Thomas Mullen - The Last Town on Earth

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.

Commonwealth 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 cicadalike 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.