“We’re only protecting our health, Mr. Miller—I do apologize if that offends your sensibilities, but we’re doing what we have to do. If a German spy were to come up this road, we would be just as inhospitable to him as we’re being to you.”
“Only more so, I would hope.” Miller smiled thinly.
“Of course.”
Miller appeared willing to leave it at that, as Charles thought he saw the man turn as if to leave. But Hightower refused to let them off that easy.
“Look, we know you’re all just a bunch of damn agitators and reds anyway,” he said. “And I don’t like knowing you’re out here hiding while the rest of us are doing our part.”
“The only one agitating is you,” Charles said. “We’re minding our own business here, on our own land, and you’re trespassing.”
Graham took a step forward.
“Is that why you’re really here, Mr. Miller?” Charles asked. “You don’t care for the way we go about our lives, so you’ve taken it upon yourselves to frighten us out of it?”
“The way I feel about your town, Mr. Worthy, is irrelevant.” For the first time, Miller’s voice lost its finely polished veneer. “What is important is that we’re at war, and all the right-thinking people of this country are standing together.”
“We’re all proud Americans in this town,” Charles replied. “And I resent any implication otherwise.”
“You’re Americans standing alone, and you’re behaving quite suspiciously. We will be watching you, Mr. Worthy. We’ll protect our country and our families from any threat we find.”
“And we ours.”
Without bidding good day, Miller turned around and started walking down the hill, toward the autos they had stopped in front of the fallen tree. Winslow and Merriwhether followed, but Hightower and Bartrum seemed reluctant to do the same. They took a couple of steps backward but kept their eyes on Graham and Mo.
“If we ever come back, you better hope you have more than two guns out here,” Hightower said.
Graham shook his head. “Next time you won’t get this close.”
They glared at each other.
“Go back home, gentlemen,” Charles said. “Nurse your families. Get Timber Falls back on its feet. After the plague has passed, you’ll see that this has all been a misunderstanding.”
Miller was nearly in one of the autos by the time Hightower and Bartrum started descending the hill. Finally, there were the echoes of the doors slamming shut, the engines roaring to mechanical life, and the autos pulled away.
Charles, Graham, and Mo were silent as they listened to the sound of the tires on gravel receding slowly into the distance, until it had been displaced by the gentle sound of water falling from the heavy branches around them. Charles removed his gauze mask, the fresh air feeling colder on his damp cheeks.
He turned to the watchmen, their eyes showing concern above their handkerchiefs.
“You think those soldiers were spies?” Graham asked.
XV
The mill hummed beneath them and around them as they stood in Charles’s office. There weren’t enough chairs to seat them all, so they stood, the small room quickly growing warm.
Charles had called an emergency meeting of the town’s magistrates, the men who had been appointed to oversee any disputes in the town. There were a dozen in total, but they were short a few, the jacks stationed too far from the mill to be called in on short notice. It was only an hour after the confrontation. There were ten people in the room and the open doorway, among them Banes, Rankle, and Graham, who had sent someone else to stand watch with Mo so he could attend.
Rebecca was the only woman in the room. She had seen Charles and Mo hurrying into town moments ago through the school’s windows, right as she was dismissing her charges for the day. Although she was not a magistrate, she wasn’t about to be told to wait outside, not by Charles or anyone else foolish enough to try.
“A German spy?” she said incredulously after Charles had relayed Miller’s story to everyone in the room.
“That’s what they said,” Charles replied.
“If there’d been some kinda fight at the camp, that might explain why all these soldiers keep wandering out here,” someone said. “Maybe they were on the run from somebody?”
“I thought of that, too,” Charles said pensively. “But if that was the case, wouldn’t the second soldier have told us all that? He said there was a naval accident, that he was shipwrecked.”
“Maybe spies set off a bomb on the boat,” Banes said. “We haven’t exactly interrogated the soldier as to what happened. Did Miller say specifically how the men had been killed?”
Charles shook his head.
“We need to find out who this soldier is,” Rebecca said. She was standing in the middle of the crowd, not by Charles’s side. Rebecca felt particularly on edge, her jaw muscles tight, her limbs ready to lash out. “And we need to get Philip away from him.”
Charles held up a hand as if to calm her. Everyone else shifted on their feet. Most avoided looking at either husband or wife, not wanting to take sides. But Rankle glanced at Charles, then met Rebecca’s eyes. She had not spoken with him since the night she unburdened herself, confessing that she did not agree with her husband. His eyes looked sympathetic.
“I’m not inclined to believe anything Miller says,” Rankle said.
“Do you know him?” Charles asked.
“I know of him.” Rankle explained that Miller, though a resident of Timber Falls, had come to the aid of his fellow business leaders in Everett during the strike, when Rankle was with the Wobblies. The strikers had added Miller to their list of foes, as he had lent money and forgiven debts to some of the mill owners during their troubles, had rallied support for the Commercial Club and spoken out against agitators and reds.
“I don’t see why they would lie about this,” Charles said. “And why would they come so far if not for something serious? I think they do believe there’s a spy out here.”
“Has anyone else heard anything about spies?” someone asked. “Or sabotage at the army base?”
“No one’s heard anything about anything since the quarantine started,” Rebecca said sharply. She realized when she said it that she sounded critical of Charles, and was embarrassed. She told herself to be more cautious, to trust that the magistrates would make the right decisions, but her faith in them was dwindling.
Some of the men in that room had themselves committed acts of sabotage in the past, at Everett and elsewhere, destroying mill equipment during strikes. But when America had joined the war and the newspapers started warning of sabotage on the home front, the thought of German agents stealing into the country had seemed incomprehensible to them.
Not anymore. A spy could somehow break into a factory or mill, Rebecca supposed, and cause havoc there, hindering America’s ability to produce new fighter planes, new ships. Neither Charles nor the doctor had said anything about the soldier having an accent, but plenty of Americans were against the war. Their voices were silenced by the Sedition Act, but that only made their muzzled emotions burn more intensely. Perhaps this was someone who had family in Germany, Rebecca thought, or a more radical pacifist than herself.
“Didn’t you say the flu started at army bases, Doc?” another man asked. “Maybe spies brought it there. Maybe this guy has something to do with that.”
After an awkward pause, Banes said he didn’t see how something like the flu could be used as a weapon, not unless German scientists had made discoveries their American counterparts had not. It sounded as if Banes couldn’t decide whether he was being stubborn to ignore such possibilities or was allowing himself to be swept away with public hysteria by considering them.
“Philip hasn’t said anything that would lead us to believe he’s suspicious of the soldier, has he?” Banes asked.
“How could he?” Rebecca asked. “Even if he did think the man was a spy, he can’t shout that out to us without risking his safety. And
we told him not to write us any notes.”
A few seconds passed in silence. Rebecca felt more words pressing at her tongue. She tried to resist, but she had held back her opinions before and seen the result.
So she said flatly, “We need to get Philip out of there.”
“Doc said forty-eight hours,” Graham reminded her. “Still got two hours to go.”
Rebecca looked at Graham, surprised. He was obviously tired, his eyes red and his face strangely puffy. But she couldn’t understand his obstinacy, his apparent lack of concern for Philip. And how could Charles not want to free Philip immediately? Was he so afraid of appearing to go back on his word to the rest of the town? Was he confusing being stubborn with being noble?
“I think letting anyone out before forty-eight hours would be a mistake,” Banes said, adding his voice to the chorus.
Rebecca saw that they took comfort in the doctor’s advice. They didn’t want to do anything that would endanger them, endanger their families. Philip would just be an unfortunate casualty.
Rankle looked down at his boots, as if shamed by the accusation in her eyes.
“At six o’clock I’m going in to examine them,” Banes continued. “As per our plan.”
“But what if this fellow is a spy?” someone asked.
“I have no quarrel with Germany,” Rankle replied.
“If this man has been running around the country killing American soldiers and doing God knows what, then I do have a quarrel with him,” Charles countered.
Rankle paused. “He hasn’t tried to break out of there,” he said, “so he probably doesn’t have a gun or anything. I don’t see why he’d try and hurt Philip.”
His attempts at reassurance only angered Rebecca more. Hadn’t he felt this way when his family had disappeared, when no one in the world could offer any clues or theories on what had happened to his wife and son? There could be no lonelier feeling than when evil befell you and the world turned its back.
“There’s one thing we haven’t considered,” Charles said. “If he is a spy, then holding on to him implicates us. If the army is tracking him, what if his trail leads them here?”
“Then the men from Timber Falls will come back,” Rankle said.
“They can’t force their way in,” Graham said. “They have no right.”
Rankle tried to reason with his friend: “Graham, I think Miller’s part of the American Protective League. The APL’s deputized by the federal government, so they can come and go wherever they please, even arrest people. They’re the ones who helped round up most of the local Wobblies. And they’ve organized slacker raids, rounding up men who haven’t enlisted. I haven’t heard of any raids in Washington, but they’ve been happening all over.”
Silence for a moment.
“Maybe the soldier’s a deserter?” Banes ventured.
“If he was a deserter, Miller would have said so,” Charles said. “He wouldn’t need to make up some story about spies on top of that.”
“Unless this is just some other guy,” someone said. “Maybe there is a spy crawling around the woods, but it doesn’t mean this guy’s him.”
That hadn’t occurred to some of them, Rebecca could see. Suddenly, the men in the room were making more sustained eye contact with one another, as if realizing for the first time that there could be another intruder in the town. What if someone were plotting to break into Commonwealth, either to spread flu or to tamper with the mill? The guards were a perfectly good deterrent to anyone who tried to wander into the town, but surely they couldn’t repel someone who was determined.
“We’re putting an awful lot of stock in what Miller said,” Rankle pointed out. “The Protective League is rotten. They watch everybody: their neighbors, their so-called friends, their family. They’re the spies.”
“And what about the other soldier—the one from last week?” Banes asked. He avoided Graham’s eyes when he said it.
Charles ran his fingers through his hair, exhaled, and looked at his watch. “Here’s what I think we should do.” And he laid out his plan.
Rebecca did not agree with the plan, but most of the men in the room seemed to, so she did not speak out. She had been outvoted once again, succeeding only in revealing to everyone how alienated she had become from her own husband, her own town. She stood there, arms crossed, staring hard at the floor as the men filed out of the room.
The last to leave was Jarred Rankle, who paused to look back at her.
“It’ll all be over in a couple of hours,” he said. “I’m sure everything will be fine.”
“Then you share my husband’s certainty,” she replied ruefully. She looked up at him, this massive man filling the doorway. When he stood up against a wall, it looked like the wall was leaning on him for support. “Certainty doesn’t make one strong.”
“But having everyone stand together does.”
“Is this what togetherness feels like? It seems rather different, from where I’m standing.”
“Your family will be together soon.”
She wondered if she only imagined the faint stress on the word your, wondered if he was contrasting her plight with his. For a moment she thought he might step toward her, but instead he nodded and walked off.
It was dark as Graham approached the storage building, rifle in hand.
The doctor’s mention of the first soldier had not unnerved him—Graham had already thought of the dead man, but the memory now lacked its stinging effect. Because there was a new threat, he felt all the more focused on protecting the town, on assuring the magistrates didn’t make any foolish decisions. He’d made it clear that he would have preferred they just keep Philip and the soldier or spy locked away for a while longer. He felt bad for Philip, and he saw that the boy would be made a victim of the unusual circumstances, but it was the safest option for the town. Nonetheless, he could see that Rebecca would never allow that, and Banes seemed to be sticking to his story about the forty-eight hours. Graham had noticed a tremor in the doctor’s voice, however: uncertainty that the others had missed. All week Graham had alternated between being so tired he feared the world was racing past him, but then suddenly so alert and aware that he thought he could see the detail of every single branch in the forest before him, as if all the world’s secrets had been laid bare. It was the lack of sleep, he knew, causing his brain to work in fits and starts. Keep focusing, he told himself. After all those hours standing and seeing nothing, he felt in his bones that something was about to happen, something of dire importance.
XVI
The first thing Philip had thought that morning when he woke up was: how do I feel? He swallowed. No pain. No thickness in the back of the throat, no suffocating tightness. He sat up and his head did not throb. His chest did not hurt, his lungs did not burn. His ears did not ache or ring. He was not dizzy.
Morning, and I’m still healthy.
Poker for breakfast. Poker for dinner. Poker for supper. Philip and Frank had played poker for so long that Philip suspected there were certain twigs that had circulated between them a hundred times. When he closed his eyes, he saw aces, clubs, royalty.
“I say we burn these cards when they let us out,” Philip said.
Frank made a show of dropping the cards he had been shuffling. “We can stop. What time is it?”
“Five.”
“So we only got an hour to go?”
“Yeah. Doc Banes said this morning he’d come in at six o’clock.”
“But nobody’s said anything since. What if they’ve changed their minds?”
“They said six o’clock. They wouldn’t lie to me.”
Frank nodded. “Since it’s going to be night by then, I thought I might stay in town until the morning, if that’s all right.”
“If Doc Banes doesn’t say anything against it, maybe my parents will let you stay at our house. No one can give you a ride to the cantonment, though. If we left, we wouldn’t be allowed back in.”
“That’s all right. I
can make it.”
“How are you going to get there?”
“Anybody ’round here got a horse I could steal?” Frank smiled, but something about the way he said it made Philip wonder whether he really was joking.
“You going to be in trouble with the army for being away so long?”
“I don’t know. Never been away before.”
“Maybe it’ll turn out to be a good thing you got stuck here. Maybe you’ll miss the boat to France, and by the time they get around to the next one, the war’ll be over.” But then he felt stupid after saying it, for his childlike need to paint happy accents on an undeniably gloomy picture.
Frank looked away. “Let’s talk about something else, Philip. I’ll be getting all I can stand of the army by tomorrow. Let’s pretend there’s no war going on right now.”
The knock on the door came at quarter past six in the evening. Frank had asked Philip twice for the time, at 6:02 and 6:13, and he seemed increasingly anxious. At the sound of the knock, he jumped.
Philip started counting to sixty in his head, but before he got to ten, he heard Doc Banes’s voice: “Philip, I’m coming in.”
For the first time since Mo had trapped Philip inside two days ago, the door opened from the outside. Philip hadn’t realized how moved he’d be by seeing someone else stride into the building. Banes closed the door behind him, his medical case in his right hand.
As Banes entered the tenuous reach of the light from the lantern and the fireplace, Philip saw that he was wearing a gauze mask.
Philip and Frank were standing, tense, unsure what would happen next.
Banes nodded at the soldier, whom he was seeing for the first time. “I’m Dr. Banes. I thought I would examine Philip here first, Private, then move on to you.”
Frank said, “Yessir.” He stood there awkwardly, then sat back down on the dirty floor.
Philip grew embarrassed about the smell emanating from the cellar.
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