He sat up finally and looked. The camp was dark except for the red wink of two or three dying fires, perhaps in families where there was sickness. Still he felt it around him: he heard a thing like its collective breathing and felt the presence of the sleeping hundreds. In the mere congregation of so many people there was some feeling, threat or promise, possibly only a great sense of weight. He had never felt it quite this way before.
With a rustle and heave Manderich sat up beside him, a shadow. “Vot iss?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t sleep.”
Old Art grunted, fumbling softly for his shoes, and then stood up. Joe stood with him, and they stepped over to the boundary fence where Manderich relieved himself with many sighings and breathings. “Gott damn,” he said at last, “I vould gift the whole labor mofement for a bladder dot vould keep all night.”
“You?” Joe said. “You wouldn’t trade the labor movement for a million a year.”
Manderich did not reply. Looking past him, Joe saw that one of the fires down in the camp had blazed up, and that over farther west there were two or three more low red blinks. There must be plenty of sickness; it would be a miracle if the ditch wasn’t full of typhoid.
From up where they stood, the not-quite-sleeping camp seemed lonely and full of strangeness; he felt a kind of spasm shake his pulse, a contraction as if from cold raised goose-pimples on his arms, and there was an urge to do something, to thrust forward into purposeful action. He said to Manderich, “It’s like a camp before a battle. As if at the crack of dawn they’d get up and start putting on armor.”
“Dot iss possible,” Manderich said. Where he leaned on a fence-post, his shirttails glimmered faintly, his shanks were white in long drawers. More perhaps than he had ever wanted to make confidential and intimate talk with anyone, Joe wanted to make it now with Manderich; he felt that he must know if Manderich felt as he did, and if he had a sense of personal destiny involved in what might happen tomorrow. But he could not quite make himself say it. Instead, he said, “Have you got a feeling this might turn into something big, Art?”
“Maybe.”
They hung on their fenceposts in the blue starlight, and it came over Joe that of all the men he had knocked around with, of all the Wobblies he had worked with for three years, old Manderich was the best. Remembering the night they had run from the cops among the warehouses and yards along the Pedro waterfront and stumbled into Otto Applequist’s little warehouse-pilfering job, he almost laughed. Art was a beauty in a fight, a slugger who never backed up and never stopped to think.
Encouraged by the kind of intimacy that the recollection brought him, and hidden comfortably in the cool dark, he edged closer to the thing that lay in his mind. “I wonder how Ettor and Giovannitti felt when they came down to take over the Lawrence strike?” he said. “You suppose they were scared, or afraid they couldn’t win, or worried what might happen next minute, or how they might be able to swing things?”
“Dey had a strike to vork vit,” Manderich said. “Dey vorked vit it. Ve got vun to start. Ve start it.”
Something passed, all but noiseless, in the air overhead; Joe hung alertly, trying to make his ear define what it had been. Then the short, doglike bark from further up the hill told him: a burrowing owl out hunting. He thumbed a loose, deep hum from the barbed wire with his finger and said, “How’s Fuzzy as a soapboxer?”
“Goot,” Manderich said. “He iss a pounder and shouter.” He pushed himself away from the post. “He iss not carrying a card any more, you know dot.”
“Why?”
“Stockton local t’rew him out. Somet’ing about some dynamiting up around Placerville.”
Suspicion had awakened in Joe as alertly as a sleeping cat wakes. “Is he all right?”
“I t’ink he iss all right. I haff schnooped around. I t’ink he iss all right.”
“I don’t like the sound of that dynamite.”
Manderich made a quiet noise and spit on the ground and Joe heard him laughing. “I don’t s’pose you effer used any dynamite.”
“As a matter of fact, I never did.”
“It iss a tegnicality,” Manderich said, still laughing.
“But if he isn’t on the level, if he’s a Pinkerton trying to frame somebody, this would give him too fine a chance.”
“Fuzzy iss all right,” Manderich said. “You t’ink he got his eye blacked stooling to dose finks?”
Joe hunched his shoulders against a recurrence of the goose-pimpling chill and thrust his hands deep in his pockets, staring down over the camp and thinking how immovable, how stagnant a mass twenty-eight hundred human farm animals would be for six of them to move. “So much could happen tomorrow.”
Old Art’s voice was almost mild. He hawked again, and spit, and said, “It iss hard to tell. So many sheepy peoples. Maybe dis iss somet’ing big, maybe it fizzles. Maybe ve get a couple hundred out to a meeting tomorrow and ve get our heads knocked by Hale’s finks but Hale gets a little more scared and builds four more backhouses. Dot iss about vot happens.”
But the sense of weight, the little chills of apprehension, said to Joe that there would be more than that. “That isn’t enough,” he said to Manderich. “Sometime a thing like this has to blow up in the boss’s face. Why not this time? What’s to keep this from being another Lawrence?”
Art started back across the weedy stubble. “Maybe vit educated vorkers, or a few educated vuns. Maybe vit organization. But such a batch of Lumpenproletariat, such a little half-dozen as we are.”
It seemed to Joe that old Art was not half as militant as he should have been, not half as ready for a fight, not made of the old gruff granite. He was only an old man with a weakening bladder and failing kidneys, somebody almost too tired for the kind of action they would need tomorrow. Irritation made his voice sharp as they stepped close to the huddle of the camp and groped for their blankets among the sleeping forms. “Who took the Bastille?” Joe said as he lay down, but Manderich made a little shushing sound as if to a child and hauled his blanket over his shoulders with a grunting sigh.
So Joe lay counting. He had no real fear of old Art if a fight came up. He had no fear of himself. The Kirkham boys were run-of-the-mill Wobblies, unknown quantities, but since they were Wobblies at all they were probably good for something in a strike or a fight. They had both made the Spokane jail in the free-speech fight three years ago. Virtanen had come in with Joe—the only man he could lay hands on when he got word that something was stirring. Again an unknown quantity, a lumber-schooner sailor, too good-natured, too hard to work up, but honest. And Fuzzy Llewellyn, a dehorn, just possibly a stool. Six little men to wield twenty-eight hundred. He wished he were good at the gab; he would have felt better if he could have depended on himself for the soapboxing.
The stars went processionally westward, and the vibration that was like the breathing of the great camp still came to his ears and nerves. He kept half sitting up, thinking he heard sounds, and all night he did not go to sleep at all, but lay planning, imagining how it would work out at the meeting. He could get Fuzzy up on the box, get the crowd around, see them coming through the tents under the pepper trees, but it disintegrated for him there. He couldn’t see the people’s faces or tell whether they took fire, and all his trying couldn’t trick them into some action, some march on the mansion or some wrecking of the stew-wagon or some committee confronting the boss and the foremen with a set of demands. He could think these things but he could not imagine them, he couldn’t make the pictures come.
Yet when the sky began to pale and the moving stars melted back into it and a chilly little wind came through the stubble and crept into his neck under the snuggled blanket, he sat up and stretched with a shiver that came more from resolution than from the wind. He knew he had too much imagination to be a good organizer. He should have been made of brass and hickory like Frank Little; or he should have been a general, a planner, an indefatigable undiscourageable manipulator of men and events like Vincent
St. John. An organizer should not think about what might be gained until after he had gained it; he should act first and think afterward.
Now, as he looked down over the ugly sprawl of tents and shelters in the cool shadowless morning it was as if his heart moved two inches, bracing itself against something that he felt would come.
4 Sacramento Valley, August, 1913
The sun came up over the brown hills, hot from the moment of its rising, and it grew hotter with every quarter-hour of its climb. By the time the six had finished breakfast and were scattering through the camp to line up every man they knew and could trust, even the dogs were hunting shade, and the first dense twittering of birds in the pepper trees had died away to an occasional cheep.
Art Manderich remained behind with Fuzzy, ostensibly to protect Fuzzy from Hale’s finks, but also for the influence he would have in keeping Fuzzy from the temptation to stool if he were inclined that way. Manderich himself had thought the precaution unnecessary; it was Joe who insisted on it.
Now as he worked through the camp listening to the talk, waiting in backhouse lines, passing the time of day with men along the canal, there was none of the mystery that night had thrown over the tents and shelters and the red wink of fires. Under the unblinking sun the exposure of the camp’s poverty was pitiless and complete. Blankets, quilts, discarded clothes, trailed over the tent ropes and stumps, or lay in the dust. In some camps there were cots, and these stood up above the dust with a kind of arrogance. Tent flaps were open, tent walls rolled up to let in air, and the contents of the tents bulged and slid out into the dust outside—water cans and jugs, baby buggies, lanterns, suitcases and telescope bags. He saw lizards dart dust-colored across dust-colored bedclothes. And everywhere he found people jumpy, already irritable from the heat. At the slightest noise or movement they looked up as if expecting something. Without any of the mystery, without any of the obscurely ominous air as of a sleeping army that it had worn last night, the camp was still full of that sense of waiting.
Two Mexican boys broke into a fist fight: within a matter of seconds men, women, and children had thronged around to see what was happening. Further down the camp, a picker’s child fell into the irrigation ditch: instantly there were two dozen hands there to pull her out, and for ten minutes afterward people kept coming to see what the excitement was. There was a good deal of talking, a good deal of spanking of children. In the space of a half-hour he heard a dozen different languages spoken. It was a slovenly, heat-tired, irritable, hopelessly mixed crowd; whatever they made of it—and he went carefully, making what he could—would have to be made by pure will and determination, and held together against all the disintegrative weaknesses of the mob. They would take a lot of talking to.
And there were also the finks to think about.
He was up on the ditchbank, looking over the shelters and waiting for the Kirkhams and Virtanen to appear, when he saw the little flurry over by the packing sheds. A man’s bald pink head rose up above a group, mainly women, and the noise that at first had been only a gabble of voices paused and steadied and became singing. Under the big thin-leaved pepper, with the road’s empty width between him and the sheds, the pink-headed man bawled above the thinner voices of the women. They were singing “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains.” The baldheaded man rotated so that his voice went off almost inaudibly in other directions and then bellowed like a megaphone. Between verses he made sweeping come-all-ye motions with his arms, beckoning people in.
Joe’s first reaction was a pulse of rage. The preaching fool would block everything. He was right in the spot they had picked for their own meeting, and he would probably go on for an hour or two. He would use up all the restlessness and all the patience to stand in the sun and listen that the camp contained, and he would send them home with the promise of pie in the sky.
Or was the preacher a plant of the boss’s? Nothing would suit the purposes of Hale better than a Jesus-meeting. It would pay him to hire a preacher at a hundred dollars a Sunday to bring the slaves the gifts of the spirit.
He swung around, furiously intent on rounding up the boys and breaking up the meeting, at whatever cost to their own plans, but as he turned he saw the fink who last night had cased their camp. The fink was leaning against a tree, his booted foot braced back of him against the trunk, and he was idly peeling a green twig with his thumbnail while he watched and listened. Joe hesitated. Already people were coming from every direction like workers streaming into a factory gate in the morning. They picked their way between tents and shelters, crossed the plank bridges across the ditch, stood up from their sloven campsites and craned to see and hear. They were thickening by the minute around the baldheaded preacher at the road’s edge. And the fink was casually peeling a twig. It was that which made Joe’s anger back up and make way for a plan. One of the best ways to get a big crowd together without trouble from the finks was to let this preacher do it.
It took him five minutes, pushing through a gathering crowd like the milling crowd on a circus ground, intent and eager and not quite sure where to go, but following the stream toward the main tent, before he spotted the red heads of the Kirkham twins. They came pushing against the stream, Virtanen behind them, all of them laughing and shaking their heads.
“Hell, we thought it was our own meeting starting ahead of time,” Russ Kirkham said. “We sprained our ass getting in there, and it’s only this bughouse preacher whooping it up.”
“Enno,” Joe said, “will you get Fuzzy and Art down here? On the fly.”
Virtanen left. The preacher’s bawling voice went out over the camp, was blurred for a moment with crowd-sound. “What’s up?” Russ Kirkham asked.
“We’re taking this meeting over, soon as the preacher has it going good. And once we take it over we may have to fight for it a little. How many men can you get together that you can really trust?”
They looked at each other, shrugged, pulled down their identical mouths. They were gangling, red-necked; in the heat their thin freckled skins looked as wet and red and chafed as an infant’s. They looked exactly alike but it was always Russ who did the talking. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a dozen. There just ain’t many in this place that’ve ever …”
“All right,” Joe said. “A dozen’ll do. You better start right now to round them up. Get in toward the inside of the crowd and work by two’s. Art and Enno and I will take care of the preacher, and we’ll get Fuzzy up on the soapbox. It’s up to you to keep anybody from pulling him off again.”
The crowd had swelled so that it spread almost out to where they were. The preacher’s words were indistinguishable over the noise people made talking and asking questions. Women moved through the dust and sun with babies on their hips, and stood on tiptoe to locate friends in the crowd. Under the peppers people were packed in close, seeking shade.
Between the tents now Manderich and Virtanen came hurrying with Fuzzy between them. They had their hands on his arms, and helped him along, and he came with a step and a hitch and a half-jump, his hat pulled far down over his ears to hide his cotton-top. His face seemed full of a white eagerness; his teeth showed like a squirrel’s.
Joe watched him as he came, and he was reassured by the eagerness and by Fuzzy’s instant comprehension of what would have to be done. Maybe he was all right. He’d better be.
They huddled only for two or three minutes before the Kirkhams hurried away. At the last moment Virtanen was sent with them. They needed more assured protection in the crowd. Joe and Art alone would have to handle the preacher.
Even while they talked fast, laying it out, Fuzzy Llewellyn’s eyes roamed over the fringes of the crowd, which by now Joe thought must number many hundreds. His tongue touched his split lip, and he said softly, “Oh by Jesus, it’s made to order, it’s made to order!”
Smiling, Art Manderich looked at Joe, a significant, humorous, allusive look, and his thumb touched the head of the hatpin in his suspender. Until then Joe had not been consciou
s of the automatic under his own arm. He had worn it so long that it was like part of his clothes. But now as they started fighting their way into the press toward the increasing bellow of the preacher’s voice he felt the gun every time he pressed against anyone. The dust was gritty on his lips. He went ahead, edging, touching people, moving them aside, saying “Excuse us, how about getting through here.” So far as he could see, few were paying any attention to the preacher. They looked, and waited, and said things to those beside them, and shushed their children, and watched the faces of their neighbors as if for enlightenment, but they stayed. The shadows of the pepper trees, at the edge of the fierce sun, dappled them with blotches and freckles of light and dark.
Ahead of him, not very far now, the preacher was loud, and Joe listened consciously for the first time as he slid and wormed and worked his way forward, making a path for the others.
“… If you haven’t known Jesus! Oh, brothers and sisters, I can’t possibly tell you the joy I felt in my heart when I first knew Jesus was my friend! I been carrying a millstone around my neck all my days and never knew it. I was weighted down with sin, oh I confess it, brothers and sisters, I confess it gladly, I’ve had my soul washed clean and that old burden of sin don’t bother me any more. But I carried it around till I was bowlegged with it, I carried a pack of sin like a peddler’s, brothers and sisters, and all because I didn’t know Jesus was my friend, all because I didn’t know where to go to get my burden lightened. Now I’ve laid it down, and I tell you one and all, I’m a new man. You’ll never know what living can be until you come to Jesus and have those sins forgiven. You’ve all got ’em, brothers and sisters, everybody’s got ’em. Just make up your mind to come in and lay that burden down …”
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 15