Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  The moving arms of a taffy-pulling machine in a candy store window stopped him momentarily, and watching his own image in the glass he cracked his face just to see if he could look human. Ghostly among trays of panoche and peanut brittle, a reflected stranger smiled at him.

  3

  He knew Anna Olson the moment he came in with Otto from the porch and saw her talking with other women in the hall. Plain, faded, comfortable, she meant Gefle so strongly that even though he had been anticipating the meeting he was stopped dead inside the door by the intense familiarity of her face. Quiet mouth, plain flat hair, the hands that worked on a half-knitted gray wool sock even while she talked: they leaped out of his mother’s kitchen over the gap of years, and voices with them like voices that he knew, women’s voices talking Swedish.

  When her eyes moved casually to brush his, he waited expectantly, but she looked on past him, and her nod was for Otto. She didn’t know him. If he wanted to, he could still walk out of here without speaking to her. In the other room someone was pumping a player piano. The party hadn’t begun yet. He could beat it out and drop the hatch cover on all this past.

  But Otto was at his elbow, shoving him forward, and he stood with Otto’s hand pinching around his muscle and endured the questioning eyes of Anna Olson and two younger women.

  “You know who this is?” Otto said, and he shook Joe slightly, holding him like something he had captured.

  Anna Olson’s eyes searched his face. He felt that her eyes were soft and her brows arched with a question. “Do I know you?” she said.

  “I guess not,” Joe said. “Not any more.”

  “Did I once?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “A long time ago. In the old country?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gefle?”

  “Yes.”

  Half smiling, she searched his face again. He was conscious of his scars.

  “I don’t.… How long ago?”

  “I left there in ’98.”

  “Before we did,” she said. Her forehead was scored by a frown. “It’s so long, I can’t.… You’re not Olaus Berger?”

  “No.”

  “There’s something familiar,” she said. “Your eyes, especially.”

  “Come on,” Otto said. “You’re a punk guesser.”

  Then suddenly her hand came out and touched Joe’s arm, and her eyes were warm with recognition and surprise. “Why of course!” she said. “Of course, I know you now. But you’ve changed. You were just a young boy the last …”

  “I have to have proof,” Otto said. “Who is he?”

  The look Anna Olson gave Joe was almost eloquently friendly. She ignored Otto. “You used to be such a funny solemn little boy,” she said. Her hand with the gray sock in it reached and pulled one of the younger women over, a woman Joe vaguely noticed as tall, neither quite pretty nor quite plain, with eyes of a placid temperate blue like Anna Olson’s, and with long strong white hands. “Ingrid,” Anna Olson said, “just imagine. This is Joseph Hillstrom. You two went to school together.”

  Ill at ease and feeling that a dozen people were listening to the talk, Joe shook the young woman’s hand with a vague impression of quick eyes and a confused pink blush before the girl stepped back. There were other hands to shake, and a string of names: Andreen, Strand, Carlson, Erickson. It seemed to him that the parlor and hall were as noisy as a tree full of blackbirds, and he was astonished at these people that Otto had fallen among, who welcomed him just because he was a Swede and a friend of Anna Olson’s. They were already, in the way they accepted Otto, like sheep sheltering a fox. Now here they were admitting a kind of wolf, a revolutionary and rebel. By the time the first awkwardness wore off he began to be amused. He let himself be dragged into the parlor and seated at a table opposite Anna Olson, where he played clumsy whist for two hours, listening, keeping his mouth shut except to answer the questions Mrs. Olson put to him: What had he been doing, what was he doing now, was he working in Salt Lake, what brought him here, did he hear from anyone in Gefle.

  This last question she asked him a second time, as if she hadn’t heard or didn’t believe his first answer, and her mild blue eyes probed him with a sort of insistence as if she expected some cryptic information that the others would not catch. He told her what he had told her before, what was true. He had not heard from a single soul in Gefle since he left, except his cousin John Alberg.

  And where was John?

  That one he could not quite answer straight, for the last he had heard of John, he was shacked up on the beach at Hilo, bucking sugar bags on the wharf when he had to, and indulging in a continuous luau between jobs. A dehorn, one of the casualties.

  He said that John had apparently settled down in Hawaii.

  “You left about the same time,” Anna said. “Pretty soon after Berta died.”

  “Yes.”

  “She had such hopes for you,” the woman said, with her look which invited all sorts of personal details, and held her head ready to listen, but he moved his lips and his eyebrows and said nothing. She took a trick and stacked it neatly and put her enlarged knuckles down on it while she studied her hand. “Do you still draw?”

  “A little.”

  “Play the piano or violin?”

  “Both, a little.”

  He saw her eyes stop, almost absently, on the scars that marked his face and neck. Then she led out the remaining tricks swiftly and triumphantly and pawed them in toward her and said, “Ingrid plays the piano too. She gives lessons. We’re all proud of Ingrid.”

  Joe nodded to register politeness. Across at the round dining-room table where the girl sat he saw her flick a sideward look and knew she was aware they were talking about her. She brought her cards close to her face and consulted them seriously, rearranging them in a neat fan. At the third table Otto was being jovial, slamming his cards down on tricks with force enough to drive a stake. There was a lot of laughing going on.

  Joe grinned to himself. Such hopes for you, he said. Now look at you. Scars all over your map, rough clothes. It’s a cinch you haven’t done so well. But we’re all proud of Ingrid. She gives music lessons to runny-nosed kids and can play marches as good as the player piano, almost.

  In the midst of his abstraction, poking in like a stick into a smug rat’s nest, there came to him without warning or reason Moe Dreyfuss’ question: Where are you going, a fellow like you? What are you after? In what he suddenly perceived to be this stuffy middle-class parlor he sat and cathechized himself in old Moe’s excitable voice, and with the whole batch of good Mormons in front of his nose he did not have to look far for an answer.

  Look what you might have done with your knack for music and drawing, he said. You could have been Professor Hillstrom with long hair and a violin case under your arm and given lessons to ten-year-olds and made almost enough to live on if you didn’t bother with breakfast. You could have taught drawing in some grammar school and been a man who was asked to whist parties by a lot of pious Swedes like these. You could have played the organ in church, or sung in the choir.

  They were talking to him. Their eyes were all on him.

  “What?” he said.

  “Your deal,” Anna Olson told him.

  The whist broke up about ten-thirty, and he found himself back in a corner with a plate and a coffee cup awkwardly balanced on his knees, listening to some woman whose name he did not know. She was telling him about her conversion and about how she was frightened to death when she first heard that Mormon missionaries were in town, as though they might have been gypsies—such stories you heard about the Mormons—until one night she was coming home and heard one of them speak on a street corner, and he seemed such an upright, clean young man, and he tried so hard in bad Swedish, falling all over himself so everybody laughed. But they were friendly, he was so obviously sincere, and she was struck by something he said. He said …

  Trapped and getting desperate, Joe moved the plate and crowded the coffee cup in
among the crumbs of his cake. He was hemmed in. The two Erickson boys, sons of Otto’s landlady, looked at him, and one of them nudged Otto and they laughed. It made him sore to have been brought into this henyard and now to be stuck here.

  On the other side of the room somebody said clearly, “Play something, Ingrid,” and here was the girl standing up and working her way over to the piano. People backed up a little and arranged their chairs as she sat on the stool rubbing her fingers and smiling a little and blushing with the quick, passing surge of pink. Two people moved their chairs directly in front of Joe so that now there was not a chance in the world of getting away. He found a table-edge for plate and cup and hooked his hands around one knee and leaned back, resigning himself. At least the woman next to him couldn’t go on any further about her conversion while the piano was going.

  Ingrid Olson bent her head and touched the keys. Her face grew serious, almost strained, a tight cord appeared in her neck and her lips pursed. He watched her curiously, a girl he had gone to school with and did not remember at all. Not a girl, actually, only a couple of years younger than he was, and he was thirty-one. He kept his eye on her, this old-maid music teacher who blushed at everything and was his contemporary, from his home town. She was supposed to be one of the smart ones, one everybody was proud of, and what had she arrived at, with her respectable start as the daughter of a shipwright? As she started to play he said to himself, Well, somebody’s been spared a good Christian wife.

  The high jabber that had been raucous in the room since he came fell away to a hush, and she played. The thing she played was quiet and grave, as sedate as this whole roomful of people. At first he listened with mild contempt for the formlessness and vague posturing ornamentation of the piece, but after a while he found himself listening harder, and he thought that there was something like a subdued excitement either in the piece itself or the way she played it. The song didn’t repeat itself like an ordinary song, but ran along like water.

  When she was finished she dropped her hands in her lap and blushed, and looking around the room Joe saw in the way they clapped and called for more that they really were proud of her. She gave them reason to think well of themselves as immigrants, Mormons, Swedes. Through a fringe of ferns he met Anna Olson’s proud eyes and he clapped with the others. All right, he admitted, she’s pretty good. Why shouldn’t she be? She’s a music teacher.

  They were still calling for more. “Maybe I’ll play a Chopin nocturne,” Ingrid said, and massaged her fingers and bent her head to the piano with the concentrated tightening look. This too was music of a kind he did not know, highbrow stuff. No Salvation Army tunes here, no Sunday band-concert marches. Something dreamy and fey, full of minors. What was a nocturne, exactly? Nighttime music?

  He watched her precise hands with the realization that she was miles ahead of him, that by comparison he was no musician at all but an uneducated amateur fit only to play on street corners with a tin cup strapped to his shin, or in some waterfront saloon.

  The realization made him coldly mad. When they started clapping again he left his hands clasped around his raised knee. Then with a feeling like the feeling of being grazed by danger he felt a group turn to look toward him, and as the clapping spattered away to nothing he heard Otto say, “Sure, on the piano. He’s a composer, he’s written dozens of songs.”

  Full of respect, ready to be edified, their faces stared at him. Otto was grinning as if he had pulled off a good joke, and Ingrid Olson had half risen, clearing her skirts from the piano stool. “Come on, Joe,” Otto said. “Take your turn. This is a home-talent show.”

  Joe let his foot down to the floor. “Not after that.”

  “Oh come on!” they said. “Play some of your songs.”

  Beyond the ferns Anna Olson’s motherly accusing eyes were on him fondly. “You didn’t tell me, Joseph,” she said.

  Shaking his head, Joe smiled at them and waved them off, but he got in one sharp look at Otto warning him to stop it at this, not to go on with any spiel about Joe Hill the Wobbly Troubadour. “Pie in the Sky” would sound pretty crummy after this highbrow nocturne stuff.

  “Otto’s just making a big joke,” he said. “I can’t play the piano.” His eyes met the questioning eyes of Ingrid Olson and he said, “You play some more.”

  “Everybody’d rather hear you.”

  “Come on!” they said. They were full of laughter again, the chummiest, good-naturedest bunch of people he had ever seen. “He wants to be coaxed!” they said, and laid hands on him to pull him from his chair. Embarrassed and angry, he held back, a ridiculous object in a ridiculous position. “I can’t play,” he kept telling them. “No, you’re mistaken. Otto’s fooling you.”

  “Don’t let him fool you,” Otto said. “He can play the fiddle too. Make him get up there.”

  Joe jerked away from their coaxing hands, really angry now. He saw them leave off their urging and their good nature at the same time. Their faces were hurt and offended, and in the silence he sat furiously, knowing that he looked sulky and not caring a damn. The hell with them, the bunch of Christers, what were they to him? What business had any of them to yank and pull on him and try to make him do what he didn’t want to do? Finally he heard the quiet voice of Anna Olson. “I guess Joseph’s bashful,” she said. “Ingrid, why don’t you play some songs people can sing?”

  To walk out now, while they gathered around the piano, was perfectly possible, but he resisted the impulse out of a stubborn intention not to show that he was bothered or in any way aware of the huffiness that had come into their looks toward him. He picked up a magazine and read it while they sang. Once Otto went by with a girl and leaned to grin and whisper, “Say, I didn’t mean to get you in a jam.”

  “No,” Joe said. “Oh holy smoke, no!”

  Stubbornly he sat until the singing dwindled and people began to shake hands all around and start home. They shook hands with him too; their concerned eyes looked him over, and he saw conversion in their looks and wondered why a Christian couldn’t be content with his own slice of heaven but always had to be yanking some sinner up beside him. Eventually he got into the hall on his way out, and then he heard his name in the familiar: “Du, Joseph.” Anna and Ingrid Olson were behind him. “Are you in a hurry?”

  For a moment he hesitated, but his anger had worn away and only his ironic amusement was left. “Not especially,” he said.

  “We never had a chance to talk. Why don’t you walk home with us? We live just down the street.”

  “Getting pretty late.”

  “Oh, come along,” she said, and hooked one hand through his arm and the other through Ingrid’s, keeping the grip on his arm even when the path narrowed and he had to walk along in the weeds.

  “I’ve been thinking all night,” she said. “I can remember when you were born.”

  “Yes?” He meant the tone to imply that he was not particularly anxious to have all the details.

  “It seems so long ago and so far away,” the woman said. Her fingers dug into his arm, and she pushed him along, leaning a little forward and walking heavily. “I can hardly think Gefle is real, any more. You said you never heard from anybody there.”

  “No.”

  “And you’ve never been back.”

  “No.”

  “I keep thinking it might be nice,” she said. Her sigh was a comfortable, wistful noise in the dark, “Maybe I’d just be disappointed. We’ve been here fourteen years. The old country might not seem the same.”

  Joe said nothing, walking beside the two women up the path along the wide unpaved street; in the night air the weeds were aromatic and brittle; somewhere, when Anna Olson’s voice paused, he heard the grassy low mutter of water in a ditch.

  “You’re not a Latter-day Saint,” Anna said. “You wouldn’t know what I mean, probably, but this is more than home to us now. Arne and I came here partly so we could be married in the temple for all eternity and be reunited in the last days.”

 
Joe coughed, feeling about as appropriate as a billy goat at a picnic. They were passing open weedy lots, and he saw the faint outline of the mountains in the starlight, a high black continuous rim beyond the shapes of houses and trees. He asked himself sarcastically if it wasn’t about time he got baptized; about all he had done all evening was listen to faith-promoting discourses.

  The pause lengthened until he found himself absently counting their steps. Anna Olson finally said, “Your mother would have been glad about the music. Have you written lots of songs?”

  “Only a few,” he said. “Otto was trying to get my goat.”

  This time, as she sighed, he heard her corset creak. He kept on walking beside her because she had been a friend of his mother’s and because she was the kind of woman his mother might have been now if she had lived. Quite suddenly he remembered a night when Anna had sat in the kitchen with her arm around his mother while his mother cried.

  The shadowy shapes of trees uprose on their left. Untrimmed shrubs hung over a fence and forced the sidewalk-path to bend outward toward the road. The women stopped at a gate, and Joe stopped with them. He could see the glint of Anna’s eyes as she looked up at him with her hand on the gatepost.

  “I always thought your father should have done something for you.”

  “Why should he?”

  “But if he had the slightest feeling …”

  “He never showed any signs of it,” Joe said, and tried to see Anna Olson’s face by the faint starlight, and added, “How do you even know for sure who my father is?”

  While they stared at each other the girl moved restlessly across the gate from them.

  “Don’t you?” Anna said.

  “I’ve heard tales, that’s all.”

  “She never told anybody,” Anna said. “At least she never told me. But it was plain enough. She was working there before, for a year. And your looks, too. After I’d looked at you for a minute tonight it was very plain. Your eyes.”

  “Well, it’s a comfort to look like a small-town baron,” Joe said.