His movement stirred Amelia, who rolled onto her other side so she was facing him, and wrapped an arm across his stomach. She muttered something, and after trying to figure out what it was, he realized she was asleep, stringing together disjointed syllables in some elfin language that made sense only in the dream she was swimming through. The surprising amount of moonlight shining through the window illuminated her face, painting streaks of glowing whiteness around her cheekbones and eyebrows, outlining her chin and the earlobe visible through her hair. Graham saw how other men started to quietly disparage the appearance of their wives over the years, but he still was amazed at her beauty, amazed she was his. For the first few months, whenever he woke in the middle of the night, he would lean over and kiss her lips or forehead before falling back to sleep; he needed to express this gentleness that, he felt, no one thought existed in a man who wore such a saturnine expression.
Now he was plotting escape from the bed, maybe to pace in the kitchen or stare out the window until his thoughts calmed, but the arm she had cast across his chest stopped him. He didn’t want to risk waking her, to deprive her of the sleep that had become so cruelly elusive to him. The baby was at last letting Amelia rest a bit, and he didn’t want to interfere with whatever dreams were giving her that serene expression. So he leaned back into the bed and, rolling onto his side, put his arm around her, the two of them lying in a half-embrace. His hand was on her hip, and he felt the enticing fullness of her body beneath the thin nightgown, felt himself becoming excited in his confused and weary state. He kissed her on the forehead and told her he loved her, softly enough for her not to hear it. He closed his eyes and willed that there be no other world except this bed, at least for the next few hours, at least until sunrise.
When the morning whistle woke him, he saw that he was alone. From the backyard, he heard the sound of wood being chopped.
He had been granted only random snatches of sleep, like crumbs to a starving man. But now that he was awake, he forced himself to move. After throwing on some clothes and quickly washing his face, he walked down the stairs and past the crib—Millie was asleep, miraculously—and into the backyard.
Another swing of the ax and Amelia halved a log. Beside her was a stack of wood Graham had brought there the previous day.
“Morning,” he said, startling her from behind.
“Morning,” she said with a short smile. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I thought I told you not to do that,” he said to her, motioning toward the ax that stood in the piece of wood, the handle held aloft by the embedded blade.
“You said you didn’t think I should do it.” She was slightly out of breath, her forehead damp with sweat. “That’s not the same thing.”
“Think of the baby,” he said.
“Graham, I cut wood for months with Millie. I’m sure I can manage.”
He pulled the ax from the log. “I don’t want to be taking chances we don’t need to be taking.”
He almost added that she wasn’t the same as she had been then, that she was nearly twenty pounds thinner and more frail, but he didn’t know how to say it without making it sound like a reproach. They had already been through that after the stillbirth—her guilt, his insistence that she was not responsible—but everything had come out wrong somehow, left her feeling worse than before. So he simply gave her a patient but hard look, one that sought to end the conversation.
She started to walk toward the house, saying, “As tired as you’ve been, you’re liable to cut your own foot off.”
He let the remark pass. Alone outside, the air cold around his underdressed body, he lifted the ax and swung away, easily splitting a log. He could do this with his eyes shut, they both knew. He could do it blindfolded and dizzy, and still he’d never so much as nick his boot.
But the ax did feel heavier than usual in his hand, his breaths deeper.
When he went back inside, Amelia was cooking breakfast while the baby lay in her crib, babbling airy nonsense. Three half-knit projects—a sweater, a scarf, and a hat—lay across a chair. With Millie growing as fast as she was and with trips to the shops in Timber Falls a temporary impossibility, Amelia needed to have clothes ready for winter. Some neighbors and friends had lent them some baby clothes, but they never seemed to be enough.
Graham walked up to her and kissed her cheek. “Still got both feet.”
“And you still look tired,” she said to his heavy lids, to his red eyes, to the marks where his fumbling hands had cut himself shaving the day before.
“Just waking up.”
“I wish you wouldn’t stand guard every waking hour, Graham. It’s not good.”
“Someone has to,” he said.
“There were plenty of other men in this town, last time I checked.” The barest trace of a smile softened her words.
“There are. And a lot of them aren’t doing their part.”
“I especially don’t like you being out there at night with Deacon. The man’s crazy.”
“He’s harmless. Barely says a word.”
“My point—” she began, but he interrupted.
“I’ll get more men to volunteer. That’ll leave me with less shifts.”
She nodded to that, not fully satisfied but aware that she’d at least won a concession. They sat down at the table and ate in silence punctuated by occasional babble from Millie. Amelia had been with Graham long enough to know that there were different kinds of silence: the peaceful silence of contentment, the amazed silence of love returned, the reverential silence of new fatherhood, the preoccupied silence of concern, the aching silence of regret. She knew that even though he had barely spoken of the dead soldier, he had been staring at the man for days now. Graham was afraid the dead soldier would come back somehow, afraid more dead soldiers would rise up against the town, corpses exhaling pestilential fumes. The man in the storage building was just another dead soldier to Graham, and he was terrified and determined to chase him back to the grave. Amelia hated that her husband felt the obligation to fight every last demon on his own, and she wanted to help him, but neither her silence nor her kind words nor her amorous movements seemed to engage him. This would pass, she had finally decided. It was the only conclusion that made her feel more than helpless.
“Do you think Philip’s all right?” she said to him after they had finished eating and he was preparing to go.
Graham didn’t turn around. “Charles says he is.”
When he had first told her what happened with Philip and the second soldier, she could barely believe it. She’d expressed concern for their friend, and he’d stalked away. Later that night, he had held her and said what she knew was an apology: he had told her he felt bad for Philip, too, but they needed to protect the town. He had held her in a way that showed he feared his own coldness.
“Just…tell Philip we’re thinking about him,” she said, thinking it was a silly message to send but not knowing what other sentiment to express.
“He knows,” Graham said. “I’ll be back for supper.” He opened the door and closed it quietly behind him.
XIV
The alarm spread quickly.
Charles had been sitting in his office at eleven in the morning, trying to determine how long the town could survive under quarantine. If it really was true that cities and towns across the country had closed down their meeting places and shuttered all their businesses, then the mill’s circumstances were not unique. Of course, if Philip or the soldier became sick and somehow passed the flu on to others in town, then Commonwealth would lose its reason for remaining closed off to the world. But Charles did his best not to consider that. That night, at six o’clock, Banes would go into the storage room and perform checkups. Assuming Philip and the soldier were still healthy, Philip would sleep that night in his bed at home.
Charles’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on his office door. When he looked up, he saw Mo walking in uninvited.
“Yes?” Charles asked, put
ting down his thick reading glasses.
“There are men from Timber Falls trying to get into town,” Mo said urgently. “They say they won’t leave unless they’ve spoken to you.”
Mo explained that he and Graham had been at the post that morning and had refused entry to the men, who had driven to town in two autos. Mo said they seemed polite so far but were firm about not leaving until they saw Charles Worthy. The recent misadventure with the second soldier had led the guards to keep a horse at the post, and the sweat on Mo’s brow suggested he’d galloped the whole way here.
Charles hurried to his carriage and rode behind Mo, who sped on his horse.
It had rained earlier that morning, and tree boughs hung heavy under the weight of the water. The carriage wheels left deep impressions in the wet earth as Charles rolled past the last of the houses and around the final bend.
Mo had already dismounted and was standing beside Graham at the post; both of them held their rifles pointed at the sky. Standing about twenty yards away were five men. The man in front wore a derby and a dark suit, not an expensive one but still fine enough to make him appear out of place in the woods. Charles recognized him but could not recall his name. Standing a bit behind was Lionel Winslow, scion of the mill-owning Winslows who all but ran Timber Falls. Lionel was young but quickly becoming the public face for the family firm as his old man retreated into senescence. His suit was dirty at the knees, most likely from his climb over the tree that blocked the road. Beside Winslow was J. B. Merriwhether, a quiet banker the Worthy mill had employed until they decided his obsequiousness did not rival his brains. J.B. looked uncomfortable, shifting on his feet. The two other men Charles did not recognize: one had a round, well-shaven, incarnadine face, and the other, a taller man with an equally red beard, was obviously a jack or millworker. These two looked more truculent than the others, closer to anger.
As Charles descended from his carriage, he remembered the advice Banes had given him regarding strangers—advice that Graham and Mo had apparently forgotten. He reached into his pocket and took out a gauze mask, fitting it over his nose and mouth. Upon seeing this, Graham and Mo each tied a handkerchief around their nose and mouth, taking turns so they wouldn’t have to lower their rifles at the same time.
Graham had scanned every man in search of firearms and concluded that no one had anything on display but that any and all of them could be carrying something.
“You have a cold way of greeting people, Mr. Worthy,” the man in front said. “Doesn’t make a gentleman feel too welcome.”
“I apologize if it seems rude to you, Mr.—”
“Joseph Miller.” The man touched the brim of his cap.
“Mr. Miller, but times being what they are, we need to protect our town.”
Miller introduced the two men Charles did not know as Skip Bartrum, Timber Falls sheriff, and the foreman Nathan Hightower. He added, “We’re not accustomed to having guns pointed at us.”
Charles smiled slightly. “They’re not pointed at you.”
“But your man there tells me if we were to walk much closer, they would be.”
“Unfortunately, that’s the case. The sign you passed explained things—this town is unaffected by the influenza, and it’s our intention to keep it that way. We mean no disrespect to you gentlemen, but we know how many people in Timber Falls and the surrounding towns have the Spanish flu and are dying from it. Until the epidemic has passed, no one can enter this town.”
“Well, it is a free country.” Miller spoke calmly, almost playfully.
“But it’s private property. In fact, you’ve been standing on private property ever since you turned around the bend there. I and my fellows here own everything you’re looking at, and it’s our right to determine who can enter and who cannot. In ordinary times, I’d be honored to give you a tour of Commonwealth, but circumstances are what they are.”
“The hell kind of a town is this?” Hightower said angrily.
Charles felt Graham and Mo stiffen beside him, but he paid the remark no heed. If he’d cared about the opinions other men held about him or about Commonwealth, he never would have made it this far.
“And why exactly have you gentlemen decided to venture out here?” Charles asked.
“We thought the fine people of this town might like to buy some Liberty Bonds,” Miller said. “It seems you’ve been overlooked by the past drives.”
“Well, regrettably, we won’t be able to get close enough to conduct such transactions. In better times, perhaps,” Charles replied. “But you seem a rather large group to be selling Liberty Bonds. I would think one or two salesmen would have sufficed.”
“Maybe we’re just curious citizens, heard about the strange way you were conducting yourselves out here,” Miller continued in a soft tone. Charles couldn’t tell if Miller was trying to defuse the situation or if he was being patronizing. “These are troubling times, Mr. Worthy, and we like to know what’s happening in our backyards.”
“This is not your backyard.”
“Well, we are neighbors, in a sense. Far as I know, Timber Falls is the closest town to this one, so we see it as our job to keep informed about what’s transpiring here.”
“We’re only trying to stay healthy, Mr. Miller, so that we can keep working. We’ve heard that Timber Falls and others have been hit so hard that you’ve had to close businesses. If we had to do something like that, as a new mill with little margin for error, we would fall on hard times indeed.”
“We’ve heard some things about your mill,” Winslow spoke up. “Heard you have some mighty strange ways of doing business out here.”
“I haven’t offered any opinion on how your family runs its mills, Mr. Winslow,” Charles snapped back.
Miller gave Winslow a quick look, apparently considering such a remark off the subject.
“But walling yourselves off from the rest of the world at a time like this—that’s not very Christian, is it?” Miller asked.
“Don’t talk to me about Christian,” Charles said. “Christian has nothing to do with this. The flu does not discriminate. It’s taking everyone in its path, and that’s why we aim to keep you off ours.”
Charles’s nerves were at attention. With his gauze mask and his arms folded before him, he knew he must look strange, knew that Graham and Mo with their handkerchiefs and rifles looked more like train robbers than noble protectors. Ruefully, he realized that to an uninformed observer, the visitors would seem the more benevolent group.
Miller fixed his gaze on Graham. “You look like a healthy young man. I don’t suppose you’ve enlisted?”
Graham rewarded him with no reply other than a steely-eyed stare.
“There are no slackers in this town,” Charles answered for Graham. “All the young men have enlisted.”
“It would be a shame if we found out anyone in this town was dodging the draft, Mr. Worthy,” Miller said. “You want to be law-abiding in a time like this.”
Graham’s fingers dug into the rifle’s handle.
“We are law-abiding,” Charles replied. “And you also know, gentlemen, that the draft has been suspended on account of the flu. The same reason why we’re closing our doors to you, and to anyone else, until such time as it’s safe to greet strangers again. Once that’s occurred and the draft is back on, then anyone in this town who’s come of age in the meantime will show up at the enlistment office bright and early. You have my word.”
“That’s not worth much,” Winslow scoffed, quietly enough to seem offhand but loud enough to be heard.
“You got something to say, you step to the front and say it, buddy,” Graham challenged him.
“I’ll say this,” Hightower said. “My sons didn’t die in France so you slackers could hole yourselves up and live off the fat of the land.”
“‘Fat of the land’?” Charles uttered a short laugh, then spoke in even tones. “We’ve taken the worst plot anyone could have asked for and are making it work through the sweat of
our labor.”
Hightower was unconvinced. “My sons didn’t die so you could—”
“We didn’t kill your sons,” Graham interrupted. “German army did. You got a quarrel with them, you can head over there yourself. Leave us out of it.”
Enraged, Hightower took a step forward. Bartrum placed a stern hand on his shoulder and muttered something in his ear, restraining him. But barely. Hightower stood there and seethed, his eyes boring into Graham’s.
“Funny you should mention Germans, young man,” Miller said. “You see, all the right-thinking towns in this area have been awfully stirred up by what happened at Fort Jenkins a few days ago.”
He let that dangle until Charles admitted, “We haven’t been reading the papers.”
“Three soldiers were killed by German spies,” Miller said. “The spies got away, and they’re probably looking for a safe place to hide until the search is off.” He made a show of looking from left to right, slowly, at the thick woods surrounding them. “I wonder where Heinie spies might hide.”
Charles was knocked off guard, and his thoughts raced: was Philip locked up with a German agent? There had been much discussion about spies in the newspapers and magazines over the past few months; the Metzgers had closed their shop in Everett and moved to Commonwealth in part because they had tired of the harassment over their German surname, the increasingly dangerous suspicions. But this was the first time Charles had heard an accusation about an honest-to-God spy in their midst, and it chilled him. After a couple of breaths, he shook his head, hoping to show Miller he would not be swayed by strangers spreading rumors. “First we’re not buying enough Liberty Bonds, and then we’re not enlisting, and now we’re harboring spies? I suppose we’re also responsible for the assassination of Ferdinand?”
Miller was cool, keeping his eyes on Charles. “My question is a fair one, Mr. Worthy. This is an isolated community. If I were looking to hide from the army, this would be an awfully attractive destination. And you do seem to be hiding something.”
The Last Town on Earth Page 21