She was giving the kitchen a final cleaning when they heard the knock on the door. Rankle had been in the parlor, finally able to stand without dizziness, to inhale deeply without choking, so he went to the door and opened it. Unlike Charles, who had been hoping this day could be avoided, and unlike Gerry Timlin, who had been stunned when the men showed up, Rankle knew who they were and why they were there the moment he saw the sheriff’s face.
“I have no papers,” Rankle replied to Bartrum’s question. “And I will not fight in Wilson’s crooked war.”
The two larger men, one of whom was Hightower, stepped into the doorway, flanking Rankle.
“Then you’re going to jail, son.”
“Don’t act like you don’t know who I am,” Rankle said, staring evenly at Bartrum. “I sure as hell remember you.”
“All you slackers look alike to me.”
“You used to live in Everett. You ran with McRae’s boys.” Rankle stepped up a bit, as if to accentuate the fact that he was a few inches taller than Bartrum. “You’re awfully big when you’ve got a pack of men, and you’re awfully tall when you’re kicking men who are lying on the ground.”
Bartrum’s face grew even redder, as if Rankle had clamped his fingers across the lawman’s neck. “You keep your trap shut and this’ll go a lot easier for you.”
Rankle shifted his gaze from Bartrum to Hightower and the other man. Both were too old for the draft, but they were strong and lean enough to be fighting in France if they so desired. Rankle thought about commenting on this but chose to say something else.
“I suppose you boys think this is real big of you. You’re all a bunch of fools if you think this war’s doing anything but—”
Bartrum shut him up by socking him in the gut. Rankle had been bracing himself for something, so even though he doubled over and felt his breath escape him, he was already choosing his spots. Hightower and the other men pulled him upright, ready to drag him to the trucks, but Rankle stepped forward and broke two of his fingers on Bartrum’s face, throwing the sheriff back so hard he would have fallen through the doorway had there not been three other men standing behind him.
Rankle didn’t know who hit him next, but soon he was on the floor. His face had been struck and likewise his neck and then his ribs. Rather than rolling himself into a ball, he tried to get back to his feet, but someone’s boots prevented him. The blows kept coming, and they were so loud he couldn’t hear Corinne screaming.
“I am tall when I’m kicking men on the ground.” Bartrum gritted his teeth as he kicked Rankle a second time. He was gearing up for a third when one of the men behind him put a hand on his shoulder.
“Skip,” the man said. “Let’s just carry him in.”
Corinne ran to the bloody heap on the floor but Hightower grabbed her arms. She thrashed and wailed and to all these men it was obvious that she was the man’s wife.
Hightower not only heard her screams but felt them, felt them reverberating through his hands gripping her; the screams shook his shoulders and ran down his legs back into the earth beneath them.
After Bartrum had put a handkerchief to his bloodied nose and spat on the floor, and after the other men had half carried and half dragged the broken and unconscious Rankle out of his house, Hightower released Corinne’s arms and she dropped to the ground as if she had been dead all along.
Philip sat on his bed, staring out the window. Ever since the accident, he had hated snow, hated how the world grew quiet as the snow fell around him.
He could still see Elsie’s words written in the fog on the window, dim and faded but legible if one knew where to look. YOU OK? and GET WELL with the backward E, and in between them, in taller and bolder letters, LOVE YOU. Still he felt unwell. His throat did not burn, but he felt cold inside his head, as if something were missing in there, as if it were all air and the winter chill were freezing his skull from the inside. He found it difficult even to think about Elsie, difficult to fully grasp love and its meaning, impossible to grapple with the concept of loss or death. He just sat there dazed, the world before him shimmering.
Time passed. He heard Rebecca angrily muttering to herself, so he rose and walked into the kitchen, which she was furiously cleaning, as she was wont to do when she needed to distract herself.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She looked up at him, strands of gray hair cascading across her face. Her cheeks were red, and sweat streaked her forehead.
“They’re arresting men who didn’t enlist. Right now. Just carting them off.”
Philip sat down. Donny Timlin’s panicked visit had seemed to pass like a dream. The moment Charles and Donny had left earlier, it had been like they never existed.
Rebecca slammed her hand against the counter, but the sound didn’t hit Philip for a couple of seconds. Then she hugged herself and let out a sound that Philip couldn’t quite discern, either a shortened cry or a bereaved sigh or a minor scream, the sound of a fist tightening around someone’s heart.
“Who are they arresting?” Philip asked, folding his arms against the cold.
“Everyone. Everyone who didn’t enlist.”
Philip imagined them dragging Graham and throwing him in a dank prison, something far darker and fouler than the last place Frank had laid eyes on. He saw them hanging Graham after a quick trial, saw Graham’s body being thrown into an empty and nameless ditch, saw Amelia in black. Philip tried to remember the conversation he’d had with Graham about the war those many months ago, but it felt like that part of his brain had been scrubbed away by something so abrasive that even trying to think about it hurt.
So he focused on the present: Graham was being arrested. Philip concentrated so hard he had to close his eyes, concentrated on making his mind work the way he knew it could. The Timlins lived in one of the houses closest to the town entrance. But Graham and Amelia lived far to the other side of the Worthy house, closer to the mill. If the men hadn’t knocked on the Worthys’ door yet, then perhaps they hadn’t yet knocked on Graham’s.
Philip slowly made his way through the parlor. He gazed out the window, this one adorned not with Elsie’s thoughts but with snowy patches in the bottom corners, the whiteness clinging there. He looked out and saw, far to his right, a group of men knocking on a neighbor’s front door: Jay Wachowski, the man who’d broken both his hands in a mill accident a few weeks ago. Philip didn’t know if Wachowski had enlisted, didn’t know if Doc Banes had cut open the man’s casts yet. Would he be carted off to prison with his hands still bound in plaster?
Philip tapped at the cold glass, remembering the time his hands had been covered in bandages to save them from frostbite. He remembered being unable to touch his own brow, being unable to feed himself, unable to so much as count on his fingers because they were all balled together in the same hideous mash of white. The snow was falling more heavily, growing thick on the roads, which would soon be dangerous, impassable.
But his thoughts returned to Graham. Graham had been the one who pulled the trigger while Philip had just stood there. He had been granted the luxury of seeing what happened to Graham as a result, and that was why he hadn’t been able to repeat Graham’s act when Frank came walking up that hill. When Philip thought of all that Graham had done, he could not escape the fact that he too might have been forced down the same path if he’d been the one who pulled the trigger. He hated and feared what Graham had turned into, but Graham’s actions had saved him from a similar fate.
Rebecca had gone back upstairs, so Philip walked to the closet by the front door. He grabbed his boots and his coat, his hat and gloves. Then he grabbed the rifle.
This was already too rough for J.B. Though Miller had said there was a chance things would get out of hand, he had also said these were weakling slackers and the vast majority would go willingly. He had said that twenty men, a show of such force, would cow the slackers into surrendering, would send them single-file, heads hung, into the backs of those trucks. Men like J.B. were doing what they could
for their country, Miller had said: We may be too old to be out on the front lines, but we’re doing our part to keep the home front protected.
But seeing that first man get slugged by Hightower, with the man’s wife and children crying in the background, had turned J.B.’s stomach. The sight of the suffering family reminded him even more of his own wife and his lost children. He did not want to be here. He had made a mistake. He should be back home, knocking on his wife’s door, again and again, beseeching her to let him in so they could wrap their arms around each other and try to keep the world at bay.
Many of the APL men with him were young enough to serve in the army but had been deferred for various reasons. Some were essential war workers, some were policemen whose absence their towns could not afford. The rest of the men, like Hightower, were older but still strong enough to defeat any young man who should foolishly challenge them. J.B., though, knew he was just a pencil pusher, a man more like Miller, who had given himself the lightweight role of truck guard. As part of Bartrum’s six-man brigade, J.B. stayed in the shadows while the others used their broad shoulders to intimidate and used their thick boots to pound down anyone who tried to resist.
“Kick the sonuvabitch,” Hightower told J.B. after the rest of them had subdued a man who had tried to escape, who had spat in Bartrum’s face and grazed Hightower with an inept punch. Every other man in the crew had kicked him at least once except J.B., whose lack of gusto had finally, as he’d feared, become suspect.
J.B. didn’t look at Hightower, looked instead at the man on the ground, covered in snow. An older child, really, a kid who probably had turned eighteen only a few months ago.
“Kick him for our sons,” Hightower said. J.B. felt that everyone was looking at him, waiting, assessing. What was he doing here? His son, James, wouldn’t want him to kick this weakling. James wasn’t like Hightower or his roughneck sons. James would want to help this boy up. But James was gone, his shattered body a million miles away and his soul across the impassable void. War changes a man, and J.B. shuddered to think what James may have become by the day he died. Maybe James would have stomped on this young man’s face, would have leaped upon him with terrifying enthusiasm.
Hightower and the others were still waiting. J.B. kicked the boy in the back. Not too hard but enough. He exhaled. He would kick the next one harder.
Graham stood up when he heard the shots. He had been sitting beside Amelia, staring at the snow, when they heard the first pop followed by three more volleys. It was a hundred times louder than any sound the town had mustered in days.
Amelia stayed in her chair, looking up at him questioningly. From their vantage point, they could see nothing but a neighborhood being buried by winter’s first act, but Graham recognized gunshots. He went to the front door and stood behind it for a moment, afraid to open it, afraid of what he might let in.
He opened the door and stepped onto the porch, shivering in the biting wind. About two blocks to his left, he saw a pile of men, a scrum, at the bottom of which was some whitened rodent flailing about. But it wasn’t a rodent, it was a man lying there in the snow, a man being kicked and hit by the surrounding men, at least one of whom held a gun pointed to the heavens.
Then a truck started driving toward them. It pulled up beside them, and a well-dressed man in a derby emerged. He opened the large back door, then the scrum of men picked up the snow-covered body they had been trouncing and carried it into the back of the truck. Graham saw the redheaded mane of one of the Timber Falls men who had tried to enter Commonwealth, the man who had called them slackers and had ranted about his dead sons in France. The sight of the man gradually meshed with that past experience, became bound in a tight net Graham felt closing around him.
The men dusted the snow from their coats and walked up to the house of one of Graham’s neighbors, where the crape in the windows should have told them they were entering a death house. They knocked on the door nonetheless, perhaps too enthralled by their bloodlust to notice the telltale signs surrounding them.
Hightower was doing this for his sons. He was doing it because he and his wife had raised their boys right, had produced two strong and right-thinking young men who went to church and had adoring Christian sweethearts. He was doing it because they had proceeded to the enlistment board on the allotted date, had entered their names and accepted their numbers with dignity. He did not know what had transpired in their rooms behind those shut doors on the last night before they reported at Fort Jenkins, did not know what they had asked of God in their prayers on their last night at home, did not know if fear had yielded to tears or if they had been calm before sleep took them. He knew what they had said to him, though, and what they had written in their letters, knew the looks in their eyes the last time he had seen them, decked out in military fatigues and looking so much older than he had ever realized they could be.
Maybe if every other young man in the country had responded as his sons had, there would have been more doughboys at the front. Maybe the Expeditionary Force would have been twice as strong, would have mowed through France in days, would have beaten the Hun clear through Belgium and back into the primeval German forests where it belonged. Maybe if every boy had been as valiant as the Hightowers, they would be home again, announcing their wedding engagements. Maybe if this damn state hadn’t been overrun by slackers and reds, by people who would rather hide from a threat than face it, Hightower’s sons would be alive.
His sons were so unlike this weak young man, who’d climbed out of his side window and leaped down into the snow, trying to sprint away through the thickening drifts. Bartrum had fired some warning shots, which slowed the kid a bit, left him debating whether this tactic was the right one. Before he could resume his flight, Hightower had tackled him from behind. The kid had tried to wrestle free and had landed a boot square across Hightower’s jaw, but by then the others were upon him. He wasn’t even moaning anymore by the time they loaded him into the truck, the last one they hadn’t yet filled.
“We’re running out of space,” Miller said.
“There’s still plenty slackers left,” Bartrum answered. His nose was broken, and though the blood no longer flowed, it was the color of cooked beets, so much darker than the white snow surrounding his head. The skin around his eyes was also darkening—that slacker from a couple houses ago had clocked him good. “We haven’t even been to half the town yet.”
“We’ll need to come back,” Hightower said.
“Not today,” Miller replied. “Way this snow’s falling, this is the last chance we’ll get for a few days. I say we stuff as many into these trucks as we can before heading out.”
Hightower nodded. “No argument here.” He gazed down the block at the next residence on their agenda. But what captured his attention was a few houses beyond, a man standing on a porch, watching them. “Sonuvabitch,” he said. “There he is.”
“Who?” Bartrum asked.
Ever since the first day they’d come to Commonwealth, Hightower had been haunted by those eyes. Even though the man had pulled a mask over half his face when Worthy had shown up, Hightower would never forget those insolent eyes. He didn’t know the man’s name, but he’d been hoping he’d be the one who got to knock on his door.
“Let’s skip the next few houses,” Hightower said. “I want to make sure we take that bastard in today.”
When Charles saw them carrying an unconscious man toward one of the trucks, he lunged forward. He was horrified by all that blood, by the fact that a man had been beaten so badly he could not walk. As they brought the man closer, Rankle’s head rolled to the side and Charles recognized his friend.
But as Charles ran, two other men stepped up and blocked his path. They told him he’d come far enough, and as he tried to press past them, they pushed him back until he fell into the snow.
Rankle was tossed into the back of the truck alongside Deacon. Deacon had been leaving a sick house with the doctor when the APL had confronted him and carted
him away. He didn’t understand why the Lord would speak to him and then cast him off like this, but he had felt no fear as he allowed himself to be carried by God’s will. His faith was shaken, however, by the wounds he saw on Rankle’s face. He squeezed past the other captured men and took off his jacket, folding it into a makeshift pillow and stuffing it under Rankle’s head. He brushed some of the hair from Rankle’s forehead and sopped up his blood with a sleeve.
“All right, there, Jarred,” Deacon rasped. “You’ll be fine. We’ll get you to a doctor soon. We’ll be okay.”
Doc Banes helped Charles to his feet. All around them, teams of APL men were knocking on more doors, emerging with more workers. Many of the workers were sick, but the men from Timber Falls didn’t seem to care.
Banes was too tired to rail against them, as Charles had. He knew that these men had lived through the flu in Timber Falls, so perhaps they would survive anything the sick people of Commonwealth could breathe upon them. These were the lucky ones, the ones chosen by God or biology to be immune, or perhaps they had already suffered and survived.
“What can I do?” Charles said emptily, looking at the trucks. One by one, men who had ignored Charles’s advice about enlisting were being led away. By the time the APL was finished, the town would be emptied of most men.
The few who tried to fight were easily subdued, not only outnumbered but also weak from disease or hunger. Even Charles had lost weight. People had stretched their meager provisions as far as they could, and many had been too sick to venture out to other towns for food when the quarantine had been lifted. Everyone looked half starved, unable to defend themselves.
VII
The three knocks were so strong that Graham’s door shook on its hinges.
When he’d seen the men coming, Graham had sent Amelia upstairs with the baby. He had pondered his options and found them few and unappealing. The knocks, when they came, were more of an assault, the door nearly giving way to the weight of the men behind it.
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