Elsie died late the night of the raid. She never knew that her father had been arrested, nor did she know Philip had set him free. She had been lying in a delirium for the final two days, attended by her father, whose pleas that the Lord take him instead of Elsie were left unanswered. Alfred Metzger never suffered the slightest fever or cough despite standing by his wife’s and daughter’s bedsides.
It never occurred to Charles or Rebecca that the news of Elsie’s death may have contributed to Philip’s silence, because his outward reactions paled beside those of Laura, who cried herself to sleep the next two nights. Philip had stared out the window at the blindingly white snow, sharing his thoughts with no one.
Once the roads were passable, a small contingent of men who had enlisted and secured deferments months ago ventured south, seeking news from the outside world. They went to Pauling, a hamlet ten miles east of Timber Falls, avoiding the larger town. The men returned with as much food as they could buy, as well as newspapers whose emphatic headlines displayed, finally, something welcome: an armistice had been signed, and the guns of Europe were silent. The armistice had been declared the same day Miller and his crew had reached Commonwealth. All those men had been arrested for failing to enlist in a war that had mercifully drawn to an exhausted close.
Charles was confident the armistice would mean the nineteen imprisoned men would be released. Rebecca had decided she would journey to the Timber Falls jail the next day, would visit the post office and find a phone and reconnect with her political contacts, spread the word that the peace-minded men of her town had been rounded up like common criminals. She would visit Jarred Rankle and the others, demand that the jailers treat them fairly—a woman’s presence could go a long way toward getting the men humane treatment, she had learned from her experience in the Everett strike. But she did not share her husband’s faith that the men would be released, at least not until the war was more of a memory, replaced by whatever new necessities arose from the vacuum of these violent and fear-addled years.
After the raid, Charles and Rebecca had knocked on every door in town—they no longer cared if it put them at risk—and found out who had been taken by the APL, who was sick, who was starving, who was dead. The looks on people’s faces and the stories that Charles and Rebecca heard had kept them up the last few nights, lying beside each other. The Worthys had little food left, but they had shared with those too ill to cook for themselves.
Charles and Rebecca had seen the depths to which some had fallen, and the depths that lurked farther below. But as badly as his faith was shaken, Charles had lived through too many tragedies and busts to concede that the mill would fail. Somehow the town would survive, he believed. Somehow.
Doc Banes’s badly kept records showed that 250 people in Commonwealth—over half the town’s population—had contracted the flu. Of these, fifty-six men, women, and children had died. Most of the dead were adults younger than thirty, those who should have been hardy enough to survive the infection. Banes didn’t know why the children had been spared in favor of those in the prime of life, but it made the aftereffects all the worse, as there were now so many widowed parents, so many orphans.
Mo was dead, as was Lightning. The river chief O’Hare, who had kept his distance from Philip, somehow became infected despite his vigilance; he had died a week ago, as had three of the drivers who worked alongside him. Laura had recovered but had lost her best friend and two other classmates.
Doc Banes never took ill, despite his long hours beside the sick and dying. Like Deacon, he began to feel specially chosen, as if God had conscripted him as a watchman for the dead, a scrivener to mark the passage of their lives. But those memories were abominable, and Banes wanted only to be rid of them. Each night his bottles of alcohol beckoned, and he found no reason to resist their call.
The Stone family had been spared by the flu—Amelia and the baby were healthy, as was Graham. He didn’t know how it was that Philip could cough in his face without passing on the infection, but there was much he did not understand. He had barely been able to sleep the last two nights and had twice hid in another room so Amelia wouldn’t see it when he broke down.
The shock of the raid and the waning of the flu brought people out of their homes, and friends could tell their stories again. Word of how Leonard and others had been sneaking out of Commonwealth for booze and women spread through the awakening town. Those who heard the news, especially those who had lost loved ones, were consumed by vengeful desires. A party of angry men had gone knocking on the sneaks’ doors only to find the perpetrators dead of the flu. The vigilantes were all the more enraged when they realized there was no possibility for retribution; the flu was an evil with no body to beat, no face to spit upon, no neck to string up.
But people had heard what Graham said to Miller about killing the spy, and though some thought Graham had said it only to scare the APL away, others saw a glint of truth. It fit all too neatly with the other stories circulating through Commonwealth, stories of another soldier who had tried to enter town weeks ago and who had been shot by Graham and buried by the town entrance. When the Stones walked through town the day after the raid, Graham had received several fearful looks that Amelia assumed were just reactions to his ugly bruises.
The following day, Amelia had refused to believe it when a friend mentioned the stories about Graham and the spy, and that night she questioned him. So he told her what he had done, but he didn’t explain why. He once had hoped that his pure motives would excuse whatever hell and muck he’d had to wade through, but his reasons no longer seemed relevant or justified, even to himself. All that mattered was that he had killed someone, so that was all he said to his wife.
And if she had recoiled from him at first and then proffered her own desperate explanations that he would neither agree with nor deny, and if she had broken down crying and then apologized and walked out of the house, returning only hours later, and if she had acted wary of her own husband, not even asking him to hold the baby when her arms were tired, and if everyone in town was looking at him as though he were some part of themselves they wished would simply disappear, then this, too, was something Graham would have to accept.
The third day after the raid found Philip at a train station in Pauling. After saying goodbye to Rebecca and Laura, he had come here with Charles in the family’s Ford. In the backseat was Graham, who had asked to join them.
Philip still did not fully comprehend the need for this journey, but Charles had insisted, explaining that it was the safest thing to do in light of what had happened the day of the snowstorm. Charles didn’t know whether those men would return, but if they did, they would be looking for Philip. Regardless of the circumstances, Philip had shot a policeman. Regardless of how sick or confused Philip had been, regardless of what might have happened to Graham if Philip hadn’t intervened, Charles knew how Philip’s act must have looked to Miller. Whether the European armistice would lead to an armistice here in the Washington forest remained to be seen.
The previous day, Charles had made a quick call to a cousin in Portland from a phone in Pauling. The cousin’s family had already suffered through the flu, the children sick in bed for days, but all was now well. Charles had explained to his cousin only that he feared for Philip’s safety due to an escalated rivalry with another mill, and he gave Philip a series of half-lies he could feed his new caretakers upon arrival.
It won’t be long, Charles promised his son. Probably only a fortnight. Just enough time for Charles to communicate with the local powers in Timber Falls, for Rebecca to rally her comrades, for people across the state to fully appreciate the fact that the Great War was finally over, that they were free to reimagine the lives they had pursued before it began. Charles was confident there would be a way to justify Philip’s actions.
Charles always used such detached language when discussing the situation, Philip noticed. He never said that Philip had shot someone, killed someone. And strangely, as much as Philip had
been haunted by the first soldier, he was not similarly tortured by his memories of the sheriff. To Philip, the man with the broken nose and the black eyes had played the role of villain in a way the first soldier had not. The sheriff had invaded Graham’s home, had beaten other men, and because of this, Philip had felt a certainty to his own actions. Though his mind had been muddled that afternoon, he hadn’t thought of it as taking a life, but as saving lives.
Still, he wondered if the image of himself shooting the lawman would make some nefarious return, would gradually or suddenly insinuate itself into his every thought. Perhaps once his mind was free of the flu’s grasp, he would be forced to wear the same yoke Graham was suffering under.
The ride was mostly silent, and it felt interminably long. The quiet was broken only by Charles’s interjections that all would be fine. Philip found even those brief comments grating, saw from his sheltered vantage point the awkward way Charles was struggling against the irrefutable winds of all the evidence surrounding them. Philip was certain Graham saw it as well, and every time his father waxed optimistic, he cringed.
At last they reached the train station, no more than an outdoor platform beside a small kiosk where the heavily bundled attendant breathed on his hands. Charles bought the ticket while Philip and Graham waited by the tracks.
“Thank you for coming for me,” Graham said. It was the first thing he’d said to Philip that day, his first acknowledgment of what Philip had done. His face was a darkened blue in the spots where he’d been struck by the APL men, and he took careful, shallow breaths due to the stabbing pain of his broken ribs. “Thank you for helping me.”
Philip nodded. “What are you going to do now?” If he was in such danger that he needed to be sent away, then the same probably applied to Graham. Yet Philip couldn’t imagine Graham running from anything.
“I don’t know.” Graham looked down the long train tracks that cut into the thick forest, the product of so many hours of hard labor that their creation seemed incomprehensible. Everything here was the result of sacrifice and pain. He looked back at Philip and his face seemed constricted, the muscles along his forehead and temples taut.
“I’ll be back soon, my father says,” Philip said.
“I hope the town’s still standing.” Their eyes met, and they held the gaze, then Philip nodded.
Graham knew from his days of riding the rails how quickly a place like Commonwealth could disappear. Many times he had journeyed past abandoned streets that had been thriving storyvilles, and he had seen that villages where he’d once laid his head were no longer marked on any maps. He knew how violence could not only tear a town in two but tear it so many times that there was nothing left to build upon, nothing left to hold, nothing left even to remember as you grabbed your scant belongings and headed someplace new.
Charles was walking toward them, ticket in hand, but not yet in earshot.
Philip looked down at the ground. “I know you want me to apologize for letting Frank into town. But I can’t.” He didn’t know if Graham had been told about the men who were sneaking out of Commonwealth for liquor or to visit their sweethearts. Nor did he know whether those facts mattered at all, or if they were just so many more flakes of snow tossed in among the blizzard of coincidences and occurrences and accidents over the last month, something so discrete and tiny that you couldn’t focus on them no matter how hard you tried. Following them with your eyes was impossible amid the swirl. “I’m not sorry I did it.”
Philip could tell Graham was concentrating carefully on what he was about to say. “I know you want me to apologize,” Graham said, borrowing Philip’s line. He paused, his eyes suddenly red and glassy. He wasn’t even looking Philip in the eye. What he managed to say, between labored and painful breaths, was “And I know that I should.”
But then Charles was back, handing Philip a ticket and some money, not seeing the look in Graham’s eyes. Charles repeated the instructions he’d already given, and Philip nodded, looking at Graham more than at his father. Then Philip asked that they not wait for the train with him.
“It’ll feel more like a goodbye if you stay.” He stuffed the ticket in his pocket. He wasn’t quite recovered, but he was well enough to stand there, boots on the tightly packed snow.
Charles embraced him. Philip forgot the anger and disappointment he had felt over the last few weeks, and for a moment he held on to his father tightly.
Charles stepped back and promised to send Philip a telegram in two days with news.
Graham and Philip looked at each other, and Graham nodded abruptly, clapping him on the shoulder a little too hard. Then they were gone.
Graham and Charles spoke little during the journey home. Graham saw that Charles was affected by sending away his son, so much that he didn’t notice how close Graham had come to breaking down. Time passed slowly as the car’s tires struggled over the slushy roads, the heavy branches of the white-and-green-striped trees swaying above.
The fact that the roads had been impassable had afforded Graham time to think, to deliberate, but now he no longer had that luxury. Men bent on avenging Bartrum’s death were free to return; the red-bearded man with the sons dead in France surely would never forget Graham’s face. Graham had chosen not to enlist lest the war tear him from his family; staying in Commonwealth to await possible arrest would mean running that same risk. Charles sounded optimistic that the situation could be resolved, but to Graham that was like hoping the tornado before you might be just a horribly beautiful cloud crafted by a creative but benign God. Graham knew what those storm clouds meant.
With his right hand, he massaged the knuckles of his left, feeling even through his gloves the contours of his bones and the awkward slope where the final finger should be. Amelia had knit the gloves herself, giving the left only three fingers because Graham had hated the way the empty finger of his old gloves had dangled there, purposeless.
To take his baby and his pregnant wife and run from Commonwealth to some other town would be to start with nothing. Some clothes, a scant amount of money to buy lodging and food for a few weeks, but little else. He would be as vulnerable as he had once been, but a thousand times more so because now he had a family. He remembered how difficult it had been to start over after Everett. But this time, he reminded himself, he would not be alone.
Last night, after telling Amelia about the second soldier, and after her long walk and the many silent hours that had passed between them, he had retired to bed. When she slipped into the bed much later, he was still awake, lying on his side and facing the wall. In the dark, she had wrapped an arm around him. “Rest,” she said to him softly, knowing his eyes were open. She put her left hand on his, and his outnumbered fingers interlocked with hers. She kissed him on the back of the neck. “Rest.” He lay there for a good while before falling asleep, not because he couldn’t but because he wanted to revel in that feeling. Hours later, he woke to the baby’s crying, and he left the bed before his wife to pick up his daughter and pace through the cold house. There in the dark the building felt hollow, empty, something that could be abandoned. He was so tired of running, yet so tired of holding his ground. And so before accompanying Philip to the train station that morning, he had told Amelia his decision, ready to hear any objections. But she’d had none, simply expressing the hope that their sojourn would be only temporary.
Outside, the trees shook in the wind. The road curved deeper into the woods and beside them was the river, harsh and cold, but still running.
The wait for the train seemed too long. Philip thought about how back in Commonwealth the recovering men were testing their strength by chopping firewood, and women were visiting neighbors they had not seen in days, knocking on doors hesitantly for fear of having those knocks go unanswered. The undertaker was consulting his list of interned bodies and writing a letter to Inston, requesting the minister’s presence for a memorial service, and Doc Banes was tending to those still too sick to leave their beds. Commonwealth was staggeri
ng to its feet, and Philip was leaving yet another town.
After years of fearing abandonment, he realized he had never been truly alone until that moment. Yet as he stood there in the stunned silence of the outside world—a world he hadn’t seen in weeks—he felt curiously unafraid. Perhaps it was the flu clouding his mind; perhaps he was too dazed to appreciate the uncertainness of his fate. But something about what Charles had said, and his tone, made Philip feel glad to stand there by himself, away from the town and all the disasters that its failed decisions had wrought.
Philip wasn’t sure when his head would feel right, but part of him wanted that never to happen. His recovery from the flu seemed to be occurring in another world, someplace wholly separate from Commonwealth, so it felt natural that he had not seen Elsie in days. Once he felt right, he would have to confront Elsie. Perhaps it would be better to never again see those riverbeds where they had collected driftwood, never again visit the lonely general store. Better simply to venture to his next destination and any beyond it, to drift on, stripped of so many things that he thought had defined who he was. And what would be left of himself, and who he would be while he gathered the fleeting pieces as they tried to drift away, was something he would somehow have the strength to accept, and build something anew.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Nearly a decade ago I read a magazine article about an infectious disease expert that briefly mentioned the 1918 influenza epidemic. The article also made reference to the fact that some uninfected towns in the western United States were so terrified of the flu that they blocked all roads leading into town and posted armed guards to prevent anyone from entering. I immediately imagined a scene that would become the seed of a novel: two guards confronted with the dilemma of a cold, hungry outsider seeking shelter.
The Last Town on Earth Page 41