The Last Town on Earth (13 page)

III

D
oc Banes didn’t sleep that night.

Maybe other people did, even those who had helped him quarantine Philip and the soldier, those who knew that the town’s precarious position in this pestilence-filled world had been jostled. Maybe they found some way to shrug in the face of what might be an incoming enemy. But Dr. Martin Banes didn’t so much as look at his bed that night—there was too much to do.

After leaving Philip behind, Banes had walked Charles home, assuring his friend that everything would be fine. He declined to describe Philip as being held prisoner; he tried to couch things in dry medical terms.
We’ll just wait out the forty-eight hours, after which time we’ll know the soldier is healthy and all is well.
Banes had walked into the Worthys’ home and helped Charles explain the situation to his wife and daughter, had stood there and weathered their anxious questions and cries, their hesitant but unmistakable blame. Finally, they began translating their worries into action, Rebecca arranging a supper delivery for Philip and Laura deciding to bake him bread. Banes had shaken the hand of the shaken Charles, tried to smile, thought against it, and instead left him with a forceful nod.
We’ll talk to Philip tomorrow,
Banes had said, hoping to convey that the hours will pass quickly.
Yes,
Charles had agreed, his voice conveying: I hope Philip sounds all right tomorrow, I hope we don’t hear any coughing, I hope I haven’t buried my son alive.

When Banes made it home, it was nearing his usual bedtime, so he turned on the lamp by his desk and lit his pipe. He lifted a volume from his bookshelf, leafing through to unfamiliar pages, diagrams of microscopic organisms that still struck him as bizarre, like abstract renderings of prehistoric monsters.

Martin Banes was fifty-six and had been a doctor for thirty-four years. In 1886 he’d attended a medical school that no longer existed—one of the many wiped out by the reforms of 1904, when medical schools started establishing academic requirements for incoming students and instituting lab work as a norm. Banes hadn’t even been to college; he’d been a chemist’s apprentice until the chemist died of typhus so early into Banes’s training that young Martin was still unqualified to take over the man’s position. So why not turn to medicine? Just sit in a lecture hall for two semesters, take some notes, and you’re fully trained. They didn’t even have written tests—two of his classmates couldn’t read. But who needed to read? He knew how to feel a forehead, where to hold a wrist when looking for a pulse, how to cut a vein, how to bleed a patient to restore balance.

And Banes was a good doctor, he knew this, despite the many changes that had shaken the field in his lifetime. He had tried to keep up, even if he hadn’t always understood the new ways. He had abandoned the miasma theory in favor of the germ theory, abandoned what he’d been taught in school about atmospheric putrefaction in favor of microscopic organisms. The discoveries of Pasteur and Koch had cast aside centuries of medical thought, and now diseases were thought to be caused by tiny bacteria and viruses rather than climatic changes and noxious fumes. It had been years since he’d last wielded his lancet and performed a venisection. Restoring balance of the four humors was no longer a doctor’s duty. Despite the advances, Banes sometimes felt that his responsibilities were becoming ever more complicated, the world more mysterious and challenging, rather than less.

Banes knew how to use the new antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus, had seen how they cut down on those diseases. He took careful notes, he reported outbreaks to the local boards, he worked whenever and wherever he was called upon. How many mornings had his wife, Margaret, awakened to find him gone after he had been called to someone’s home in the middle of the night? She had been such a hard sleeper, Margaret. Slept through the telephone ringing, slept through him dressing and packing his bag, hitching the horses and heading out in his carriage. He missed her. Now the bed was always empty when he returned from a house call, always cold.

They hadn’t had any children, and only now, alone in his old age, did he fully understand all those pitying looks they’d received from others who eventually realized the couple was barren. Margaret had died of pneumonia five years ago, leaving Banes to his patients and his books and journals. Their meaning passed him by often, but he tried to ignore that, tried to hold tightly on to that which his mind was able to capture. But unlike past discoveries that had challenged his ways of thinking, past breakthroughs that had required him to absorb some foreign bits of knowledge, his sticking point now was the opposite: an almost complete lack of information about this new disease.

The newspapers had been of little help. At first they hadn’t reported on the Spanish influenza, and when they finally did, they wrote as if it were already being cured. Nothing but good news was allowed in the press during wartime. Thus the stories all portrayed soldiers feeling better after a testy bout with
la grippe,
doctors feeling confident and civilians being insulated against disease, even if it was all untrue. Medical journals also glossed over the subject, at least the journals to which Banes subscribed. The little he knew about the Spanish flu came via the letters from his former patient Jonathan Pierce.

Pierce was now Dr. Pierce, had vowed to become a doctor after he recovered at age twelve from influenza. A bad case indeed. But Banes had treated him, had told his family how to nurse him back to health, had prayed for him at night, and young Jonathan had recovered, matured, gone to college, and then headed off to medical school at Johns Hopkins, a world away. He had kept in touch with Banes, sending him letters describing his adventures in medical science, regaling him with stories of laboratory discoveries and tales of unknown scourges both discovered and cured. Banes always detected the hint of condescension in these letters—Jonathan the wise young clinician informing the old, undereducated country doctor of the new ways of Science. At the same time, Banes appreciated this window onto the brave new world of medicine, felt privileged to have the view, if occasionally dizzied by its heights.

But the last letter had made him only dizzy. Dr. Pierce—along with all the other young, intelligent doctors, it seemed—had been assigned to medical military duty at the start of the war. Pierce was one of the physicians in charge of Fort Devens, a large cantonment outside of Boston. His letter had been written on September 20, and Banes could tell by the uncharacteristic waver in the script that Pierce had written it late at night, after too many hours of work and too many nights without sleep. The camp had been hit by some new plague, Pierce wrote. The highest health officials and the most esteemed minds had already come to Devens to offer their aid, and they had walked away shaking their heads. First Pierce had thought it was cerebrospinal meningitis, but then the cases worsened and spread, and men were dying. They were dying of bronchopneumonia, it now seemed, pneumonic infection perhaps caused by influenza. But it was an influenza unlike any he had seen.

The first sign of danger was the speed of contagion. But the symptoms rivaled the breadth of the epidemic in their horror. Even if only a few people had suffered this disease, it still would have been a terror to be scarcely believed. Men bled from the nose, from the ears, some even from their eyes. Autopsies of dead soldiers revealed that their lungs were blue and heavy, thick with fluid, sometimes thick with blood. Victims became cyanotic, starved of oxygen—parts or all of their bodies turned blue, sometimes such a dark hue that the corpses of white men were indistinguishable from those of coloreds. They were literally drowning to death in their own fluids. And so quickly! More than one soldier had died within twenty-four hours of his first reported symptoms.

The camp was a madhouse, Pierce wrote. Against army regulations, the soldiers had been crammed into too-tight quarters as a result of the scale of the draft, and their dwellings provided the perfect powder kegs for an influenza spark to ignite. Men were sick in top bunks, coughing and bleeding onto healthy men below. Healthy men tracked in patients’ spilled blood on their boots, their bare feet. Dozens of nurses and physicians were sick, and some had died; the call for more nurses had already gone out to the surrounding counties. Some soldiers—healthy at the time, but who knew for how long?—already had been transferred elsewhere. Surely this would spread illness to bases in other states.

Of course, by the time the letter had escaped military censors and wound its way across the country to Washington State, by the time the small post office in Timber Falls had received it and Banes had journeyed to town for it, weeks had passed and the flu had spread across the land, making Pierce’s prediction both prophetic and pathetically useless. It was already too late.

Banes knew it was possible that the mysterious soldier was healthy, possessing some resistance to the same disease that, according to rumor, had infected a majority of those at the nearest camp, Fort Jenkins. But he also knew there was an equal chance that the soldier had brought the disease with him, symptomless for now but present nonetheless. Evil spirits or invisible germs? A decaying jaundice of the air itself or a microscopic agent of death? Miasma or germ? The two schools of thought warred in Banes’s mind, and though he accepted the new theory now, he had believed the other for so long that it seemed more natural to him, despite what those medical journals were saying. Regardless, the solution was the same: keep it contained. Keep Philip and the soldier locked away, count the hours. Pray.

Was forty-eight hours long enough? That was what Banes remembered having heard in the past, but he found nothing in his piles of journals to confirm it. This flu seemed so different, so much more powerful, than any before. Perhaps it could incubate for longer periods of time. Sitting at his desk, Banes knew that if the person trapped with the soldier hadn’t been his friend’s son—if he’d been anyone else in town—Banes probably would have chosen to quarantine him for longer. Lock him up for four days, maybe even a week. Why not? Where was the harm in inconveniencing two men, one of them a stranger? But he knew Philip, knew how young he was, knew what the experience would do to Charles and Rebecca. So he had said forty-eight hours and would stand by it and hope to God that he would not regret it.

Banes read through his journals and through all of Pierce’s letters, dating back so many years. He read and read until he wasn’t sure if his incomprehension was due to the lateness of the hour or the density of the prose or the second Scotch he had drunk, perhaps ill advisedly, at half past four. He looked up when he felt the sunlight creeping through the gap in his drawn curtains, breaking through the clouds of pipe smoke he’d been exhaling. Dawn. Surely Charles would head out to speak with Philip first thing in the morning. Banes would wait to give them a moment of privacy, then go out and survey the situation.

A whistle sounded—six o’clock. The night had escaped him, and he felt no more the wiser. He must sleep, even if he only had two hours. Just enough to stay alert.

The bed was cold. He thought of Margaret, then of the soldiers bleeding through their eyes. Please let that scourge leave this town untouched, he prayed. But if it were to come here, at least Margaret wouldn’t have to see it; at least he wouldn’t have to see her turn blue.

No, he thought, succumbing to superstition. Don’t think that way—never regard a past death as welcome. That thought can serve as an invitation to death, allowing it to visit again, make itself at home.

IV

A
fter bringing food to the storage building, along with a lamp, blankets, and two pillows, Charles and Rebecca had returned home in silence. While Rebecca cleaned the kitchen, Charles had escaped to his small desk in the bedroom, writing a letter he planned on delivering to Philip the next morning, something he hoped would soothe the boy during his internment.

Charles had been sitting there for thirty minutes and had written two sentences. He put down his pencil as Rebecca carefully closed the door behind her. She stood against it silently.

“This has to stop,” she told him.

Confused, he asked, “What has to stop?”

“The quarantine. First closing the town, and now locking Philip away? Charles, this can’t continue. You must see this.”

“You heard what the doctor said. You heard how—”

“Charles, this is
wrong,
” she interrupted, her eyes pleading.

“Why is it wrong to try and protect the town? Rebecca, I’m…” He trailed off, exasperated at having to fight the same argument with his wife that he was already having in his own head. “I don’t like Philip being in there any more than you do, and I hope to God he forgives me for this, but…I’m doing what I can to protect everyone in town.”

“This is our
son,
Charles.” She held out her hands to him.

“Other people in this town have sons!” Charles slammed a fist onto the desk and stood. “Is ours more important than theirs? How can you say we should put everyone else at risk just so Philip can sleep in his own bed tonight? How is that a solution?”

He paced past her, and Rebecca was quiet. He did not often raise his voice, and even more rarely did he do so with her.

“I am only trying to do what’s right,” he said, turning to face her again. “What’s right for the people in this town, the people who have sacrificed for us. The people who have given everything to make this town work. There is nothing I can do”—his voice wavered—“nothing I can do for anyone in any other town that is sick. But there
are
things I can do for the people in this town, and I am trying to do them as best I can.”

He was breathing heavily, more riled up than he could remember being since the Everett strike. When he turned back to Rebecca, he saw that the imploring look on her face had faded, and in its place was a muted caution that suggested resignation or restrained anger.

“I understand what you’re trying to do, and your intentions are good.” She spoke slowly. Her voice, too, was shaking, and her eyes were wet. “But I am finding it harder and harder to stand by these decisions.”

“This is not easy for me, either,” he said. “I am barely holding on, Rebecca.” He wanted to tell her how much he needed her to support this decision and help him through it. But instead of admitting that weakness, he said, “This town was as much your idea as mine. This was your dream, too.”

She started at that, then backed up, shaking her head. “I never wanted this to be something so apart from the world. I wanted to show the world what it could do, what we could do. I didn’t want to stand back and spit on them. And now we’re spitting on our own son.” She opened the door.

“Rebecca, don’t—”

“I’m sorry. I need to be alone.” She descended the stairs, Charles watching her disappear.

He paced for a while before sitting down at his desk. Philip was in a dark building right now; he would sleep on a cold floor beside a stranger. A stranger who might be sick. And if he was, that would mean Charles was being asked to sacrifice his son for the town. He put his hand flat on the desk to steady himself as he sat there. Suddenly dizzy, he closed his eyes for a moment and breathed.

It had been barely five years since the morning that had changed Charles’s life, when he had been driving out of Everett for a morning meeting and discovered the tire tracks that ran off the side of the road and down a steep ravine. Later, when he’d learned how Philip had been abandoned by his father, Charles had vowed that he would never repeat that transgression. But if Charles’s and the doctor’s decision looked like abandonment to Rebecca, it must look even worse to Philip.

Charles opened his eyes. He stared at the letter he had started, then crumpled it and threw it in the wastebasket. He would start again. He needed to start again.