The Last Town on Earth (23 page)

IV

N
ews of Leonard’s death spread like a forest fire through the town. Charles and Doc Banes decided that despite the risk of hysteria, people needed to know the truth so they could take precautions against infection.

They quarantined Yolen’s house, with a guard assigned to the front door. It was as if everyone in town were slowly being divided into guards and the guarded.

Charles sent word through his foremen, letting them know more guards were needed and that they must report any absences immediately.

Philip, who had gone to work at the mill while Charles and Doc Banes made their plans, felt a special dread as he headed out for his daily errands that day. It was eleven in the morning when he left the office, walking down the long plankway that overlooked the mill, breathing in the sawdust and pine. Below him a group of sawyers was manning the gang saws, taking out the fresh-cut wood and separating the tie cuts and shingle bolts. The first time Philip had accompanied Charles to a mill, he’d been stunned by the constant buzzing that seemed to wrap itself around his head. Now it fit as comfortably as the wool cap he donned as he walked outside.

It was getting colder, with a stiff wind coming in from the river. To his right was the gaping mouth of the mill, opening up to the river beyond. A long and continuous supply of logs floated into the building, ordered by the chained booms that the river hogs controlled. And there was the river, alive with movement: hundreds of logs floated upon it, many of them giving ride to the river drivers themselves, men armed with peaveys and spiked poles and cant hooks. From a distance, it seemed like those medieval devices were an extension of the men’s arms, as if the drivers themselves had become constructions of metal and wood. They jabbed and poked at logjams, they jostled recalcitrant drifts that were on the verge of straying downstream. What looked at first glance like chaos was in fact orderly and smooth, the gently bobbing traffic completely under the river drivers’ control.

Philip had been stunned when Graham told him that many river drivers didn’t even know how to swim, but after months of watching them work, he understood that they didn’t have to. An experienced river hog was as likely to slip into the depths as a tree squirrel was to plummet to the earth.

Philip saw the narrow skidways cut into the hills that rose from the riverbanks, saw fresh wood that had been firmly planted in the ground a moment ago sliding down the chutes, disappearing beneath the chilly surface for a second or two, then reemerging, the light yellow of its cut wound poking up first. From where Philip stood, the jacks were invisible; the constant procession of logs floating down the river was the only evidence of their existence.

Despite all this activity, the sight was still unusual for the absence of boats navigating to the mill and hauling off stacks of timber, the absence of draft horses painstakingly dragging carriages of cordwood to the pull-ups. As hard as everyone was working to maintain the mirage that all was normal in Commonwealth, the lack of buyers and shippers—of outsiders—was jarring.

Philip walked out to the narrow dock built alongside the sorting gap. The water below was shallow and clear, and beneath the glassy surface, Philip could see deadheads lying on the river bottom, useless wood that had sunk and would be cleared away only when the pile threatened to rise above the waterline.

Philip had found that river drivers were the least conversational of millworkers, their jobs requiring them to operate at an apex of concentration and equilibrium. The river chief was a laconic man named O’Hare, a lanky redhead who would have been tall even if not for the two-inch spikes on the caulked boots that he and his fellow river hogs wore.

Philip’s steps were silent, but O’Hare felt him coming from twenty feet away, felt the extra weight on the deck. When he saw Philip, O’Hare reached into his pocket and used a handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose.

Philip stopped several feet away. “M-morning,” he stammered. “How are the numbers today?”

O’Hare eyed him with suspicion, then bent down and reached into a small metal box with his free hand to pull out some papers. Behind him, some of the river drivers had allowed their attention to stray from their duties and were watching.

The river chief read the figures to Philip, who recorded them in his book. The pencil shook in Philip’s hand under the glare of so many squinting eyes.

“All right, then,” O’Hare said, which was what he always said to conclude their brief interactions. But instead of turning back to his work, as he usually did, he stayed where he was, as if to watch Philip go.

“One other thing,” Philip said. “Any unexpected absences?”

“Three guys haven’t shown,” O’Hare said, and told Philip their names. Then Philip, the mill pariah, walked back to the office as fast as he could.

“Where’ve you been, girl?” Elsie’s mother barked as Elsie walked into the store. Elsie had stayed after school later than usual to help Mrs. Worthy clean up. Now that Philip was out of the storage building, she and her teacher had resumed their routine of discussing the day’s events and planning for tomorrow’s lessons.

Elsie apologized for being late. “I didn’t think there’d be as much for me to do here.” An unfamiliar sense of boredom had hung over her the previous afternoon as she’d helped her father with inventory. There had been less and less for them to do, as they were running out of stock to count, organize, and rearrange.

Elsie grabbed a broom and dustpan as a young woman entered the store.

“How’s my favorite customer this afternoon?” Flora asked. Her voice sounded different somehow.

“Worried.” The woman was one of the newest timber brides—she looked only a year or two older than Elsie. Pale blond hair, freckles high on her cheeks, thinner than most. “People are saying the flu got here after all.”

“That’s what I heard,” Flora said. “Just a few people, though. Doesn’t mean it has to get out of hand. What can I help you with?”

The woman bought some coffee and a bag of flour, one of the last in stock. “You got any more of those huckleberry jams or marmalades?”

Flora shook her head. “We’re clear out of jams. Wouldn’t mind some myself. Getting tired of nothing but butter on my bread.” She smiled, an apology mixed with a reminder that everyone was in the same situation.

“Maybe I’ll buy some extra butter while I’m here.”

The woman was barely out the door when Flora started coughing. Elsie didn’t notice it at first, but as she finished sweeping, the coughing intensified. She looked up.

“Alfred,” Flora called out when she had the breath, “you mind interrupting your busy schedule and fetching me some water?”

But Alfred was in the cellar, so Elsie put down the broom and walked over to the spigot in the back room. Her mother was still coughing when Elsie handed her the glass. “Are you all right?”

Flora quickly drained the glass, but after she finished, she grimaced as if the water hadn’t been able to wash down whatever was in her throat. She nodded. “Be fine. Just something stuck down there.”

Elsie took the empty glass and filled it up again. When she handed it back to her mother, there was a distracted look in Flora’s eyes.

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.”