The Last Town on Earth. Thomas Mullen

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 evergrowing 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 fro n 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