The 42nd Parallel Read Online Free PDF

cellar. “Well, when we get another one we’ll concrete the whole place,” Uncle Tim told everybody. For a whole day there was no work done. Everybody stood around looking at the tall black intricate machine that stood there like an organ in a church. When the machine was working and the printshop filled with the hot smell of molten metal, everybody’s eyes followed the quivering inquisitive arm that darted and flexed above the keyboard. When they handed round the warm shiny slugs of type the old German typesetter who for some reason they called Mike pushed back his glasses on his forehead and cried. “Fifty-five years a printer, and now when I’m old I’ll have to carry hods to make a living.”
    The first print Uncle Tim set up on the new machine was the phrase: Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
    When Fainy was seventeen and just beginning to worry about skirts and ankles and girls’ underwear when he walked home from work in the evening and saw the lights of the city bright against the bright heady western sky, there was a strike in the Chicago printing trades. Tim O’Hara had always run a union shop and did all the union printing at cost. He even got up a handbill signed, A Citizen, entitled An Ernest Protest, which Fainy was allowed to set up on the linotype one evening after the operator had gone home. One phrase stuck in Fainy’s mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.
    The next day was Sunday, and Fainy went along Michigan Avenue with a package of the handbills to distribute. It was a day of premature spring. Across the rotting yellow ice on the lake came little breezes that smelt unexpectedly of flowers. The girls looked terribly pretty and their skirts blew in the wind and Fainy felt the spring blood pumping hot in him, he wanted to kiss and to roll on the ground and to run out across the icecakes and to make speeches from the tops of telegraph poles and to vault over trolleycars; but instead he distributed handbills and worried about his pants being frayed and wished he had a swell looking suit and a swell looking girl to walk with.
    “Hey, young feller, where’s your permit to distribute them handbills?” It was a cop’s voice growling in his ear. Fainy gave the cop one look over his shoulder, dropped the handbills and ran. He ducked through between the shiny black cabs and carriages, ran down a side street and walked and walked and didn’t look back until he managed to get across a bridge just before the draw opened. The cop wasn’t following him anyway.
    He stood on the curb a long time with the whistle of a peanutstand shrilling derisively in his ear.
    That night at supper his uncle asked him about the handbills.
    “Sure I gave ’em out all along the lakeshore . . . A cop tried to stop me but I told him right where to get off.” Fainy turned burning red when a hoot went up from everybody at the table. He filled up his mouth with mashed potato and wouldn’t say any more. His aunt and his uncle and their three daughters all laughed and laughed. “Well, it’s a good thing you ran faster than the cop,” said Uncle Tim, “else I should have had to bail you out and that would have cost money.”
    The next morning early Fainy was sweeping out the office, when a man with a face like a raw steak walked up the steps; he was smoking a thin black stogy of a sort Fainy had never seen before. He knocked on the ground glass door.
    “I want to speak to Mr. O’Hara, Timothy O’Hara.”
    “He’s not here yet, be here any minute now, sir. Will you wait?”
    “You bet I’ll wait.” The man sat on the edge of a chair and spat, first taking the chewed end of the stogy out of his mouth and looking at it meditatively for a long time. When Tim O’Hara came the office door closed with a bang. Fainy hovered nervously around, a little bit afraid the