“Mainly on-the-job organizing. We’ve got to lay a foundation in this state before we can get anywhere. Haywood tried Bingham last year. You know how far he got. They busted his strike with Mexican scabs. But he left a lot of buttons behind. We’re trying to spread it in the smelters and up in Park City and down in the coal camps. Next time we pull a big strike we want support.”
There was a question in his black eyes, but Joe shook his head. “I don’t want to waste my time working on some smelter bullgang when I could be doing something important. Do you know how many dollars it takes to keep a crew of lawyers working? How much does it cost to save a man from the chair?”
“Yeah,” Ricket said, not as an answer but as an acknowledgment of the force of the argument. He rubbed his hands circularly one upon the other and then reached for a big brass-ended advertising pencil and twirled it between his palms. “This is a bad town for raising money in,” he said.
“No town’s much different.”
“I don’t know,” Ricket said, “maybe these Mormons tithe away all they got. I should think for the Oatfield boys you might do better down on the coast.”
“I just came from the coast,” Joe said. He knew what was the matter with Ricket. Ricket liked the organizing and he liked a fight, but he didn’t like dispersing himself in a dozen directions helping defend every organizer that got thrown in jail.
“I had a hunch when I came into this town,” Joe said. “I can do something here, but not at any penny-ante organizing in some smelter.”
Ricket tossed and caught the pencil. “That was a suggestion, that’s all.”
Looking restlessly around the jamb of the door, Joe nodded at the old flatbed press in the main room. “I see you’ve got a press.”
Ricket nodded.
“A song printed on cards will double or triple your take at a street meeting,” Joe said. “A really good song can make you fifteen or twenty dollars.”
Ricket nodded again. “Now I see where you come in. You got a song?”
“I can write one.”
“Then you’d be a sucker to go to work organizing in a smelter,” Ricket said, and hitched himself forward to hump over the desk. He gave Joe a glance of almost winsome friendliness. “I got a single-track mind, I try to drag everybody I see into what I’m interested in at any special time. I want you to know we’re glad to have you in town. You got a place to live?”
“I’m at a boardinghouse down in Murray.”
“There’s a cot up at my place.”
“Thanks, I’m fixed.”
“About food,” Ricket said, and smiled his phantasmal smile. “If you go broke, there’s a Chink on First South will give you credit any time on the strength of your card.”
Joe stood up, and the swivel chair shot backward against the wall as Ricket struggled to his feet.
“Any time you get a song ready,” Ricket said. He shook hands with Joe and watched him go out—Ricket, a great black bear of a man with an odd manner, and a smile that came and went like the play of muscles when a man grits his teeth. Maybe he was getting everything that the traffic would bear out of Salt Lake and maybe he wasn’t. They would see what a Joe Hill song would do. Maybe it would wake this burg up a little.
One song. One more song. Joe went out into the morning heat with his mind already beginning to churn out scraps of rhyme, sort among the old familiar tunes. One song, we will sing one song … and there was the tune. The words came thronging to pair with it, and he went up a strange street wrapped in his inner swathings of contemplation, working at the verses. My Old Kentucky home sold for taxes, gobbled by the landlord, raided by the cops, taken over by the bank, sold by the sheriff at public sale. There was plenty you could do with the idea. He walked a street in Salt Lake City, in the bright stare and clarity, the barren brilliant light of a September morning, with words moving in his head, and he inquired the way to the public library and turned left out of the sun.
As he turned, he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Inside a pawnshop window, ringed by harmonicas and banjos and watches with thick chains, was an automatic in a worn holster. Pressing his arm against his ribs, he felt the emptiness where the Luger had used to ride, and he thought of how once in their talk Jud Ricket’s shiny black eyes had dropped to the place where a hidden gun would be. In that flick of Ricket’s glance he had seen a reflection of his own legend: Joe Hill, an ice-eyed stiff with a rod under his arm, a maker of songs and a hunter of trouble, an uncompromising enemy of the master class but maybe dangerous, maybe hard to handle.
With hardly a break in his stride he turned into the pawnshop, and five minutes later he came out with the gun in a package in his pocket. Now he went full stature again, veritably Joe Hill, wearing the things that completed and uttered him: an empty purse, a gun, the forming words of a song.
By the time he reached the stone library below the spread wings of the Eagle Gate he had arranged the easily alternated counters of his belief into a stanza.
We will sing one song of the meek and humble slave,
The horny-handed son of the soil,
He’s toiling hard from the cradle to the grave,
But his master reaps the profits of his toil.
Other stanzas were clamoring at the gate, half seen. One song of the politician, one song of the children in the mills, one song of the girl below the line, one song of the poor and ragged tramp, one song
… of the preacher, fat and sleek,
He tells you of homes in the sky.
He says “Be generous, be lowly and be meek,
If you don’t you’ll sure get roasted when you die.”
At the circulation desk he waited impatiently for the girl to come from sorting cards at a file. “I’d like to borrow a pencil for a few minutes,” he said.
The girl’s eyes behind round windows of glass jumped to meet his. He saw her mouth pop open. Two words came out: “We don’t …” Her tongue touched her lip quickly, something moved in her throat. Without a word and without taking her eyes from his face she reached sideways and groped up a long sharply pointed pencil and laid it in his hand.
5
“I guess I don’t quite understand what it is you do,” she said.
It was the third time he had been to the Olson house. On the music rack of the piano sat the scribbled and erased music notebook they had been working on: a song he had begun long ago, in San Pedro, and had never been able to finish. Between the lines of music Joe had copied out the first verse, to see how the words matched with the notation.
Workers of the world, awaken!
Break your chains! Demand your rights!
All the wealth you make is taken
By exploiting parasites.
“I’m an organizer,” he said.
He heard Anna Olson at the dishes in the kitchen. Through the open window he saw a man and two little girls setting up a ladder under an apple tree red with fruit. The dirt street lay lulled and quiet in the evening. There was a smell of mown alfalfa. Eastward the Wasatch showed between poplar trees, its slopes bronze and pink with the late sun and the first beginnings of autumn. He had momentary perception of how peaceful it was, and he thought of a little shanty somewhere in the hills.
“You don’t work in any particular place,” Ingrid said.
He let himself look at her serious, interested face, into her eyes that held his a moment and then dropped. She had nice skin and a faint clean smell, and sitting next to her was still an unfamiliar and faintly disturbing experience. He remembered having been bumped by her arm as she leaned to pencil something into the music notebook.
“Haven’t you heard about the IWW?” he said. “I go someplace and stay long enough to plant a few sticks of dynamite, and then I clear out and go blow something up somewhere else.”
“No, seriously. Do you make speeches?”
“I’ve made a few. I’m no good at it.”
“How do you organize, then?”
“Talking to the
men. Generally there’s dissatisfaction, maybe some trouble. I get them to pull together, form a committee. At meetings, I’m generally the guy that thumps the piano. Sometimes I draw cartoons just to get people laughing, you know, promote solidarity. People fight a lot better when they can sing, or when they’ve got something to laugh at.”
“Who tells you what to do? Do you get paid by the locals where you go, or by a national office, or what?”
He stiffened a little at that, delicately touched in his pride. “I never took a dollar from the union.”
Her face went pink with the easy blush, and he saw that she felt rebuked. Watching her reach up self-consciously to smooth the pages of the music notebook, he thought of how much he could tell her that would shock her pious ignorance, and felt magnanimous for keeping still. “I guess I don’t quite understand what it is you do.” I guess not. The struggle of labor against the bosses was more than she ever would understand.
“You have to live somehow, though,” she said.
He laughed. “A man can live quite a while on what he can mooch from free-lunch counters in saloons.”
That brought her eyes up, testing him to see if he were joking. In a careful voice she said, “I see. Where do you sleep?”
“Under bridges, out in the jungles, on park benches. Or I can always unroll a blanket on the floor of the local hall.”
Just when he expected her to smile she gave him her direct, serious look. “It’s your whole life, isn’t it?”
Somehow he felt the question as an accusation, and he stood up, tired of this conversation. He had taken a lot of satisfaction in doing for the past week what he had been doing, but he did not want to sit and justify himself and his life to Ingrid Olson.
“Let’s go down and take in a show,” he said.
A little smile of malice curled her mouth. “Can you get tickets at a free-lunch counter?”
Joe shrugged. “You gave me my supper. Why should you kick at buying me tickets to a show?”
First she laughed, and then she touched four black keys on the piano, and then she looked up at him with the pink washing again into her face. He saw that she would take him to the show if he asked it. Holy smoke! he said to himself. Aloud he said, “Quit worrying how I live. It’s been two or three years since I even thought about it. Right now, as a matter of fact, I’ve got five dollars that I borrowed from Otto.”
“You’ll have to pay it back sometime.”
“That’s Otto’s worry.”
“You’re a shiftless man, Mr. Hillstrom,” she said, but he jingled the change in his pocket and smiled at her.
“I can afford to be shiftless. The world owes me a living. My labor has created enough wealth already so I could retire on my fair share of it.”
“If you could get it.”
“Yeah, if I could get it.”
That night late, standing under the dark vines, he kissed her and found her lips warm, her body willing. For half a minute his hands were all over her, his mouth hot on hers, but then she strained backward, pushing him away. He reached for her again, his blood thick in his ears and his breath fast, and felt how the thin stuff of her dress slipped on her shoulders.
“No, no Joe, please!”
The hot fit passed, and he saw her coolly: a middle-class, conventional, pious, proper woman, a believer in marriage and property and children and cottages with vines on the porch and a husband with a regular pay enevelope, a Swede girl from Gefle who knew too much about him and didn’t half understand what she knew.
“Okay, no,” he said.
“Joe …”
“What?”
With her hands on his arms she turned him so that the vague glow of the lamp inside the parlor fell across his face. Her eyes looked into his so long that he began to wonder what she was up to. It was as if she hunted for something, her eyes pried at him. But she said nothing. At last she shivered suddenly and crowded against him, pressing her face into his shoulder, and broke away and ran inside.
Walking home, he spoke ironically and with some astonishment to himself. He said, Joe, look what you’ve just had offered to you on a platter. This is the chance of a lifetime. You can marry this girl and get a house and a couple of acres of land thrown in. All the rest of your life you can sit around the house in carpet slippers and spit off the porch or weed around in the flower beds while your wife earns the bread and butter giving music lessons. You even get a mother-in-law to boot for cook and bottle-washer. You can settle down on Forty-Eighth South Street in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley and to hell with the workers’ revolution. To hell with the troubles of miners in Colorado or gyppo men down on the D & RG or stoop-crop pickers in the San Joaquin Valley. To hell with the radicals in the capitalistic jails. You can sit around the rest of your life eating apples and playing whist with a lot of Swedes and talking about the old country.
That’s a fact, he said to himself—more and more astonished, more and more ironical. All you have to do is reach out your hand.
And be good, he said. You’ll have to promise to be good. You couldn’t be kept around the house unless you were house-broke.
The Erickson house was dark. So was every other house on the thinly built-up street. On the porch he sat down, too restless for sleep, and heard the dry unwearied noise of the cottonwood leaves like the rustling of thoughts in his mind. The loneliness that always lived with him, and especially late at night, came out of the dark and hobnobbed with him on the empty porch: a melancholy nighttime yearning washed in on the barely moving night air. He put his feet on the rail and pushed his chair back against the wall and closed his eyes. After a while he found himself in the midst of people he admired, the uncompromising enemies of the system, men and women he would have gone a long way to see and would have used for the models of his own life.
As if he had been there, he saw Frank Little parading back and forth in the street, up in the Mesabi, his tough, one-sided mouth distorted in jeers and his tongue going in a steady stream of profane catcalls, daring the finks inside their headquarters to come out and get him. You think I’m afraid of you, you scabby sons of bitches? I’m a cripple, I couldn’t even run away. What’s holding you back? You hired out to beat up workingmen. Why don’t you start on me? I’m a red, red Wobbly, I’m a radical agitator, and I hate the guts of every scabby fink of you. Why don’t you come out and start to work? He saw Frank Little throw his crutch fifty feet out in the dust and hobble along without it between silent, watching miners and the company headquarters full of finks. A human flame, a fire of hatred and protest, he dared the whole wage system and its gunmen single-handed.
And Frank Little faded and the picture of Gurley Flynn’s red mane came in. He saw the veritable twist of her lips as she spoke from a soapbox, and felt the electricity she gave off. Another flame. And The Flynn faded into Katie Phar, the kid Katie with her child’s eyes and her child’s silvery voice, a kind of saint, an innocent homely Joan of Arc, no torch like The Flynn but with just as much courage. And behind Katie as she sang outside the Spokane jail came the other faces—the grim creased mask of Art Manderich, the gopher teeth of Fuzzy Llewellyn bared in a still grin, Herb Davis’ cocked jaw, the serious, intellectual intentness of Tom Barnabas, the rocky immovable face of Big Bill Haywood. They came like a parade, the fighters, the devoted and dedicated and incorruptible. They came in crowds—the free-speech fighters in San Diego driven back by the white blasts of firehoses, washed away like chips, and re-forming and coming back to be blasted again, and re-form again, and come on. He heard them singing in the Fresno jail, and opened his eyes on the darkness of this sleeping street, the blotted shadows of trees and houses, the high crestline of the Wasatch cutting off the stars. He remembered himself kissing Ingrid Olson at her front gate, and the way her eyes searched and pried at his for some assurance, and said to himself, No, my God, what are you getting into? You don’t want to wear that collar.
Then what was he doing hanging around Salt Lake? He ought to get out
of here and hike for Colorado where he could do some good. What he had told Jud Ricket was strict truth. He didn’t want to spend his time in the routine slow groundwork organizing in preparation for something a year or two years away. He was a trouble-shooter and he ought to be where trouble was brewing. Yet there were Fuzzy and the others in the Sacramento jail. He knew precisely why Fuzzy had stuck to his soapbox in that fracas. As definitely as if Fuzzy had told him he knew that Fuzzy stuck because he wanted to prove he was no dehorn. The Stockton local that had blacklisted him had to be shown that Fuzzy was as true-blue a rebel as lived.
And Joe Hillstrom? Why was Joe Hillstrom breaking his neck to raise money for Fuzzy’s defense? Oh yes, he said to himself, that’s a good question—and saw himself cutting through the clutter of tents, running like a rabbit while Fuzzy stood fast.
His mind ducked and bent, reaching out for the thought of the songs. Down at the hall the cards with “My Old Kentucky Home” still drying on them; over at Ingrid Olson’s the notebook with the half-completed “Workers of the World.” As if talking with some questioner or critic, he framed an orderly plan: I want to stay in Salt Lake long enough to get a lot of songs done. I can always have the use of a piano, and this Olson girl can help me with the harmony when I bugger it up. Maybe I’ll try a popular song or two, waltzes or two-steps, not labor songs at all. If I could get one or two of those published and sold I could turn over the royalties to the defense fund. There’s a lot more money in that kind than in a labor song printed on a card, and besides, the money for a popular song comes out of good bourgeois pockets, not out of workingmen. I could make the system contribute to the revolution that will overturn it …
A vaudeville singer in a straw hat, leaning on a cocky cane, sang from a brilliant stage, and a face, unrecognized but unmistakable, looked at Joe Hill with admiration and said distinctly, “I hear your song all over, everybody’s singing it” singing what turkey trot singing what and he bent his head at the post office window and said “I want a money order for five hundred dollars make it to the General Defense Fund, Industrial Workers of the World.” I can’t get all that on one line, the face inside the window said, and turned his pad, too bad, and Joe said, “Make it IWW, that won’t trouble you.” He fell back from the window as Ingrid Olson put her head out, serious, with her hair in thick braids, and she said, “You’re so shiftless, Mr. Hillstrom,” but he held the blue slip of the money order up in front of her nose.
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 25