showing his nerves. He sat a bit taller in his chair and stopped bouncing his knee. She reached out and squeezed his hand, then let it go. Her smile seemed forced. The look in her light blue eyes was watchful, as ever.
“How do you think people are going to react?” Philip asked her quietly.
She shook her head, some gray tendrils falling from her hastily arranged bun. Rebecca had been to countless suffrage and political meetings, not only in Commonwealth but also in Timber Falls, in Seattle, and in dozens of towns and cities along the coast. She practically had been raised on such gatherings, accompanying her father, Jay Woodson, a fecund intellectual who had written tomes little read by any but the far-left intelligentsia, provocative disquisitions on the country’s coming economic collapse. Rebecca’s father had passed away before she married Charles, but she had done her part to build upon her father’s legacy, spearheading suffrage groups, antiwar organizations, and now this: the town of Commonwealth, a new hybrid of socialist haven and capitalist enterprise. And yet tonight’s meeting was less about politics than survival.
“I don’t know,” she admitted to Philip. “We’ll see.”
Graham sat several rows behind the Worthys, having arrived only a few minutes before the meeting was to start. Amelia had stayed at home with the baby—she was more tired than usual on account of her being two months pregnant, a fact the couple hadn’t yet revealed to their friends. He rubbed at his neck, the air too hot now that the room was filled to bursting, the movable wooden pews lined with men and women, the walls covered with people leaning, shifting their weight from foot to foot.
Finally, Rebecca whispered to her husband that he should get things started. Sometimes Charles still seemed uncomfortable in his role as head of the mill and de facto leader of the town, she noticed. All those years as the silent bookkeeper in his family mill, years of being overshadowed by his fast-talking older brothers and the domineering patriarch, had been difficult for him to overcome. He had learned how to emerge from the low expectations of others, had become an eloquent spokesman, rallying the faith of a town, but sometimes he needed his wife to remind him of this. Charles nodded without looking at her and stood up.
Charles’s hair and beard had gone completely white over the last few years. He was tall and had the broad shoulders of a lumberjack despite the fact that he had spent all his days inside an office. Anyone could have looked at his fingers and seen that they were too free of blemishes, his palms too soft. At fifty-two, he was one of the oldest residents in this town of workingmen, and his eyes were calm and benevolent. His white collared shirt and gray flannel pants were slightly worn in places that he had either failed to notice or chosen not to concern himself with.
He was followed to the podium by Dr. Martin Banes, the town’s sole medical authority, and as the two men looked out at the packed hall, voices quieted without a single raised hand or throat clearing. It occurred to Charles as he opened his mouth to speak that he had never heard so many adults so quiet. He stayed silent for an extra second or two, the first invisible syllable hiding somewhere beneath his tongue.
Charles was not the town mayor or its pastor, as Commonwealth lacked either civic or religious leaders. But the town was in many ways his creation, the realization of a dream he and Rebecca had shared years ago while suffering through the Everett general strike, its violence and madness.
Charles had been twenty-four when his father, lured to the great Northwest by stories of endless forests of Douglas fir, had uprooted his family from their home in Maine in 1890. Charles’s mother and his younger brother had been buried less than a year earlier, taken by that winter’s brutal pneumonia, and Reginald Worthy insisted that this new endeavor was exactly what he and his remaining sons needed. Their destination was the new town of Everett, established just north of Seattle with a well-situated port that, people said, would soon become the Manhattan of the Pacific.
The first years had been torture. Charles would remember with a pained wistfulness the busy streets of Portland—to say nothing of the crowded shops and festive parks of Boston—as he walked past newly constructed houses that looked like a strong gale might knock them down, the taverns whose floors were still covered with inches of sawdust, the streets thick with mud. And the stench of the place—the cows that townspeople kept in their yards as insurance against hard times, the sweat of the millworkers and loggers and carpenters, the poor experiments with plumbing. That far-western outpost of America was decades behind the New England that Charles sorely missed; it felt less like they had crossed the country and more like they had crossed back in time, slogging away in the preternatural darkness of a city without streetlights.
All the more reason to work ceaselessly, trying to forget the world around him by focusing only on what his father wanted him to master: the numbers, the cost of acreage, the price of lumber and the price of shingles, the pay of the millworkers. While his father and his elder brothers did the hobnobbing and the wooing, Charles remained at his desk in his small office, where the sounds of the mill would have made concentration difficult for a man less single-minded.
Still, to Charles, the great family narrative of amassing staggering wealth was a tainted one. He had never been comfortable with the way his family and all their rivals inflated their prices after the San Francisco earthquake of ‘06, profiting off the suffering and helplessness of others. But worse 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,
