The Last Town on Earth. Thomas Mullen
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.
“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?”