Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “I was on my way east,” Lund said. “I read about your trial in the paper I got in Ogden. It was the first I knew.”

  His face a little in shadow, his eyebrows lifted quizzically, Joe watched him. Their position was a little like that of priest and penitent in a confessional, though which was priest and which penitent, which hoped for comfort from the other, was a question. Joe tapped the steel screen between them and smiled. “It’d be nice to shake hands, but they don’t seem to approve of that here.”

  He laughed, but Lund did not laugh. The screen was too unavoidable a reminder that Joe was cut off where friendship and good will could do little for him. Because he could think of nothing to say, he filled his pipe, and when it was full he offered it to Joe. Joe shook his head.

  “Still a good Christian,” Lund said.

  “All the virtues.”

  Frowning at the suck and blaze, Lund got the pipe going and waved out the match. He was full of balked rebellion at having to sit here and talk through bars, with a guard listening twenty feet away and Joe’s face so shadowed that he could not see it clearly. He wanted to study Joe’s face, and he wanted the long interrupted unhurried talk they had had in San Pedro. But he would have no better chance than this.

  “Joe, what can I do?”

  “Nothing to do.”

  “I’ve still got that money of yours.”

  Beyond the wicket he saw the slow white smile. “You’d better use that to save souls.”

  “I guess they’ll have to stay unsaved,” Lund said. “I’m out of the mission.”

  “Out? Why?”

  “You’re entitled to your laugh,” Lund said ruefully. “Political shift of power in the synod. Evangelicals went out, fundamentalists came in. I was a little too latitudinarian for them.”

  There was a pause while they eyed each other. Joe’s face twisted with disgust. “My God, what a bunch of bolt-heads. You ran the only respectable mission on the coast.”

  “Not enough Augsburg Confession,” Lund said. “Not enough Apostles’ Creed. They want a nice tight denominational mission, and they knew I wasn’t the one to run it.” But it warmed him to hear Joe’s praise. It was praise he valued.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Back to the farm.”

  “In Minnesota?”

  “Yes.”

  “No more soul-saving at all?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much place for a latitudinarian Christian,” Lund said.

  “You ought to get into the union battle,” Joe said speculatively. “You’re educated, you can talk. Get yourself whipped up a little more and you’d make a soapboxer.”

  The thought made them both laugh. “I told you,” Lund said. “No soul-saving. Not even for the heaven-on-earth.”

  Their laughter ebbed and left them with the necessity of finding a new tack. At least five of their few minutes had passed.

  “I do have that money, though,” Lund said. “You’ll need it for your defense.”

  “My defense!” Joe spat the words out so bitterly that Lund leaned, frowning, to see him better.

  “Isn’t the IWW defending you?”

  “I told them to lay off.”

  “But the papers said …”

  “They go right on wasting money,” Joe said. “They’re crazy. The union shouldn’t bleed its treasury defending me. One man isn’t worth it.”

  Lund straightened a little. “Now you’re talking nonsense.”

  “No,” Joe said. “I’m not talking nonsense.”

  His hard stare was difficult to face; his mouth was set like a stubborn boy’s. Lund looked down at the warm bowl of the pipe in his hand, looked up again to see Joe’s mouth move as if tasting something. Rather than force a clash, he let the talk edge away.

  “How does it look, really?”

  “You’ve seen the papers.”

  “Anything critical happen in court today?”

  Joe shrugged.

  “What I can’t understand,” Lund said, “is why you don’t prove where you were that night, and settle this quick.”

  With the crossed shadows of the wires on it, Joe’s face was changeable and hard to read, but now his eyes were dark, his mouth harshly pinched, the long scar white along jaw and neck.

  “Why should I prove an alibi? I’m innocent till they prove I’m guilty, that’s what the law books say. If there’s any proving to be done, let them do it.”

  “But if it means saving your life!”

  “You sound like my lawyers,” Joe said. “I don’t have to prove anything. That’s the D.A.’s job.”

  “What if they ever catch Otto? Can he clear you?”

  “If they catch Otto he’ll be right where I am, charged with the same thing,” Joe said. “He was smart to take it on the lam. But even if they caught him his testimony wouldn’t be worth any more in that court than mine would be. I’m guilty as hell right from the start. They’re all set to stand me against the wall.”

  “And you’re all set to let them!” Lund said, so angry that his voice shook. “In heaven’s name, what’s wrong with defending yourself? You’re worth ten times what the IWW can spend to save you, and you know it. And no woman’s reputation is worth a man’s life.”

  “I’m surprised at you,” Joe said, soft and mocking.

  “What kind of woman would let you sacrifice yourself that way? If you got shot over a woman, she should have been the first one to come up and clear you.”

  Joe had dropped his chin on his clasped hands. “You sound more and more like my lawyers,” he said. His voice had taken on an edge.

  With difficulty Lund got control of himself, studying his knuckles wrapped around the bowl of the pipe, forcing his lips into a smile. “Anyway, you’ve got a defense and got lawyers whether you want them or not. You may have the bad luck to be acquitted in spite of yourself.”

  Joe shrugged, lifting his hands and dropping them again.

  Not quite ready to give it up, Lund said. “Wasn’t there something about the caliber of the gun? Wasn’t yours a different caliber from the one that did the shooting?”

  “My alert lawyers thought of that one too,” Joe said, and gave Lund a wintry, indifferent smile. “They took me and the hawkshaws down there. The guy had a record of selling the gun but not of what caliber it was. And the guy that sold it to me had left town.”

  His voice was so apathetic, indifferent, disinterested, and his shoulders and hands so limp and slack that Lund wanted to reach through the screen and slap him awake. He gave no handhold, his blankness and apathy were too smooth for any friendly help to catch onto. Angrily the preacher said, “What were you doing buying another gun in the first place?”

  And that only got him the ironic, amused stare. “They say I wanted to kill a couple of guys.”

  Lund swept his hand across the little counter shelf in a gesture of disgust.

  “Tell it to the cops,” Joe said.

  It was going badly, like a cross-examination. The steel between them was flimsy compared to the screen that Joe himself erected. Even Lund’s intense desire to understand, a desire that went deeper than friendship, he knew, and rooted itself in his whole faith that right and wrong were separate and recognizable, glanced off Joe like light off a mirror. There was no confidence, little friendliness, hardly any interest in the face at the wicket, but only a closed, enigmatic, still expression that might have been either apathetic or stubborn. The eyes in their pale steadiness dominated the thin mask of a face; a little smile moved the stiff lips.

  “They don’t give me the papers,” he said, “but the other day a trusty smuggled in a piece of the Saturday Blade and Ledger. I saw in there that some fellow has finally got the dope on Nebuchadnezzar. You know that yarn about how he went crazy and ate grass. Well, this bird has a theory that Nebuchadnezzar really ate alfalfa, because apparently there’s all kinds of food value in alfalfa. He says you could live on it for a month.” The smile pulled the lips wider. “Work and pray, liv
e on hay. The bosses ought to get hold of that guy and put him in charge of the cookhouse.”

  He made himself clear. The talk was to stay away from such questions as Lund most wanted to ask. As he moved his hand sideward Lund saw the right one, the shiny patch of scar the size of a dime between the first and second knuckles, and the deformed hump on the back of the hand. Defeated in his attempts to pierce Joe’s surface, he said nothing, but Joe’s eyes followed his to the broken hand, and the voice beyond the screen sharpened in instant bitterness.

  “That’s another nice thing. I’m lying in bed with a bullet through me and just as the cops come in I reach under the pillow for a handkerchief to spit in. One of the dicks thinks I’m reaching for a gun, and he lets me have this.”

  He flexed his fingers, and his lips tightened and his eyes burned. “They leave you plenty,” he said. “There goes the piano.”

  Lund sat with his head bent, feeling how everything that he could think of to say died in his mind, inadequate or inappropriate or too likely to harden Joe’s protective shell. At last he said, “Joe, I can only stay about one day. There won’t be visiting hours again till Friday, and I can’t be here then. But I’ll try to come to court tomorrow. Maybe I can see you there for a minute.”

  “Sure,” Joe said. The fury had passed from his face; the indifferent irony was back. “Come on up and see the show. Its a three-ringed circus.” A grin widened his pale eyes and forced his eyebrows upward. “Man-eating wild animals,” he said. “That’s me. Two clowns. Those are my lawyers.” His finger made a contemptuous rattle across the screen. “They’ll be in here any minute trying to pump me again.”

  The bell rang.

  Earnestly and in haste, Lund stood up and hooked his fingers in the screen. “Listen, Joel Don’t get sore at what I say, or what your IWW friends say. Let the union do all it will. Put up a fight, and quit standing on your dignity as an innocent man. You’ve been in this jail too long. Quit acting as if you wanted to be a spectator at your own funeral.”

  The upper part of Joe’s face was in shadow. A sliver of dusty light came through the west window and touched his quiet broken hand. He lifted his head a little, and he seemed almost gentle.

  “Okay, now you listen. If I’m innocent all I have to do is sit still, isn’t it? I don’t have to prove it. It’s automatic unless they can prove the opposite. And if I’m guilty, would I let the union spend thousands of dollars getting me off? I’d sit still, wouldn’t I? Either way I’d sit still. That’s what I’m doing.”

  The policeman motioned at Lund, there was obscure scuffling beyond the screen, and then footsteps, as empty of meaning or reassurance as any of the talk, as Joe was led back to his cell.

  3

  The windows of the courtroom let in a view of summer sky and moving clouds. Pigeons walked the window sills and fluttered on ledges and cornices, and occasionally the breeze brought in a whiff of locust blossoms from the park below. The room, small, high-ceilinged, paneled, waited like a theater for its opening curtain.

  The varnished benches were already jammed. Squeezed in with the first of the crowd, Lund sat on the center aisle and looked across a wooden rail to the table where Joe’s attorneys, Scott and McDougall, laid out papers. Beyond were the witness chair, the high judicial bench. On the left side, elevated above the benches, was the jury box. In a place so severe and bare as this the most solemn and deliberate injustices could be done impartially, impersonally, without bias or ill will, because everything in the room, even the expressions on the faces of spectators and bailiffs and attorneys, made it clear that the actors here, judge and jury, prosecutor and witnesses, had ceased to be men and were for the time being mere instruments. Only the accused, in such a room, remained touched by human frailty, and he was reduced to helplessness like a child among grownups.

  The jury now was in the box: a teamster, a real-estate dealer, a bill collector, a farmer, a clerk, a laborer, a coal dealer, a streetcar motorman, a salesman, another farmer, a blacksmith, a contractor. Solemnized by their position, they sat down with dignity and in silence. One or two glanced out across the room; they reminded Lund of stagehands peeking between the curtains at a filling house to estimate the crowd.

  Now the district attorney, tight-jawed, preoccupied, with a smoldering look about him and an aggressiveness in his shoulders and his careful clothes. Now the bailiff and two plainclothes men coming in a side door and ranging themselves inside the rail. Unhurried, without rancor, the courtroom readied itself, and watching it as the clock crept toward ten Lund was struck not simply by the way it divested itself of human fallibility and human sympathy, but by how small this home of justice was, and how shabby with yellowed varnish and the smell of cuspidors.

  The room suppressed the voices of everyone in it, but there was a steady insect-hum of whispering and low talk. Out of it the news grew: “Hillstrom. Here comes Hillstrom.”

  Handcuffed between two deputies, Joe came through the bailiff’s door at the side. He walked with his head up, his face like something carved out of pale, flawed wood. In a gray suit, with the flowing silk tie of the Swedish Young Socialists, a poet’s tie, he looked almost jaunty. His eyes touched nothing, recognized nothing, and when the deputies brought him inside the rail and unlocked the cuffs he sat down between his attorneys and gave the spectators his straight shoulders and the back of his neat head.

  Around him Lund heard scraps of talk—the casual buzz, the cold dope, the shrewd speculation, the guess.

  –like a ladies’ man. Maybe that woman story isn’t—

  –bringing Judge Hilton, from Denver, the labor lawyer. Seems Hillstrom is somebody important among the radicals. They’re all steamed up.

  –snotty-looking cuss. How does a guy in a jam like that—

  – Scott telling the newspaper boys. The person that got Judge Hilton into this is the daughter of Lorenzo Snow. How do you like that? When the daughter of the ex-president of the Mormon Church—

  –Say, it’d sure be something if she turned out—

  –Naw, I don’t think so. Sob sister. She’s been mixed up with the radicals a long time.

  –Still it’d sure be—

  Lund fixed his eyes on the back of Joe’s head. The weight of custom and tradition and social authority in the stale courtroom, the crowd that came to feed on raw emotion as Roman crowds fed on the agonies of the martyrs, the oppressive unanimity of the forces leagued against Joe Hillstrom, were too much. He felt smothered—and if he felt so, how would the prisoner feel? How demoralizing must it be to be one pitiful little wrong-doer, or one more pitiful, wrongly accused, and sit inside the dock sensing how the quiet many-armed impersonal power closed in: the district attorney ambitious for political advancement; the jury of middle class citizens fearful of violence, scared of the taint of radicalism, hating what threatened their security; the judge an imperfect mortal cast as Omnipotence; the spectators avid for the sight of the victim’s face as society struck its blow.

  He could tell from the set of Joe’s shoulders that he held the whole weight of it up.

  Now the stage was set, the jury boxed, the prisoner at the bar, the attorneys at their tables, the evidence assembled, the witnesses summoned. The clock above the jury box said four minutes past ten. The bailiff’s gavel whacked down; there was a rustle and heave as the jury, the intense district attorney, the plainclothes men, dour McDougall and pink-jowled Scott, the prisoner, the whole backward stretch of the audience, surged up in the empty ritual of respect. The door of the judge’s chambers opened and a frail old figure came in and climbed to the high seat. A bloodless, thin-lipped, mottled old face looked out over the court, a bony hand and wrist stretched out of the sleeve, the gavel came down. The jammed room seated itself again, obeisance over.

  He had forgotten how tedious court procedure could be, how ponderously the revenge of society moved, how legal ingenuity at splitting hairs could obscure the vital issue, divide one question into a dozen, elicit at great trouble a cloudy stat
ement of the obvious, sift the simplest statement for hidden meanings or twist it into something incriminating. Just to think of sitting in the prisoner’s box while the case against you grew by such intolerable grain-by-grain accretion, to have it confused by objections, sustainings, overrulings, exceptions, made his head ache. Simply to sit through the proceedings while they convicted or acquitted you was punishment enough for most crimes. He found his mind caught on the word “advocate,” and in fantasy he stood up and asked them all why they did not lay aside all this machinery of attack and defense and put in its place some honest machinery of inquiry whose purpose was understanding and not the winning or losing of a case.

  Yet he knew too that at least in the beginning these were the methods by which men had tried to correct blind vengeance into justice, and even if it came to quibbling, a quibbler was an advance over a vigilante. He knew too that the very tedium of the proceedings operated like a playwright’s cunning in the building of suspense. The drama lay in the gradual approach to a life-and-death crisis by the most trivial and monotonous of means.

  Here was the matter, first, of a bloodspot scraped from the sidewalk on West Temple the morning after the murder. Here was the state chemist to make his report, which was brief: the sample was mammalian blood, but it had been brought to him too late for him to say for sure that it was human. So now the district attorney in his role of Prosecutor, trying to establish the inestablishable and close a link in a desired chain of evidence:

  –You say you can be sure this is mammalian blood, Mr. Harms?

  –Yes.

  –It could be human?

  –It could, yes. It could also be the blood of a dog or cat or sheep.

  –But it is not very likely to be sheep’s blood, there on West Temple Street, would you say, Mr. Harms?

  Perhaps at the end of ten minutes of this there would be left a little residue of belief against the defendant. There was a kind of contiguous logic involved. One of the robbers was thought to have been wounded by Arlin Morrison. One chamber of the Morrison gun had been fired. This gout of blood was found nearby on the sidewalk. Joe Hillstrom had appeared later with a bullet through his lung. Therefore this blood on the sidewalk could have been human blood shed by the robber who could have been wounded by Arlin Morrison, who might have fired the discharged chamber of his father’s gun, and this robber could have been Joe Hillstrom.