Bottles hawked with contempt, and his head wagged. “Shtink bombs and phoshphorush and dynamite! I told you, I jusht fuck around for fun.”
“Just the same …”
“Where you from?” Bottles said violently. His face was suddenly very red. “How the hell I know who you are? You come in here and proposition me thish way, I do’ know you from a hole in the ground. You’re in the wrong plashe.”
“Here’s my paid-up card, for one thing,” Joe said.
Bottles shrugged, but looked.
“Ever hear of Joe Hill?” Joe said.
“Maybe sho, maybe not, I’m tellin you, mishter, you got the wrong coon.”
“Well, I’m Joe Hill. I’ve been working all up and down the coast. You know George Reese in Portland, and McCandless and Riordan over here, and you know Frank Little, and know he just went up to Great Falls on an organizing trip. I’ve been working with all of them. You’ve heard of Joe Hill, so you know who I am. You don’t have to act as if I was a stool.”
“I thought you shaid your name wash Hillshtrom.”
“Hill, Hillstrom, what difference does it make?” Joe said.
Bottles stared at him steadily, his heavy shoulders thrust forward a little. He grunted as if in surprise, and coughed. “All right,” he said. “I heard of Joe Hill. Now tell me why Bert McCandlessh didn’t come down here himshelf if the union needsh help.”
“I told you,” Joe said. “They think they have to calm the public down. Too much talk of IWW dynamiters. They won’t move unless the company kills a half-dozen men, then maybe they’ll do something. They’ll get voted down sooner or later, but meantime those boys are down there taking a beating.”
Lifting the lid of the stove, Bottles spit in on the fire, and after he had spit his lips puckered into an ancient, helpless hole. “I shpose you’re all right,” he said. “I got to be careful. Beshidesh, I got a belly full of thish phoshphorush. I got me damn good and poishoned, shee? I damn near died. Hadn’t had shome oil of turpentine handy, I would of. I been fuckin’ around with thish stuff too long. Now I got thish phoshy jaw. Any day now I’ll yawn and busht my god damn jaw right off. My jawbonesh rotting right in my head, shee? I bitched myshelf good with that phoshphorush shtuff.”
Joe was silent. For a moment, as he looked at the degenerated and poisoned face of old Bottles, he hated him for a scissorbill. Just once more. He was already wrecked, what difference would it make?
“You come around here ashkin for shome’m imposhible anyway,” Bottles said. “Chrish shake, you do’ make that shtuff overnight. You got to treat bone ash with shulphuric, and filter off the calshium shulphate, and conshentrate it, and mixsh it with shawdusht, and dry it, and dishtill it, and then you have to shuck it up into tubesh. Jusht shlip oncesh, like I did, and you get a mouthful. Maybe you’d like to shuck up that shtuff into a tube with your mouth.”
“I thought you might have some left around,” Joe said.
“Yeah? You know what I’d get if any cop came in and found any of that around? I’d be shmart to leave it laying around, I sure would.”
Joe shrugged. “Well, if you did have any, it might be smart to get rid of it.” He threw up his open hands, letting the possibility go, but he was not quite ready to give up the whole thing. Any chemicals, any explosives, were too precious. Bought at a drugstore or hardware, they could be traced—unless a Pinkerton bought them to plant and frame the union. In a fire, you needed a backfire, and he said to old Bottles, holding his anger and disappointment in, “How about stink bombs?”
The agate eyes blinked, the mouth pursed. “Okay,” Bottles said. “I can give you shome shtink bombsh.”
From a brace under the bench he fished out a padded chocolate box with the picture of a girl under a parasol on it. Inside there were many little blown-glass bubbles with a plug of cooled glass at the bottom. They looked like crude base-loaded salt-shakers. Bottles stood silently counting them, his limber lips moving. “About four dozhen. That do you?”
“Fine.”
Joe reached for them, and as he took them in his hand he saw that Bottles was watching him intently. Across Bottles’ shoulder he could see that the rainy dusk had frayed off into dark, and that mist was thick on the inside of the windows. Bottles’ shadow loomed and moved on the wall; the movement of the shadow arm as the old man reached into his pocket was like a threat. His hand came out with a jackknife in it, and Joe tensed, muscles and nerves tightening alertly. For a moment he expected Bottles to attack him. Then the old man grunted, turned aside, opened the knife and set the tip of the blade under the edge of a knot in one of the two-by-four studs. The knot slipped out like a cork to reveal a slanting augur hole. Feeling with a thick finger, Bottles pulled out a six-inch glass tube filled with a yellowish, cheesy solid.
Slowly Joe began to smile, but Bottles did not smile as he handed the tube over. He replaced the knot and pried out another one and took three tubes from a second hole. From a third he got two more, and finally he stood looking at Joe with his mouth pursed and helpless and old.
“Thash all of it,” he said. “Thash the lasht, and I ain’t makin’ no more. I been poishoning myshelf for too damn long. I ushed to be a shtrong man, shtrong ash a bull, by God. Now I haven’t got shtrength enough to pull your pecker out of a lard pail. Phoshphorush poishoning, ever hear of it? Phoshy jaw. Itsh got my heart, too. Other night I woke up like shomebody’d drove a crowbar through my chesht.” He threshed the violent arm outward. “Phoshphorush! I’m really bitched for good. I’m not makin any more.”
“That’s all right,” Joe said. “You’ve already done your share to help the cause along.” He rolled the tubes in newspaper and packed them into the candy box along with the stink bombs, and wrapped the whole box in another newspaper. When he had it all done Bottles, who had watched every move, splatted his loose lips contemptuously.
“I never ashked to get rotted away in the god damn cause,” he said.
“That’s the way the luck goes sometimes.”
“Shcrew it!” Bottles said.
Joe tapped the box under his arm. “Every working stiff on the coast will owe you for this. Every working stiff’s behind you, too. We’re all in it together till we win it.”
“Only I’m in it a little deeper than mosht,” Bottles said. “I washn’t cut out to be a fuckin’ martyr. Hell with it. Thish ish the lasht.”
Joe smiled and shrugged. He eyed Bottles a moment—an old guy, washed up. There would be no help from him any more. He felt no sympathy for Bottles’ troubles. Maybe he was poisoned, but he didn’t have to cry about it. You took what came. If you weren’t in the movement for keeps, you didn’t belong in it.
“Well, take it easy,” he said. Bottles did not shake hands. He followed Joe to the door, and looking back from the shore end of the gangplank toward the lighted door where the old man stood, Joe saw him big-shouldered and bushy-haired like one of the mountain giants of the fairy stories, one of the workers in metals, the livers in deep caves, the lonely and isolated and dangerous, made poisonous by the fumes of their own subterranean forges.
In the late afternoon of the next day he walked out of the wood-enclosed right of way to the cleared rim of a gorge. Ahead of him the narrow-gauge tracks ran out on a spidery trestle two hundred feet over tidewater. Across the gorge, spilled in wild confusion down the slope, an avalanche of logs had been dumped from flatcars coasting around the upper edge, and had fallen in a tangle of red-brown plated pine and gray fir down to the orderly parquetry of wet logs choking the river behind the boom. Lower down, on the far bank, already in deep shade, were the mills and the one false-fronted street of the town. He saw four men stacking lumber, and steam drifted from the mill buildings, wisping away against the bluffs. The rain had all blown away inland; the sun was setting clear, and the crossties and timbers of the trestle were already dry, though the grass and ferns where he sat down were damp.
In the ferny quiet he sat with his back against a stump. After a while he h
eard the quitting whistle down below. The sun glared fierily through the needle-tops of the firs, and the air grew chillier. Joe checked the angle at which the sun was setting, and turned to see where it would rise in the morning. Straight up the gorge. Then the rays would hit the trestle by eight o’clock, at least, and by ten the protected angles of the timbers should be getting nice and warm.
Tomorrow was Sunday; there shouldn’t be anyone crossing the trestle, and no work going on. The scabs would all be lying around the bunkhouses getting over a big Saturday night, probably, and it would be hard to rally a crew for an emergency. Maybe the whole thing would fizzle, but there was a chance it would work, or work at least enough to slow things down, break up the operation of the company’s plans.
It was almost time, almost dusk. Joe filled his pockets with dry needles from a protected spot under a tree, and from his bindle he took the chocolate box. Working very carefully, he cracked the tubes and with twigs and newspaper worked out the pliable sticks of phosphorus. The glass he covered with needles and dirt, and when the gone sun was only an area of intenser light behind the forest on the point beyond the rivermouth, he rose with his bindle across his back and the phosphorus held carefully in his hands and started across the trestle.
The earth fell away under him, he saw the slaty reflecting water, the matchstick crisscross of the floating logs, the smokes lifting toward him in windless feathers. Down below were the elements of his devoted life: a struck mill and a lockout, striking workers evicted from company houses and scabs installed in their places, a permanent deputy paid by the company and a crew of goons to “keep order” among the mill hands camped in tents and shanties out beyond the company street. In the straggling street paralleling the choked rivermouth, among the raw lumber and piles of slabs and corrugated iron sheds, oppressive capital and militant labor faced each other in one of the ten thousand battles of the revolution.
He saw it below him small and cluttered and shabby, pinched down under the shadow of the river bluffs, ringed by dark trees, one inconsequent battleground among ten thousand battlegrounds, but as important as any, as legitimate a place to fight in as any. It seemed to him as he looked down that he saw with great clarity, not in any new way but with a new freshness, the meaning of the words in the Preamble: “There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system …”
But as he walked along, his sight was blurred by the ties, the alternate solidity and empty space beneath his feet. A wind puffed down the gorge toward the sea; he felt the trestle strain the thin pressure of the air, and a second or two later saw the feathers of smoke rising from the town bend seaward like candleflames in a blown breath.
It was fantastic. Ordinarily he was as steady and sure-footed on a trestle or scaffolding as on solid ground, but now his knees tightened with the fear that something might break the strong rhythm of his walking, that his eyes might misjudge the blurring alternation of the ties, that he might step through and fall. He felt the trestle sway lightly, dangerously, and he stopped and stooped, almost grabbing for support.
Alone and high above the chicken yard where he would soon pounce, he did not feel like a hawk. He felt scared and queasy, and in anger at himself he stopped and stood straight until the uneasiness went away. Then he looked around.
He was almost in the middle. Swiftly he squatted, broke the waxy sticks of phosphorus into short pieces, and using the piece of newspaper like a glove, laid them along a six-foot stretch of the sheltered eastern angle of the truss beam. Over them he scattered the pocketfuls of fir needles he had gathered. He worked quickly and surely, with no more shakiness of the knees though he had to lean out to arrange the sticks as he wanted them. When he was through he stood up and slapped the needles from his clothes. The covered phosphorus sticks were entirely out of sight. At 83° Fahrenheit they would burst into flame.
As he walked on, steadily stepping across the open ties, his mind was working like a clock. He was in search of a black German named Schermerhorn and a Frenchy named Tisserand. Tonight, with any luck, the Wobbly hall would be open for a while at least and a certain number of the strikers would be signed up and wearing buttons. Still later, while selected people threw stink bombs and kept the deputies busy over across the river, there would be a street meeting. Even a half-hour would be enough. Contact would have been made, solidarity established, a core of the IWW planted in the town so that the union could move in its heavy support.
This time tomorrow he might be in jail or on his way out of town with the marks of clubs on him, but by then there would have been a job done. And before this time tomorrow there was going to be a nice fire that would cripple the operation of the mill and go up above the firs at the rivermouth like a yell of defiance.
3 Sacramento Valley, August, 1913
The spot where they had unrolled their blankets was a long way from the ditch, and outside the edge of the old orchard whose sawed-off stumps were put to use as stools all through the camp. They were on the fringe, a little higher, up where dry oatgrass and tarweed spread under the fence and up the first slope of the hills, and they could look down over the camp sprawling across the old orchard and bunched under the pepper trees along the ditch. The sun, which had poured down heat all day, was almost flat; they sat with their backs to it, waiting for it to go down.
“Yes,” Joe said finally. “But how mad are they? Can we do anything with them, or are they like most of these stoop laborers?”
Fuzzy Llewellyn lifted his face and gave Joe a distorted look. One cheek wore a puffy discolored bruise, and the eye on that side was swollen nearly shut. He talked stiffly past a split lip. “I think there’s a …”
His one good eye sharpened and focused, staring past Joe. Quite slowly and smoothly he folded back onto the ground, crawled into the shelter they had rigged from two bent strips of corrugated iron culvert hammered flat, and pulled a blanket clear up over him. “Keep on talkin’,” he said from underneath.
With hands hanging at their knees they sat on, facing half away from a man in breeches and laced boots who came up from along the edge of the camp. Backs to the sun, drooping, they sat still. Without appearing to look, Joe saw the man giving their outfit a sharp once-over as he came.
Joe caught his eye when he was within thirty feet. He nodded. “Evenin’,” the man said. The others lifted hands and let them fall again, not quite looking around.
“You’re pretty far from water up here,” the man said.
No one answered for a moment, until old Manderich said, “More preeze.” Virtanen, a slow-headed Russian-Finn, smiled. Joe and the Kirkham twins hugged their knees.
“I guess you’re right, at that,” the man said. He laughed and drew his shirtsleeve across his forehead, replaced his hat. His feet had not quite stopped moving. Now he was almost past, walking a little sideways in order to watch them. “She’s a hot son of a bitch, for fair,” he said, and passed on. They watched him plod along the fence and eventually drift down into the edge of the camp again. Fuzzy waited a long time before he poked his bruised face out.
“Ve vould show up less if ve camped down in the crowd,” Manderich said.
“It ain’t safe,” Fuzzy said. “I’m too easy to spot, with a tow head and a buggered-up face. They prowl this place like cops on a beat. There must be a dozen special deputies and finks around.” He sat down among them again and ran a finger tenderly along his leaking eyelid.
“That doesn’t seem so many for a camp this big,” Joe said.
“It’s enough to show they’re jumpy. If they wasn’t jumpy they wouldn’t have taken the trouble to goon me out of camp.”
“What’d you do, exactly?”
“I called a meetin’,” Fuzzy said. “I come in he
re and I took one look and I called a meetin’.” His lips pointed sharply, alertly, and like a bird pecking he spit between his feet. His bruises gave his grin a cocky, one-sided leer. “Troublemaker!” he said.
Joe watched him. “What’d you have in mind when you came back?”
“Call another meetin’!”
They laughed, a short, unanimous acknowledgment of Fuzzy’s cockiness. “When?” Joe said. “Tomorrow?”
“That’s what I figured. What do you think? Sunday mornin’ they’ll all be sittin’ around smellin’ the backhouses, or waitin’ in line to get in one.”
Joe kept watching him, trying to appraise this Llewellyn. He knew nothing of him except what he had learned in the last six hours, and it didn’t pay to take chances. “How are you on the soapboxing? Can you start her off?”
“Listen!” Fuzzy said, “just let me up there and I’ll soapbox the livin’ Jesus out of ’em. I got somep’m to tell ’em about this dump. Only I won’t dare show my mug around too much beforehand. You boys’ll have to set it up.”
“We’ll set it up,” Joe said. He rose, beating the dust from the seat of his corduroys. “Before we settle any strategy I’d like to take a look around. You feel like a walk, Art?”
“Come on,” Manderich said. “I show you.”
He led Joe down to the edge of the ditch that cut at an angle through the immense camp. All through the city of tents and shelters and tarp-covered wagons the sawed-off orchard stumps made a regular pattern. Along the ditch people had crowded in close to take advantage of the shade of the pepper trees, and their tent ropes stretched to the edge of the path.
Even at seven o’clock it was hot. The ground was beaten bare; the sun caught in a golden haze of dust among the tents. Children were wading at the edge of the ditch, but a man with a pail chased them out angrily and stood a moment, his mouth grim, waiting and looking for a clear spot, before he reached far out and hooked a pailful from deeper water. The mealtime smoke of many fires rose and mixed with the dust, and all over the tent city and over the crude shelters and the shelterless bedroll-camps that spread for a quarter of a mile there was a light, sun-dazzled haze. Men chopped wood, women stooped and squatted around campfires, there was a calling and yelling of children. All the sounds, in the last heat of the day, had a dragging, tired resonance, the shrillness taken out as distance takes the shrillness from a train whistle. In the evening the sounds that rose above the camp had an almost musical hum.
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 13