The Last Town on Earth Read online

  Beside her, Philip stood, and as he took his first step toward the line, Rebecca started to raise her hand instinctively to grab his shoulder, to pull him to his seat and tell him he was making a mistake. He was only sixteen! He should not stand out there and hold a gun against whoever might happen upon the town. But before she could grab him, he had stepped beyond her, into that long line, sidling up beside Graham, who nodded at his unofficial brother and patted him twice on the shoulder.

  For many years Rebecca would remember that shoulder clasp and the way Philip’s back seemed to straighten under the weight of Graham’s hand.

  III

  What had the soldier’s name been? How old was he? Where did his family live, and how recently had he written to them? Were they reading his most recent letter now, trying not to tear up at the end of it, hoping that another would soon follow?

  Philip’s mind raced. As much as he tried not to do this to himself, as much as he tried to focus on the supper on his plate, on his stepmother’s voice, he could not stop himself from wondering about the man whose life he had helped bring to a violent and completely unexpected halt.

  “Are you all right?” Rebecca asked.

  If everything were all right, Philip thought, then there would be no need to post armed guards by the town entrance. There would be no need for the rifles, and there would have been no need to shoot the soldier. The soldier would be sitting beside him right now, happily eating Rebecca’s cooking and telling them all for the tenth time how thankful he was for their hospitality.

  “I’m fine.”

  They’d ask the soldier about the war and he’d shrug, act uncomfortable with all the attention at first, but once he started talking about it, he’d find it difficult to stop. He’d tell them about his training and the rumors circulating through the camp about where they’d be deployed. He’d tell them he wasn’t in any hurry to get to the front but that once he got there, he’d be honored to do his duty for God and country.

  Rebecca put her hand on Philip’s shoulder. “Try to eat some.”

  “Sorry,” Philip said.

  “Don’t be sorry. Just remember to take care of yourself. You have to eat.”

  He ate. It took effort at first, but the first few bites awakened his stomach. The stew was warm and heavily salted, and dark enough for Philip to be less than sure whether there was any meat in it or if it was just vegetables. What day was today? Was it Wheatless Monday, Meatless Tuesday, Porkless Thursday? Every grocery store in America displayed those signs. Save food for the soldiers, everyone said. “Wheatless days in America make for sleepless nights in Germany.” Not that Philip would complain—he ate much better with the Worthys than he ever had with his own mother.

  Outside it was already dark, the autumn sun chased away by the cold winds.

  Philip tried not to think of the soldier. Instead, think of this house, the people inside it. Think of today.

  “It’s Wednesday,” he blurted out.

  “Yes?” Rebecca answered, her eyes watchful and warm.

  He thought for a moment. “Are you sorry you can’t be at your meetings?” Typically, Wednesday evenings were when Rebecca would be meeting with fellow suffragists in Everett or Seattle, or maybe in some of the smaller towns, hoping to build up the movement with new recruits.

  She nodded. “I am, but we’re all making sacrifices now.” Then she found a way to smile at the situation. “I’m sure the groups can survive without me for a few weeks.”

  It was the second Wednesday since the quarantine had begun, so this would be the second week of meetings Rebecca had missed. She did not appreciate the forced inactivity; she sorely missed those suffrage meetings and rallies, as she had missed the rallies for the Woman’s Peace Party, rallies they’d held in the months leading up to America’s joining the war. She and other WPP members had made speeches and exhorted people to vote for the peace candidates, to fight against the pressures that the Preparedness Movement was exerting, those thinly disguised warmongers who wanted the country to build more warships and cannons and guns just in case. She missed those meetings especially, sitting with like-minded men and women, people who felt, like her, that no good could come of war, especially this war, fought for no justifiable reasons beyond those lies spread by the propagandists. But once Wilson had declared war and Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, suddenly the WPP was illegal—Americans weren’t allowed to preach peace anymore. Now everyone was supposed to sing happy songs about fighter pilots and doughboys, hate the kaiser and love their president.

  Philip nodded at her. “Hopefully you’ll get to be out there again soon.”

  “In the meantime, I can always write plenty of letters,” she said, smirking ruefully. “I just can’t mail them yet.”

  “Maybe you’ll get suffrage anyway,” he said with a slight smile. “Maybe they’ll pass the law during the flu.”

  She laughed. “That’d be nice, but I doubt it.”

  The door opened, and in walked Laura, Philip’s adoptive sister. She was two years younger than Philip, with straight amber hair that might have been blonder had she lived someplace with more sunlight. She had brown eyes that could look incredibly mean when she wanted them to, which they often had in Philip’s first few years with the family. Laura wasn’t a bad person, Philip eventually learned, she was just used to being an only child. Having to accept an adopted brother—an older adopted brother, for goodness’ sake—at the age of nine had been a difficult task.

  She sat down on a chair opposite Philip and looked at him carefully, showing more compassion than she usually permitted herself.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “I was thinking about making a cake later,” Laura said.

  Cake? This was something she did only on his birthday. Because everyone was conserving sugar until the war ended, the thought was downright treasonous. “Great. Why today?”

  She looked away, as if uncomfortable with her own act of charity. “I just wanted to.” A pause. “I thought you’d want some.”

  “Thanks.”

  Laura had not been told about the dead soldier. Their mother had explained that a man had tried to enter the town but that Graham and her brother had persuaded him to leave, and that the confrontation had left Philip exhausted.

  “Welcome,” Laura said. In the background, Rebecca tried to make herself invisible. “You don’t need to help me with my math tonight, either.”

  “No, I said I would.” Philip was afraid of changing his routine. It was awkward enough eating supper alone, but his guard stint had lasted until eight, and Charles was at an emergency meeting with the rest of the guards at the town hall.

  After Laura went back to her room, Philip forced himself to finish his food. This stew would have saved the soldier’s life, he thought. If it had been placed at the bottom of the hill moments before the soldier’s arrival, he would have eaten it and then continued down the road. If they had known he was coming, if they somehow could have anticipated the day’s events, he would be alive and his stomach would be full, and Philip’s wouldn’t be queasy.

  When he finished, Rebecca told him she’d clean his bowl, which he politely tried to resist. Despite their years together, he still felt somewhat awkward around her. He had known that the way his own mother had raised him had been unconventional—taking him from town to town, scrounging for money, blaming him for their troubles—but he’d grown used to it over twelve years. Even the smallest acts of kindness from Rebecca left him somewhat unsure how to react, how thankful to be and how wary.

  He sat back down at the dining room table as Rebecca cleaned the kitchen. The room was cold and quiet, and the windows strained against another gust of wind.

  After waiting by the fallen soldier for nearly half an hour—long enough to determine that he didn’t have any accomplices lagging behind—Graham had told Philip to head back to town and find the doctor, but not to tell anyone else what had happened.

  Com
monwealth was a small town, and most people knew each other—nearly everyone knew Philip and whose son he was—but fortunately, not many realized he was on guard duty that day. The few people he passed merely nodded to him, and he nodded back without meeting their eyes. For most of his quick walk through town, he saw only the soldier, his chest exploding and his empty body toppling back.

  Philip was rushing down unpaved streets that were still thick and muddy from the previous evening’s rain, past identical houses lining the road. Everything in Commonwealth was jarringly new. Due to the hastiness with which the town had been constructed, some porches leaned a bit too far to one side, and some buildings bore the spotty marks of a hasty paint job, but there were no dilapidated storefronts or vacant lots, no broken windows or collapsed roofs. The town was so freshly ensconced in the woods that it smelled strongly of the forest, the Douglas fir and red cedar, the salal and toadstools dotting the nearby riverbed. Mixed with this was the smell of so many men sweating in a stuffy mill, emerging at the end of the day breaded with sawdust, the scent of torn bark and wet wool. Moments ago the cicada-like thrum of mill saws would have echoed through the colonnades of trees, but the closing whistle had already sounded, and Commonwealth was so quiet Philip could hear the river dancing over moss-covered rocks.

  And so quiet that Philip’s voice, when he entered Banes’s house and found the doctor alone, sounded deafening: “We shot a man trying to come to town. A soldier. He was sick. He’s dead.”

  That was how it came out, the words a jumble, all the facts except the main one—we killed someone—seeming so unimportant. He was a soldier. He was young. He sneezed and coughed a lot. He said please. He started to cry right before Graham pulled the trigger. He had a limp, like me.

  Banes followed Philip back to the guards’ post, a good distance beyond the front of the town, past a row of fir trees that all but concealed the buildings from view. The doctor nodded when he saw how far away the body lay. All of his experience told him to go forward, to kneel down beside the body, but he knew he couldn’t. He knew what the other people in his profession all across the country were going through right now, knew about the tired repetitions of futile acts, and he didn’t want this to happen to Commonwealth.

  “We’ll leave him there for twenty-four hours,” Banes decided. “Then we can bury him.”

  Philip was dreading the idea of burying the soldier, but at the same time, he wanted to be one of the ones to do it. He owed the soldier the respect of participating in a proper burial. Philip looked to his side, at the empty chair that the soldier could have been occupying, and he wondered what the man’s family would have said at his funeral.

  “I guess you were right,” Philip said as he stood to leave the dining room. “I guess it was a mistake to go out there.”

  “I never said that,” Rebecca answered after a pause.

  “I know. I could tell you thought it, though.”

  Rebecca dried her hands on her apron. “I never thought you made a mistake. I thought you had a very hard decision to make—we all do right now.”

  Philip nodded, then excused himself to the bathroom, leaving her alone in the cold kitchen. She sighed, realizing she hadn’t responded as well as she could have. But she was angry, and would it have been right to try and conceal her anger, to coat it with maternal sympathy and false warmth?

  She hadn’t believed what Charles had told her that afternoon about the soldier, had found it impossible to visualize Graham firing on another man—and with young Philip standing beside him! But then when she had seen the look in Philip’s eyes, she knew it was the truth.

  How could this happen? Years ago her two elder sisters had run off to join a commune, and Rebecca had hated them for running away, for cutting themselves off and never responding to her letters, even when she wrote to them of their father’s illness. Rebecca and her younger sister, Maureen, had cared for their father in his dying days. Maybe their little commune had been beyond the reach of any postmaster, but that possibility did nothing to salve the pain she had felt, the loneliness she had seen in her father’s eyes as he realized he would never see his girls again. Rebecca had hated them for their disinterest in the rest of the world, their silent shrugging at other people’s plight. And now her own community was doing the same thing.

  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 teno
r 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.