By two o’clock, Philip had compiled the absence reports from the other mill foremen, most of whom were as wary of his presence as the river chief had been. There was no word from the lumber camps, since the messengers hadn’t made it that far into the woods, but there was a total of seven river and mill men unaccounted for. Doc Banes, back in Charles’s office at noon to hear the report, shook his head.
“It moves fast.”
Banes asked for the men’s house numbers, and Philip looked them up in his account books, scribbling them on a sheet of paper. Banes grabbed the paper and his bag. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Tell the foremen that if anyone else appears ill, they’re to be sent home immediately. No one is to ‘tough anything out’ or ‘work through it,’ do you understand? If someone so much as sneezes, they’re sent home.”
Charles nodded.
“Philip, how well do you know Leonard or Yolen?” Banes asked.
“I don’t,” Philip said. “I recognize their names, but I don’t think I’ve crossed paths with them lately.”
“How about the men on the absentee list?”
Philip pointed out a couple of the names, men he’d met through Graham. “But I haven’t spoken to any of them in days—not since before the quarantine started.”
Banes pocketed the list.
“How could men I haven’t even been near be getting sick, and I’m not even sick myself?” Philip asked, but the doctor didn’t have time to speculate. Banes simply reminded them to keep track of anyone else who fell ill, and with that, he was out the door. All those late nights reading his journals and Dr. Pierce’s letters were, alas, going to be put to use.
Philip slumped in his chair. Was he really the cause of the sickness in town? After enduring the glares of the river drivers, he felt trapped in his office, afraid to venture out and hear others’ accusations. Worse, he feared that those accusations were justified.
He sipped his water, checking his throat again. He still had no symptoms. But would that soon change, possibly within the hour?
He kept his head down as he worked at the books. He tried not to touch anything that wasn’t on his desk. He tried not to speak, not to breathe. He didn’t want to make anyone sick, and he didn’t want to catch anything from anyone else. He wished he could close himself off, a personal quarantine within the quarantined town.
Suddenly, the previous days’ captivity didn’t seem like such a terrible thing.
Jarred Rankle was walking home from the mill when he noticed Graham a few feet before him. Jarred called out Graham’s name twice to get his attention. “Where you coming from?” he asked.
“Storage building,” Graham answered. They continued walking as they spoke, each man hesitant to prolong his stay in that busy road. They sensed the fear in the town, in the closed windows and drawn curtains and in the wind that carried God knew what scourge.
“You hear about Leonard and Yolen?” Rankle asked.
“And the other guys who never showed up at work. Anything new on that?”
“I don’t know about them, but three of my guys went home in the middle of their shifts. Started coughing like crazy, said they could barely stand up.” Rankle paused. “Came from out of nowhere.”
All day Graham had stared at that building, and the building hadn’t twitched, and nothing inside it had moved, yet things were happening behind his back. The flu was sneaking past him, the dangers invisibly pooling at his feet.
They reached the street corner where they would need to part. They paused briefly, each conscious of Doc’s warnings about lingering in public places. All around them, the tired men moved with wary purpose. Everyone wanted to get home, to close his doors. That was the advice the foremen had passed along—get lots of sleep and eat well. Avoid anyone who’s sick. Stay home if you fall ill, and have someone notify the doctor. Already the men were avoiding eye contact, anxious to escape one another’s presence.
Graham and Rankle were met by Mo, who hesitated before stopping to greet them.
“How’s our spy?” Mo asked Graham.
“I didn’t see him.” Graham had been guarding the building with Douglas, a mop-headed blond fellow who had built many of the houses in town. Douglas had volunteered to be the one who went into the building to deliver the soldier’s food, and Graham sure hadn’t fought him on it. Even though Douglas wore a mask when he went in, and even though Doc Banes had vetted the soldier’s health, Graham still didn’t like the idea of getting close to the man while people in town were coming down with flu. He couldn’t understand why other people didn’t see what was so obvious to him: Doc Banes had been wrong. Quarantining Philip and the soldier for forty-eight hours had not been enough.
“I think more men are going to be sick tomorrow,” Rankle said in a somewhat confidential tone. “I think things will get a whole lot worse before they get better.”
“We don’t know it’s the flu yet,” Mo said hopefully. “Doc hasn’t said—”
“Doc’s an old man,” Graham interrupted in a low voice, looking at the legion of men walking past him, the dirty and stubbled cheeks, the furrowed brows. “Let’s be straight with each other here—it’s flu. The flu found us. The question is: what are we going to do about it?”
“Doc Banes told us to—” Mo saw from the dismissive look in Graham’s red eyes that he was wasting his breath.
“It’s the spy,” Graham said, keeping his voice down so the passersby wouldn’t overhear. “Things were fine till he got here.”
Mo looked at Rankle, perhaps hoping he would disagree. Rankle considered something, then said, “We can’t let him go, Graham. Charles is right: if anyone else caught him afterward and found out he’d been here, it’d be bad for us. It’d look like we harbored a soldier killer. The army would take over our town before we knew what hit us.”
Graham looked away. Much of the past day had passed in a haze, the fatigue wearing away at the spaces beyond his vision, pulling the edges closer together, darkening them. But he suddenly felt energized. He would not be caught helpless; there was a solution.
“He’s in there, and he’s…he’s breathing the stuff out on us.” Graham struggled for the right words to convey what he thought was an obvious point. “He brought it into town with him, and now it’s just coming out of him. The longer he stays here, the worse it’ll get.”
Rankle coughed, and Graham and Mo looked at him in alarm. After a second cough, he shook his head at them. “I’m not sick, fellas. Sawdust’s been getting to me.”
Mo said, “If it was the spy’s fault, then Philip would’ve gotten sick, right?”
“I didn’t say I understood how this all works,” Graham admitted. “I ain’t a doctor, and even though Banes is, I bet he barely understands any better’n we do. Everybody’s calling it the Spanish flu, but for all we know, it’s some kind of German poison or something. I don’t know—all I’m saying is…” He paused, looking Mo in the eye, then Rankle. “You know that guy has something to do with this.”
Silence. The ranks of passing millworkers had thinned, and now only a few stragglers passed them on the road. The first spittle of an approaching rain began to fall.
Rankle said, “Yeah. I think so, too.” It was clear: no one had been sick before the soldier had come to town, and now contagion was rampant.
Mo didn’t know what he thought, tell the truth, but he gave a sort of nod crossed with a shrug.
“So what do we do about it?” Graham asked.
“Graham,” Rankle said, his gray eyes steadily aimed at his friend, “we just gotta hold tight and hope things turn out okay.”
“You don’t have any family that can get sick, Jarred.”
Rankle squared his shoulders. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not taking any stupid risks, Graham. I’m just trying to keep you from taking any.”
Graham looked away again. “I’m not taking any risks. I just don’t plan on standing around while everyone around me starts dying.”
“
One person has died. Even if more people do get sick, we don’t know anyone’s going to die.”
Rankle and Graham looked at each other evenly.
“Wish this town hadn’t dried up,” Mo said to break the tension as the rain became steady. “I could use a drink.”
But then he seemed to remember too late that both his companions had given up drink after their past tragedies. He stammered a bit, a brief and unintelligible mumble.
“Yeah,” Rankle sighed, not seeming to mind. “Me, too.”
“I should head home, fellas,” Graham said. “I have to see to Amelia and the baby.”
“All right,” Rankle said, eying his friend with concern. “Take care of yourself.”
“You two both.” Graham nodded at them, then walked off.
It was dark when Elsie flipped the OPEN/CLOSED sign in the front window, her tired eyes reflected back at her.
The shelves in Metzger’s General Store had never looked so barren. A couple hours ago she had helped her father bring up everything from the cellar, so whatever sat in the aisles was all that was left. At this rate, the store would be emptied in less than a week.
“I think everyone knows we’re running low,” Alfred said, apparently reading his daughter’s thoughts, “so they’re hurrying to buy what they can before it’s too late.”
“Do we have much at home?”
“We’ll get by.”
At the desk, Flora coughed again. She looked dazed, her posture less commanding than usual. She coughed again, cupping her hand in front of her mouth. After she stopped, Flora left her hand by her face, her fingers caressing the side of her nose, tracing the rim of her eye sockets.
“Are you feeling well, Mother?”
After a second, Flora responded, “No, dear, I don’t believe I am.”
V
Philip let out a long sigh, exhausted by his first day back in the world. It was after dinner and he was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his fingers laced behind his head. As strange and terrible as that day had been, he found himself thinking neither about the flu nor about Frank. He was thinking about Elsie.
He wanted to thank her for the letter she’d left him at the storage building, for the bright light she’d shone on his dark stay in the prison. But he didn’t know how he would say this, even as Frank’s words about kissing her rang in his ears. She had written that she didn’t blame him for letting Frank into town, but would she change her mind when she learned that the flu had been let loose in Commonwealth? Philip was too afraid to find out, which was why he hadn’t ventured over to pay a visit to the Metzgers.
There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” he said, sitting up.
In walked Laura, carrying a small satchel. “Hi,” she said, closing the door behind her. Then she reached into the satchel and took out two of the fighter-pilot books, one of which Philip himself hadn’t read. He would never read it, he had already decided.
“Thought I’d bring these back,” she said. Philip shrugged, then rose from the bed and opened his closet door. After the books were safely buried beneath a baseball glove, Philip resumed his position on the bed. Laura sat on the edge.
“Everybody at school’s scared,” she told him. “Mom’s even thinking about closing it down for a while.”
“Are any kids sick?”
She shook her head. “But I heard Mom and Dad talking about which men from the mill are sick, and three of them have kids at school. The kids could catch it from them.”
They were silent for a short while.
“Did people at school talk about me while I was…gone?” Philip asked.
“Sure, a little bit. It was pretty big news and all.”
“Were people angry at me?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“For letting the soldier in.”
Laura shrugged. “I don’t think anybody blamed you.”
“But now people are getting sick.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Thanks for the cornbread while I was in there, by the way.”
“Welcome.”
“Frank says you’re a good cook.”
“So is he really a spy?”
Philip looked at her. “You aren’t supposed to know about that.”
“I can keep secrets.”
“You keeping any other secrets I should know about?” He was thinking of Elsie.
She raised an eyebrow mockingly. “So tell me about the spy.”
Philip thought for a moment. “I don’t think he’s a spy.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause he’s a nice guy. He’s just a carpenter from Montana. He misses his girlfriend.”
“Maybe he tricked you. Spies are devious—that’s a requirement for the job.”
Philip didn’t like to think he’d been deceived. “I just don’t think he is.”
“Did he have an accent?”
Philip just rolled his eyes.
“Well, did he sound like maybe he was trying to disguise one?”
“No. But he did ask me if I knew of any good places to hide bombs, and he went on and on about how he loves sauerkraut.”
“How am I supposed to know? Just because someone’s a German spy doesn’t mean he’s actually from Germany. Maybe he’s just an American who loves Germany or hates America. Maybe he has relatives in Germany and he’s more loyal to them than to people over here.”
“Elsie has relatives in Germany. Should we put her parents in prison, too?”
Laura sighed impatiently and got up. “You’re impossible sometimes,” she said disgustedly as she headed out the door.
“Good night, fräulein.”
She closed the door just short of a slam.
Philip wished that joking with his sister meant things could be perfectly normal again. But people in town were sick, and Frank was locked in a cellar. Philip wanted to see him, to ask him more about who he was and where he’d come from—to exonerate him or to learn something that would cast new light on Charles’s suspicions. Maybe Frank, guilt-stricken for deceiving Philip, would burst into tears and confess everything. Or maybe he’d be dead from flu in the morning. If Frank were to die, Philip would never know the truth about him. But if Frank died, maybe Philip would be next. Philip swallowed to see if his throat was sore.
He fell asleep with the light on. When he woke up in the middle of the night, he was so disoriented by the bright light that he thought he’d emerged into some transitory world where souls prepared for their final journey. Even after he had turned off the light, he lay awake for hours, staring into the darkness.
VI
Yolen was blue the next morning.
It had started in his fingertips, Jeanine told Doc Banes when he arrived. She had noticed it the night before when she had tried to give Yolen something to drink. He had fumbled at the glass and dropped it, pieces shattering across the floor. When she woke up this morning, her husband’s condition had worsened: his temples were dark blue as well. The blue smear had spread to his cheeks and neck, and his lips, too, were the color of the sky minutes after sunset, as were his ears. He coughed violently as Doc Banes inspected him, nearly dislodging the thermometer.
His temperature was unchanged. That it hadn’t increased was the only good news.
Banes knew that Yolen was drowning, slowly suffocating as his fluid-filled lungs failed to extract enough oxygen from the air around him. Banes had never seen such a thing. Even after he’d read about this in Dr. Pierce’s letters, he had scarcely believed it possible. But here it was staring at him, eyes wide and helpless.
Banes put his hand on Yolen’s forehead, trying to be reassuring. Yolen was disoriented and foggy; his mind could not escape from the blaze immolating his body. Banes told him to sleep.
Banes and Jeanine closed the door and went into the dining room, where she slumped into a battered wooden chair.
“Isn’t there anything else you can do? What do those blue spots mean?”
Banes talked a bit about what caused the blue spots without telling her they might herald death.
“And why are people guarding my house? I’m a prisoner in my own home!” She stood up suddenly, as if prepared to fight Banes or whatever demon had cast its imprecation on her door.
“We can’t let this spread through the town, Jeanine. It isn’t you they’re keeping in here, it’s the flu.”
Even as he said it, Banes realized that the need to guard this house or any other had already dissolved. As the previous day had worn on, he’d been forced to acknowledge that the flu was already spreading uncontrollably. Soon there would be more infected homes than the town could possibly quarantine.
“So I’m just supposed to stay in here until my husband dies?” Jeanine’s eyes were tearing up, her momentary anger already displaced by fear. She had noticed that this time the doctor had put on the mask before he’d knocked on the front door. He was wearing it still, hiding behind it even as he tried to reassure her.
Banes said they shouldn’t give up on Yolen yet. As bad as this flu could be, plenty of people pulled through. Leonard had died, but he’d had no one to take care of him. Jeanine could be the difference for her husband. Was there anything she needed, anything Banes could send over?
She shook her head and sat back down, staring at the floor and crying.
People should be here, Doc knew. Neighbors, family. Nurses. But the women who ordinarily served as his nurses in extreme times had all steadfastly refused to do so now—they didn’t want to risk bringing flu home to their families. And the neighbors who should be cooking Jeanine’s meals and visiting to keep her spirits strong were hiding as well, peeking at her house through closed blinds and praying that the scourge would not wander across their yard. Jeanine was as alone as her husband.
Most likely she would soon be alone without him, Banes knew.
Banes told her he would be back that evening. She didn’t reply as he walked through the front door, past the guard with the gun. It was Deacon, who had been out there all night silently staring at those covered windows, wondering with a detached curiosity why the devil had chosen to strike this particular house.
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