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By Root 589 0

and the thick stands of shagbark hickory, white oak, red elm, and maple predated the coming of the white man into Indian territory. Nestled down within the spaces permitted by a thinning of the larger trees were walnut, cherry, birch, and a scattering of pine and blue spruce. There were wildflowers that bloomed in the spring and leaves that turned color in the fall that could make your heart ache. In Illinois, spring and fall were the seasons you waited for. Summer was just a bridge between the two, a three-to-four-month yearly preview of where you would end up if you were turned away from Heaven’s gates, a ruinous time when Mother Nature cranked up the heat as high as it would go on the local thermostat and a million insects came out to feed. It wasn’t like that every summer, and it wasn’t like that every day of every summer, but it was like that enough that you didn’t notice much of anything else. This summer was worse than usual, and today looked to be typical. The heat was intense already, even here in the woods, though not so bad beneath the canopy of the trees as it would be downtown. So Old Bob breathed in the scents of leaves and grasses and flowers and enjoyed the coolness of the shade as he drove the old truck toward the highway, reminding himself of what was good about his hometown on his way to his regular morning discussion of what wasn’t.

The strike at Midwest Continental Steel had been going on for one hundred and seven days, and there was no relief in sight. This was bad news and not just for the company and the union. The mill employed twenty-five percent of the town’s working population, and when twenty-five percent of a community’s spending capital disappears, everyone suffers. Mid-Con was at one time the largest independently owned steel mill in the country, but after the son of the founder died and the heirs lost interest, it was sold to a consortium. That produced some bad feelings all by itself, even though one of the heirs stayed around as a nominal part of the company team. The bad feelings grew when the bottom fell out of the steel market in the late seventies and early eighties in the wake of the boom hi foreign steel. The consortium underwent some management changes, the last member of the founding family was dismissed, the twenty-four-inch mill was shut down, and several hundred workers were laid off. Eventually some of the workers were hired back and the twenty-four-inch was started up again, but the bad feelings between management and union were by then so deep-seated and pervasive that neither side could bring itself ever again to trust the other.

The bad feelings had come to a head six months earlier, when the union had entered into negotiations for a new contract. A yearly cost-of-living increase in the hourly wage, better medical benefits, an expansion of what qualified as piecework, and a paid-holiday program were some of the demands on the union’s agenda. A limited increase without escalators in the hourly wage over the next five years, a cutback in medical benefits, a narrowing down of the types of payments offered for piecework, and an elimination of paid holidays were high on the list of counterdemands made by the company. A deadlock was quickly reached. Arbitration was reftised by both sides, each choosing to wait out the other. A strike deadline was set by the union. A back-to-work deadline was set by the company. As the deadlines neared and no movement was achieved in the bargaining process, both union and company went public with their grievances. Negotiators for each side kept popping up on television and radio to air out the particulars of the latest outrage perpetrated by the other. Soon both sides were talking to everyone but each other.

Then, one hundred and seven days ago, the union had struck the fourteen-inch and the wire mill. The strike soon escalated to include the twenty-four-inch and the twelve-inch, and then all of MidCon was shut down. At first no one worried much. There had been strikes before, and they had always resolved themselves. Besides, it was springtime,