The Last Town on Earth
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Rebecca wasn’t sure if she was letting her anger at the country—at Wilson, at this horrible war—turn into anger about the town; she wasn’t sure if they were separate issues or two sides of the same coin. She and her fellow suffragists had worked so hard, come so close, but they had failed. If only they had won the vote, used it in the 1916 elections, maybe they could have made the difference. Women never would have allowed this nation to turn to war, never would have let the politicians take their sons away for battles on the other side of the earth. All the letters they had written, the marches, the parades down the streets of Seattle, that feeling of absolute certainty that this was right. That incredible new word, feminism, still sounded strange to her ears but inspired her. It was a word she wanted her daughter to hold close to her heart as well. They had come so far and done so much, but they had still fallen short, and now this. The mothers were voteless and couldn’t stop their sons from being fed into the meat grinders of Belgium and France.
Then again, maybe their votes wouldn’t have mattered. After all, Wilson had promised not to drag America onto Europe’s battlefields, yet here the country was at war, and the advocates for peace were being branded unpatriotic, radical. People were being jailed simply for speaking the truth, for proclaiming that this was a rich man’s war, a war for the bankers who had loaned so many millions to the Allies that they couldn’t stand to see them lose, couldn’t risk the loans going into default. So feed us your workingmen, feed us your young boys who can barely read and write, and let us plug them into the trenches, let them die for J. P. Morgan.
Rebecca’s last trip to the post office in Timber Falls had yielded a letter from her younger sister, and Rebecca still seethed to think of what Maureen had written. Maureen met twice weekly with other ladies in Seattle to roll bandages and prepare comfort kits for the soldiers, and she helped with the Liberty Loan drives, posting enthusiastic signs all over the city. She went to grocery stores to tell people the importance of food conservation, and just the other day they had told the police about a woman who was clearly ignoring the call, hoarding meats and sugar. Maureen and her friends met each week and made lists of neighbors who hadn’t yet bought any Liberty Bonds, neighbors who might possibly be antiwar agitators, and turned the lists over to the authorities. Their lists had already led to seven arrests, she happily reported.
Ah, Maureen. Blessed with three daughters and a son not yet thirteen, thus safely insulated from the war. Of course Maureen was making sure her fellow ladies were enthusiastically in support of the war. Perhaps suffrage wouldn’t have changed a thing. Maybe the Maureens of the world far outnumbered the Rebeccas, and this Great War would lead only to more wars, to be repeated infinitely.
Rebecca stood at the kitchen window, gazing at her own reflection and the faint shapes of the houses lining the streets. In other houses on streets just like this, children were sick, parents were sick, and beds belonging to young men were empty, perhaps permanently so. This was America, she thought, tears welling up in her eyes. This was what America had become. She dug her fingernails into her palms, willing the tears away.
Charles opened the front door, unbuttoning his coat and leaning forward to peck his wife on the cheek. Philip entered the kitchen and said hello as Charles removed the bowler that had once been black but had faded to gray. Rebecca left the room, knowing that Charles would want to talk to Philip in private.
Charles asked Philip how he was doing and received a shrug in response.
“I’m sorry you had to be a part of that.” Charles had always had a soft voice, even when he was Philip’s age. It was as if the rest of his body had aged all these years just so it could catch up to his voice, its calm tenor and weathered hue.
“It’s all right,” Philip said, though he looked like he was thinking, It’s all wrong.
Charles nodded. He hadn’t seen Philip look so vulnerable since the first time he’d seen Philip’s eyes, in that hospital room nearly five years ago. Philip now sat at the kitchen table with his hands at his sides, as if he thought he might need to defend himself. His face was white and his eyes were slightly wider than usual, evidence that the shock of that afternoon hadn’t worn off. Would it ever? Charles was becoming an old man; he had lost loved ones to disease and seen millworkers cut down by grisly accidents, had seen severed limbs and had touched frozen corpses and had heard the choking last breaths of his own mother and younger brother, but he had never seen anyone murdered. He had fought in no wars, had never needed to defend himself from some malignant aggressor. Though his association with his father’s mill had caused him to feel somehow responsible for the violence of the Everett strike, he had never felt the punishing weight of an individual’s death on his conscience. Fathers were never supposed to say that they didn’t know what their sons were going through, but Charles was acutely aware of the fact that his son was stumbling through terrain where he himself had never trod.
So he nodded, closely watching Philip’s eyes, which were avoiding his. Had the quarantine been a mistake? Charles should have known when he helped sway the town into this decision that it would so quickly come to roost under his own roof. It seemed some odd type of justice, centered there in the middle of a situation that until then had seemed to lack any sense of justice or irony or symbolism whatsoever, nothing but chaos and death.
“You two did the right thing,” Charles said.
“I really didn’t do anything,” Philip replied. “Graham did everything. I was …” His voice trailed off.
“You may think so,” Charles said, “but you helped by being there. I’m sure you made it easier for Graham.”
Too late, he realized that was the last thing Philip wanted to hear.
“You did the right thing,” Charles started over. “The man was sick, and if you’d let him in, half this town would be sick within days.”
“He could’ve been sick just from sleeping outside all night. We don’t know for sure he had the flu.”
Charles shook his head, politely but firmly. “Right now nearly everyone in this country who’s sick has the flu. Especially in Washington. I’m sure he had it.”
I’m sure. Philip looked like he couldn’t understand the concept of certainty right then. “I hope he did,” he said.
“What you had to do out there was hard,” Charles acknowledged, as if he had any idea. “I wish it had been me instead of you. But just because it was hard doesn’t mean it was wrong.”
Philip nodded again.
When Charles opened his mouth to say something more, Philip stood up too abruptly. “I should go to the store—Rebecca asked me to fetch a few things for her.”
Philip clearly wanted to be alone. Charles waited a moment, feeling that he was abdicating some responsibility by letting his son leave before providing him with some nugget of paternal wisdom. But he let him go nonetheless because, God help him, he could think of nothing else to say.
IV
“And how is my favorite customer this evening?” That was how Flora Metzger greeted everyone who walked into Metzgers General Store, and she smiled at the sawyer who didn’t look a day over eighteen.
“Jus’ fine,” he said. He gave Flora his order—molasses, cornmeal, potatoes, and any fruit she had—and she rummaged through the back shelves, whistling to herself.
“You look thinner, young man,” she said when she returned. “Your wife ain’t feeding you well?” Flora herself was well fed, with curly gray hair that hung down around her fleshy cheeks, and matching gray eyes that saw all that transpired within her store.
“She’s a fine cook,” the man said, holding back a smile.
“I hope you lie better to her than you lie to me.” Flora chuckled as she scribbled a receipt. “Handsome man like you”—she winked at him—“I’m sure your wife has other skills.”
“Good night, ma’am,” the man said, blushing as he shuffled off.
Flora knew the way millworkers and loggers spoke among themselves—you could overhear quite a lot if you had a mind to—and she delighted in embarrassing them with the same sort of talk. Even the men who’d been shopping at her store for two years were hardly used to her banter; she always seemed to find the right comment for making the toughest of toughs turn red before he finished his transaction.
Up to the desk stepped Leonard Thibeault. Flora had known what he wanted as soon as she spotted his head looming behind the other customer. Leonard was a tall man, and he seemed to assume his height gave him an impressive air, that no one would think to doubt his strength or steadfastness. He had a long oval face and a bush of brown hair that added a couple of inches to his stature.
“How’s my favorite customer this evening?” Her voice was thinner this time. His wry and somewhat off-kilter smile was all the answer she needed.
“Bottle o’ whiskey, if y’ don’t mine.” He had a low and rolling voice, the edges of his words dampened by a French Canadian accent that thirty years in the West had not erased.
She nodded and went to the back shelves. When she returned with the bottle, she noticed that Leonard wasn’t wearing a jacket despite the cold, and that one of the buttons on his brown flannel shirt had been skipped so that the shirttails hung at different lengths. Such a sight normally would have won a gibe from Flora, but Leonard seemed beneath such remarks.
“You might want to slow down the frequency of these purchases,” Flora advised as she filled out the receipt. Her eyes were on the paper, but she felt him swaying like a lone pine on a windy day. How he managed to drink this much without losing a finger or an arm to one of the saws was a mystery to her, some enchanted luck of the foolish. “You know we aren’t getting any new shipments till the flu’s passed.”
She would’ve expected that someone who loved his liquor would learn to use it sparingly in times like these, to preserve the supply. But then again, someone like Leonard would probably figure a way to make moonshine out of pine needles if necessary.
When she looked back up at him, she saw him staring at one of the walls. He might have been reading a government flyer about sugar conservation if his eyeballs had been moving. He hadn’t heard a thing she’d said.
“Thanks, Flora,” he said, pocketing the slip and cradling the bottle as he swayed to the door.
Philip smelled alcohol on the breath of the tall man who nearly walked into him as he left the store. The man didn’t apologize or even seem to notice as he veered off, busily opening a bottle.
“How is my favorite customer this evening?” Flora asked as Philip approached the counter. Behind her, Alfred Metzger had emerged from the cellar and was rummaging about in the aisles. He was always stocking and restocking and counting and recounting what was left on the shelves while Flora presided over the store. His height and thin frame made him his wife’s opposite. Most customers saw his face only on the rare occasions when she wasn’t manning the place.
“Fine, ma’am, and you?”
“I’m two days older than when you saw me last. That ain’t good.”
“But you look at least two days younger.” Something about Flora Metzger brought out Philip’s brash side.
She smiled and put her hand to her breast in mock flattery. “You always know how to make a fat lady’s day.” This was part of why Philip had wanted to visit the store, so Flora’s forceful personality could make him forget about the soldier for a few moments.
“You look taller,” she said. “You grown in the last two days?”
“Haven’t checked. My pants still fit.”
“Well, when they stop fitting, you come in here and I’ll get you furnished right. I want my favorite customer looking sharp, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, what do you want?”
Philip enjoyed this banter. One of his tasks as mill accountant was to visit the general store to collect production numbers and sales slips; trading goodhearted jabs with Flora certainly beat discussing volume with the laconic foremen.
“Flour and cornmeal, please.”
She sighed mightily as she lifted herself from her chair. “How many?”
Philip thought. They really needed only one bag each, but with the town closed off, the store wouldn’t be replenishing its shelves anytime soon. “Two bags each, please.”
She heaved the bags onto the desk one at a time, then reclaimed her imperial position on the chair. After Philip signed his name by the cost in her book, she eyed him. “You preoccupied with something? You’ve already been in my store a full two minutes, and you haven’t asked after my daughter yet.”
Elsie Metzger was fifteen years old and one of the best-looking girls in town, as far as Philip was concerned. He tried to make his smile disappear, but it was impossible. “I … don’t always ask after her.”
“Oh, she’s not good enough for you?”
“No, that’s not what I—” He shook his head again, realizing he couldn’t win. “So how’s Elsie?”
“Lazy. She needs fresh air.” Flora leaned her head back and called out, “Elsie! Come help Philip Worthy carry his purchases home!”
Philip shook his head. “No, please, I’ll be fine.” Could there be anything more insulting than needing a girl’s help carrying groceries? He heard movement from one of the back rooms, so he started stacking the bags of flour and meal.
“Oh, hush. She’s just back there twiddling her thumbs anyway. The walk’ll do her some good.”
“Mrs. Metzger, really, I don’t need any help carrying this.”
Flora raised one eyebrow. “I think you need help in more ways than you realize.”
She’d barely finished saying that when Elsie came through the side door. Philip knew that most of the other young men in town didn’t share his high opinion of the tomboyish Elsie, but that didn’t make him question his judgment in the slightest. He knew her well because she was Laura’s best friend. He knew what types of jokes she found funny and which made her blush; he knew that when she was playing cards, any faint wrinkles on her forehead meant she had a good hand and that a strangely serene expression meant she was trying to mask a bad hand. She hadn’t been one of the prettier girls when she was younger, her thick eyebrows casting too dark a shadow over her eyes, her curly brown hair too disheveled. But she’d reached the age when some of the formerly overlooked were beginning to take their rightful places as the beauties they’d always been meant to be. Elsie’s eyes glowed with an intelligent, mysterious light, and she was becoming vain enough to keep her hair more or less under control. She’d always had an uncommonly deep voice, but nowadays it seemed softer.
Philip had started to lift the sacks from the counter when Flora clamped her hands upon them. “I said Elsie’s helping you, and that’s final. I don’t want anything falling and tearing open and going to waste—especially not while we’re under quarantine.”
He had once dropped a sack of flour, more than a year ago, and Flora had never forgotten it. But this was the first time she’d gone so far as making Elsie help him.
He finally accepted the inevitable. “I’ll get the flour,” he told Elsie, who lifted the meal.
“Tell Charles I said hello, and tell Rebecca she’s not giving my daughter enough homework,” Flora called after them.
With her back to her mother, Elsie rolled her eyes at Philip.
After Philip had followed her out the door, Alfred’s voice rose from deep in the aisles. “You playing matchmaker, Flora?”
“Do you have a problem with Philip Worthy?”
“I only have a problem with your meddling.”
“I don’t meddle. I instigate. Big difference.”
“My mom likes teasing you,” Elsie said as they walked along Commonwealth’s main street, dark except for the light emanating from people’s homes.
“She likes teasing everybody.”
Elsie nodded. “True, but you especially.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. ‘Cause you aren’t a logger or millworker, maybe. You’re not like most of the other fellows in town.”
Philip’s fingertips were already starting to tingle—they did that sometimes, a legacy of his accident five years ago. Damage he would have to live with, the doctor at the Everett hospital had said in an uninterested tone. At least the tingling meant they were still there, as opposed to his left foot, which had been amputated. The longer he carried the sacks, the more his fingertips tingled; soon the sensation would spread to his hands and up his arms, reaching his elbows. It didn’t happen as often as it used to, partly because he was stronger and partly because he had learned how to function within his new limitations. The feeling was something between pain and numbness, but he knew from experience that if he pushed himself too far, his arms would grow unresponsive and the bags would come crashing down.
“I really can take those sacks for you,” he told her. “You can head back if you want.”
When had he started getting so nervous around her? He’d known her for five years: when he’d first been adopted by the Worthys, he had wasted many afternoons with Laura and Elsie, playing card games and taking bike rides, wandering along the river to collect driftwood. The three of them would sit on the stones at the water’s edge, watching the river drivers walk across the gently bouncing logs as they floated down the river, calmly riding them like Aladdin on his carpet.
“Hey, this is my way to get away from my mother for a few minutes. Don’t deprive me of it.”
Philip nodded. “So my mom’s not giving you enough homework?”
“Don’t you dare tell her that. My mother calls me lazy if she catches me being idle for two seconds. Between school and the store, I do more work than she does, sitting there gossiping with everyone who walks in her door.”
Although he liked working with Charles at the mill, Philip missed school, because he missed being around Elsie. He missed talking to her, missed looking at her while she concentrated on a test or stared out the window, lost. There were few girls her age in town, but even if Commonwealth had been overrun with young maidens he still would have plotted ways to accidentally cross paths with Elsie.
“So what happened out there this afternoon?” For all her criticism of her mother, Elsie did share her mother’s hunger for gossip.
“What have you heard?” Because Mrs. Metzger hadn’t asked him about the soldier, Philip had assumed the news hadn’t gotten around. But maybe even she knew there were some things you shouldn’t joke about.
“I heard some men saying someone tried to get into town.”
Philip nodded. “Someone did. He was sick, so we made him leave—fired a couple warning shots, and he got the message.”
That was what they’d been told to say. Charles’s idea, and the doctor had agreed. No need to worry everyone, no need to complicate things. Only the guards needed to know. Charles had told Rebecca, so maybe it was assumed that the men would tell their wives and that their hushed and conspiratorial whispers would stay in the chamber of matrimonial secrets. But Philip sure wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. That he knew.
“How close did he get?”
“Not close enough to make us sick.” But Philip wasn’t sure—what if he was carrying around a tiny piece of the soldier right now, in his lungs, his blood, his heart?
“What was he doing here? He didn’t say if he was going to come back with more soldiers, did he?”
Philip and Graham had thought this question might arise, but Charles and Doc Banes had dismissed it. So Philip chose to belittle his own concern by smiling and lightly chiding Elsie. “I really don’t think any soldiers are trying to take over our town. He didn’t look like a Heinie.”
She smiled, even though her grandparents had come over from Germany. Her parents had assured her that the incessant anti-German comments of the day didn’t apply to them. “So who fired the shots?”
“We both did—Graham shot one, and I shot one.” He said that quickly, twitching his head before he said it.
“I’ve just never shot at anyone, is all.” Like many girls in Commonwealth, Elsie had fired a gun a few times, but she seemed to find the idea of firing at another person strangely thrilling.
Philip tried to clarify the lie. “We didn’t shoot at him. We shot into the air. Just as a warning.”
“Did he have a gun, too? He was a soldier, right?”
Damn, you have a lot of questions, he thought. “Mustn’t’ve had one with him, I guess.”
Elsie nodded. She planned on becoming a teacher in two years, when she finished her own schooling, and Rebecca had encouraged her to be curious and inquisitive, especially when things didn’t make sense.
They walked on in silence. Philip’s arms were aching, but he resisted the temptation to rearrange the bags and let Elsie see he was struggling.
“I heard in Seattle they aren’t even letting people go outside without masks on,” Elsie said. “If you don’t have a mask, the trolley won’t pick you up. You can even get arrested for it.”
“I heard that, too. Not about the arresting, but I guess that makes sense.”
“They’ve canceled school in most towns, and closed any other places people get together.”
Philip nodded. “I wonder what teachers are doing, then.”
“Getting sick, most likely. Or tending sick husbands and children.”
“I guess we’re lucky, huh?” But as his comment hung in the air, Philip thought how strange it sounded. He’d meant lucky that the flu hadn’t invaded their town yet, but the flu was still laying siege to it, so that didn’t seem so lucky. And what had happened today sure as hell wasn’t lucky.
She seemed to know what he’d been thinking. “It’s pretty rotten, isn’t it? First war, and now everybody sick.”
“They say we’re winning the war.” But by the time they could get another newspaper, Lord only knew what would be happening in Europe. Were the soldiers healthy? The one from that afternoon certainly was not. Philip had a sudden image of a gray battlefield bereft of explosions or gunfire but filled with the writhing bodies of the sick and dying.
“I know we’ll win, but still,” Elsie said. “Two rotten things happening at once. Makes you wish you could run away someplace where none of this is happening.”
“It’s happening pretty much everywhere, I think.”
“I know. I just wish there was someplace to escape.”
But as they walked in silence, they came to the same strange realization: the closed-off town of Commonwealth was precisely this place. There was no war, no pestilence. People around the globe were dying, dying from flu and pneumonia and aerial bombings and bayonets, but in Commonwealth, the last town on earth, people were safe. This was the place to run to, and they were already here. All they could do was wait.
By the time they reached his house, Philip’s hands were almost completely numb. “Well, my lady, thank you for your kind assistance.”
“You’re welcome.” He let her pile the cornmeal atop the stack he was barely holding on to. After a brief pause, he took a quick step toward the door right as she did the same. They smiled at each other awkwardly, and he stepped back to let her open the door for him.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sure. Be careful out at guard post, okay?”
“Okay.” Their eyes locked for what felt like an uncomfortable amount of time.
“And if something interesting happens again, you’d better come tell me about it.” She smiled again. “I don’t want to have to carry cornmeal across town just to hear all the good stories.”
She turned and hurried off.
Philip kicked the door shut and ran to the dining room table, dropping the bags with a heavy crash. He sat down and shook his hands to get the blood flowing.
It was quiet in the house. He sat there for a while, thinking about Elsie but also, inescapably, about what he and Graham had done. He looked at his hands and thought of Graham’s four-fingered hand, wondering if Graham ever stayed up at night worrying that he’d lose more fingers on the job. One lost finger you could deal with, you could accept. Carry things with the other hand, learn to give an extra 25 percent of strength and dexterity to the remaining four fingers. But losing a second or third would be tougher, surely. Philip had seen many such men in Everett and Commonwealth, had caught glimpses of their horrible claws in the rare moments when they let their hands out of their pockets and exposed them to the world and the amazed gazes of children. He wondered if there was some end point, some line in the dirt, some amount of pain and suffering beyond which one could never continue.