Lund opened the door and groped his way out, reached under his overcoat and with difficulty got at his wallet. The guards at the gate forty feet away were watching him closely. Down the street under the nearest arc light a handful of men clustered, also watching. As Lund put the wallet away and turned toward the gate one of them left the group, came a few steps peering, and then came on at a limping run. Another guard appeared promptly beside the two at the gate.
“Wait!” the running man called, and Lund recognized Carpenter. The printer’s face was gray, as if he had been standing in the cold a long time. The light from the gate shone bright on a drop at the end of his nose. He laid his hands on Lund’s arm and said breathily, “Can you see Joe? Will they let you in?”
“I don’t know,” Lund said. “I hope so.” His own lips were stiff, but somehow the coldness in his mind rather than in the air had made them so.
“You can get inside, though,” Carpenter said. His breath blew in quick spurts of steam as he turned his head toward the watchful guards behind the gates. “They won’t even let us close,” he said bitterly. “We can’t even walk on the sidewalk in front of the god damn place. It’s against their law to walk on the sidewalk.”
His gray mouth twitched, and he hung onto Lund’s arm. “Listen! If you get to see Joe, tell him not to give up, hear? There’s still hope, tell him. Some guy in Seattle has wired the governor that he was with Joe the night Joe got shot, and can tell the whole story. The whole Pardon Board is up there meeting with the governor right now. Tell him we’ll get him loose yet.”
“Is that true?” Lund said. “Are they meeting?”
In spite of himself, in spite of his disbelief, he felt the hope awaken in him like a sleeper rising on an elbow to listen. There had been a dozen stories, a dozen sleights, a thousand threats, but this was the real crisis now. This wire from Seattle, whether true or faked, might get Joe another reprieve. If the board took it seriously enough to meet about it …
His mind was running ahead, and he brought it back to Carpenter. “I was up there. I seen Straup and two or three others go in, about two-thirty this morning. Tell Joe that. There won’t be any shooting, tell him. They wouldn’t dare.”
“I’ll tell him if I get the chance,” Lund said. “I’ll try.”
He left Carpenter on the sidewalk and went up to the smaller pedestrian gate at the side of the big double steel ones. The guards stared at him hard-eyed, and even when he presented his pass they made no move to unlock and let him in. “Come back at six-forty-five,” they said. “Spectators and witnesses at six-forty-five.”
“But I’m Hillstrom’s spiritual adviser!” Lund said. “The warden told me late last night it would be all right to come in.”
“What’s your name?”
“Lund.”
“Go in and ask Bestor,” the guard said to his companion. Lund was left standing outside, like someone caught trying to sneak into a show without a ticket. Farther out, on the sidewalk, Carpenter stood where he had intercepted Lund. From his little sentry-box window a guard called to him: “All right, you, move on down there.”
“Go screw yourself,” Carpenter said, and stayed where he was.
The guard came out of his box and made a threatening motion with his gun. In a frenzy of defiance Carpenter yanked his coat open over his chest and faced him. The gate lights fell on his working face. Coat still held open, jaw thrust out, he came two steps closer. At the arc light below, the little group of Wobblies moved uneasily. One of them called something to Carpenter.
The third guard returned from the main building, and his chief, tense at the steel grill, said over his shoulder, “Okay?”
“Okay.”
The lock of the small gate clicked swiftly. “All right, come in here.” Lund was pushed on toward the building. Over his shoulder he saw the head guard and one companion open the gate and walk out to Carpenter, who came to meet them with his frantic chest bared. Even when a rifle barrel jammed into his belly he held the coat wide. There was not a word spoken that Lund could hear. The second guard frisked Carpenter and then the two of them crowded and pushed him backward to the little group under the light. There the head guard held his rifle on them and the other frisked them one after the other. When the last one had passed under his slapping hands the two bulky uniforms with rifles held flat across their chests used the guns to push the whole group off the sidewalk and clear across the street. It was like pushing snow off a sidewalk with a scraper.
The guards were coming back when Lund reached the steps. Over the wall the crest of the mountains was sharp against the empty lightening sky. A silhouette with a rifle came out on the wall and stretched, spreading its arms.
The first thing Lund saw as he stepped inside was a clock with its hands at ten minutes past six. The numbness that had fastened upon his senses during the tumbril-like ride from his hotel, the somnambulist muffling of his mind so that even the guards and the sullen Wobblies moved silently and stiffly like images on a screen, departed from him as if the floor had given way, and he stood in the doorway shaken by absolute terror, staring at the face of the clock. He was a sleeper shaken awake by shouting and a stridency of bells; a confused stander in a passageway while panic streamed past.
Slowly the room filled in and he took his eyes off the clock that said there was almost no time left, no more than sixty minutes more before it would be too late forever. If any reprieve came, it would have to come before the minute hand of the clock went once more around.
The guard in the cage and another against the wall, the one who had come out of the closet in the warden’s office, were watching him. Big with blue and brass, belted with broad leather and hung with guns, they let their eyes feed on him. He hardly heard his own voice saying good morning, and he cleared his throat, getting himself together. The guard Bestor examined his pass and handed it back. “You’ll have about an hour to wait.”
“But I saw the warden last night about eleven. He said it would be all right to go back in with Joe.”
“You the fellow that was in his cell, the YMCA fellow?”
“I’m a minister, yes. I was there last night.”
Both guards were regarding him steadily, and he saw that their resistance, their uniformed dull opportunity to stand in his way, was a pleasure to them. They enjoyed seeing him push and try to get by. His tongue stumbled in his mouth. “The warden said this pass would let me back in this morning—before they come for Joe.”
Bestor shifted, still leaning against the wall. He creaked softly like a saddle when he moved. “I couldn’t let you in on that. It don’t say anything about letting you into his cell.”
Lund put his hands in his overcoat pockets to hide their shaking. “A man is going to die this morning,” he said sharply. “He has a right to whatever consolation can be given him. Is the warden in?”
“He isn’t seeing anybody.”
Lund made one step toward the warden’s office door, and Bestor made one step as if to intercept him. They confronted one another, crouching a little, like wrestlers feinting for a hold. In Bestor’s face Lund saw every habit of restraint, every lust for domination and denial, that could ever have been bred even in a prison. The man was a walking cell block, with a lock for a mind. In his passion Lund even estimated the chances of beating him to the warden’s door, jerking it open before the guard could lay hands on him, but the very thought of himself in that position, possibly getting himself shot and appearing in the paper as a desperate IWW intent on murdering the warden.…
The outside door opened and Sheriff Coues came in. He nodded around and started in toward the warden’s office, but Lund stopped him. “Things have got mixed up. Last night the warden told me I could spend the last hour with Joe. He gave me this pass. But this man can’t let me past, and he has orders to keep everybody away from the warden.”
The guard had relaxed, easing himself upward to erectness with padded muscles. The sheriff eyed Lund a moment, looked at the pass. “Le
t’s see,” he said, and turned the knob of the warden’s door.
Warden Webster pivoted at his desk; he had evidently been sitting looking out the window into the darkness. “What’s it look like out there?”
“It’ll be all right,” Coues said. “I posted eighteen deputies around outside, with shot guns. Those guys are all wind. They won’t start anything.”
“Everything ready?”
The sheriff sighed as if he were tired to the bone, and sat down on the edge of the desk. He yawned artificially, inducing the yawn with widened jaws, and rubbed a hand up his cheek and over his brows and eyes. “I wish to Christ it was done.”
Lund had been standing back uneasily. The clock was the most important thing in his mind; he felt how it had moved even since he came in here. “Mr. Webster,” he said, “the pass you gave me won’t get me past the gate out here. Could you pass me through?”
The warden turned a cheap alarm clock that sat on a file beside his desk. It said six-twenty-two. “Boench given Hillstrom a hypo?”
“He wouldn’t have one,” the sheriff said.
“How’s he acting?”
“Quiet. I went up about one and he was writing a song.”
Irritably the warden swiveled in his chair, confronting Lund abruptly. “If he’s ready by himself he’d better be left alone.”
“He asked me to come back,” Lund said. “You heard him.”
The warden put his two flat hands on the desk as if about to push himself to his feet. His sleepless eyes were streaked and pouched. It occurred to Lund that he was a sad man, and that the sheriff was another. The more responsible instruments of society’s revenge were not so much vindictive as sad and tired.
“Mr. Lund,” Webster said, “my whole feeling in this business is that Joe ought to be allowed to die as quietly as possible. If you’re going up there to exhort him and stir him up and shed tears over him you can’t go.”
Clenching and unclenching his hands in the big linty pockets of his coat Lund said softly, “Do you think I want to go? He asked me to come.”
“All right,” Webster said. “At ten minutes to seven Sheriff Coues will come to get him. You can stay until then. When he’s led down, you join the witnesses.”
He went to the door. “Bestor.”
The guard came smartly forward.
“Search Mr. Lund carefully and then take him up to Hillstrom’s cell.”
For a moment Lund looked into Bestor’s still hazel eyes. The man with the lock for a mind would have the satisfaction at least of frisking him.
In five minutes the prison yard, the bleak spread of gravel just growing visible, and a trusty who crossed on some early errand and looked at them and said “Good morning, Mr. Bestor,” in the soft, careful prison voice. Now the door and the prison smell, the faintly stale smell of paint, hot radiators, disinfectants, many men, a smell that would have been like the smell of a gymnasium except that a gymnasium always had the odor of sweat and activity and bodily heat in it, and here the smell was cold in spite of the warmth of the building. Now the iron stairs, two angled flights, to Number One cell block on the third tier, and the faces of impassive guards, a new shift.
He stood while Bestor explained to the guard on duty at the gate. Down the aisle he saw the steel door locking off the maximum-security section. He wished Bestor would not talk so loud: the man’s voice thumped and echoed like a voice in a barrel. Lund dreaded another voice from the one occupied cell, telling them all to go away.
As if bucking an invisible current, he followed down the corridor through the inner door and along the row of cells to the one that held Joe. Joe was sitting on the cot reading. Somehow Lund had the impression that he had jumped there just a moment before. The floor all around him was strewn with balled-up papers. The mere sight of him sitting there, and the moment’s contact with the wide blue stare that could mask anger, contempt, a joke, fake innocence, interest, set Lund’s heart to pounding with painful heaviness. He slipped in the door and spoke, finding his voice hoarse. “Hello, Joe.”
He was amazed that Joe could smile. “Don’t be so downhearted, Gus,” he said. “Take off your coat and sit down.”
“You’re all right,” Lund said gratefully. “You’ve got courage.”
“Cheer up,” Joe said. “This dying business isn’t as bad as it’s cracked up to be.”
Struggling out of the overcoat he had the feeling that the cell was too small for the task; it was like trying to take it off in a telephone booth. But it give him a moment of something to do, and it let him make the routine offer of assistance that was always the easiest thing. “Anything I can do?”
“Everything’s taken care of,” Joe said. “I wrote some letters but the guard’ll take care of those.”
“I heard you wrote a song last night after I left.”
“Yeah. Want to see it?”
“I’d like to.”
He sat down on the cot to read the carefully copied sheet that Joe handed him. His mind was pulling against itself, one part of it cunningly estimating what time the clocks said now, another part alert for signs of cracking in Joe’s surface calm, still another trying to focus upon the words of the song. The song was entitled “Don’t Take My Papa Away from Me,” and it was a tissue of shopworn sentiment and threadbare clichés, a lugubriously bad song:
A little girl with her father stayed, in a cabin across the sea,
Her mother dear in the cold grave lay; with her father shell always be—
But then one day the great war broke out and the father was told to go;
The little girl pleaded—her father she needed
She begged, cried and pleaded so.
Don’t take my papa away from me, don’t leave me there all alone.
He has cared for me so tenderly, ever since mother was gone …
While he read, Lund’s mind was wrenched with unhappy amazement that this song should have been written, seriously and on the last night of his life, by the same man who a few hours before had sent out that austere telegram to Bill Haywood and the embattled IWW throughout the world. Spartan and sentimentalist lay side by side in Joe Hillstrom. Like a spit of rain flicking across a lighted window the image came and passed: Joe’s stiff and posed and light-drenched figure as he thrust the telegram out through the bars at the guard. He looked up from his reading into Joe’s eyes, and the eyes were asking for praise.
“It’s good,” he said miserably. “They’ll have it in the songbook.”
For a moment Joe’s eyes were dead and blank, as if there were some wandering of his attention, an interest in something remote and inward and inaccessibly private. Then he forced light back into them—it seemed to Lund to grow by a visible act of will—and he said, “I wrote something else. Look at this.”
The sheet he handed Lund had three stanzas written on it in the neat copybook hand, and it was signed with the rubber stamp slantingly across the bottom. The verses were entitled “Joe Hill’s Last Will.”
“Read it aloud,” Joe said urgently, and Lund read.
My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan—
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”
My body? Ah, if I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to all of you.
JOE HILL
Not trusting himself to speak, Lund nodded and handed the paper back. In a moment he saw that Joe’s attention was wandering again, the inward resolution wavering. Already many minutes had passed. It must be at least a quarter to seven.
Abruptly Joe swung around. “I thought something might happen,” he said in a high, tight voice. “It did before.”
&n
bsp; “Resign yourself, Joe,” Lund said. “It’s the only way. Please, boy!”
He put his hand on Joe’s arm and saw the stretched lines from the corner of the thin mouth. “I’ve never preached at you, and I won’t now,” he said. “In the end we answer to ourselves. If you can come before yourself with a clean conscience they can’t hurt you, Joe. They can’t touch you.”
Joe’s head jerked, a strange pecking motion as if he were recovering from being pushed, and his lips parted to show the even clenched teeth. “I can answer to myself ail right!” he said shrilly. “They’ve had plenty of chances to change their minds. Thousands of people have put in a word for me. President Wilson has wired them twice. They still want to shoot a man because he’s an enemy of their filthy capitalist system. All right, let them shoot me! I’m ready for them. What are they waiting for? Why don’t they come on?”
Lund grabbed Joe’s shaking hands and hung on to them both. He wished he hadn’t come. It was unbearable, and he did not help Joe. In the face of Joe’s cracking control he wavered, thinking of what Carpenter had panted at him by the gate. Which was better, to take the last walk resigned to your death, or to walk out still believing the miracle might free you before the firing squad took aim? He did not know, he miserably did not know.
“Joe,” he said, “listen, Joe! It isn’t final yet. The Pardon Board has been meeting all night. Somebody wired from Seattle that he could prove an alibi. There might be …”
Joe’s lips flattened across his teeth, and his breath wheezed. His eyes darted around the cell as if in search of a door. “Then there’s still a chancel” he said.
“I don’t know,” Lund said. “Don’t bank on it too much. There isn’t much time. You’ve got to be ready, you’ve got to be resigned.”
Joe pulled away. “I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. I’m ready for them.” His eyes were moving constantly around the cell, and he kicked the balled-up papers with his feet. Words came out of him in bursts, jerkily.
“Messed the place all up. Writing all night. Ought to clean the joint out.” He smiled a strained, ghastly smile. “Brought up to be neat. Sailors always neat. Ought to sweep out here.”
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 42