Joe Hill

by Wallace Stegner

  Joe made the indeterminate sound again, wishing the kid didn’t insist on being so important to himself. The people he met, the places he went, the plans he made, what he said to the boss. What difference did it make? He could get to be a pest, making adventures out of every two-bit thing that happened to him.

  Now the kid yawned a last time, almost with determination; his feet shuffled determinedly on deck. “Well, guess I’ll go see if Bottles has got paper and a pencil. I haven’t wrote a letter to my Sis for six weeks.”

  “You better do that,” Joe said.

  “She takes an interest in what I do,” the boy said. “She sits there in Akron, ironin’ shirts in a laundry all day, and the places I get around to seem pretty exciting to her. If I know I’m gonna be someplace around a certain time I give her a general-delivery address, and she writes me these big long letters. If I let her, she’d quit tomorrow and hit the road out here. That old laundry stuff has got her goat pretty bad.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “Well, you go write her.”

  Eventually the kid broke his embarrassed hanging around and went inside. After a minute the lamp bloomed yellow, pushing light through the window back of Joe and showing the worn deck planking, the unpainted stern rail, the broken armchair where the kid had sat. Across on the island the gasworks twinkled on, as remote as the stars, and as incomprehensibly conducted. The few lights that had shone high on the hill had gone out. The night air was growing chilly. For a long time Joe sat back in the dark by the window. Once he leaned to put his face against the pane and saw the kid at the table, still writing.

  The tantalizing sea-smell that the freighter had trailed past was still in his nostrils. The past was in it, and pictures blew like smoke across his mind, the hills and the bay and the rivermouth and the ships, the schoolyard with the lush summer grass, the YMCA reading room where sailors had come, the smoke of boats coming down from the copper mines at Falum. He could have drawn every street and building in that seaport town, and yet when he tried to bring it closer, to put himself back in the cottage, to come in on some winter evening with the red muffler three times around his neck, and image his mother in the kitchen amid the warmth and the smell of food, something in him turned away and held it off. By an effort of will he could summon the house he had grown up in, but he couldn’t hold it. It ran out of his mind like water from a leaky pail, and left him only an irritable, empty sense of loss.

  Names wouldn’t do it, either. He tried, softly and to himself, the singing Swedish sounds, naming every street of Gefle, stores and shops he remembered, people he knew. None of them meant what he kept trying to make them mean, and he felt himself watching and testing himself for the effect he wanted. He tried naming his mother’s name, Berta Hillstrom, and waited for the emotion that had ground like hobnails through his childhood and youth. But his mother’s wrongs and her skimped dejected life stirred in him only a vague unhappiness now. It was 1910 now; she was twelve years dead.

  He walked around to the door and looked into the cabin. The kid hunched over the table, still writing. Behind him, against the wall, was the long bench jumbled with glass bottles, jars, beakers, racks of test tubes, that Bottles amused himself with when he was sober. There were chemical stains on bench and floor, a faint chemical stink in the air. One of the bare studs and part of the wall had been charred by fire.

  “Got any more paper?” Joe said.

  “Sure.” The kid tore out three or four leaves of his tablet, and pawed among the mess on the table until he found a stub pencil. The point was broken, and he got out his knife to sharpen it. His forehead was pimpled, but he looked clean, curly-headed, healthy, not like the usual road punk. His hands were full of an eagerness to be helpful, and he smiled when he looked up from the sharpening and handed the pencil across.

  Back in his chair in the stern Joe shifted to get light on the paper. On the top sheet he drew a quick cartoon of a lumber camp–stumps and drooping firs and a tall topped tree with a top-faller clinging in it, and down on the ground a donkey engine contorted and bucking, with a peavy handle sticking out of its insides and a lot of smoke and agitation and gear wheels going up in radiating explosive lines. Beside the donkey engine he drew a beefy man in a stag shirt facing a smaller, curly-headed figure. The curly-headed one was thumbing his nose. Below the drawing Joe printed neatly, “This is how I kissed my last boss goodbye.”

  When it was finished he took it inside and handed it to the kid. “Here,” he said. “Put this in for your sister.”

  The kid looked at the picture and then up at Joe. The innocent awe in his face was pleasant to see. “Kee-rist, where’d you learn to draw like that?”

  “Send it on,” Joe said. “Give her my love.”

  Back in his chair again he sat and doodled aimlessly, producing a string of meticulous three-dimensional boxes, a string of sailing ships leaning in a wind. He spelled his own name, Joseph Hillstrom, in elaborate Old English lettering he had learned to make as a schoolboy from Salvation Army tracts. He turned the page over and drew a tophat with a shiny highlight up its length, and under the tophat he drew a pot-bellied man with a big watch chain. Across the page below this he sketched in the figure of a woman with a shawl over her head and one hand stretched out beseechingly. Then between the two his pencil made a tall severe figure with a pistol in its hand, aimed at the pot-bellied man, and out of the muzzle of the gun he drew a puff of smoke.

  Just for an instant, when he moved the paper more into the faint light and studied what he had drawn, the old hatred leaped in him like the explosion of a match, but it went out as quickly as it had come to life, and he sat quietly with the paper in his hand. It was a long time since he had dreamed that murder-dream, a long time since he had even thought of the well-dressed stranger with the intent, half-puzzled eyes that he had once seen at a public meeting and known for the man rumor called his father. It seemed to him that he had spent months and years of his boyhood dreaming of how he would pay back that man, but the hatred was cold now. There was only a faint bitterness like quinine under the tongue, and a brief flare of anger that licked out not so much against the wrongs of his past as against the emptiness of the present. He felt as gutted as a codfish.

  He brought his mind around to the kid inside, still writing his endless letter to the sister who worked in a laundry and dreamed of romantic adventures like her brother’s. He imagined meeting a girl like that, one who had never been out of her home town, and thought of the things he might say to her and the places he might tell her about. She would love to hear of strange places and exciting things. She would have light curly hair like her brother’s, and good teeth. Underpaid and poor, she would live in a boardinghouse, maybe, a single room in a house with mechanics and traveling men and clerks who parted their hair in the middle.

  For a while, tall and quiet and strong, a man who had lived a rough life but had stayed clean, he was her protector through a series of carefully composed scenes. He visited her greedy boss, a fat soft man in a peppermint-striped shirt, and cowed him into raising her wages. He destroyed several clerks with little mustaches, noting carefully how they fell when he hit them, working out the encounters detail by detail, varying a point here or there, going back and starting over, altering by a slight sneering word the contemptuous thing he said just before he swung. She was an unprotected working girl, at the mercy of bosses, mashers, white slavers. Indignation grew in him at the thought of the punk inside spending his time bumming on the road. He’d go bad, or get himself killed, and there would be no one to look after the girl.

  Whistling abstractedly through his teeth, he stared out over the lake and imagined what might happen. The tune that passed between his lips was “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” and it got wound up in his speculations until it began to take them over and guide them. Suppose she got hard up and couldn’t pay her rent, or lost her job, or got sick. There was only one way she could wind up. Her situation began to unravel as the words of a song, set to the tune he was
whistling, and he let it unravel until he had a whole verse and a chorus that he could write out in a careful round hand.

  One little girl, fair as a pearl

  Worked every day in a laundry;

  All that she made for food she paid

  And she slept on a park bench so soundly.

  An old procuress spied her there,

  She came and whispered in her ear:

  CHORUS

  Come with me now, my girlie,

  Don’t sleep out in the cold;

  Your face and tresses curly

  Will bring you fame and gold.

  Automobiles to ride in,

  Diamonds and silks to wear,

  You’ll be a star bright

  Down in the red light,

  You’ll make your fortune there.

  Feet clomped on the deck, the floathouse moved a little, slugglishly, something fell with a clatter and Bottles’ voice, muffled with liquor, said “Sonofabitchl” His footsteps came along the deck to the door and stopped. There was a moment’s silence before his voice said, “Night owl. What you doin’, writin’ a letter?”

  “To my Sis,” the kid’s voice said. “We got on a regular letter-writin’ bee. Joe’s writin’ one outside.”

  “Fella ought to write more letters,” Bottles said. He came around the corner and stood in the misty dark beyond the window, a big-shouldered, big-headed drunken old buffalo of a man. Joe folded the paper with the song on it and creased it neatly with his thumbnail.

  “God damn,” Bottles said. “I’m glad to see you boys writin’ letters. Guy never thinks how other people might feel. Selfish bastards, one little letter could make somebody happy as hell.”

  He loomed over Joe. “Hate to see anybody make my mistake,” he said. “I ain’t wrote home in ten-twelve years. Ain’t that awful? How I know what they’re doin’? How they know I ain’t dead or in the bughouse or some’m? You take my advice and keep on writin’ letters, then you won’t wind up a bum like I am.”

  He lurched against the wall and felt his way around the corner. From inside Joe heard the kid say, “Well, it’s me for that old soogan. Is it all right if I roll up out on deck, Bottles?”

  “Anyplace you fuckin’ please,” Bottles said. “Sleep on the fuckin’ roof if you want.”

  The light went out with a puff, and minutes later the faint stink of kerosene leaked out the window above Joe’s head. Without a light, there was no use trying to finish writing the song. It was no good anyway. The gauntness was back in him, the gutted feeling.

  He folded the paper once again and put it away in the pocket of his flannel shirt. Writing a letter, he thought. Writing a letter! Who to?

  He spit out a curse like a seed from between his teeth and felt his way around the deck to where his bindle was stuck on the sill of an open window. While he was unrolling the blanket the kid’s shadow reared up briefly against the faintly luminous sky and then subsided again with a big sigh. “Boy, this is worth all the bunkhouses in Washington and all the straw stacks in Montana,” he said. “Just like your own yacht.”

  Joe did not reply. He got the blanket under him and rolled his coat for a pillow and lay down on his back. There were stars across the sky, misty and remote, and he lay giving them back a bleak and savage stare. Tomorrow he would go south. There was nothing there that drew him, and it was no treat to hole up with John in the shack, and longshoring in San Pedro was no better as a job than logging in Washington. Worse, maybe, the way you sat around all day waiting for some snotty dock boss to point the finger and say, “You, and you, and you, and you.” But he had been north ever since he had left the old Sarah Cleghorn at Victoria six months ago. Without wanting to go anywhere in particular he wanted to get out of here. He might as well head for Pedro as for anywhere else.

  2 San Pedro, June, 1910

  He traveled fast and light, with only a little bread and a couple of cans of beans in his balloon. Three days after he hooked a manifest out of Seattle he was soaking up steam in an Oakland Turkish bath. That night a strike of trainmen on the Southern Pacific stalled him in San Jose, but by the next evening, after talking with pickets and learning that the engineers and firemen had not yet voted to come out, he hung around the yards. There were so many railroad dicks around that there was no show to get aboard anything; he would have to snag one on the fly. Just at dark he started down the tracks out of town, through straggling shacks and Mexican barrios, until he was at the fringe of town, past where he estimated the yard dicks would have to drop off as the train gathered speed. Then he sat down by the trackside and waited, drowsing over his knees until a locomotive’s light poked down the laddered track and roused him.

  All the next morning he sat alone in a boxcar and dangled his heels out the open door, watching the picture-postcard ocean between San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara twinkle and flow inward to the white beaches and break in big surf on the points. Outside of Santa Barbara he ditched the freight, walked clear through town, and picked it up again on the other side, clear out by Montecito, rising from his covert at a place where bums had jungled at the very edge of a big estate.

  In Ventura a pair of shacks, going in pairs like nuns for protection, looked in one side of the car just as Joe went out the other. The train was still moving slowly. Before they could come through after him he had ducked through a ruck of rabbit hutches and chicken pens and littered backyards and out onto a dusty street. Again he walked through the town. This time he found a little jungle camp under some pepper trees, where about a dozen hoboes were lying around waiting for a stew. He chipped in a can of beans and ate with them, and after he had eaten he lay down with his hat over his face and slept. After dark he awoke, ate a tincup full of mulligan, washed the cup with sand and seawater down at the shore. There was a game of cooncan going on on a blanket by the fire; he sat off to one side, watching it.

  After almost an hour word came down that a freight was coming. Joe stood up, and a man next to him said, “I’ll be glad when their damn strike is over and the shacks are talon’ bo money again. You really got to earn your ride, this way.”

  The bos were scattering along the grade. The headlight reached over them, the locomotive shook the ground as it passed in a moment of glare and steam and power. Back up the tracks Joe saw the lanterns of the yard dicks drop off, two of them, and bob and plunge and come to a stop. Figures were running desperately along the grade, but the chances were not good. The train was already rolling as fast as a man could run. The dark cars drew past him as he sprinted on the uneven footing, trying to keep his feet in the dark and still spot an open door. The man ahead of him swerved and gave it up, and in desperation Joe shifted his bindle over his back on the dead run and hooked a ladder with his right hand, jumping to get his feet clear as the train yanked him into the air. Panting, he clung to the throbbing rods, and then climbed carefully, his breath coming hard and his heart pounding, and made his way along the roof in the wind and the rain of cinders until he found the propped hatch of an empty reefer. His cautious call got no answer, but when he let himself down he found two other bos already there. They shifted over for him without a word.

  At daylight the three of them ditched the freight together as it began to jerk and crawl into the Los Angeles yards. By nine o’clock Joe was riding the PE car down the Shoestring toward San Pedro.

  He had traveled without anticipation, for no reason except that he was sick of what he had been doing and wanted to be on the move, but as he stepped off the car he had a curious momentary feeling of coming home. It was a morning of blowing fog, with the sun breaking through and then driving under again. He saw the footpath and the ragged shacks, the flats, the island, and then the warming air chilled abruptly as a feeler of mist blew inland. The footpath led blindly into a white, enclosed world.

  Just off the blurred familiar path an old wheelless buggy swam in and out of sight like the half-boat of a troll. The earth pitched in sluggish waves, old Galway’s pile of boards and rubbish crawled,
Sheehan’s privy tilted, the bleat of Sheehan’s goats was an otherworldly sound in the mist. Then the fog thinned as suddenly as it had thickened, the earth subsided, the buggy sank back into the rank grass, the shacks emerged steady as islands, and the sun mowed the flats like a scythe.

  The rear end of John Alberg’s shack dropped off by broken steps to a tidal creek where a skiff lay aground in the mud of extreme ebb. From the rusty stovepipe no smoke rose. Joe paused at the door, fixing his face for greetings, but when he pushed inside there was no one there, though the shack was warm and the stove still hot to the touch.

  The place was a pigpen, as usual, the brass bed and the bunk along the front wall humped with dirty quilts, the table littered with dirty dishes. The air smelled of sardines and coffee. Looking around to see who was living with John now, Joe found a tin suitcase under the bunk, and in the suitcase a letter addressed to Otto Applequist. Otto, then. That guy.

  Under the other bunk, in his old sea chest, he found his blue serge suit, a suit of long drawers, a striped shirt, three stiff collars, and a pair of yellow button shoes. Looking at them, he made a soft sound of derision, but he wiped off the shoes and hung the suit on a nail. In the piece of mirror stuck behind a stud he examined his whiskery face, the flat cheeks rough with beard except where the scar ran smoothly under his jawbone, the eyes cold blue, the hair lank. A vision began to grow in his mind of coming into Pedro all dressed up, greeting acquaintances, hearing the gossip. After the momentary disappointment of finding no one at John’s, the vision was full of warm possibilities.