"Arrival" (cont'd)

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2.
    The house in which he had grown up, living his entire life with his father and mother and four younger siblings, no longer felt quite as much like home as before. It had become home to strangers; rougher, harder men than the family would have liked to associate with. Men who drank, swore, fought, casually uttered the Lord’s name in vain, these latter blasphemies being the closest they ever came to Church.
    Under ordinary circumstances the family would have had nothing to do with these sort of men. But these times were hardly ordinary circumstances, and the family really had no choice.

    Mother cleared away the last of the breakfast dishes from the long dining table, all except those which sat before a stray boarder who appeared to be in no hurry to get to the mill on time, dirty plates and flatware hoisted in her wiry hands as she turned toward the kitchen doorway. The pivoting door was just swinging closed; before it stood Michael in his wool overcoat which was patched in several places and fraying at the cuffs.
    “It’s time for me to go,” he said.
    “Yes,” she replied as unemotionally as she could. But Michael could see hints of moisture in the corners of her eyes.
    “Train’s leaving soon.”
    “Yes…Michael, I’m sorry it has to be this way. We don’t want you to go, none of us. Your father did everything he could down at the mill. You do know that, don’t you?”
    Yes, his father. He had inquired about openings, anything, at the mill where he worked. But Father had preserving his own job to worry about without cashing in any favors for his son. As if he had any favors left to drawn upon. He had said his goodbyes the night before, eager to get to bed early and snatch a few more minutes of weary sleep before rising before dawn to hurry off again to work.
    There was nothing for Michael here in Rockdale, nor up the river in Joliet. He had inquired everywhere—foundries, wallpaper mills, printing plants, the breweries that struggled to adapt to the early years of Prohibition. He had even taken the interurban trains to both ends of the line, to Aurora and Chicago Heights, with no success there either. The collar cities, all of them once minor industrial strongholds, seemed to have no work for an unskilled laborer, with skilled craftsmen being barely better off.
    This was his last best hope.