Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “This is wonderful! This ought to sweep the country!” the plump one said, and with nimble hands picked up the chorus. He sang again, looking soulfully upward, slightly knitting his brows like a man tasting a rare and delicate wine.

  Come and take a joy ride in my aeroplane tonight

  Way beyond the clouds where all the stars are shining bright.

  There I’d like to look into your loving eyes of blue

  And if I should fall, then I know I’d fall in love with you.

  “It’ll be a bombshell,” he said dreamily, still playing softly, and shook his head back and forth. “ ‘Say, darling, if you’ll be my little honey dove …’ ”

  Joe moved toward him, so hot inside that he felt his own eyes like burning coals in their sockets. He did not say a word. An organ that stood between him and the piano player he went around or past or through—it was behind him. The plump one stood up.

  “Say, listen,” the pimpled one said shakily behind Joe’s shoulder. The piano player slipped two steps around the piano, almost into the window. Joe moved after him, calculating which way the youth might jump, trying to anticipate him. A half-second would do it, one punch, one smash on the smart alec’s mouth. That mouth was no longer smiling. The punk was scared.

  He said something in his throat, but it never became words, and he did not know what it was he had tried to say. He feinted around the keyboard, then the other way. The plump salesman, slow and clumsy, jerked first one way and then the other. He was pale; he had begun to sweat; he wet his lips.

  Behind him Joe heard the other salesman’s frantic voice. “Say, listen! You get out of here! You can’t start a row in here!”

  “Did I start it?” Joe said softly, holding the plump one fixed. “I came in to ask a civil question.”

  He did not take his eyes by the merest fraction from the fat one’s face. It shook him with fierce pleasure to see the sweat beading the white lip.

  “I guess you like a little joke,” he said, and put his hands on the piano’s velvet wood, gathering himself.

  A shadow darkened the window. Across the upraised fat arm Joe saw the blue, the badge, the sauntering ponderous weight. His tight diaphragm relaxed in caution and disappointment, and then, balked and explosive with fury, he grabbed the song off the rack. The pimpled salesman scrambled back between a spinet and a stand of drums to let him pass, and the whole seething top of Joe’s mind as he went out onto the sidewalk was full of the picture of how he would look knocked end over end into that tangle of brass and rawhide.

  The son of bitches I The dirty superior mocking sons of bitches!

  Anger drove him at a plunging walk around many blocks. Every time the crumpled music sheets in his hand brushed his clothes or caught his eye his blood surged in him hot enough for murder. He felt as if he had swallowed a stone, and at every corner drinking fountain he stopped and stooped, drinking slowly, letting the cold water bubble against his lips and teeth.

  Eventually he cooled his anger to the point where he could think, but even then he could think nothing but curses. He was not a swearing man: some finicky-ness of language ordinarily kept his talk pure, but now only obscenities came close to expressing what he felt. Every time he thought of himself standing there like a rube while those two played their little insolent game he felt his eyes bulging from his head with rage. Like city slickers playing with a hick they had swallowed their smiles, led him along, looked upward and rolled their eyes while they clowned the singing of his words, and played the tune on that thousand-dollar piano till it sounded like some organ grinder’s wornout cranking.

  Oh, the sons of bitches, the dirty sons of bitches! The punks in their classy clothes, doing their little slave jobs and leaning elegantly to spit on anybody who didn’t tie his tie the latest way. The piddling little salesmen lording it around with diamonds on their fingers. The lame-brained, fat-muscled pimps of the System, the dirt, the lower than dirt, the slave-shit that they were.

  He should have known better than to take any song of his to a place like that. If anyone published Joe Hill’s songs it ought to be the union. If he wrote songs he ought to write songs that a union could sing, not the kind some dribble-chinned punk could snicker at. You didn’t get any help from the System, even indirectly. No song written by a workingman and a union man would ever have a chance to make ten cents in the world where Cohan coined money for Tin Pan Alley hacks. You fought the System every waking minute or it gelded you. There was no halfway method.

  Leaning against a wall staring slit-eyed across the glaring afternoon street he was visited by the words of the Preamble, those words written by an unfrocked priest and memorized by working stiffs and fighters for freedom everywhere. He said them to himself as in his childhood, kneeling in the cold by the unwarmed bed, he had said the Lord’s Prayer:

  The working class and the employing class have nothing in common … Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize.… We must inscribe on our banners the revolutionary watchword ‘Abolition of the wage system’ … we are forming the new society within the shell of the old.

  Amen. Amen, and God curse the trade-union compromisers and the shopkeepers and the salesmen and the fat-assed clerks and the housewives and all those who wanted security at any price. God curse all the slaves who didn’t know they were slaves, all those who licked the boss’s shoes and put on the boss’s swagger when only the janitor was around. God curse every smart alec working for ten dollars a week and thinking he’d be president some day. Curse their stupidity and their insolence and their arrogance and their dirty sniveling lickspittle cowardice. Curse the whole gelded tethered lot of them, and all the uniforms that walked up and down and protected them from getting what they deserved, or pulled up in the paddy wagon every time honest workers walked out of a hell-hole and peacefully picketed on a street that by rights they owned. Curse them and give them fits and visit them with diarrhea and give them dreams every night that will make them wet their secure little beds with fear.

  He looked at the sheets in his hand, folded and smoothed them and replaced them in his coat pocket. His jaws were lame from being clamped together; the stone in his stomach gave him a sensation like hunger.

  At the entrance to the cigar store against which he leaned there was a glass globe filled with colored jawbreakers. The urge for something sweet flooded his mouth, and he reached a penny from his pocket and put it in the slot. But when he turned the lever to release the ball of candy the machine jammed, and no jerking or yanking or pounding would free it. It seemed to him that even the candy machines were part of the general conspiracy, and only by forcing himself to stand over the water fountain on the corner for a full minute could he get himself calm. Just as he stood up, a Murray car pulled down State Street, and on impulse he jumped aboard.

  7

  At supper he took pains to make it clear he did not want to be talked to. Karl Erickson was rounding up people to take in a show, but when he tried Joe he got only a short shake of the head. Otto tried joking him about having had a fight with his girl, and got a look that made him move his eyebrows and shut up. When they all gathered in the parlor after supper to pump the player piano Joe deliberately broke his custom and went straight upstairs to the room.

  For a while he lay on the bed with his hands locked at the back of his head, and stared upward and thought and burned slowly with continuing anger. After a while he got the music out of his coat and studied it, searching for the reasons why the salesman had laughed, but the whole attempt made him so sore that he put the music away. Finally, just to be doing something besides think, he got out of the dresser drawer the package that contained the automatic. It had never even been unwrapped since the day he bought it. Now he found a rawhide bootlace and started rigging the holster into a shoulder scabbard.

  Somehow and somewhere he had been betrayed. His hunch that Salt Lake City would turn up something big had not panned out, yet he had felt it strong, as strong as
he had ever felt a hunch in his life. From the time when he had first walked up and looked over the town, coming baby-clean from the steam room at the springs, he had had the feeling that he was looking for something: a house he would know, a familiar face, a thing he had planned. And then meeting Otto on the street, and after that Anna and Ingrid Olson, as if his past had crowded up to form a ring around what might happen here and now.

  And what did happen? He wrote a couple of songs, drew a few pictures, lay around like someone on a vacation, tried to crash the System and got himself laughed at by a couple of punk clerks.

  With his knife he cut the buckle off an old belt, trimmed the belt to the proper length, and bored holes in both ends. With pieces of the bootlace he laced the belt into the holster flap so that it made a loop; before lacing the second end snug he stood up and put the loop over his left shoulder, trying the fit. He was standing up fiddling with the strings when Otto opened the door.

  Because Joe had not heard him at all, he was sure Otto had come on tiptoe, trying to catch sight of something private. A born snoop. But after a twitch of irritation he went on adjusting the strap, saying nothing. Otto sat on the bed and leaned back on his hands and watched.

  Taking off the holster, Joe cut two slits in the part that housed the barrel of the gun. Through these he threaded the rest of the rawhide lace, and stood up to the mirror again to pull the lace around him. With the thong pulled snug around his chest, the holster fitted flat against his ribs. He slipped the automatic in it, pushed it back an inch or two, put on his coat to see if the bulge showed. It was all right.

  “Going somewhere?” Otto said.

  Glancing up into Otto’s intent, feeding stare, Joe noticed that the grin was on Otto’s mouth, but it was hardly a grin at all, only an habitual set of the muscles.

  “Nowhere in particular.”

  From his sweater pocket Otto fished up a flat can of snuff. As if absent-mindedly he dipped himself a pinch between thumb and finger and tucked it into his cheek. The metal lid caught a dull flash from the darkening windows as he put the can away.

  “Whatever happened to that little Luger you and Manderich took away from me that night?”

  Joe paused at the job of cleaning up shavings and scraps of leather. He allowed himself a little smile. “I donated it to a church.”

  “You what?”

  “Donated it to a church.”

  “In the collection plate, I suppose.”

  “No, in the breadbox.”

  He watched Otto’s curiosity come out and nibble around at that one, trying to make sense of it. Finally Otto said, “You really got a lot of nerve, you know that? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, donating it to a church, but that was my gun.”

  Joe bent and brushed up the last scraps from the rug, saying nothing.

  “Also,” Otto said, “you owe me five bucks.”

  He was watching Joe with an intentness that seemed to carry some special unsaid meaning. In the dusk his eyes were steady and small and bright like the eyes of a watchful rat.

  “You’ll get it,” Joe said.

  “When?”

  “When I get it.”

  “When’ll that be? You ain’t been hunting a job.”

  “No,” Joe said. “Anybody with money enough to pay me wages is somebody I wouldn’t work for.”

  “I been seeing about this trouble in Colorado,” Otto said. “Just so you don’t beat it over there and leave me holding the bag for my five.”

  “Quit worrying,” Joe said. He got up and went out, and Otto came after him down the stairs, tonguing his cud of snus. Mrs. Erickson and her two sons were just leaving for the show.

  “Sure you don’t want to come along?” she said.

  “No thanks.”

  “Otto?”

  “I guess not.”

  Joe went into the parlor and sat down at the scuffed piano. A player roll of “Over the Waves” was on the spindle, and he pumped it through. The music, of an incredible mechanical nimbleness and regularity, beat in his face. He kept his feet going until it ended and then flipped the reroll button and pumped it silently back to its beginning. For a minute he tried playing the same piece himself, trying to make his fingers perform as faultlessly as the player roll. But he didn’t really feel like playing, and the mechanical perfection of the player reminded him of the plump clerk and what he had done to the aeroplane song. In a pause he swung around on the stool, and found Otto still watching him.

  “By God I wish I could figure you out,” Otto said.

  “Don’t strain yourself,” Joe said. Sitting half sideways, he put his fingers on the keys and played very softly the tune of “Workers of the World.” The thought occurred to him that he might wander over to Ingrid’s for the evening, but he decided immediately that he didn’t want that either. He didn’t want to sit around and talk old country. He wasn’t sure what he wanted. He wanted to kick chairs across the room.

  “You’re one of these organizers that works for nothing,” Otto said.

  Joe said nothing.

  “But when you get a chance to take a little contribution from the other side, you pretend you’re too pure for that.”

  Still Joe said nothing. The glow from the big round-wicked lamp carved deep shadows from Otto’s long upper lip to the corners of his mouth, and his ordinarily pale, rather protruding eyes looked deeply socketed. For an instant he looked like Manderich.

  “Listen,” he said, and dropped his voice. Holding Joe’s eyes, he got up to lean on the piano. “I know a way you can make enough in one night, tonight, to keep you organizing for two months.”

  “Yes?” Joe said. But he did not say it in a way to stop Otto. He wanted to hear what Otto would say.

  Otto’s eyes were mottled like marbles in the lamplight. They opened wider, bringing back the silly-looking dangling grin.

  “I know a bird runs a little joint,” he said. “Every night this guy closes up his place and takes the day’s cash home with him in a paper bag. He walks two blocks with it, all by himself. It’s as easy as swatting flies.”

  “You can go pull it by yourself then.”

  “It’s easier with two. One can keep him quiet while the other goes through him.” Stooping until his rump stuck far out behind and his chin was on his stacked hands, he watched Joe steadily as a dog waiting for something to drop from a table. He looked ridiculous in that position, like the rear end of one of the masquerade donkeys in a political parade. “I always thought you’d be a good one to hook up with,” he said. “You never fooled me, not for a minute. But you got a talent for keeping your mouth shut.”

  In front of Joe the player roll was punched with dots and dashes and staggered lines of holes like some intricate code. He felt as if he leaned back against some strong pressure from behind. The last thing he wanted was to get mixed up with Otto. If he took what the world owed him as a workingman, he would take it alone.

  But he sat silent, and Otto said, “This guy’s somebody I’ve had my eye on for a couple weeks. He don’t vary by ten minutes from one night to the next. He walks those two blocks like he was walking a beat.”

  Joe rotated gently on the stool, pushing himself clear around until he was back facing Otto’s mottled intent eyes. “How do you know all this?”

  “I keep my eyes open,” Otto said.

  Joe’s foot had started him around again. “What time does he close his joint?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  He felt as if a pump were blowing his insides full of cold air. Light and empty, he swung around again to face Otto.

  “What time is it now?”

  Before Otto could answer, the clock in the dining room began to strike, and they sat facing each other, silently counting, until it stopped at eight.

  The Captive

  1 Salt Lake City, June, 1914

  The first thing Lund did when he got off the train in Salt Lake City was to call the county jail. An asthmatic voice told him, between coughing sp
ells, that visiting hours were three to four Tuesday and Friday. Today was Tuesday. He was lucky. But court would be in session until three-thirty. There was only the half-hour opportunity, and unless he wanted to go to the courtroom first he had more than six hours to kill. He told himself that he did not want to go to court knowing as little as he did. Maybe he didn’t want to go to court at all.

  Eight years of uninterrupted work in the mission had made a provincial of him. The baggage carts and the redcaps and the newsstand girl and the big waiting-room mural that showed the driving of the golden spike were strangenesses, almost dangers, to his senses. He felt clumsy in the cool vault of the station, and when he stepped outside he got stranded on the sidewalk under a blast of white sun.

  The newspaper item that had pulled him off the train was torn out and folded into his breast pocket. He had to know more, but where would he go for information? Not the sheriff’s office, where there would probably be nothing but official indifference. Not the IWW hall, which would be dispensing partisan hysteria. A helplessness weighed upon him; when he put down his bag to think a moment, a bellhop captured it and led him to a big yellow hotel bus.

  His room at the hotel held him only ten minutes. In another ten he was standing before the semicircular desk in the public library. A librarian came up and looked at him.

  “Do you keep back files of the Salt Lake papers?”

  “How far back?”

  He consulted the scrap of newspaper in his pocket. “Beginning January 9, this year.”