One statement could clear him, if he would make it. But instead of that he would go to his death arguing technicalities and plausibilities, either because he hoped they would save him or for some enigmatic reason that was like a bad joke persisted in. Or he might be freed by the under-cover, confidential manipulation of a relationship and a connection that Joe himself would scorn to acknowledge and refuse to use.
To a simple man with a moral view, the differences between guilt and conviction, innocence and freedom, were a trouble to the mind.
4
The visiting room at the State Prison. In the center a rectangular steel cage, a room within a room. On three sides of the cage, inside and outside of the screen, a scarred table, and on inside and outside continuous benches. Visitors and prisoners sit on the benches, their arms on the table, and talk through the net of steel. On the fourth side the cage opens into the prison yard by a barred door. Prisoners are brought in here, visitors come through the office from the front entrance. At both entrances stand uniformed guards. The walls of the visiting room are plaster painted a robin’s-egg blue except for a wainscot strip of pebbled metal painted a poisonous and angry green.
At the entrance from the office a little group stands uneasily quiet—Ingrid Olson and her mother, Jud Ricket and Jack Carpenter of the defense committee, Gustave Lund. In a few minutes Joe Hillstrom enters the cage from the prison yard, handcuffed between two guards, one of whom detaches himself. The other comes along and sits down beside Joe on the inside bench.
Ricket says something under his breath and Carpenter lurches on his crooked leg. The two women look uncertainly at the men, the men look back. There is only a half-hour altogether; someone must go first. And with the guard there it will be hurried, public, dismal. The prison does not leave a guard with anyone but Joe. In the cage two other prisoners are talking with visitors in a freedom that seems extravagant by comparison.
At last Ricket, with a last questioning look at the others, shrugs and starts forward. At the screen, still standing, he puts out his hand to touch Joe’s fingers in the parody of a handshake, but the guard warns him off. Beside Lund Jack Carpenter jerks with anger, muttering.
Joe looks wasted and pale from sickness and imprisonment, his scarred face is wedge-thin, but he sits erectly with the guard like an enormous manacle on his left wrist, and he smiles. Even from forty feet away Lund sees his eyes, how passionate and troubling a blue.
The group by the door cannot hear what Ricket says. He talks earnestly, his head close to the wire, and Joe listens, nods, nods again, smiles. He says something and Ricket replies.
Abruptly Ricket is on his feet. Contemptuously he raises his hand, turns it around several times before the face of the guard to show that he has nothing concealed in it, and touches the tips of his fingers to Joe’s. For a moment he is bent, concentratedly bowed toward the prisoner; then he breaks away and comes back toward them massive and grim. Jack Carpenter starts, half turns in question of the unspoken order they follow, and goes on.
Carpenter does not sit down, and his voice is loud enough to be heard. He ignores the guard; to him the man is not there. He looks through the screen, his bad leg bent, his body twisted to balance his weight, and he says, “This isn’t goodbye, Joe. I want you to know that. I’m not sayin’ goodbye. All I want to say is keep your chin up in here, keep fightin’. That’s what we’re doin’ outside, and we’ll win yet. You’ll be out of here a free man.”
He stops. His throat works. With a harsh violence he raises his hands and shakes them fiercely before his face. “Okay, boy!” he says, and swings and comes limping back. Lund looks away, not to watch his face.
The remaining three hang, hesitating. “Next?” the guard at the door says. “Who’s next?”
Ingrid pushes her mother forward, and Lund feels a pang of fierce jealousy, thinking that next time she will try to shove him ahead, keep the final minutes for herself. Lover or friend, who has the most right? Joe has wired him to come. He glances again at Ingrid and sees unexpected lines in her face and neck; she looks strained, prudish, a vinegarish old maid, waving her mother on.
The woman comes up slowly to the wire net. Her hands start to come up and fall again quickly as she glances at the guard. With her hands like dead birds on the table she slumps to the bench and leans forward. Lund hears only her first words, “Oh, Joseph!” and then murmurs and the sound of her crying. He sees Joe’s stiff head nod, he sees the long look Mrs. Olson gives him, and then she too comes stumbling back.
Lund feels unclean, watching her face twisted with crying, and he wonders what the guards are made of, to sit impassively handcuffed to scenes like this. If the girl goes now he doesn’t want to watch. He knows her face will crumble as it crumbled at the gate when they talked the first time. It would have been better if none of them had come. They all pretend hope, they all carry in their minds the possibility that Hilton’s efforts will bring a last-minute reprieve, but they all come too with the knowledge that this may be their last look at Joe and their last word. He knows the girl will collapse.
He will not quarrel with her over precedence or time. She may go now or he will. For a moment their eyes met, Lund makes a gesture, a motion indicating that she may choose. She has her arm around the shaking shoulders of her mother, and her face is raised. A nod, and she has taken her arm away and is walking firmly toward the cage.
So far as Lund can hear or see—and he watches painfully, unable to look away—she says nothing, and neither does Joe. He cannot see Ingrid’s face, only her stiff back, but he can see Joe’s pale cheek and the almost luminous even blue stare.
Ingrid bends and puts her face against the screen, holding it there until Joe bends awkwardly to meet her, pulling at the handcuff that tethers him to the guard. They kiss through the steel net, and Ingrid’s hands come up to press through the wires against his cheeks. Directly from the kiss, moving stiffly, she steps back and comes to her mother. Her face is like paper. Looking neither right nor left, their necks rigid against looking back, the two women leave.
Lund rubs his sweating hands on his sleeves. “How much time?” he asks the guard.
“Five-six minutes.”
Five or six minutes to say and hear everything that might be said. He feels his own face gray and inflexible as he comes up and slides onto the bench.
They face each other, friends and antagonists, the preacher and the slave, and what they find to say is trivial, a thousandth part of what they might say, or a deliberate avoidance of that. Joe speaks first.
–I was afraid you couldn’t come.
–I was glad to come.
A pause while they smile almost in embarrassment at each other. Between them now, Lund feels, there is no room for complaints, sympathies, attack or defense or contention. They are old friends and one will die in five days. He has his own consolations, so that the consolations his friend can offer him are probably unwanted. Yet there has been a telegram; a kind of desperation has arranged this meeting. Lund searches the sharp face for the despair he has half expected to find in it, and he does not find it. Even after that unbearable minute with the girl, Joe Hill is serene, or seems so. He sweeps the backs of his fingers across the steel mesh.
–Seems as if all our talking is through one of these strainers lately.
–It’s good to talk to you, even through this.
–I guess so.
His eyes wander to the corner of the cage, where an old Greek with a face like a bird of prey talks vehemently to a little pockmarked man behind the wire. His voice is loud and harsh; he pays no attention to other visitors or to the guards; he has the confidence that the tongue he speaks is unknown; his anger or whatever is bothering him can be private even when he airs it at the top of his lungs. Joe looks from the old Greek to Lund, his eyebrows waggle humorously, but under them his eyes for a moment are bleak.
Lund waits (for you did send a wire, there was some reason. When the last chance failed and you were sure you had to die
, you did send. Why? What did you want to say?).
–Well, anyway this will be the last time I have to look at this joint.
–Don’t give up hope. You’ll be saved yet.
–That’s a pipedream.
–Hilton is still working. Everybody is.
–They’ve spent too much on me now.
–Why do you keep saying that?
–Because it’s true. If the state of Utah wants to kill me, I’m ready.
–I can’t imagine it.
–I am, just the same.
There is a momentary duel of eyes, and Lund looks away in shame, feeling almost as if he has been trying to argue Joe out of his resignation. Now he looks back, forcing his smile, trying to project his friendship and his goodwill, even his love, through the mesh to the remote man inside.
–Joe, why did you send for me?
–I guess I wanted to talk.
–So do I. That’s why I came. But how can we?
The thin hands, shrunken from long idleness, go sideward in an impatient gesture.
–Pretty bum place for it.
–There isn’t any other place, and not much time.
His own words bring to Lund a panicky sense of urgency and hopelessness. He cannot stand to hold Joe’s glance, and he looks away, but within three feet of his face is the square, putty-colored face of the guard, a pair of flat streaked eyes with a roll of skin like a welt all around the lids. Joe’s voice brings him back.
–I want to ask a favor.
–Anything.
–The night I wired you I got to dreaming, just the woolliest kind of old dreams. I woke up scared to death and I wanted to talk to somebody. So I wired you.
–I’m glad you thought of me that way.
–But this is no good, through this strainer, with Fido on my arm. I want to talk all night.
–I wish there was some way.
–Maybe there is. When the law murders somebody it does it politely. They give a man a chance to kiss the hand that kills him. That’s what they have these “spiritual counselors” for.
–But the prison …
–How do you know? They’re all scared of the IWW, but you’re no IWW, and can prove it. You’re an ordained preacher. You’re the only spiritual counselor I’ll have. Except for all this security business they haven’t been making it tough for me. They give me pencil and paper, why wouldn’t they give me the preacher I want?
–But there’s a regular prison chaplain.
–I wouldn’t let him inside the same cell with me. Look …
His eyes widen with a compulsive, insistent stare. He takes hold of the mesh with his crippled hand and his face is so tight the scars whiten along his jaw. He shakes the screen a little in his excitement.
–They always give you a big feed. They always let you have your little last-minute requests. Well, this is mine. I’m going to …
A bell rings. The putty face of the guard rises as he stands up, and Joe is tugged to his feet.
–I’m going to write the warden. You go see him. Tell him he has to.
–Joel Suppose it doesn’t work, this is the last time.
–No goodbyes. See the warden. He’s got to. Don’t let him say no.
The guard leads him away.
See the warden. With the authorities so upset they kept Joe handcuffed even inside the prison, what chance was there of an irregularity so extreme as the one Joe asked? But he had to try.
Behind the steel grill in the main hall a guard sat a high desk with the switchboard of an alarm system on the wall at his side. He looked down on Lund aloofly, a man of immeasurable restrictive power. Across the hall in the anteroom to the warden’s office two trusties worked at typewriters.
“I’d like to see the warden,” Lund said to the guard.
The guard looked down. “I think he’s out of town.”
“When will he be back?”
“Ask in there.”
Tiny and impotent, he stood in the anteroom before a counter, enclosed within the implacable institution. Even the man who came forward, a prisoner himself, was part of the granite structure of rules, regulations, routines, precedents. A man’s life could get lost in this maze without a trace. A man’s death could be brought about by the invocation of these routines and never cause a stir. Procedures would be put in motion, duties assigned and performed, entries made. The thought of Joe being led back deep into the interior of the place put him forever out of reach.
“When will it be possible to see the warden?” he asked the trusty, a man who wore a patch of cotton under one lens of his glasses and looked like an undernourished clerk with a scraggly chicken-neck.
“He’s out of town.”
“When will he be back?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Didn’t he leave any word?”
“None that I know of.”
“Is there anybody who would know?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, is there somebody in charge while he’s gone? Is there a deputy warden, or somebody?”
“In charge of what? What did you want to see him about?”
“A matter of prison rules.”
The skinny trusty looked worried and baffled. “Oh no, you’d have to talk to him personally.”
He turned away, but Lund put his hands on the counter and leaned anxiously, remembering the futile two or three minutes through the screen, the imperturbable guard. No goodbyes. See the warden. “Listen, this is terribly important!” he said. “I’ve got to see the warden.”
The trusty turned, waiting patiently, making no sign.
“Tell me this,” Lund said. “Isn’t he required to be here for the execution Friday morning?”
He was watching the patched and sunken face closely, and he saw something change there, some movement of the eyes or set of the muscles. “Isn’t he?”
“Yes,” the trusty said. “I expect he is.”
“But you don’t have any idea how much before then he’ll be back.”
“No.”
Lund knocked his fist lightly on the counter. He caught the trusty’s one shy eye again. It occurred to him that the trusty might have been on the brink of what Joe faced himself. He might be a lifer, condemned and commuted, or he might have known men who had waited out their last hours in the maximum-security cell block. He couldn’t be as wooden as the guards.
“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “I’m a friend of Joe Hillstrom’s.”
“Yes,” the trusty said, without expression.
“I’m a minister, a Lutheran minister. I’ve been running a seamen’s mission. Joe wired me to come. He wants me for his spiritual adviser on the last night. That’s why I have to see the warden.”
The trusty shook his head.
“You don’t think there’s a chance?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“If he’s scared I might be an IWW, I can prove I’m not. I can prove anything the warden wants me to. But it’s Joe’s last request, do you see? He’s depending on me to arrange it.”
“Yes,” the trusty said. “Well, you’d have to talk to Mr. Webster.”
Lund subsided. It was hopeless, as he had known all along it was. And there was no help to be had from this man. Looking at him, he wondered if he were the kind of trusty who had sympathy for other prisoners or the kind who preyed on them more brutally than the guards. Where had he read about trusties who were grafters and sadists and takers of bribes? Jack London, probably. It occurred to him that he might get help by offering this man a bribe, but his mind revolted. He felt defeated and sad, and he said, “Will you do something for me?”
The man looked at him silently with his one careful eye.
“Do you answer the telephone?”
“Generally.”
“I’ll be calling every few hours until I find the warden in. Will you connect me, if he is in? I know he may be hiding out to avoid cranks, but believe me, I’m not a crank. Get
me through to him when you can, will you? My name is Lund. Will you remember that?”
The trusty took out a handkerchief and blew into it and folded the handkerchief carefully. His eye came back to Lund’s as if trying to surprise something. “You’re a minister, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Just a second,” the trusty said. He seemed to have thought of something, or remembered something. His eye wandered past Lund; he seemed to listen to a voice in his head. “There’s a chance he might’ve come back,” he said vaguely. “Hold it a minute, I’ll see if I can find out anything for you.”
There was an elaborate pretense about him that brought a flicker of hope to Lund. He waited, listening to the dry click of the typewriter operated by the other trusty-clerk, and hearing the routine noises from outside the anteroom. A guard looked in and went away again. An official voice informed someone who had just come in that visiting hours were over.
It was several minutes before the inner door opened and the one-eyed trusty slipped quietly out. Lund could tell nothing from his face, though he searched it for hope. Puny and pale, he went in squeaky heavy shoes across the office space and sat down at his desk. Just when Lund’s heart had fallen like a stone and he was turning away in angry defeat, the little man looked up across his typewriter and said mildly, “You can go in.”
Galvanized, Lund went through the gate and tapped on the door. He looked at the clerk and the clerk nodded, so Lund pushed the door open. A bald, Napoleon-browed man sat behind a long desk under the windows and watched him enter. He was as immovable as the walls, the guards, the steel gates and the elaborate security regulations. He did not look friendly or receptive; there was a hard pinched frown between his eyes.
“Mr. Webster?” Lund said. “My name is Gustave Lund.”
The warden shook his hand one perfunctory shake and nodded to a chair. With the light in his face, Lund saw the other as a haloed silhouette. “Did your clerk tell you …?”
The warden gave him a short shake of the head, the merest fraction of a no.
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 38