sharp as they’d once been, he thought he had seen two men standing atop the hill, watching him as he turned the Ford to drive away.

  He’d told a few friends about the experience, asked them if there was any news from Commonwealth. That had been nearly a week ago, and he’d heard nothing.

  And here he was, back from another wasted effort, back to his sick daughter and his stark house. He exhaled deeply, his breath fogging the windshield. In the Ford he, too, felt quarantined, temporarily separated from the town’s horrors, his daughter’s suffering. Upstairs Gwen’s window was dark—she couldn’t endure the lamplight even while awake. He hoped she was sleeping, but lately the coughs had given her no rest. He looked at the mailbox, saw that it was empty. Violet would have checked it by now, and if there had been word from James, she would have telephoned him at the bank. Unless the news was bad. Each day it was harder to get out of his Ford.

  J.B. said a brief prayer for his children. Then he gripped the handle and pushed the door open, stepping back into a world he had learned not to trust.

  XII

  “ ‘Across the foam in no-man’s-land I’ll soon be fighting, / But I know your lips are no man’s land but mine.’”

  Elsie heard Philip singing to himself while he painted the porch of a recently constructed house. Because of the quarantine, the call for more workers had been temporarily muted, and many houses in Commonwealth were empty. As Elsie approached, she wondered how long it would be until the flu passed and new workers could fill this block of empty houses.

  “Morning,” she said.

  “Morning,” he replied, putting down his paintbrush. He looked surprised to see her there—the new houses were at the end of a block, not really on the way to anything.

  “Are you painting alone today?”

  “Graham’s supposed to be helping. Must be late.”

  She nodded, unsure how to ask the question that had driven her there.

  “Where are you off to?” he asked.

  “Church,” she said. Though Commonwealth’s traveling Unitarian minister had been banned from the town along with every other outsider, his leaderless parishioners had decided to gather for Sunday-morning prayer sessions without him. They would carry on, asking God to make the flu pass so they could end the quarantine, welcome back their minister, and act like a real church again.

  “Get a little lost?”

  “I felt like going for a walk,” she demurred, looking away.

  Philip crouched to wet his brush again.

  “You’re a hard worker,” she said. “Six days a week at the mill, all this painting today, all that digging on Friday…”

  Philip left the brush on the lip of the bucket and stood up. “What digging?”

  “I don’t really know. I was hoping you’d tell me. What were you fellows digging on Friday?”

  “Who?”

  She smiled a bit. “Don’t insult me, Philip. I saw you that morning. I saw you digging out there and—”

  “What exactly did you see?” His voice was tight.

  Elsie took a half-step back. She looked down for a moment, her confidence in this confrontation dwindling. “I saw you and Graham Stone and the other men. I’d gone out for a walk, and I heard you out there…” She cautiously met his eyes again. “It almost looked like you were digging a grave.”

  “Is that all you saw?”

  She nodded. “I went home after that.”

  Philip closed his eyes for a second.

  “Why, did I miss something?”

  He opened his eyes. “There were a couple dead deer down there. Doc said they mighta died of some kind of disease or something, and that we should bury them where we found them. We didn’t want to tell people because we thought they might get scared it was flu, but Doc says it wasn’t.”

  Philip wasn’t as good of a liar as he thought he was, Elsie thought. But why was he lying to her? She paused, wondering how far she should push him. But surely there was an explanation. “Philip, I saw what you buried.”

  Their eyes locked. Then Philip looked around—a couple of women were walking past on the corner a few houses away, but they weren’t close enough to overhear.

  “What did you see?” he asked, his voice quiet.

  She stared back at him. He knew she knew. Why did she have to say it? “It wasn’t a deer.” Until then she’d felt almost powerful in her knowledge of a secret and confident there was some safe and rational explanation for what she had seen. But his obvious discomfort scared her. “What’s going on, Philip?”

  Philip motioned to the door of the house. She was so overcome by the situation that she didn’t think how improper it was to venture with him into an empty building. He opened the door and shut it behind them.

  Inside, the house smelled like wood and dust, the things every house would probably smell like if people weren’t living in them. Even Elsie’s breath seemed to echo.

  “It was the soldier from the day before, wasn’t it?” Even though they were alone, she said this in a lowered voice.

  Philip could only nod in response.

  “Did he get sick? Did he sleep out there overnight and die?”

  He looked startled, then nodded sadly. “Yeah. The morning after Graham and I made him leave, the guys who had the next day’s shift saw him there. He must have hid down at the bottom of the hill overnight, hoping the next morning we’d let him in or something.”

  “So…did he die of the flu, or from the cold?”

  “I…I don’t know. Doc Banes, I mean, he said he couldn’t tell. But, um, we left him there for a few hours in case his body was contagious, then we buried him.”

  “So there’s a chance he was actually healthy and he died because we wouldn’t let him in.” She said this calmly, thinking it through.

  “Charles and Doc Banes said we shouldn’t tell anyone, though, because people might assume he’d died of the flu, and panic.”

  As Elsie took this in, she saw that his eyes were welling up. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded, looking away.

  She stepped closer to him, her hands clasped before her. She wanted to reach out to him but feared it would be improper.

  “I’m sorry, Philip. I didn’t mean to suggest it’s your fault he died. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  His gaze was hard and fixed on something be
yond the window, just something to stare at as the tears slowly and stubbornly dissolved in his eyes.

  “He probably did have the flu. If you’d let him in, maybe everyone in town would be sick by now.”

  “Yeah,” he pronounced at last.

  Elsie felt horrible. Not only must he blame himself, but surely the thought of the soldier dying from exposure made him think of his mother’s death, of his frigid night at the bottom of the snowy gorge. The last thing Philip wanted to think about was a person who had died from the cold, she figured. She longed to reach out and hold him, tell him it was all right for him to feel this way.

  “I’m sorry I brought this all up. I can get too curious sometimes, I guess.”

  He nodded, still looking out the window, then turned to her. “I don’t think we’re doing the right thing.”

  At that she stiffened somewhat. “You’re right; we should go back outside.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I don’t think we’re doing the right thing with the quarantine. I don’t think we’re doing the right thing closing the town.”

  She exhaled. “Everything’s so…confusing right now. I keep hoping this’ll end soon, that we won’t have to worry about it much longer.”

  They looked at each other for what began to feel like an uncomfortable amount of time.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said.

  “That’s all right. I can see why you did. And besides, I lied to you, too.”

  “You were pretty good at it,” he said, smiling.

  She smiled back. “I really don’t have that much experience.”

  “I know that’s a lie,” he said, laughing, and for a moment they were just two kids again, teasing each other because they didn’t know how else to show their feelings. They were miles away from the flu or the war.

  But within seconds Philip brought them back.

  “I’m supposed to be out there in a couple hours. At the post.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I know that you being out there makes people feel safe. People talk about it.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. My mother, for one—after her being so sick last year, she’s really worried about the flu. And my dad. Other folks talk about it, too. Everyone knows how bad it is. No one wants it happening here.”

  He looked as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

  “I should be getting to church,” she said.

  “Okay. And…did you tell anyone else about…the grave?”

  “No.”

  “It’s supposed to be a secret.”

  “I understand. I’ll keep it that way.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you not coming to church?” Elsie asked as they walked back outside. The Worthys had become irregular churchgoers, she had noticed, and that was probably Mrs. Worthy’s influence, as it was rumored that she attended only for Charles’s sake and secretly did not believe in God.

  “Oh, no, I can’t,” he stammered, reaching down for the paintbrush. “I have to finish the porch.”

  They bade each other goodbye, but as she walked away, she reflected on his response. After walking half a block, she looked back at him, saw his thin body bent forward, his eyes intent on the wet bristles gliding across the wooden posts. The fact that he was out there painting a house that could not be used as a home until the quarantine ended seemed odd, she thought.

  She turned around, late for church. In the distance she could make out the singing, the voices projected farther than usual, as if the congregants were so nervous from the jangling tensions of the quarantine that they were yearning to cast something beautiful upon that barren landscape. She ran toward them.

  XIII

  “Good day to be out,” Mo said.

  “Looks like it’s going to rain,” Philip disagreed.

  “Nah, that ain’t rain. That’s just Mother Nature’s gray blanket. It’s comforting.”

  Mo was a talker. Where a man of Mo’s size got his unceasing energy was a mystery to many lumberjacks, not least those larger men who had tried to shut him up with force and had learned, to their detriment, that his prowess with words was matched by the dexterity of his indefatigable fists. Turns out the one story Mo seldom told was how he had been a boxer in Detroit, flyweight. If you worked beside him long enough, he would eventually tell you, late at night and a bit high from drink, how he had accidentally killed a sparring partner with some hard blows, though he wasn’t swear-to-God certain it was accidental, on account of his having been insulted by the sparring partner earlier that day. Which is why he had run from Detroit at age twenty-five, hiding in the Upper Peninsula and then the forests of the West, aiming all his future blows at defenseless tree trunks.

  He had gone bald rather young—he was in his mid-thirties—and the ridge of his oft-broken nose was a painful zigzag. When people asked about it he lied and said cops done it.

  “Rain is comforting?”

  “If you look at it the right way, it is.”

  After only a few weeks of his new life as a lumberjack, Mo had realized there was nothing else he would rather do. Forget boxing rings, gymnasiums—he needed to be outside. The smell of the earth, the sun’s embrace—even on those deadly cold days, the feel of the sun—rather than the stilled emptiness of a building without windows. Mo quickly became the least favorite member of every team he was placed on due to his interminable monologues about the glories of the outdoors, his praise of greenery and blue sky.

  “The Hun’s really running now. I hear an armistice could be just around the corner. Before the end of the month, even.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Philip had barely been paying attention to Mo’s earlier ramblings, participating only with the occasional “uh-huh,” but this statement piqued his curiosity. Until then he’d been thinking about Elsie and the empty house and how he’d felt when he was alone with her in a place no one else could see. He’d never wanted to leave, wished he could live there forever.

  “Around.” Mo shrugged. “Folks are talking. Guess somebody saw a newspaper.”

  “Newspaper would have to be over a week old by now.”

  “So maybe the war’s over already and we don’t even know. Maybe everybody else in the country is celebrating. Soldiers and nurses are dancing in France. Parades in Paree.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  “I doubt it’s happened, though. Doesn’t feel like it.”

  “You think we’ll know when it’s over?” They weren’t close enough to other towns to see fireworks or hear the roar of a crowd, the thump and wail of a marching band.

  “Sure we will.”

  “How?”

  “I dunno. The air, the sky.” He scratched at his cheek, beside an ugly boxing scar.

  “We’ll be able to tell the war is over because of how the sky looks?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “The sky here’s gray every day.”

  “Exactly. Don’t you think old man Sun would finally come out for that?”

  Philip checked for a smile but saw none.

  “I can tell things from the weather,” Mo said. “Every real bad thing that’s happened to me out here, I’ve known it was coming from the weather.”

  “Such as?”

  Mo thought. “First time anyone on my crew ever got killed, it happened on an afternoon when we had lightning but no rain. We were just about finished with our shift when we saw the lightning start, but we were working for a real mean bastard who didn’t care if his crew got struck or not, so we had to stay out there. Lightning ain’t a good thing when you’re chopping down trees.”

  “I know that.”

  “So we’re out there working, and everybody’s pretending not to be bothered by the lightning because we’re all tough bastards, of course, but everybody’s thinking about it. I was working with this one fella I didn’t particularly like on account of he was one of those guys who thought that insulting you real bad was the way to get to kno
w you. So the lightning is flashing, but there’s still no rain—no thunder, even, it was almost like we were just imagining the lightning—and I decide my saw needs sharpening so I head on back to the shed. I spend some time on it, and when I turn around to head back to my spot, I see that my partner is lying there on the ground. And I get closer and see he’s been stabbed straight through the heart, there’s blood all over his chest and his eyes are dead as McKinley’s. And pretty soon the lightning had stopped, and it never did rain.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Couple a guys he’d insulted a bit too much. They were from Poland, and he’d had himself a good time the night before making fun of Polish women—Polish mothers in particular—and they hadn’t cared for that. I pretty much knew it was coming.”

  “Then it wasn’t the weather that warned you, it was you knowing the guys were mad at him. That’s why you were afraid something bad was coming.”

  “First of all, I never said I was afraid.” Mo looked a bit peeved. “Second of all, you can call it how you like.”

  As more of the day passed in silence, Philip thought about Elsie again—so much better than thinking of the last time he had been out at the post. Was Elsie at church still, or was she at home, or helping at the general store? Philip was probably the furthest thing from her mind, he realized. When he’d been talking to her, he had seen the concern in her eyes, had even had the sense that she was close to hugging him, but surely he’d been imagining it. He was just the adopted boy with the missing foot who hobbled around town and happened to live in the same house as Elsie’s best friend.

  His thoughts and feelings leaped back and forth between these poles of infatuation and abject despondency. The skies became somewhat darker, the clouds more thickly covering any evidence of the sun, which Philip had not laid eyes on in days.

  And what about Graham? He had never shown up to help paint. Something about the way Graham had acted the other day had kept Philip from walking over to the Stones’ house and knocking on their door, asking what the holdup was.