The Last Town on Earth. Thomas Mullen
than that was the bust that had followed, when the mills miscalculated and felled too many trees. Prices had plummeted, men had been laid off by the hundreds, and accountants like Charles had searched desperately for ways to reverse the losses. It was busts like those that made his father’s and brothers’ unbridled avarice during good times a necessity, they told him: one needed to exploit advantages as a hedge against unforeseen calamities in the future.
To someone as conservative as Charles, this made sense in theory. What didn’t, especially when business was thriving, was firing workers who asked for better wages, failing to fix machines until after they had maimed forty or fifty men, and charging exorbitant prices in the general stores they had opened in the timber camps. Certain things simply were not right, Charles said. But his brothers scoffed. You’d understand if you had your own family to care for, they would tell him, shaking their heads. Their wives and children needed clothes, food, tutors, maids. Perhaps a single man could afford to worry about the finer points of worker treatment, but they could not.
Marriage, as it turned out, did not mellow Charles’s sentiments, especially since he had married Rebecca, an outspoken schoolteacher with radical leanings. The birth of their daughter only strengthened his belief in living a more moral life, both at the mill and at home. But it wasn’t until 1916 that a decade’s worth of family squabbles and jealousies finally exploded, as did the town where they resided.
It was the year of the general strike in Everett—the year the lines between the mill owners and the workers were drawn all the more starkly, even as the line between right and wrong was smudged. Charles found the unions’ requests not so unreasonable, and he said as much to his father, who threatened to disown his son if he ever repeated such sentiments. Reginald and the other mill owners were enraged by the various acts of skullduggery and sabotage being hatched by the nefarious Wobblies—the Industrial Workers of the World, radical unionists who had chosen Everett as the next stop on their road toward revolution. The brothers shook their heads at Charles, brainwashed by his socialist wife. Rebecca wanted to leave the town, arguing that this was no place for their twelve-year-old daughter to become a woman.
The so-called Everett Massacre forever destroyed whatever creaky bridge had remained between Charles and the other Worthy men. Of course, his father and brothers insisted that it was the strikers who had fired the first shot and most of the following volleys—damn reds will try to burn down the town and rape and pillage their way across the country if we don’t stop ‘em now. But Charles knew that most of the guns fired at the workers had been paid for by the Commercial Club, a businessmen’s group that his brothers chaired. If their fingers hadn’t been on any of the triggers, they had pulled the strings from a distance. As the backs of the strikers were broken, the men returned to their jobs and the town stumbled back onto the rocky road from which it had briefly wandered.
But Charles and Rebecca believed the general strike and its violence had brought everyone’s true colors to the fore. The couple made their decision. Charles let his brothers buy out his share in the Worthy mill, and he used the money to buy the land for Commonwealth—a distant plot that his father believed to be unworkable. Reginald, outraged by the defection and apoplectic at Charles’s plan to build homes for workers and offer them higher wages, never spoke to Charles again. He died one year later. Charles heard about the passing when he received a letter from one of his sisters-in-law three days after the funeral.
Now, barely two years after the Everett strike, Charles owned a successful new mill supporting a swiftly growing town where no one felt spat upon or cast aside.
Look at this, Rebecca, Charles thought. Look at what we’ve created—look at what we’ve done. It was amazing how people could toil so hard but only in extreme moments marvel at the accomplishment. He looked at the crowd, at the tense and nervous eyes—every person in the hall had risked so much by coming out to Commonwealth, taking a chance on a dream Charles had been foolish or stout enough to believe in. He would not let their sacrifices go for nothing.
“Thank you, everyone, for coming,” he began. “We need to discuss the influenza that has hit so many other towns so hard.”
By then everyone had indeed heard about the so-called Spanish flu, but it was hard to distinguish fact from rumor, truth from gossip, rational fear from paranoia.
What Charles told them was this: a plague that had apparently begun in eastern cities like Boston and Philadelphia had recently spread to the state of Washington. Dr. Banes added that he had received correspondence from a physician friend at an army base outside of Boston who attested to the disease’s extreme mortality, its speed of infection, and the strong possibility that it would spread via army bases as young men from all across the land were shuttled to various training cantonments. Fort Jenkins was only thirty miles away, Charles continued, and he had heard from several purchasers that the surrounding towns had been especially hard hit. Businesses had been closed and public gatherings were forbidden. Physicians and nurses were working all hours, but still the disease was spreading faster than could be believed.
“The best anyone can figure is that this is some new form of influenza,” Doc Banes told the crowd. He was fifty-six years old, with dark hair that had retained its color except for a shock of white at the front. He wore a bushy mustache that he once waxed into handlebars, but lately it had lapsed into a thick tangle. A good friend of Charles, he had abandoned the possibility of a comfortable but lonely retirement in order to join the Worthys here when they founded the town.
“It’s similar to the flu that you know in many of its symptoms—high fever, headache, body ache, cough,” the doctor explained. “It hits you quickly and can lead to pneumonia, and it’s incredibly contagious. But it’s far more severe than usual strains, and it’s killing people faster than any flu anyone’s ever seen.”
Charles said that in his last trip to Timber Falls, he’d talked to several buyers with knowledge of the disease’s spread. The flu seemed to have sneaked up on most cities and towns, but Charles could only speculate that Commonwealth had bought a temporary reprieve because it was so cut off from the rest of the country. They had been afforded a glimpse into the suffering of those around them while there was still time to defend themselves.
The hall was eerily silent as Charles and Doc Banes spoke. Many had heard rumors of such a flu but had hoped that the stories were embellished. Hearing the facts voiced by the soft-spoken Charles and the sober-minded Banes caused them to sit all the more still.
Charles told them he had heard that the War Department was even putting a halt to the draft because so many soldiers were sick, and that Seattle had passed a law mandating that anyone walking in public wear a gauze mask over his mouth and nose. Other towns had outlawed spitting and shaking hands.
Charles’s voice gradually strengthened, filling in the empty spaces that had been created by the people’s silence. “And as far as I’m concerned—as the manager of the mill but also as a man of this town, as a husband and father—we need to do whatever we can to make sure we stay uninfected.”
“How do we do that?” A man called out. “You got a cure for us, Doc?”
Banes shook his head, but Charles spoke for him. “The only way not to get sick is to prevent the flu from getting into Commonwealth.” He paused. “I propose we close the town to outsiders and halt all trips out of town. No more errands to Timber Falls or anywhere else, as that only makes it possible to catch the flu from people in those towns and bring it back here. No one leaves Commonwealth, and no one comes in, until the flu has passed.”
For a moment the crowd was silent. Then came the sounds of hundreds of voices—some of them low murmurs between spouses, others exclamations, some of them disbelieving laughter. Charles saw Philip turn around and glance at all those heads nodding or sternly shaking, all those brows furrowed or eyes widening.
“For how long?” someone shouted above all the others.
Charles opened his mouth and the voices grew quiet, awaiting his response. But Charles stopped himself, deferring to the doctor.
“We can’t be sure,” Doc Banes said. “Probably no longer than a month—the flu moves quickly, and I would guess that after