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The Last Town on Earth

Page 20

by Thomas Mullen


  Everyone at the school has been talking about you and everyone is hoping you come out soon. I think this whole quarantine thing is so rotten and wrong, and now that they’ve done this to you I can’t believe that no one else sees it but me. I know you must feel the same way, though.

  I heard some kids at school wondering aloud why you let the soldier in, but I can imagine why. I know that standing guard out there must be so difficult and to be confronted with someone wanting to come in must have been unbearably hard. I know you feel bad about what happened a few days ago—I still have not told anyone what I know—but I do think you and Graham did the right thing. I also think you did the right thing by letting the new person in yesterday. I know that sounds contradictory, but I don’t think it is. I think you had your reasons and I want you to know that even though it might feel that you are alone, you aren’t.

  We’ll see you soon,

  Elsie

  Philip placed the letter back in the envelope. Elsie had been thinking of him all day; he couldn’t believe it. He had wondered if she’d felt the same way, had hoped, but this was his first strong piece of evidence. Unless Philip was misreading her words. So he opened the letter once more and read them a third time, his heart still beating fast.

  Elsie’s reference to other people talking brought back his fears that the townspeople would blame him for betraying their trust. She seemed to have faith in him; hopefully, the others would, too.

  He lay down on his blankets and stared at the ceiling, thinking of Elsie. If he had been anxious to be released from this prison before, now he was positively desperate.

  “So, what exactly do you do at Fort Jenkins?”

  After supper, they had played poker for another hour, then had taken a break to collect more wood for the fire. To preserve lamp oil, they had decided to kill the lamp for the night, and the fire cast an orange and ever-shifting glow on their faces. They had already talked plenty—Philip had learned that Frank was a carpenter who worked with his father, that his father had built most of the houses on one side of the river in Missoula, that Frank had a younger sister who was blind, that Frank loved to fish and that his idea of happiness was climbing to the top of Mount Sentinel and watching the sun set over the hay-colored peaks to the west. But Frank had spoken barely a word about his military service.

  “What do I do?”

  “Yeah. Practice shooting, marching, digging trenches? How does it work?”

  Frank thought for a moment. “Believe it or not, we haven’t been able to practice shooting yet because we don’t have any guns.”

  “No guns?”

  “I guess they’re running short, and the first priority is obviously the guys in France, so they haven’t gotten around to giving my company real firearms yet. We practice marching with broom handles.”

  “Really?”

  “And we practice bayoneting with broom handles.”

  “You must be a dangerous man with a broom. How about a mop?”

  “I could stab you through the heart with a mop. Don’t let me anywhere near the broom closet or I’ll go off on a rampage.”

  When Philip looked back at Frank he saw a different face, that of a man miles away, slogging through mud or staring into an unimaginably vast sea. The face made Philip deeply uncomfortable.

  “So after this is all over, you’re going to marry Michelle?”

  Frank looked down, then at the fire. “Yeah.”

  “You tell her about that, or is it a surprise?”

  “She knows. She might think I was just saying it, though—a lot of guys just said it before they left so they could get their girls to loosen up with ’em. They brag about that at the camp. But I didn’t just say it; I meant it.”

  Frank reached into his pile of twigs and threw one at the fire.

  “So how come you don’t have a sweetheart making you cornbread?” he asked, apparently eager to turn the focus of the conversation away from himself.

  “I’ve got a girl,” Philip blurted defensively. He regretted the lie immediately but, more important, didn’t want to be teased. Was it really a lie, or was it just a mild exaggeration?

  “Do you?” Frank said, raising his eyebrows and turning to face Philip. “Here we’ve known each other so long and you never said anything. What’s her name?”

  “Elsie,” Philip said, painting himself farther into the corner.

  Frank threw another twig into the fire. “Tell me about her.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know,” Frank said slowly, looking at the fire again, “if the thought of her keeps you up at night. If hearing someone else say her name makes you turn your head. If she’s pretty.”

  “She’s very pretty. And yes to everything else.”

  “Blond or brown hair?”

  “Brown.”

  “My kinda girl.”

  “She’s real sweet. Very smart but not, you know, snooty about it. Like my sister can be sometimes. I used to be in the same class as Elsie, and I’d see sometimes that when she was writing her answers to a test, she was making a fist with her other hand. Like she was concentrating too hard not to.”

  “Why were you looking at her—you copy her answers?”

  “I just like seeing her when she’s focusing like that.”

  “You kiss her yet?”

  Philip started wondering just how far this interrogation was going to go and how honest he cared to be. “Not yet. But I will.”

  “You do that. You’re a lucky man, still in the same town as your sweetheart. Lucky you didn’t have to get sent away.” Another twig into the flames. “As soon as you get out of here, you march right on up to her and give her the kiss of her life. She doesn’t like it, you can tell her that crazy soldier made you do it.” He smiled and looked back at his companion. “But she’ll like it.”

  Philip nodded, grinning slightly with embarrassment. “Okay.”

  “You going to marry her?”

  Philip shook his head, his smile widening. “That’d be rushing things, I think.”

  “The wedding proposal might startle her?”

  “Might.”

  “You never know. Some guys wait too long.”

  “Did you wait too long? How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five and still single? What were you doing with yourself before Michelle?”

  “Maybe I did wait too long. Maybe I’m trying to teach you a few things I learned the hard way.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, an opportunity can be either the shortest-lived thing or the longest-lasting thing in the world. You take advantage of it when you have it, and it’ll last forever. You sit on your hands, though, and it’ll be gone before you can even blink a second time.”

  Philip fixated on that image—of something important disappearing before his eyes, leaving behind no trace. Even though he wasn’t sure if he should ask, he did anyway: “Are they going to send you to France soon?”

  Frank paused. “Don’t know. Some guys say they aren’t sending anybody until the flu passes, but that’s just a rumor. We’ll see.” Then he thought of something. “Are a lot of boys from this town serving?”

  “Some of them, but not many. Most of them enlisted and got worker deferments.” Philip added, even though he knew he shouldn’t have, “And some guys didn’t enlist.”

  “Really? You can get in trouble for that.”

  “I think they’re conscientious objectors.”

  “Huh.” Frank’s face clouded over.

  “What?” Philip asked.

  “Nothing,” Frank said. “I just know that there are some C.O.s in the army. They get drafted—they just refuse to fight.”

  “So what do they do?”

  “They build cantonments. They clean mess halls. They get the shit work.”

  Philip looked at Frank searchingly while Frank stared straight into the fire. Then Frank lay down and closed his eyes.

  “I’m g
oing to turn in,” Frank said. “If the good people of this town are going to set me free tomorrow night, I want to be well rested.” He rolled over, facing away from Philip.

  Philip, alone for a moment, briefly considered seizing the opportunity to read Elsie’s letter again. But something about what Frank had said left him feeling juvenile. He, too, lay down and closed his eyes, visions of men with broomsticks marching past.

  XII

  The morning whistle sounded different to Leonard Thibeault, one of the Commonwealth millworkers. First the whistle was quieter than normal, as though someone had stuffed cotton into Leonard’s ears while he’d slept, and then it was louder than he could comprehend. Deafening. Piercing. It was two holes drilling into his skull from opposite ends, and when the drill bits reached each other in the center of his brain, he opened his eyes.

  Then he closed them. That was the second thing he noticed—the pain in his eyes. Not in his eyes exactly, but behind them, in the part of the body that controlled the eye, the invisible mechanisms that told it where to move and how quickly, the levers and switches and pulleys that helped him squint or stare or wink. The whole apparatus seemed shot to hell. Just that one blink and the pain was a wave that rolled through his skull.

  He was on his back. His legs and arms ached, the joints in particular throbbing. At this point the signs and messages were coming at him too quickly and all he knew was that this was a terrible, terrible dream. Or he had woken up too soon. Or he had drunk too much the night before. What the hell was it he’d drunk? Was it trustworthy? He tried to remember, but his brain didn’t want to, didn’t let him—like a recalcitrant librarian, it balked at the orders, refused to look up the necessary information. Whatever he had drunk had knocked him flat out.

  There was another whistle, following far too quickly after the first one. This certainly was not real. But no nightmare had ever hurt like this.

  It was incredibly hot in the small bedroom in his empty house, where he hoped one day to bring a wife. He was sweating and his nightclothes were damp and the blankets that pinned him were surely unnecessary, but he couldn’t muster the energy to remove them.

  He was dimly aware of the possibility that this was real and he was awake and therefore was supposed to be at the mill, working. But the mere thought of rising was an impossibility. He felt his mind wandering to the strangest places, scenes he had visited as a child, so long ago that he hadn’t thought of them in years. He thought about girls on whom he’d nurtured crushes as a schoolboy, about two of his cousins who’d died in a farm accident when he was six or seven. He didn’t even remember their names. But there they were, laughing at something he’d said.

  At some point, either seconds or hours after the most recent whistle, he felt more lucid than before, coherent enough to concentrate on his breathing. He thought that maybe if he took deep breaths, he’d feel strong enough to get up. So he inhaled deeply, but he’d taken in barely any air when his stomach muscles seized on him and he coughed so hard that his head lifted from the pillow, coughed so long it was like a dream without end.

  Until one day he wasn’t coughing anymore. He was still there, still lying on his back, still neither daring to open his eyes nor even think about it. It was so hard to think, the damned librarian in his head was so adamant about not doing any work, that it was better to just drift off. He stopped thinking about the pain and stopped thinking about breathing, and then one of his dead cousins—maybe his name had been Louis—threw him a ball. Leonard lifted up his tiny arms and caught the ball, smiling gleefully, and tossed it back toward Louis, tossed it so far he couldn’t see if Louis made the catch but somehow he knew that he had.

  XIII

  Graham was tired, but he refused to let his fatigue interfere. Interfere with his work at the mill, interfere with his guard duties, interfere with the vigilance of his thoughts. He felt how precarious the town’s situation was—the balance slipping more with each passing hour—and he needed to steady it, steady himself. He had little choice but to press on.

  Graham was not sleeping well. He hadn’t told Amelia this, hadn’t wanted to disturb her slumber. She snored—a most unladylike snore, in fact, but one that had only made Graham smile to himself in the weeks after they married. Their courtship had been brief and not without controversy, as the couple had not received the approval of Amelia’s father, a mean old specimen named Horace whom Graham had never spoken to without smelling liquor on his breath. Having lost her mother at a young age, Amelia had all but raised her three younger brothers while her lumberjack father disappeared on his season-long assignments in the woods. Amelia had told Graham that her father had never laid a finger on her, and Graham believed her, but still he wondered sometimes whether there were childhood memories she hadn’t told him, didn’t want to acknowledge.

  He had met her at church, in Timber Falls. The first months after Everett had been bleak, and Graham had moved around a bit before landing in Timber Falls and forcing himself to get a new mill job. He needed the work to keep himself from turning into a hopeless drunk, one of those shriveled husks he saw so often, guys who said they’d once been brawny and tough and could chew on gravel until some viciousness had befallen them, something that not even the Hercules of their youth had been able to counter. Graham would not let that happen. Every night he lay in bed sleepless, but every day he worked, each day harder than the last. He hoped that through pain and sweat and self-denial he could reach some plane where his past suffering could never again reach him, never bring him down.

  He had known Tamara so briefly; he chastised himself for having allowed naive daydreams of romance to sweep him off his feet. They had been so different, the educated activist and the hardheaded millworker. He hadn’t felt comfortable with her friends, their political conversations and obscure references, and as time passed, he came to understand that his feelings for her had been colored by the events swirling around them. He had mourned her for longer than he had known her, and though he felt this made him silly and a victim and small, the pain never quite went away, never quite left him, just faded like that of a broken bone that kept you awake late at night until you noticed, bleary-eyed, that it was morning and that at some point you did indeed sleep. And here you were on a new day, so what were you going to do with it?

  I got used to not having a home and not having a family, he thought. I got used to having only nine fingers. I can get used to this, too.

  After years of neglecting his religious upbringing, Graham had begun attending church. His mother had loved Sunday mornings, and as he sat there surrounded by the congregation’s striving voices, he found himself remembering his family back in Kansas—the quiet mother who never knew how to stand up to her belligerent husband, the younger brothers whom Graham would pick on at home but loyally defend in the school yard.

  Graham knew something about mean fathers, and as he sat in church, he could tell from a distance that this man Horace was someone from whom his daughter, Amelia, was yearning to escape. Graham’s eyes met Amelia’s once, and he looked away, feeling unholy or guilty or something not right, as he knew that church wasn’t the place to be eying women. But he found he couldn’t help doing it again the next week, or the week after that, and soon he was going to church every Sunday like a good Christian, though he was barely listening to the preacher, hardly singing the hymns. He was there only to see her.

  Amelia had ice-blue eyes and an almost too-white face—her skin seeming to glow in the sunlight as she left church—that seemed remarkably controlled for her eighteen years. She was beautiful, but what also drew him was the strength she seemed to possess, despite being held back by her family. Perhaps Graham was drawn to her for these reasons, so he could both save her from her situation and feed off that strength.

  The first time he gave her a gift, she’d given him an even greater one. A week after they had taken their first walk together, he had handed her a small bouquet of flowers, so uncharacteristically nervous that he’d made the mista
ke of holding it in his left hand. As she reached for the bouquet, she saw that hand, which he normally kept hidden in his pocket, saw the mangled knuckle and the skin that still hadn’t lost its reddish hue after many months. He saw her eyes on the missing finger, and he hurried to exchange the bouquet between his hands, but before he could do so, she took that hand in hers. Let her fingertips glide over his knuckles, tracing the bones of his wrist, all the while keeping those ice-blue eyes on his. If she had smiled or said something reassuring, it would have sound forced, wrong. She just looked at him. It froze him for a second, the fact that she hadn’t flinched, hadn’t recoiled, had wanted only to touch that one part of him. Then she thanked him for the flowers, when he felt he was the one who should be thanking her. They walked through town for the rest of the afternoon, she holding his left hand, which she had refused to release. Graham had known she was the woman he would marry, that she was someone who had felt her own pain and recovered from it, walked away new, and that with her he would do the same.

  Here they were two years later, and everything had come true. They had a daughter and another baby on the way. They had a house, and Graham had a good job and plenty of friends, men who would come by and sit on his front porch, or he on theirs, and smoke together after repairing someone’s fence or working on a roof or building a shed. Amelia, too, seemed to thrive in the new town, busily maintaining their home, helping new families get acquainted with Commonwealth, making friends easily. His life was finally one worth having.

  Graham sat up in bed after lying there restless for what must have been an hour, maybe more. It was the middle of the night and cold in the room as the blankets fell from his chest. Every time he had felt the languid arms of sleep ushering him in, he’d seen the face of the soldier before him, had seen the man’s eyes beseeching him, had felt the hook of the trigger pressing into his finger. It had been days now, and still the gunshots rang in his ears.

 

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