The Last Town on Earth Read online

  “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.

  Philip sat there and massaged his sore arms with his numb fingers, waiting for the feeling to return.

  V

  The body only felt light because six of them were lifting it.

  On the doctor’s orders, they’d waited exactly twenty-four hours, unsure whether Banes had cold hard science as his reason or if he was just superstitious. Maybe this was how you were supposed to bury vampires or the possessed to make sure they wouldn’t rise again.

  Philip had left the mill office to come down there, though Charles had told him he didn’t need to. He had dreamed of the soldier the night before and had been thinking of him all day, and he knew it would have been wrong to run from this last duty.

  The other gravediggers were men who, in addition to their jobs as millworkers and lumberjacks, were serving the town as guards: Rankle, Mo, Deacon, and Graham.

  “Vultures didn’t get to it,” someone remarked.

  “Deacon wouldn’t let them,” Rankle said softly.

  Deacon just nodded.

  “You shoot at the vultures?” asked Mo.

  Deacon shook his head. “They stayed away,” he said in his raspy voice.

  Indeed, Deacon, with his gaunt cheeks and flimsy limbs and coal-black eyes, looked like a scarecrow brought to wicked life. Philip could easily imagine wild, carnivorous birds keeping their distance from him—people did the same thing. Deacon had once trained to be a Catholic priest, so the story went, but he’d decided that God wasn’t calling out to him after all. He was a man who usually kept quiet, allowing the demons to fight out their arguments in his head. Others noticed that when he thought he was alone, he swore like a madman.

  Philip had never dug a grave before, though he figured the others had. This couldn’t be the first burial for Doc Banes, nor could it be for Graham. And Deacon all but looked like an undertaker.

  Jarred Rankle also had the air of a man who had dug his share of graves. A short but strong man whose brown hair had recently gone gray, he had eyes that looked as if they had been carved too deep into his granite face, and they seemed all the darker for hiding beneath those craggy brows. Rankle was one of Charles’s favorite foremen, both for his efficiency and for his intellect. A former Wobbly of high rank, he often visited the Worthy residence to write political letters with Rebecca or read from her ever-growing pile of radical journals. He was an uncle of sorts to Philip and Laura and an irregular guest for meals, as he had no wife of his own. Rebecca had told Philip once that Rankle had a family years ago but had “lost” them. She had offered no further explanation and Philip had not dared ask, but her comment helped explain a certain look that shadowed the man’s face at supper sometimes.

  The earth was harder than Philip had feared. The first two shovelfuls were smooth and clean, as if the outermost layer of earth were a soft cushion to comfort all men, but after that it was dense, the tightly bound record of a million years barely held down by the trees and rocks. Philip’s muscles would be sore the next day; his weakened hands were already tingling.

  No one asked Philip or Graham any questions about the soldier. Philip didn’t know if they were afraid of looking rude or if they simply didn’t want to know, but he was glad they didn’t ask.

  The previous night, Charles and Doc Banes had called all the twenty-odd guards except for Philip to an emergency meeting at the town hall. They had told the guards about the soldier and asked that everyone keep quiet about it, but even they knew that some men were better at keeping secrets than others. Graham would certainly tell no one, except possibly his wife. But Mo, a talkative former boxer from Chicago, would probably find it difficult to keep quiet, as would some of the others.

  Most of the guards were the same men who served as town magistrates, elected for one-year terms as members of a board that was the closest thing the town had to a police force. Four months ago the magistrates had met and voted to expel from the town two men who had been found to be thieves—the only expulsions in the town’s short history. Other than that, the magistrates—who currently included Graham, Rankle, and Charles, with a lifetime appointment as the mill’s owner—had spoken to a couple of violent husbands and the parents of some children who had pilfered from the general store, but nothing more. Everyone in Commonwealth seemed to want to be there badly enough that they did their best to live peacefully.

  But now the guards were upholding an even greater responsibility, and the secretiveness surrounding the killing of the soldier struck some as wrong. Commonwealth wasn’t supposed to have secrets.

  The gravediggers chose a spot far enough away from the road to be unseen. They didn’t want anyone to stumble upon the grave. None should know. No one needed to be killed to protect the town. All was well.

  The trees here were close enough together to almost completely block the sun, but Rankle had managed to find a spot where they had enough room to dig without hitting unbreakable roots. In another hundred or thousand years, though, the surrounding roots would wrap themselves into the soldier’s remains, feeding and somehow drawing life from this dead husk.

  The body didn’t smell yet, maybe because of the night’s cold. For that Philip was grateful. Doc Banes had been the first to approach, had leaned over the body and done something the rest couldn’t see. The body’s right knee was still sticking up, frozen in the position it had first fallen. That amazed Philip. He wondered if it meant the eyes were still open, too, still pleading with the sky.

  Then Doc Banes had thrown a blanket over the body and nodded to them, and they had proceeded to the spot where Rankle had started digging the grave. Philip wanted to say something to Graham but he wasn’t sure what. He stole as many glances as he could at Graham’s tireless face, but Graham never looked back. Instead Graham dug faster and deeper than anyone. The rest of the men took an occasional break to unclench their fingers and roll their shoulders, but Graham kept digging, a man possessed.

  The previous day, after they had shot the soldier and Philip had run for Doc Banes, Philip and Graham had completed their shift in near-total silence. It had passed in a strange blur, perhaps the adrenaline from the encounter acting with some kind of amnesiac force. As far as they were concerned, the final thing they had done out there was shoot someone.

  The men carried the stiff body, each surprised at how light it felt, and placed it in the grave. The
blanket never slid off and Philip never had to look at the soldier’s face again.

  No one checked the body’s pockets for any identification or other trinkets. No one wanted to know his name, and there was no way they could report his death to his family. The gravediggers couldn’t afford to care about who the man was.

  Mo, who normally found it difficult not to make conversation, whistled for a bit to break the silence. But even he seemed to realize it sounded disrespectful, and soon stopped.

  Meanwhile, Deacon worked on the spot where the man had fallen, hacking at the earth with his shovel and turning it over and spreading the dirt around to cover the spots where blood had left its stain.

  After the time-consuming and arduous digging, it was sobering how quickly they were able to fill the grave back up. “All right,” Rankle said when the last shovelful had been moved back into place.

  Every man thought to himself about finding a rock or a large branch to mark the spot, a talisman that would stand in as a grave marker. And every one of them rejected the idea without voicing it.

  Graham turned around first, without bidding anyone good day. He kept his back to the rest of them and walked toward the town, leaving the shovel behind so no one would ask him about it. Philip realized he hadn’t heard Graham speak a word all day. He followed Graham back to the mill, but from a distance.

  Rankle joined Mo at the post, as they were on guard duty that day. When the others left and the two watchmen stared down the gentle slope of the road, the view before them was different than it had been before. Everything in their line of vision—the softly sloping hill and the dirt road and the thick forest beyond—was now forever defined by the fact that it was just a bit off to the left of the dead man’s grave.

  VI

  Philip never would have volunteered for guard duty if it hadn’t been for Graham. He wouldn’t have thought himself capable.

  Growing up with only a mother, Philip was accustomed to not understanding jokes that the other boys told, jokes they had presumably overheard their fathers or older brothers telling. Dragged from town to town throughout his childhood, he was used to being behind in his studies, relegated to the back of a new classroom while the teacher lavished attention on her familiar students and ignored the new kid. By the time the Worthys had adopted him, whatever lessons Philip had learned from his travels were buried deep beneath his grief for his mother and his difficult recovery from the accident. In school he was silent and at home he was distant, as if so convinced that this new existence was a dream that he was simply waiting to wake up. By the time he accepted the reality of his situation, he had already adjusted to thinking that his missing foot and difficult past made him somehow lesser than everyone around him.

  It was Graham who taught him to revise these expectations of himself. Charles and Rebecca had provided what support they could, but that was their job as parents. It meant more to Philip coming from a man who had no obligations to him. He had met Graham when Charles invited the Stones to dinner during those first days in Commonwealth. When everyone else had left the table, Graham had matter-of-factly showed Philip his maimed hand, which he’d caught Philip surreptitiously glancing at several times.

  Graham had invited him along hunting one afternoon, teaching Philip, despite his weak arms, how to hold a rifle, how to load it, what to expect when he pulled the trigger. Back when new buildings were seemingly sprouting from the earth in Commonwealth, Graham also showed him how to work on the frame of a house. Although Philip worried about being a drag on Graham’s time, Graham seemed to enjoy teaching him all that he had been forced to learn from strangers on trains and in timber camps.

  It had seemed perfectly natural to volunteer as a guard alongside Graham. But Philip wasn’t sure it had been the right decision—not anymore.

  Which was why, after supper on the day they had buried the soldier, Philip walked the four blocks to Graham’s house. He needed to tell Graham his fear that standing guard had been a mistake. He had been dreading the thought of going back out to the guard post for his next shift, but he wasn’t sure if that was because standing guard was wrong or because he was simply scared of another conflict. All day long, the only thing Philip had thought about was the dead soldier, and as bedtime approached he found himself dreading sleep and the haunted dreams it would bring.

  True to the town’s mission, the Stone and Worthy houses were nearly identical despite the gaping differences in the men’s backgrounds. Both houses were two stories tall, with tiny cellars and roofs that pointed skyward like fingertips in prayer. Their chimneys exhaled smoke barely visible in the night sky. Charles’s home was only somewhat larger, either a minor oversight in the town’s egalitarian vision or a utilitarian acknowledgment of the fact that Charles and Rebecca had adolescent children.

  The windows on the first floor were illuminated. Philip knocked gently in case the baby was asleep.

  Amelia smiled when she opened the door. A few strands of her brown hair had escaped her bun and were hanging before her blue eyes. She was thin and not tall, with the light skin of a lifelong Washingtonian. Cradled in her mother’s arms, the tiny head barely visible through the billows of blanket, was Millie.

  “You here to get my husband involved in some kind of trouble?”

  Philip hadn’t quite lived down the time he and Graham had gone hunting and had temporarily lost a couple of friends’ horses by failing to tie them down properly. The horses had panicked and fled after Philip fired his first shot. Of course, it was Graham who had taught Philip such troublemaking skills as firing a rifle and playing poker.

  “Yeah, I was thinking of taking him by the saloon, maybe seeing if he wanted to rustle up some women.”

  “What saloon would that be?”

  “It’s a secret,” he said, following her in. “Only the millworkers know about it. They said if I told any of the wives about it, they’d feed me to the machines.”

  “Um-hm.” The baby started crying. “And why would you want to rustle up any women? I thought you only had eyes for Elsie Metzger.”

  “Boy, can’t a guy talk to a girl without the whole town gossiping?”

  “Can’t a housewife gossip?”

  Beyond the small parlor and the dining room, Philip could see that the kitchen was filled with jars—jars on the table, on the cutting board, jars crammed on the floor, leaving only a narrow path to walk through. Amelia was in the midst of the autumn canning frenzy, particularly important this year.

  “Looks like you’ve been busy,” Philip said.

  “Oh, no more so than usual,” she said, blowing a few strands of hair from her face. Amelia always seemed to be working on several projects at once—she was in charge of the town’s community gardens, in addition to the impressive one in her own backyard, and whenever Philip stopped by, she was making preserves, sewing or knitting clothes for her family, or tackling the type of home repair work that many women reserved for their husbands. Amelia had lost her mother when she was seven years old and had inherited early the homemaker role in her family, which had included three younger brothers. The immense amount of work necessary for sustaining her new family in a frontier town perhaps seemed, in contrast, quite manageable.

  “Aren’t you happy to see your uncle Philip?” Amelia asked the baby, who was still crying.

  “Doesn’t sound too happy.”

  Amelia walked toward Philip and, too quickly for him to refuse, put the baby in his arms. “Cheer her up.”

  In his arms, Millie stopped crying, gazing at him wide-eyed, her forehead furrowed.

  “You did it again,” Amelia marveled. “You’re like magic. Quite an effect on the young females.”

  “Last time she spit up on me.”

  Amelia laughed. “I forgot about that. Anyway, Graham’s upstairs. I’ll go get him.” She stopped on the second stair and turned. “Oh, and no poker tonight. I don’t want him losing any more of our money to you.”

  Philip smiled. Though a novice, he had picked up
the game quickly. “We’ve only bet with real money once. I think we used walnuts last time.”

  “That explains why I couldn’t find any when I was baking last weekend.”

  As Amelia went upstairs, Philip walked the baby in small circles. Millie was five months now, still impossibly small to Philip’s eyes, but she felt heavy, as if a baby were somehow denser than other human beings. Her eyes were huge, and Philip wondered if the rest of her would grow into them or if she’d always have large eyes like her mother. She stared at him intently.

  “So what are you looking at, exactly?” he said to her softly. Did she even recognize him, or had the event with the soldier changed him so much that even a baby could see the difference? He tried to laugh at himself when he realized he was reading too much into an infant’s blank expression, but the laughter wouldn’t come.

  She was warm against his chest. His fingers had regained their feeling a few hours after burying the body, but they began to tingle slightly beneath the cotton enveloping the baby. It was with a disquieting chill that Philip realized he had held that day first a dead body and now a smiling infant.

  He looked up, rocking the baby softly, and his eyes as usual were drawn to a crooked stair at the bottom of the staircase, which always reminded him of the days after Amelia’s stillbirth. At the time, the Stones had been living in a smaller house with two other families, as Commonwealth still hadn’t enough buildings. Whenever Graham wasn’t working at the mill, he was helping construct new houses, and he had encouraged Philip to join in. Graham taught him the basics, and Philip spent many hours that summer helping the older men build the town. After the stillbirth, Amelia was bedridden for days, and Graham barely spoke, his face a downturned mask of silent grief. He also barely slept, working late into the night on the new house, desperate to complete the job so he and his wife could move in and begin to grapple with the world that had just turned on them.