The Last Town on Earth (19 page)

Frank reached into his pile of twigs and threw one at the fire.

“So how come you don’t have a sweetheart making you cornbread?” he asked, apparently eager to turn the focus of the conversation away from himself.

“I’ve got a girl,” Philip blurted defensively. He regretted the lie immediately but, more important, didn’t want to be teased. Was it really a lie, or was it just a mild exaggeration?

“Do you?” Frank said, raising his eyebrows and turning to face Philip. “Here we’ve known each other so long and you never said anything. What’s her name?”

“Elsie,” Philip said, painting himself farther into the corner.

Frank threw another twig into the fire. “Tell me about her.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know,” Frank said slowly, looking at the fire again, “if the thought of her keeps you up at night. If hearing someone else say her name makes you turn your head. If she’s pretty.”

“She’s very pretty. And yes to everything else.”

“Blond or brown hair?”

“Brown.”

“My kinda girl.”

“She’s real sweet. Very smart but not, you know, snooty about it. Like my sister can be sometimes. I used to be in the same class as Elsie, and I’d see sometimes that when she was writing her answers to a test, she was making a fist with her other hand. Like she was concentrating too hard not to.”

“Why were you looking at her—you copy her answers?”

“I just like seeing her when she’s focusing like that.”

“You kiss her yet?”

Philip started wondering just how far this interrogation was going to go and how honest he cared to be. “Not yet. But I will.”

“You do that. You’re a lucky man, still in the same town as your sweetheart. Lucky you didn’t have to get sent away.” Another twig into the flames. “As soon as you get out of here, you march right on up to her and give her the kiss of her life. She doesn’t like it, you can tell her that crazy soldier made you do it.” He smiled and looked back at his companion. “But she’ll like it.”

Philip nodded, grinning slightly with embarrassment. “Okay.”

“You going to marry her?”

Philip shook his head, his smile widening. “That’d be rushing things, I think.”

“The wedding proposal might startle her?”

“Might.”

“You never know. Some guys wait too long.”

“Did you wait too long? How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five and still single? What were you doing with yourself before Michelle?”

“Maybe I did wait too long. Maybe I’m trying to teach you a few things I learned the hard way.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, an opportunity can be either the shortest-lived thing or the longest-lasting thing in the world. You take advantage of it when you have it, and it’ll last forever. You sit on your hands, though, and it’ll be gone before you can even blink a second time.”

Philip fixated on that image—of something important disappearing before his eyes, leaving behind no trace. Even though he wasn’t sure if he should ask, he did anyway: “Are they going to send you to France soon?”

Frank paused. “Don’t know. Some guys say they aren’t sending anybody until the flu passes, but that’s just a rumor. We’ll see.” Then he thought of something. “Are a lot of boys from this town serving?”

“Some of them, but not many. Most of them enlisted and got worker deferments.” Philip added, even though he knew he shouldn’t have, “And some guys didn’t enlist.”

“Really? You can get in trouble for that.”

“I think they’re conscientious objectors.”

“Huh.” Frank’s face clouded over.

“What?” Philip asked.

“Nothing,” Frank said. “I just know that there are some C.O.s in the army. They get drafted—they just refuse to fight.”

“So what do they do?”

“They build cantonments. They clean mess halls. They get the shit work.”

Philip looked at Frank searchingly while Frank stared straight into the fire. Then Frank lay down and closed his eyes.

“I’m going to turn in,” Frank said. “If the good people of this town are going to set me free tomorrow night, I want to be well rested.” He rolled over, facing away from Philip.

Philip, alone for a moment, briefly considered seizing the opportunity to read Elsie’s letter again. But something about what Frank had said left him feeling juvenile. He, too, lay down and closed his eyes, visions of men with broomsticks marching past.

XII

T
he morning whistle sounded different to Leonard Thibeault, one of the Commonwealth millworkers. First the whistle was quieter than normal, as though someone had stuffed cotton into Leonard’s ears while he’d slept, and then it was louder than he could comprehend. Deafening. Piercing. It was two holes drilling into his skull from opposite ends, and when the drill bits reached each other in the center of his brain, he opened his eyes.

Then he closed them. That was the second thing he noticed—the pain in his eyes. Not in his eyes exactly, but behind them, in the part of the body that controlled the eye, the invisible mechanisms that told it where to move and how quickly, the levers and switches and pulleys that helped him squint or stare or wink. The whole apparatus seemed shot to hell. Just that one blink and the pain was a wave that rolled through his skull.

He was on his back. His legs and arms ached, the joints in particular throbbing. At this point the signs and messages were coming at him too quickly and all he knew was that this was a terrible, terrible dream. Or he had woken up too soon. Or he had drunk too much the night before. What the hell was it he’d drunk? Was it trustworthy? He tried to remember, but his brain didn’t want to, didn’t let him—like a recalcitrant librarian, it balked at the orders, refused to look up the necessary information. Whatever he had drunk had knocked him flat out.

There was another whistle, following far too quickly after the first one. This certainly was not real. But no nightmare had ever hurt like this.

It was incredibly hot in the small bedroom in his empty house, where he hoped one day to bring a wife. He was sweating and his nightclothes were damp and the blankets that pinned him were surely unnecessary, but he couldn’t muster the energy to remove them.

He was dimly aware of the possibility that this was real and he was awake and therefore was supposed to be at the mill, working. But the mere thought of rising was an impossibility. He felt his mind wandering to the strangest places, scenes he had visited as a child, so long ago that he hadn’t thought of them in years. He thought about girls on whom he’d nurtured crushes as a schoolboy, about two of his cousins who’d died in a farm accident when he was six or seven. He didn’t even remember their names. But there they were, laughing at something he’d said.

At some point, either seconds or hours after the most recent whistle, he felt more lucid than before, coherent enough to concentrate on his breathing. He thought that maybe if he took deep breaths, he’d feel strong enough to get up. So he inhaled deeply, but he’d taken in barely any air when his stomach muscles seized on him and he coughed so hard that his head lifted from the pillow, coughed so long it was like a dream without end.

Until one day he wasn’t coughing anymore. He was still there, still lying on his back, still neither daring to open his eyes nor even think about it. It was so hard to think, the damned librarian in his head was so adamant about not doing any work, that it was better to just drift off. He stopped thinking about the pain and stopped thinking about breathing, and then one of his dead cousins—maybe his name had been Louis—threw him a ball. Leonard lifted up his tiny arms and caught the ball, smiling gleefully, and tossed it back toward Louis, tossed it so far he couldn’t see if Louis made the catch but somehow he knew that he had.

XIII

G
raham was tired, but he refused to let his fatigue interfere. Interfere with his work at the mill, interfere with his guard duties, interfere with the vigilance of his thoughts. He felt how precarious the town’s situation was—the balance slipping more with each passing hour—and he needed to steady it, steady himself. He had little choice but to press on.

Graham was not sleeping well. He hadn’t told Amelia this, hadn’t wanted to disturb her slumber. She snored—a most unladylike snore, in fact, but one that had only made Graham smile to himself in the weeks after they married. Their courtship had been brief and not without controversy, as the couple had not received the approval of Amelia’s father, a mean old specimen named Horace whom Graham had never spoken to without smelling liquor on his breath. Having lost her mother at a young age, Amelia had all but raised her three younger brothers while her lumberjack father disappeared on his season-long assignments in the woods. Amelia had told Graham that her father had never laid a finger on her, and Graham believed her, but still he wondered sometimes whether there were childhood memories she hadn’t told him, didn’t want to acknowledge.

He had met her at church, in Timber Falls. The first months after Everett had been bleak, and Graham had moved around a bit before landing in Timber Falls and forcing himself to get a new mill job. He needed the work to keep himself from turning into a hopeless drunk, one of those shriveled husks he saw so often, guys who said they’d once been brawny and tough and could chew on gravel until some viciousness had befallen them, something that not even the Hercules of their youth had been able to counter. Graham would not let that happen. Every night he lay in bed sleepless, but every day he worked, each day harder than the last. He hoped that through pain and sweat and self-denial he could reach some plane where his past suffering could never again reach him, never bring him down.

He had known Tamara so briefly; he chastised himself for having allowed naive daydreams of romance to sweep him off his feet. They had been so different, the educated activist and the hardheaded millworker. He hadn’t felt comfortable with her friends, their political conversations and obscure references, and as time passed, he came to understand that his feelings for her had been colored by the events swirling around them. He had mourned her for longer than he had known her, and though he felt this made him silly and a victim and small, the pain never quite went away, never quite left him, just faded like that of a broken bone that kept you awake late at night until you noticed, bleary-eyed, that it was morning and that at some point you did indeed sleep. And here you were on a new day, so what were you going to do with it?

I got used to not having a home and not having a family, he thought. I got used to having only nine fingers. I can get used to this, too.

After years of neglecting his religious upbringing, Graham had begun attending church. His mother had loved Sunday mornings, and as he sat there surrounded by the congregation’s striving voices, he found himself remembering his family back in Kansas—the quiet mother who never knew how to stand up to her belligerent husband, the younger brothers whom Graham would pick on at home but loyally defend in the school yard.

Graham knew something about mean fathers, and as he sat in church, he could tell from a distance that this man Horace was someone from whom his daughter, Amelia, was yearning to escape. Graham’s eyes met Amelia’s once, and he looked away, feeling unholy or guilty or something not right, as he knew that church wasn’t the place to be eying women. But he found he couldn’t help doing it again the next week, or the week after that, and soon he was going to church every Sunday like a good Christian, though he was barely listening to the preacher, hardly singing the hymns. He was there only to see her.

Amelia had ice-blue eyes and an almost too-white face—her skin seeming to glow in the sunlight as she left church—that seemed remarkably controlled for her eighteen years. She was beautiful, but what also drew him was the strength she seemed to possess, despite being held back by her family. Perhaps Graham was drawn to her for these reasons, so he could both save her from her situation and feed off that strength.

The first time he gave her a gift, she’d given him an even greater one. A week after they had taken their first walk together, he had handed her a small bouquet of flowers, so uncharacteristically nervous that he’d made the mistake of holding it in his left hand. As she reached for the bouquet, she saw that hand, which he normally kept hidden in his pocket, saw the mangled knuckle and the skin that still hadn’t lost its reddish hue after many months. He saw her eyes on the missing finger, and he hurried to exchange the bouquet between his hands, but before he could do so, she took that hand in hers. Let her fingertips glide over his knuckles, tracing the bones of his wrist, all the while keeping those ice-blue eyes on his. If she had smiled or said something reassuring, it would have sound forced, wrong. She just looked at him. It froze him for a second, the fact that she hadn’t flinched, hadn’t recoiled, had wanted only to touch that one part of him. Then she thanked him for the flowers, when he felt he was the one who should be thanking her. They walked through town for the rest of the afternoon, she holding his left hand, which she had refused to release. Graham had known she was the woman he would marry, that she was someone who had felt her own pain and recovered from it, walked away new, and that with her he would do the same.

Here they were two years later, and everything had come true. They had a daughter and another baby on the way. They had a house, and Graham had a good job and plenty of friends, men who would come by and sit on his front porch, or he on theirs, and smoke together after repairing someone’s fence or working on a roof or building a shed. Amelia, too, seemed to thrive in the new town, busily maintaining their home, helping new families get acquainted with Commonwealth, making friends easily. His life was finally one worth having.

Graham sat up in bed after lying there restless for what must have been an hour, maybe more. It was the middle of the night and cold in the room as the blankets fell from his chest. Every time he had felt the languid arms of sleep ushering him in, he’d seen the face of the soldier before him, had seen the man’s eyes beseeching him, had felt the hook of the trigger pressing into his finger. It had been days now, and still the gunshots rang in his ears.

His movement stirred Amelia, who rolled onto her other side so she was facing him, and wrapped an arm across his stomach. She muttered something, and after trying to figure out what it was, he realized she was asleep, stringing together disjointed syllables in some elfin language that made sense only in the dream she was swimming through. The surprising amount of moonlight shining through the window illuminated her face, painting streaks of glowing whiteness around her cheekbones and eyebrows, outlining her chin and the earlobe visible through her hair. Graham saw how other men started to quietly disparage the appearance of their wives over the years, but he still was amazed at her beauty, amazed she was his. For the first few months, whenever he woke in the middle of the night, he would lean over and kiss her lips or forehead before falling back to sleep; he needed to express this gentleness that, he felt, no one thought existed in a man who wore such a saturnine expression.

Now he was plotting escape from the bed, maybe to pace in the kitchen or stare out the window until his thoughts calmed, but the arm she had cast across his chest stopped him. He didn’t want to risk waking her, to deprive her of the sleep that had become so cruelly elusive to him. The baby was at last letting Amelia rest a bit, and he didn’t want to interfere with whatever dreams were giving her that serene expression. So he leaned back into the bed and, rolling onto his side, put his arm around her, the two of them lying in a half-embrace. His hand was on her hip, and he felt the enticing fullness of her body beneath the thin nightgown, felt himself becoming excited in his confused and weary state. He kissed her on the forehead and told her he loved her, softly enough for her not to hear it. He closed his eyes and willed that there be no other world except this bed, at least for the next few hours, at least until sunrise.

When the morning whistle woke him, he saw that he was alone. From the backyard, he heard the sound of wood being chopped.

He had been granted only random snatches of sleep, like crumbs to a starving man. But now that he was awake, he forced himself to move. After throwing on some clothes and quickly washing his face, he walked down the stairs and past the crib—Millie was asleep, miraculously—and into the backyard.

Another swing of the ax and Amelia halved a log. Beside her was a stack of wood Graham had brought there the previous day.

“Morning,” he said, startling her from behind.

“Morning,” she said with a short smile. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I thought I told you not to do that,” he said to her, motioning toward the ax that stood in the piece of wood, the handle held aloft by the embedded blade.

“You said you didn’t
think
I should do it.” She was slightly out of breath, her forehead damp with sweat. “That’s not the same thing.”

“Think of the baby,” he said.

“Graham, I cut wood for months with Millie. I’m sure I can manage.”

He pulled the ax from the log. “I don’t want to be taking chances we don’t need to be taking.”

He almost added that she wasn’t the same as she had been then, that she was nearly twenty pounds thinner and more frail, but he didn’t know how to say it without making it sound like a reproach. They had already been through that after the stillbirth—her guilt, his insistence that she was not responsible—but everything had come out wrong somehow, left her feeling worse than before. So he simply gave her a patient but hard look, one that sought to end the conversation.

She started to walk toward the house, saying, “As tired as you’ve been, you’re liable to cut your own foot off.”

He let the remark pass. Alone outside, the air cold around his underdressed body, he lifted the ax and swung away, easily splitting a log. He could do this with his eyes shut, they both knew. He could do it blindfolded and dizzy, and still he’d never so much as nick his boot.

But the ax did feel heavier than usual in his hand, his breaths deeper.

When he went back inside, Amelia was cooking breakfast while the baby lay in her crib, babbling airy nonsense. Three half-knit projects—a sweater, a scarf, and a hat—lay across a chair. With Millie growing as fast as she was and with trips to the shops in Timber Falls a temporary impossibility, Amelia needed to have clothes ready for winter. Some neighbors and friends had lent them some baby clothes, but they never seemed to be enough.

Graham walked up to her and kissed her cheek. “Still got both feet.”

“And you still look tired,” she said to his heavy lids, to his red eyes, to the marks where his fumbling hands had cut himself shaving the day before.

“Just waking up.”

“I wish you wouldn’t stand guard every waking hour, Graham. It’s not good.”

“Someone has to,” he said.

“There were plenty of other men in this town, last time I checked.” The barest trace of a smile softened her words.

“There are. And a lot of them aren’t doing their part.”

“I especially don’t like you being out there at night with Deacon. The man’s crazy.”

“He’s harmless. Barely says a word.”

“My point—” she began, but he interrupted.

“I’ll get more men to volunteer. That’ll leave me with less shifts.”

She nodded to that, not fully satisfied but aware that she’d at least won a concession. They sat down at the table and ate in silence punctuated by occasional babble from Millie. Amelia had been with Graham long enough to know that there were different kinds of silence: the peaceful silence of contentment, the amazed silence of love returned, the reverential silence of new fatherhood, the preoccupied silence of concern, the aching silence of regret. She knew that even though he had barely spoken of the dead soldier, he had been staring at the man for days now. Graham was afraid the dead soldier would come back somehow, afraid more dead soldiers would rise up against the town, corpses exhaling pestilential fumes. The man in the storage building was just another dead soldier to Graham, and he was terrified and determined to chase him back to the grave. Amelia hated that her husband felt the obligation to fight every last demon on his own, and she wanted to help him, but neither her silence nor her kind words nor her amorous movements seemed to engage him. This would pass, she had finally decided. It was the only conclusion that made her feel more than helpless.

“Do you think Philip’s all right?” she said to him after they had finished eating and he was preparing to go.

Graham didn’t turn around. “Charles says he is.”

When he had first told her what happened with Philip and the second soldier, she could barely believe it. She’d expressed concern for their friend, and he’d stalked away. Later that night, he had held her and said what she knew was an apology: he had told her he felt bad for Philip, too, but they needed to protect the town. He had held her in a way that showed he feared his own coldness.

“Just…tell Philip we’re thinking about him,” she said, thinking it was a silly message to send but not knowing what other sentiment to express.

“He knows,” Graham said. “I’ll be back for supper.” He opened the door and closed it quietly behind him.