The Last Town on Earth. Thomas Mullen

      “I haven’t thought that far ahead.” Still smiling.

      “I used to be like that.”

      “Then what?”

      “I got smarter. And I met someone.”

      She’d only let him kiss her on the cheek before, but that night she leaned toward him as if giving permission for more, to do what he’d been thinking about damn near constantly for days. They kissed for a longer time than was proper for two people standing beneath one of the few streetlights on that side of town. He held her and was amazed at how fragile she felt, despite the steel in her eyes and her voice and her posture. Despite his happiness, he thought how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable he was, to have something in his life other than himself that he needed to worry about, and protect.

      The violence got worse, and fast. The night after the cops dragged a group of strikers to secluded Beverly Park and beat them nearly to death, Tamara told Graham that the IWW office wanted to send her down to Seattle to meet with the local chapter and recruit more people to Everett. That sounded like a safer idea than wandering around the violent streets of Everett, and Graham invited himself along.

      With some of his few remaining coins, he paid for ferry tickets. A mid-western boy who’d spent all his adult life in the mountain states, he’d rarely been on a boat, and he didn’t know how to swim. As a storm moved toward them, the chop of the waves increased. By the time they neared Seattle, the skies had opened and it was pouring—the Sound an infinity of liquid explosions—and the boat was pitching from side to side. The moment they got off, Graham let out a long, slow breath and tried to steady himself. He was not looking forward to the ride home.

      Tamara, who had apparently been on many a boat, not only in Lake Michigan but also on the Atlantic, as she had family in Boston and New York, was good enough not to tease him. Instead she told him more about her family, how she was the youngest of five sisters and had twelve nieces and nephews with more surely on the way. She loved and missed her parents, but the cause was worth the physical distance between herself and her family. Graham had nodded to all this, secretly wondering if one day he would meet this lawyer father and warmhearted mother, this gaggle of sisters and brothers-in-law with their Chicago and New York accents, their starched shirts and fancy cigars.

      This was what he wanted. Not necessarily the family and their unimaginable strangeness, but the comfort of sitting beside Tamara and knowing she wanted to be with him. He would create a haven for the two of them, carve a better existence out of the strange land he’d been wandering through, create a more beautiful and rewarding world than the one they’d known.

      In Seattle the rain continued to pour down, the city as gray and forbidding as a medieval fortress. Some Wobblies met them at the docks and escorted them to a ratty office located between the shipyards and some paper mills. All day it was conversation and strategizing about cops and jails, lawyers who’d helped out at past strikes, and how many folks could be recruited from Seattle to come north. Graham tried to make himself helpful, but mostly he felt like a laborer transported to a factory unlike any he’d ever seen, a revolution factory.

      At six o’clock Tamara told him they’d need to stay till tomorrow, that dozens of folks were being rounded up and they’d all head back to Everett the following afternoon. One of the Wobblies had a room they could use, Tamara said. A room.

      The Wobbly, a thin redheaded guy named Sam, with a similarly redheaded wife, lived in a small place in the eastern part of town. They made supper for Graham and Tamara and talked about the labor situation in Seattle. All evening Graham couldn’t stop thinking about sharing a bedroom with Tamara. Then Sam announced they’d best be getting some shut-eye, as tomorrow promised to be a helluva day.

      It was all so strange, Graham thought, the way he and Tamara headed to the room without having spoken at all about the fact that they would be spending the night in the same bed. They just proceeded as if this were the rightest thing in the world. And it felt that way. She held his hand as they walked into the room and as soon as he’d shut the door she was in his arms, the two of them kissing before his hand had released the doorknob. Graham was conscious of the fact that he was in a moment he would remember till his dying day, so with every breath he concentrated on making sure that his future memories of that night would be forever untainted.

      He did not awaken the next morning with Tamara in his arms because she was already up and dressed. He was a deep sleeper, she told him with a smile, and it was time to get going. She kissed him before leaving the room so he could dress in privacy, and this strange feeling of familiarity despite unfamiliar circumstances thrilled him. Waking up with a woman in the room, a woman he’d fallen in love with. He hadn’t quite thought this possible, yet there he was.

      In a few hours they were back at the docks, along with about four hundred new friends. The IWW had hoped for a couple thousand, but this was an impressive number nonetheless. Two steamboats were needed to get them to Everett, the Verona and the Calista. Tamara and Graham and the Wobbly ringleaders got on board the Verona, which departed first, and though Graham hadn’t been looking forward to being on a boat again, he was relieved to see the bright sun in a perfectly cloudless sky, the water laid out so flat before him it was like a Kansan field, the tiniest of ripples shifting in the wind like stalks of corn. The boat ride was smooth, though so packed with bodies that it seemed to rock slightly just from the Wobblies’ singing, which grew louder with each verse. The Verona cut through Puget Sound, and the Wobblies serenaded the surrounding islands with their battle cries, their hymns of brotherhood and triumph, their odes to fallen leaders, and their righteous calls for a future of unity and peace. In the distance Mount Rainier watched over them like a mildly disapproving God, or so it seemed to Graham. But soon it and the wharves and cranes of Seattle faded into the distance.

      The air over the Sound was cold, but there were so many people on board that few could feel it. The boat slowed as Everett came into view, all the mills silent, the sky above their smokestacks pure with inactivity.

      But silent the dock wasn’t. As the Verona pulled nearer to Port Gardner Bay, Graham was one of the first to see the crowd. Even more people lined the streets and the hill just beyond, looking down at the dock and the approaching boat like spectators at a boxing match. These throngs were not singing, and Graham noticed that quite a few of them were wearing handkerchiefs on their forearms.

      The passengers grew quiet, perhaps remembering broken noses and cut eyebrows suffered at the hands of McRae’s men, or similar assailants in some other town, different faces but always the same fists. The passengers who had knives in their pockets let their hands slip down and finger the steel as they watched the scene unfold before them. Waiting.

      The songs started up again, this time even louder than before. “We meet today in freedom’s cause and raise our voices high! We’ll join our hands in union strong to battle or to die!” Hearts beat faster as the singers looked one another in the eye, trying to keep themselves from being intimidated by some two-bit thugs with a bottle of whiskey in one pocket and a .38 in the other.

      Graham put an arm around Tamara and held her hip with his good hand. They were toward the bow, on the port side—the side that was lining up against that dock swarming with men. Graham couldn’t see any knives or clubs or shovels or guns on the dock, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

      The boat pulled alongside the dock and one of the Wobblies reached across to tie it down, but an angry-looking man with dizzy eyes stepped out from the crowd. It was Sheriff McRae, Graham recognized, and the stories about him seemed to be true, as he walked with the slightly staggered shuffle of the raging and belligerent drunk.

      “Who’s your leader?” McRae demanded.

      “We’re all leaders!” a handful shouted back, voicing one of the IWW slogans.

      Graham leaned down toward Tamaras ear to tell her they should take a few steps back, but before he could speak, McRae raised his voice.

      “I’m sheriff of this town, and I’m enforcin’ our laws. You can’t dock here, so head on back to—”

      “The