An Unfinished Season by Ward Just

hand, as one would the hand of a blind man, he turned slowly to me and spoke in an unnatural voice.
    Son, he said. Go next door. Call Tom Felsen. Tell him to come here. The hospital, my mother said.
    Will you do that, son?
    Yes, I said.
    You’re shot, my mother said.
    I’m not shot, he said. I’m cut.
    We could all have been killed, she said.
    Flying glass, he said.
    We could all have been killed, she said in her clarinet voice.
    Call Tom now, my father said to me.
    You’re bleeding, my mother said.
    He raised his arm to look at his wounds, the ones on his forearm, and then he noticed his hand, blood rising from his fingers. A shard of glass was lodged in the skin at the base of his thumb, and as we watched he deftly plucked it out, looked at it, and dropped it on the floor where he ground it under his heel. The lips of the wound gaped white and red. When he looked at it with his slow smile, I smiled with him; and he looked at me and winked.
    We’ll go now, my mother said. You must have your hand seen to.
    It wasn’t gunshot, my father said. They weren’t armed except for that, he said, pointing to the brick at his feet. They threw a brick through the window when I answered the telephone. I never should have done it. They were waiting for me to do it. Watching me through the window—that was their signal. He turned to my mother, standing impatiently at his side. They’re just cuts, nothing more. I don’t need a doctor. I need a Band-Aid. It’s not a question of anyone being shot, Jo.
    It’s raining, he added.
    Your arms are cut, my mother said.
    Yes, they are, my father said, and reached down to pick up the brick, hefting it in his hand. He said, I never believed they’d do something like this. Never believed it in the world. Tom warned me—
    What do you think? my mother demanded. They’d do anything given half a chance, the threats they’ve made. Why did you think they wouldn’t act?
They told you they would.
My God, Teddy.
    Threats are one thing, my father said. Acts are something else.
    Have it your way, my mother said. Don’t ask me to believe it.
    When did it start to rain? my father asked in his normal voice. He was trying to return things to normal, to our family dinner before the telephone began to ring; and then I realized how far from normal our family had become, my mother frightened by cars in the road and threatening telephone calls, my father carrying a gun and worried about the Communists and the future of his business, and I—I, so far on the margins of the family, a spectator only, trying to read between the lines and discovering that the spaces were infinite but that one thing was certainly true, my father and mother loved each other and cared about each other, and then from the moment the brick crashed through the window I knew that was an illusion and the space between them was infinite, too.
    I’ll be in the car, she said. Unless you want Wils to drive you.
    Tom Felsen first, my father said, nodding at me and moving to the sideboard where he poured a glassful of scotch. When he raised the glass to his mouth, his hand was steady as a metronome, but when he bent to sip, something went awry and the whiskey splashed on his shirtfront.
    Tell Tom to get here pronto, he said, his hand now locked at his side, and then he thought to ask the question that must have been on his mind all along. Are you both all right?
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    They never caught the brick thrower, though the sheriff suspected it was Clyde, the foreman, bitter that the strike had gone on for so long, bitter at the strikebreakers, bitter that he could not afford medical attention for one of his children. When the telephone calls didn’t work, he thought he’d try something dramatic, calculating that my father would yield and settle the strike. Clyde thought you’d be scared shitless, the sheriff said to my father. He thought you’d cave, Teddy; but he