The Last Town on Earth (9 page)

X

C
harles was standing at the foot of his bed, looking in a small and faded mirror above his dresser as he removed his tie, when he heard the murmuring voices of his children coming from downstairs.

“I’m glad he’s talking to Laura,” Charles said to Rebecca. “He’s barely said a word at the mill the last two days.”

Rebecca stood up from the bed, putting down the journal she had been reading. “How is a person supposed to act after watching his friend shoot someone?”

Charles was still, surprised by her tone. Then he walked up behind her, wanting to put his hands on her shoulders to calm her, but thought against it.

“He never should have been out there,” Rebecca said.

Charles waited a beat. “He volunteered.”

She turned to face him. “You let him.”

“I was supposed to forbid him?” His voice grew louder, but he was still enough in control to keep the children from overhearing.

Rebecca began tidying the bed.

“Do you blame me for this?” he asked.

Her answer, when it came, seemed less important to him than the fact that she didn’t voice it for a full three seconds.

“No,” she said. “I know you didn’t want this to happen. I’m sorry. I’m just…” She shook her head. “I’m just
angry
that it happened.” She sat down on the bed again, her hands clasped in her lap.

Charles didn’t want any more arguments, any more debates. They had been arguing for months about the war, as his opinions were more moderate than hers. He had reminded her recently that the price of timber was up thanks to the army’s need of spruce for fighter planes and Douglas fir for constructing cantonments, and then Rebecca had all but accused him of war profiteering.
Have we moved deep into the woods and paid workers a better wage just so they could help the army kill more Germans?

“I’ll tell him he’s not to serve as a guard again,” Charles said. “It was a mistake to let him, you’re right.”

“I’ve already talked to him about that,” Rebecca replied, “and he doesn’t want to stop. He’s afraid he’d be letting Graham down if he did. And I think he really means that he’d be letting us down, too.”

That seems to make this argument moot, Charles thought. “So what do you want me to do?”

Maybe all she wanted was to hear that Charles did indeed have Philip’s pain on his conscience, have the death of the soldier on his conscience. Even so, he wasn’t sure he could say it, wasn’t sure he could give voice to all the pressures bearing down on him. He had that one life on his conscience, yes, but he also had the lives of every person in the town. Every man and woman he had encouraged to leave their previous jobs and homes, to whom he had promised a better way of life, for whom he had vowed a stronger community, a land of safety and hope. He had to remember that.

The town was bigger than Charles, bigger than his paternal instincts for Philip’s protection, bigger than his need to please his wife. He thought of his selfish brothers, how they had always used their families’ needs to justify their own petty actions—that was why the workers were badly paid, why the strikebreakers could knock heads. He would not allow himself to fall into that trap, to use his love for his family to justify a moral failing. It didn’t mean he didn’t love Philip, Rebecca, and Laura any less—it meant that he loved them so much he would not compromise his vision of love for all.

That this was so incredibly difficult to do only convinced him that it was right.

Rebecca said, “I don’t want you to do anything.”

Charles sat on the bed beside Rebecca, who was gazing ahead at the wall rather than at her husband’s large blue eyes. He put an arm around her and she did the same, and they sat there in a half embrace.

“I don’t blame you,” she said, hoping it was true.

Twenty minutes later, Charles had gone to pay a quick visit to Dr. Banes, and Rebecca was downstairs making tea. The pot was not yet whistling when there was a knock on the door.

Rebecca pulled the curtain aside to get a glimpse of the visitor: Jarred Rankle. She smiled and opened the door.

“Good evening, Jarred.” She backed away and left the door open. “You’re just in time for some tea.”

Rankle held a hat in his hands, as well as some papers. His heavy jacket only added to the thickness of his muscular frame, and the floor seemed to creak a bit more loudly when he walked on it than when Charles did.

“I’m finally getting around to returning these journals,” he told her. “They were very interesting—thank you.”

“Better start reading more slowly,” Rebecca said. “We’ll have to make every printed word last until the quarantine ends.”

“Is Charles in?”

“He’s visiting Doc Banes.”

Rankle blanched. “Is he all right?”

She smiled. “Not that kind of visit. Just to talk.”

He nodded.

“Join me for some tea. You look chilled.”

He paused, torn between decorum and perhaps something else. His heavy granite eyebrows shifted a bit, then he sat down at the table. “Thank you,” he said. “So how are your little charges at the school?”

She smiled as she carried two cups to the table and sat across from him. “They’re fine. I think I may have miscalculated, though. I thought the inactivity of having the town closed would bore them and lead to trouble, idle hands and all that. So I’ve been even stricter than usual lately, giving them extra work, but I wonder if I’ve gone a bit overboard. The more I give them, the more distracted they seem. I’m beginning to feel a bit guilty about it.”

“Ah, it’s good for ’em.” He smiled. “I never did well at school, and look what became of me. Drive the little ones into the ground; they’ll thank you for it.”

They talked for a bit about one of the journal articles Rankle had read, something about the recent trial of the Wobbly leadership. Dozens had been sentenced to long jail terms for the crime of speaking out against the war.

“Wilson’s just using the war as an excuse to jail all the Wobblies,” Rankle said. “He’s in a panic about what happened to Russia—afraid of having his own Bolshevik Revolution on his hands.”

“Did you see some Democrats are calling the IWW ‘Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors’?”

He smirked. “I saw it. I’d heard it before, too. They’ll blame ’em for the war, blame ’em for not fighting the war, blame ’em after the war. It’s nothing new.”

He coughed then, a hoarse and forceful shudder that rocked the table. Rebecca didn’t worry, as she was used to his coughing. Like many men in town, Rankle had the asthmatic cough of the shingle weaver, his lungs scoured by years of sawdust.

Jarred Rankle had been a young husband and father living outside Missoula when the lack of jobs forced him to take a six-month stint felling timber three hundred miles from home. He had missed his family terribly during those months, reading letters filled with news of their two-year-old son’s progress. After four months, his wife’s letters stopped reaching him, and Rankle blamed the timber town’s crooked postmaster, to whom he had refused to pay kickbacks. After the job was finished, it was time to see if the situation back in Missoula had improved, but when he reached his house he found it empty. Some of their scant possessions had been left behind, but not many. He asked around but no one knew where his wife was, or his son. He contacted family but they didn’t know, either. Rankle’s wife and child had lived there only one year and had few acquaintances, so no one had noticed their sudden absence. The winter had been long and cold, and weeks had passed when people never saw their neighbors. He spent the next six months and every last penny he owned trying to find them, but there was no trail and no leads. He never saw them again.

After drinking away a couple of years and living in and out of small town prisons, Rankle made a friend, a Wobbly by the name of Rubinski. When he heard Rankle’s sob story, he both empathized and told him the story was all too common.
You think you’re the only bum’s dragged himself to the ends of the earth to find a job to feed your family and come home to find ’em gone? You think you’re the only one to wonder if they was killed by Injuns or horse thieves, or maybe they found a richer man and ran off with him, or maybe they died of the cold in the snow? You think you’re the only one who’s played by the rules and still had everything taken from him?
A thousand invisible and brokenhearted men walked alongside him, kicking their empty bottles and holding on to old love letters with blistered, work-weary fingers. Rankle applied for his red card that week and never drank again.

Rankle spent the next ten years following jobs in the Northwest and organizing for the Wobblies. He had been in Everett for the general strike, where his position made him a marked man. He’d been outnumbered by thugs and beaten up at the Beverly Park ambush, and was in the hospital recovering when the ferries had taken their ill-fated voyage, though he lost two friends that day. Tired of the violence and overwhelmed by the disappearance of more loved ones, he had parted ways with the Wobblies after that. He left Everett and bounced from job to job until he heard about what Charles Worthy was doing in Commonwealth.

After a brief silence, he saw a preoccupied look take hold of Rebecca. “Are you all right?”

She placed her cup on its saucer. “Worried.”

“Once the war’s over, the unions’ll be back.”

She smiled. “Not about that. About Philip. About the quarantine.”

Rankle felt a bit uncomfortable, stepping into a family situation. “He won a lot of guys’ respect, volunteering as a guard.”

“I’m not much interested in him winning respect. I think some men around here overvalue that.”

Rankle’s heavy eyebrows shifted in acquiescence. “If it helps to know, he does seem to be in good spirits around the mill,” he said. “And people like working with him. He’s a good kid. I keep my eye on him.” He felt another cough coming but stifled it with a sip of hot tea. He could feel the sweat at his hairline.

“Thank you. He is a good young man. That’s why I worry—about him and Laura.”

“I’ll say this: if I could raise a family in any town in America, it would be in Commonwealth.”

She looked down for a short while, her brows knit.

“I voted against the quarantine,” she finally said. “I think it’s wrong. I don’t think we should shut the world out, cut ourselves off.” She stared at her hands, folded into a tense knot.

It was the first time she had confided in him this way. But she felt herself becoming as cut off as she feared the town had become; she was telling him because she had to tell someone.

“Things will work out,” he told her after a silence. An expression as confident as it was simple.

She shook her head again. “I wish I had done more to stop it—” Her voice broke, her eyes watering.

After a moment’s hesitation, he reached out and put one of his massive hands atop hers, squeezing it a bit. His palm felt warm on Rebecca’s fingers.

She looked up at him. He was a handsome man, the sharp edges of his jawline and cheekbone intimidating, perhaps, but the calmness of those gray eyes more than compensating. Surely he could have remarried, Rebecca figured—he probably could have had his pick of wives, even in towns where available women were greatly outnumbered by lumberjacks. She didn’t know if he had ever stopped mourning his family or if he had never stopped believing they were alive. Perhaps he had allowed himself to become married to a cause, first to the Wobblies and now to Commonwealth. If so, it was not a complete marriage, for Rebecca still sensed the loneliness inside him.

He removed his hand, his gray eyes turning away, as if to remind them both where they were, who they were.

“I’m sorry to put on a scene,” she said, gently dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.

He shook his head. “Don’t be. Everyone’s feeling unsettled. But I know we’ll get through this.”

He thanked her for the tea and was on his way, and she sat at the table for a long while, her fingers still feeling the weight of his hand.

XI

I
t was dark when J. B. Merriwhether of Merriwhether’s First Bank turned off the Ford’s headlights and killed the engine in front of his house in Timber Falls. He reached for the door handle and paused, realizing that, with the windows up, he could not hear any coughing emanating from his house. The silence felt like such a gift that he stayed there a moment, waiting inside the Ford, breathing.

His daughter, Gwen, had been sick since Saturday, six days now. On Friday night she had been her vibrant self, though restless from being cooped up at home—the schools were all closed on account of the flu. But the next morning she’d woken up complaining of a headache, of pains in her knees and elbows, of terrible cold despite three wool blankets. By noon she was running a high fever.

Gwen will pull through, J.B. had told himself. She was about the hardiest girl J.B. had ever known—whenever J.B.’s son, James, had taken sick for a few days, Gwen would barely get a sniffle. But as the days had passed, his calm words no longer reassured him or his wife. Every time he opened his mouth to utter them, they were bludgeoned by the sound of Gwen coughing, a sound that grew more hoarse each day.

The flu had been in Timber Falls for over three weeks now.

He couldn’t believe how many people had succumbed. Mayors throughout Washington were closing dance halls and forbidding theater owners to run their reels, banning public gatherings for fear of contagion. J.B. had kept the bank open—how could the pillar of a town close?—but within days, all of his employees had called in sick. For the past week he had been the only man in the building, helping the dwindling number of customers who came in each day. It seemed like half the town was sick, and the other half was home caring for them.

The
Timber Falls Daily
hadn’t been reporting the flu’s death statistics at first, but families insistent on recording the passing of loved ones had finally cowed the paper into listing the deceased. Mill owners had told J.B. they were suffering through absenteeism of strike proportions, and men had to be awfully sick before they’d forgo a day’s wages.

James, meanwhile, was now in France, or at least he was when he’d written his last letter.
Most recent
letter, J.B. scolded himself, not
last
letter. J.B. remembered the look on Violet’s face when he’d finished reading the letter, a look of profound worry. Did she still blame J.B. for not doing more to keep James out of the war? But what could he have done? J.B. had volunteered to work on the enlistment board, had worked with the other upstanding paragons of social order in Timber Falls, had sat with them at their desk on the appointed day when all the men of appropriate age were required to enlist. Some friends of J.B. had pulled what strings they could, and the long arm of Uncle Sam had passed James over that time. But months later, in the second draft, James wasn’t as fortunate. So off he was to Fort Jenkins, and from there to France.

His mind on his son, J.B. had spent the last two hours doing his patriotic duty as best he could. Since locking the doors of his empty bank, he had driven all over Timber Falls, hanging posters on lampposts and walls. In the passenger seat of the new 1918 Model T Ford coupe was a stack of Liberty Bonds, and on the floor beneath them, a few posters he would deal with tomorrow. His wife didn’t approve of the image—a bloodred handprint above the words
THE HUN
—
HIS MARK
/
BLOT IT OUT WITH LIBERTY BONDS
—but he found it stirring. She preferred the ones with the valiant woman in the white dress, one hand extended to the sky like Lady Liberty herself, standing above the words
VICTORY
—
LIBERTY LOAN
.

J.B. had driven down empty roads and hung posters that no one would see save the doctors and undertakers who rode past. He feared he was wasting his time, but someone had to sell the bonds, do their part. And J.B. needed a task, sorely needed to
do
something. Anything was better than sitting at home, listening to Gwen’s cough. Waiting for a letter from James.

One night the previous week J.B. had been at the Pioneers Club, one of the few gathering places in town that hadn’t been shut down, since it wasn’t exactly a public venue. He had been drinking with some of the boys when they were visited, unannounced, by one of the Four-Minute Men. The speaker looked just young enough that his sons, if he had any, weren’t likely to be drafted yet, and maybe that helped with his sunny optimism.
The proud and patriotic American people are the difference in this here conflict,
the man said,
the difference between the Allies drowning in the mud of Caporetto or standing tall at Belleau Wood. But folks in Britain are still low on food, and the French are being raided from their homes by the Heinies, so more help is needed from good Christian folks like you gentlemen here.
When the man finished, J.B. vowed to spend his weekend selling Liberty Bonds.

So he had driven all over Timber Falls and the neighboring towns, but in two days he’d barely sold any. Sometimes he heard coughing or moaning from within houses he approached, and sometimes, after his knock, there would be footsteps approaching the door. The footsteps would stop and he would wait, but in most instances, no one would answer. He would knock again and the footsteps would recede, their gentle sound fading beneath the percussive assault of more coughing. A total of eight people had dared to answer their doors, five of them purchasing bonds after enduring J.B.’s appeal. The last person to answer had said no, that the only reason she’d answered was she had hoped he was the undertaker. She’d been waiting for two days.

That had been Saturday.

On Sunday, rather than subjecting himself to another round of ghostlike homes and hollow-eyed stares, he had decided to drive even farther from Timber Falls in hopes of finding a less ravaged population. Surely no one had thought to trek out to Commonwealth—no one ever went to that crazy town. Perhaps it was foolish of J.B. to do so, but he had figured that since no one else had tried it, he might as well be the first. And besides, he had always liked Charles Worthy more than he dared admit.

Because who but a socialist or red sympathizer—which J. B. Merriwhether of Merriwhether’s First Bank most certainly was not—would dare say anything the least bit favorable about Charles Worthy? A man who had made all the lumber barons of Timber Falls and Everett roll with laughter when he suggested he could run a successful mill by paying his workers more, by sharing with them equally? A man who had started a mill miles from a viable port, on a tract of land that his own father had deemed unworkable?

But J.B. had known Charles before all that, had handled the banking for the Worthy family’s mill in Everett before starting a new bank in Timber Falls. He knew the calm and quiet Charles Worthy was craftier than he received credit for, and though Charles was overshadowed by his guffawing, handshaking, cigar-smoking brothers, J.B. suspected the Worthy family mill in Everett would undergo a decline now that Charles was no longer the caretaker of its financial fortune. If anyone could make a mill like Commonwealth succeed, it was probably Charles.

And wasn’t his son, Philip, only a year or two from draft age? Philip was the other reason J.B. liked Charles. A man who adopts an orphaned boy like that, a complete stranger—that’s not a bad man. J.B. wanted to be the first to sell some Liberty Bonds in that crazy town, to shake Charles’s hand one more time.

After the long drive deep into the woods, however, J.B.’s journey had come to an end at the tree that blocked the road and the sign warning him off. He had sat there for a good two minutes, his engine idling, his foot on the brake, as he tried to make sense of it. The sign had said
ON ACCOUNT OF
THE
OUTBREAK
, not
ON ACCOUNT OF
OUR
OUTBREAK
. Was the town healthy and hiding? And though his eyes weren’t as sharp as they’d once been, he thought he had seen two men standing atop the hill, watching him as he turned the Ford to drive away.

He’d told a few friends about the experience, asked them if there was any news from Commonwealth. That had been nearly a week ago, and he’d heard nothing.

And here he was, back from another wasted effort, back to his sick daughter and his stark house. He exhaled deeply, his breath fogging the windshield. In the Ford he, too, felt quarantined, temporarily separated from the town’s horrors, his daughter’s suffering. Upstairs Gwen’s window was dark—she couldn’t endure the lamplight even while awake. He hoped she was sleeping, but lately the coughs had given her no rest. He looked at the mailbox, saw that it was empty. Violet would have checked it by now, and if there had been word from James, she would have telephoned him at the bank. Unless the news was bad. Each day it was harder to get out of his Ford.

J.B. said a brief prayer for his children. Then he gripped the handle and pushed the door open, stepping back into a world he had learned not to trust.