Read An Unfinished Season for Free Online Page A

be damned, my father went on, pleased but trying not to show it.
    My mother rarely spoke during the news, though often she would look questioningly at my father, who offered his own commentary on the events of the day. He believed things were out of control, by which he meant directed by unseen hands. He knew that something had changed with the winning of the war and the unquiet peace that followed. He knew this from conversations with his friends at the club, and listening to the men on the floor talking about their new Ford coupe or the Johnson outboard they had their eye on, and the washing machine their wives were after them to buy. Commotion was in the air, both grievance and a new sense of destination. The whole nation had won the war and the whole nation was entitled to share in the victory. My father looked into the eyes of this new face and saw something of himself; but still he would not yield.
    His situation had changed. By the early 1950s, Carillo & Ravan had greatly increased revenues and had branched out from stationery and business forms to company reports and catalogues. My father quite suddenly discovered he was rich, and when friends approached him about forming a real estate syndicate, he agreed at once. Syndicates were the new thing. Downstate Illinois was underbuilt and the banks had money to lend. The moment he reached out (as he said) into real estate was the moment his life changed. The printing business occupied less of his time, and his shirts were free of ink. He no longer talked so much about “the business” as he began to spend as much time on the financing of a subdivision in Pekin as he did in the backshop of his printing business. It was strange at first, my father said, very strange that a partnership in northern Illinois could have a profound effect on the economy of central Illinois, and then it didn’t seem strange at all but logical and natural.
    He laughed and said, The colonized have become the colonizers.
    Little fish eating littler fish. Scraps enough for everyone.
    And the profits are phenomenal.
    The labor negotiations were conducted by the general manager, my father “saving himself,” as he put it, for the climactic round. A strike deadline was set and postponed when new proposals were laid on the table. Still, my father stayed away. He ignored the stubbornness of the union and failed to detect the determination of the men to share in the new prosperity. When the strike came, he was unprepared. He felt betrayed, as if he were the object of a coup d’état. It had never happened before, collective bargaining always a kind of dumb show of exaggerated gestures; and then they settled for a two-and-a-half-percent wage increase. My father, on business in Pekin, heard the news by telephone. His general manager was convinced the Communists were behind the strike. Carillo & Ravan had an important government contract and surely this was an effort to embarrass the Eisenhower administration, compromise it in its valiant Cold War struggle. The leadership of the union was suspected of having links—that was the word, “links”—to the American Communist Party, Comrade Earl Browder’s party, the party that everyone knew was a puppet of the Kremlin in Moscow, Browder a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union, and always under the personal surveillance of J. Edgar Hoover’s most trusted assistants. When word came of the tyrant Stalin’s death, Earl Browder wept bitter tears. The union leadership had refused to sign non-Communist affidavits as the government demanded that it do pursuant to the Taft-Hartley Act, the law of the land—and were they not therefore in contempt and unworthy of public support? That was the verdict of the local newspaper, and the first time I ever saw the words “pursuant” and “affidavit” in print.
    The strike began when the printers downed tools and threw up a picket line manned by their rowdiest