“May I see your enlistment papers, please?” Bartrum said as his men hung around him, snow draping the air behind them.
Gerry shook his head, confused. “What papers?” His voice was scratchy and weak, like that of a man who had not spoken in days. Then he coughed into one of his hands, and J.B. realized he wasn’t just ugly, he was sick.
The flu had abated somewhat in Timber Falls, at long last. Many were still sick, but death was no longer commonplace, which was how Miller had been able to wrangle enough healthy and strong-willed patriots for the raid. If not for the flu, they would have done this two weeks ago.
But here in Commonwealth, J.B. was learning, the flu was still strong.
Bartrum made a loud exhalation, feigning annoyance with an air of practice. “Did you enlist for the army, sir?”
Gerry stood speechless. He looked at Bartrum’s badge and considered, but he clearly wasn’t used to being spoken to this way. “Who’s asking?”
“Skip Bartrum, Timber Falls sheriff.”
Gerry’s eyebrows shifted. “You ain’t sheriff of my town.”
Bartrum’s expression was unchanged. “We’re with the American Protective League, smart guy, and that makes us deputized wherever our boots should take us. And unless you have some papers to show us, you are under arrest for failing to enlist, for shirking your obligation to your country, and for being a yellow-bellied bastard.”
Gerry finally seemed to understand the trouble he was in when two of the men sidled up beside him. They were both as big as he was, and he was not at his best. J.B. stayed outside, nervous at the escalating tone.
“Gerry?”
The men looked into the house and saw a woman nearly as tall as her husband. She had broad shoulders, a full bosom, and a mean face that made the deputies grateful they were there for her husband and not her.
Gerry didn’t reply, so she walked up beside him. She glared at Bartrum—if his badge impressed her, she didn’t show it. “What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry to say, ma’am, your husband did not enlist for the draft,” Bartrum replied. “He is under arrest.”
He nodded to the two men, who clamped their hands on Gerry’s forearms and started leading him off the porch. Gerry was still too stunned to do anything but follow, and he coughed again, this time unable to catch it with his hands and instead spraying it on Bartrum’s chest.
“You can’t do this!” Pauline Timlin screamed out at them after a moment’s shock. “He’s a sick man! He’s been in bed all week!”
“Rest assured, there are cots in the Timber Falls jail,” Bartrum said with a smile as he followed his men and their captive.
The smile reminded J.B. that he was supposed to feel good about this. After all those days of mourning, of being helpless to stop the flu from ravaging his family and his town, finally there was something he could do, a wrong he could right. There were slackers in this town, and he would damn well help jail every last one of them.
Inside the house, the three Timlin boys, aged three to nine, arrayed themselves in the doorway in differing degrees of undress. Then their mother screamed and chased after Bartrum, slugging him in the arm.
“That’s enough!” the sheriff shouted at her, rubbing his surprisingly sore forearm. “Get back with your family, ma’am, or we’ll cart you off, too!”
But after he turned back around to watch the men load Gerry into one of the trucks, the back door of which Miller had helpfully opened, Pauline let loose a wordless howl and charged forward, her outstretched hands aimed at the back of Bartrum’s shoulders. As J.B. stood in amazement, one of the other men interceded, catching her midway, using all his strength to block her charge. He managed to step forward, slinging her onto the ground. Pauline landed roughly on her backside, cushioned only slightly by the growing pillow of snow.
The younger Timlin boys started crying.
Gerry, enraged at seeing his wife so mistreated, lashed out at his captors. He managed to shake off the two men who had been leading him toward the truck, but before he could get any farther, Hightower socked him in the gut. The punch seemed to carry all the weight of Hightower’s recent pain, all of the agony of his dead sons. Gerry doubled over, gasping and dropping to one knee. Within a few seconds he had been thrown into the back of the truck, wheezing.
Bartrum unholstered his revolver. The gun was pointed only at the ground, but it was threatening nonetheless. “Tie his hands,” he told the men.
J.B. didn’t like violence but he remembered Bartrum’s instructions: they would need to quash any resistance as roughly as possible to discourage anyone from following suit. There were many more houses to check.
The oldest Timlin boy, Donny, ran to help his mother up. As the men tied up Gerry, Bartrum gave Pauline a calm and steady look, then walked to the truck.
“Go run to Mr. Worthy’s,” Pauline whispered into her son’s ear. “Tell him he needs to get over here—now.”
Donny ran.
Not every house in town was occupied. As the flu had stretched on and food supplies had dwindled, a number of families and single men had abandoned the town, running from starvation and from the flu. They left despite the fact that Charles Worthy still owed them for their labor the past few weeks, despite the fact that they had once willingly fled from the same towns where they were now returning. But this exodus had not been as large as might have been expected, as so many had become too stricken to travel. Although many knocks were answered by silence, there were still plenty of houses for Bartrum’s men to raid.
There was less coughing in the Worthy house that morning. Rebecca was putting water on the stove for tea when she saw an unusual sight: Philip walking into the kitchen.
“Well, hello there,” she said, smiling. This was the farthest Philip had walked since his first day with the flu, when he had wandered over to Graham’s in a delirium.
He smiled back, looking weak but overjoyed to be standing there, to be coming back to life. She asked him how he felt, and he said hungry. An auspicious sign. She began to heat oatmeal for him, and he sat down at the table.
“It feels good to move around,” he said slowly. He seemed to be remembering how to talk, his tongue awkward, his body stumbling its way through the most basic movements. He had been in bed for ten days, they’d told him the previous night, when he’d been well enough to sit up and carry on a conversation.
He had wanted to walk around the house then, but his parents had asked him to stay in bed a bit more, to continue resting. They did not tell him that his recovery was unexpected. Doc Banes had leveled with Charles and Rebecca halfway through the illness: he did not think Philip would survive. The symptoms and their severity were following the same pattern as those of the men and women who had already succumbed. Philip’s flu had begotten pneumonia, and he was having trouble breathing. When Banes gave his dismal diagnosis to Charles, he was expecting that Philip’s lips and fingers would be blue the next day and that he’d be a corpse the day after that.
But the good doctor had been wrong. Philip hung at the threshold for so long that his parents weren’t sure if this was just the devil trying to wring every last drop of suffering from his victim, or if Philip was actually recovering, albeit gradually. Days later, here Philip was, sitting at the kitchen table, eating oatmeal. Rebecca didn’t believe in miracles, but the vision before her left her wondering how to classify such an event.
Philip had never been heavy, but he’d lost even more weight, his jaw and cheekbones more prominent than before, his skin the color of stones at the bottom of a river. He looked like he had emerged from a grave, not a sickbed.
Rebecca carried another bowl of oatmeal past him, heading toward the stairs. “I’ll be right back. I have to take this to Laura.”
“Is Laura still sick?” His voice was gaining strength, but it sounded small beside the hugeness of this question.
“She’s much better,” Rebecca said. “She’s worried about Elsie.”
Rebecca stopped
, wondering how blunt to be. She had seen how he acted around Elsie, had seen her writing a letter to him in school once. But after so many near-sleepless nights, after seeing the town collapse around her, she lacked the strength to soften the blow for him. “Elsie’s very sick,” she said. “The doctor doesn’t think she’s going to make it.”
Long after Rebecca had ascended the stairs, Philip sat at the table, staring off into the space just above his empty bowl.
The world looked different. He couldn’t believe how long he’d been ill. Only twelve days had passed between shooting the first soldier and then becoming sick; an entire lifetime had been crammed into those few days, or so it seemed. And now ten days more had passed with no reliable record except disturbing dreams, conversations he wasn’t sure were real or imagined.
Elsie’s not going to make it. His head didn’t hurt anymore; it felt like a too-tight helmet had been unscrewed from his skull. This sensation of newness, of space, of freedom, left him feeling almost dizzy, made the air around his eyes feel fuzzy, glowing. Elsie’s sick. He tried to focus on that thought but found it strangely elusive. Elsie. He had seen her in his dreams, visions of her, and although the train he had ridden on had not been real, Elsie was real. She wasn’t a figment of his imagination, a hidden longing that was incompatible with the world around him. She was real, she existed. Elsie. She was sick?
He sat there for a good long while, beginning to understand. The oatmeal felt good in his stomach, strengthening him, but a new nervousness unhinged him, starting in his gut and working its way through his depleted frame. He anxiously started scraping his fingernails—they had become so long while he was in bed—against the wood table. He was getting better, he had survived, he had returned to the world that had continued without him, but where was Elsie?
Then there was a frantic knocking on the door, and a child’s voice, screaming.
VI
The first truck was full in less than an hour.
More than a dozen had been arrested so far, Miller noted. At this rate they would need to send the full trucks back to the Timber Falls jail and then return for a second batch, even a third or a fourth.
“I’d like to see how he’s going to run his mill now,” Winslow said to him with a short laugh.
“That has nothing to do with this.” Miller’s face soured as if he’d been offended by a dirty joke. “I told you this isn’t about Worthy’s mill—this is about protecting our country, making sure men are following the law. I don’t give a damn what this means for his mill or yours.”
Winslow’s smile could not be erased. “You have your reasons, Mr. Miller, and I have mine.”
Miller saw the man’s point: if the flu hadn’t already crippled Worthy’s mill, losing eight or twelve truckloads of men surely would. The Winslows would do quite a bit better without Worthy’s mill undercutting their prices and offering higher wages to lure away workers.
And speak of the devil, there he was: Charles Worthy, looking far less commanding and proud than he’d appeared that day by the road into town. He was sweating in the snow, his hair disheveled and his normally pale face gone red with fear or rage or cold.
Charles had driven the old Ford he usually reserved for longer distances; this matter was too urgent for walking. After stopping near the crowded spot where the trucks and autos were blocking the street, he kicked open his door, nearly forgetting to turn off the engine.
He had wanted to bring more men with him, but if this visit was what he thought it was, that wouldn’t have been wise.
Charles should have done more to ensure that everyone had enlisted, he now realized—he should have required every man to prove that he had secured an essential-worker deferment. Instead, he had let his own ambivalence about the war, combined with his wife’s hatred for it, allow him to make a poor decision. And this was the result.
Charles couldn’t believe the sight before him. He knew all the men locked in the trucks. Some of them looked to be in shock, but many of them were clearly scared. Many were still sick, their faces hollowed from the time Charles had last seen them, their coughs polluting the trucks. Some of the men were young, barely older than Philip, but an equal number were in their late twenties or thirties and had wives, families.
And there the families were, at least some of them: a small crowd had gathered around the trucks, women screaming or crying or pleading, some of them with babies in their arms or children at their side. They stood there in the snow, most having rushed out of their houses without wraps, imploring three large men with badges and holstered pistols to let their husbands go. The APL men stood there expressionless as statues, hands at their sides in case they needed to unholster their weapons.
“What in the name of God is going on here?” Worthy yelled.
Miller waited for Worthy to reach him—he wanted to explain the situation, not holler it down the street. Worthy was irate but alone, no armed guards this time, and Miller was comfortable with the fact that he and his colleagues were firmly in charge.
“These men are under arrest for failing to enlist, Mr. Worthy,” Miller said. “We’re knocking on every door in town and will see the papers of every man of draft age. Any man who doesn’t have such papers will be sent to jail in Timber Falls to await trial.”
“These men are essential war workers, you know that!” Miller could tell Worthy was not used to bellowing like this. It made his own calmness feel like a form of power.
“And you know that all men of age, regardless of their occupation, are required to enlist. Then, and only then, the enlistment boards decide who is and is not an essential worker. If your men assumed they would be protected, that assumption wasn’t theirs to make.”
“This is ridiculous! Why arrest men you know would be declared exempt if they had—”
“Because they’re breaking the law,” Miller interrupted, raising his voice. “Because other men all over the country have enlisted and been sent to France and are doing their duty, and no one here has any right to shirk those obligations.”
Beside Miller, Winslow broke into a smile at seeing the pompous Worthy in such a state. Worthy saw the smile, which seemed to increase the fire in him.
“How much are the Winslows paying you for this?” Worthy asked Miller. “How much are they paying you to cart off my—”
“I am no one’s lackey!” Miller stuck a finger in Worthy’s face, finally shaken from his calm. “I am doing this for our country, Mr. Worthy, for our country. I’m in debt to no one and nothing but that. I don’t know how these men of yours can look themselves in the face while other boys are out there risking their lives, but they’ll have plenty of time to ask that question of themselves from behind bars. Do not get in our way.”
With that, Miller turned around and strode toward one of the trucks, as if to assist the three armed men in keeping back the shrieking families. Really, all Miller wanted to do was put his back to Worthy, to show that their debate was over and that Worthy’s presence here was useless.
Charles looked at Winslow, who was certainly of draft age but likely had received his exemption already. Men like him didn’t fight in wars.
“You can blame me and my family all you want, Worthy,” Winslow said, still unable to control his glee. “You’re the one who chose to hire rapscallions and reds. This is what happens.”
He too left Worthy to stand there, impotent in the swirl of events larger than himself, larger than his love for the mill, larger than this town and its dreams.
Rankle resisted.
He had been sick for six days but had been recovering, slowly, for the past forty-eight hours. His neighbor, a man named Hunt with whom he had chatted amiably on many occasions but never known well, had died early on in the epidemic, and Hunt’s wife, Corinne, rather than subsuming herself in grief, had dedicated herself to keeping Rankle alive.
Corinne had hung crape in her windows the morning after the undertaker had retrieved her husband’s body. There could be no funeral, the d
octor had informed her, because there could be no public gatherings—a service would have to wait until the flu had passed. That evening Corinne had seen the doctor leaving the house of Jarred Rankle. So the next morning, her husband barely twenty-four hours dead, she had knocked on Rankle’s door and, hearing no reply, had opened it herself and brought him hot tea and put extra blankets on his bed; she spoke to him while he lay there, flayed by the fever’s lash. She did all the things she had been unable to do for her husband, who had died after only one day of sickness—one day! She had barely had time to put a cool towel on her husband’s forehead, to put her lips there and marvel at the heat. By the time she had told him how much she loved him, her husband had already been shaking uncontrollably, already halfway to a place where he could no longer hear her. And then he was gone.
But Rankle’s flu was slower, and this time the Lord had given Corinne a chance to help. Rankle spoke little that first day, but he seemed unsurprised to see her there, as if this were the fulfillment of some predetermined arrangement. Hardly anyone in town was helping their neighbors this way, too terrified of bringing infection into their own homes. But with Corinne’s husband gone, she was unafraid of death. She slept on the floor of Rankle’s bedroom, caring for him when he woke with coughing fits. At night she looked through the windows and saw her own house, empty, desolate.
The day it first snowed—the day of the raid—Rankle had recovered to the point where Corinne’s presence was no longer needed. He had slept soundly that night, never stirred by a cough or by nausea, and had woken up with a full appetite. As Corinne cooked for them, she knew it was time for her to return to her house, to the emptiness she did not want to confront. She had offered herself to God, helping this man who she thought would eventually spread the disease to her, but they were both healthy now, and her husband was still dead.
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