Joe Hill

by Wallace Stegner

  The bench brought him out above a wide panorama of the valley. Below him he recognized the turtle-backed tabernacle and the six gray spires of the Mormon temple, a view almost exactly like one he had seen on a stereopticon slide. Back of him the capitol, massive and dome-topped, spoke to him of the power and strut of the law as the temple spoke of the power of the church. And far across the valley, beyond all the streets and past the last straggle of trees and miles across the arid flats south-westward, the stacks of smelters fumed slowly at the foot of the next range. Power again, the Copper Trust, the silver magnates.

  The homes of Salt Lake City were humble, buried in trees, only the occasional glint of their roofs showing how they lined the trenches of the streets. But the homes of power were tall. Banks and business buildings leaped up tall at the foot of the hill, the temple spired upward to its gilded angel, the tall stacks of the mining bosses smoked across the valley. Above them all, lordly on its eminence, was the home of the law.

  Sitting in the shade of a spindling new tree, he remembered a story a carpenter had told him in San Pedro. The carpenter and two other men had been working in the new office of the governor on a Saturday afternoon, fitting baseboard and trim. Taking advantage of the quiet, the carpenter brought a pint back with him from lunch. They had all taken a pull at it and corked it up when the governor came in to show his quarters to friends. The carpenter hastily shoved the pint in against a stud and went on working. But the governor’s party stayed so long that he eventually had to case the bottle in. It was there yet in the wall back of the governor’s desk.

  For a moment Joe told himself that it was a good and laughable thing that the secret whiskey was there. It was a flaw in the imposing perfection, an expression of a workingman’s right to be himself. But he couldn’t stay amused. For one thing, the worker had lost his bottle, and that was the way it always went. For another, he shouldn’t have been the slave of the bottle in the first place. The system made a drinker out of him and then beat him out of his drinks. The secret pint in the wall didn’t mean anything after all. He wished it were a bomb.

  But the feeling that something impended, that soon now he would remember what errand had brought him here to the heart of the sticks, remained with him. He was on the run, yes. It seemed that he was always on the run from something. But he was coming toward something, too. This town felt ominous with meaning, as if there had been a forgotten reason and a destined meeting. Yet the only things he could see from the hill that might have relevance to his life were the arrogant triple symbols of the system’s power.

  In his room that night, in the boardinghouse run by Mother Wynn on North Temple Street under the shadow of the gilded angel, he sat and wondered if he should not go out and hunt up the hall. But after the close call in San Pedro he felt the need of caution. It wouldn’t hurt to smell around Salt Lake a little before making himself known. Besides, he felt languid, drained by the heat, and though he heard voices down on the porch where it was cooler, he did not move. Tomorrow he might find friends among them, good union men, or workers who might be talked into taking out a card, but he would not exert himself to know them now.

  Idly he reached over and picked up the Gideon Bible that lay on the washstand. Inside he read the little message from the Gideon Society, and on the flyleaf the neat inscription: “Mother Wynn—Please accept as a token of gratitude this little book I just dashed off—with. Jesus H. O’Dwyer.”

  Turning the page, he read from the beginning of Genesis, and he had got as far as the generations of Adam when he looked up to see that the window was no longer giving him enough light, and that he was straining his eyes in the dusk reading a thing in which he no longer had even the interest of contempt. But when he started to toss the book back on the stand he hesitated and held it more to the light to read a little further. There was a terrible, uncompromising sadness about the monotonous verses of begats:

  And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness … and called his name Seth.… And the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.… And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan … and Cainan lived seventy years, and begat Mahalaleel.… And Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.… And all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years, and he died …

  Like grains of sand pouring between his fingers the generations came and passed, and centuries after they had passed the dry husks of their names made a forlorn sound in the world in which they and all their works were as grass.

  This was the stuff millions of good Christians read for gospel. This was the way they built up patience in themselves to accept what they were given and bear the yoke they bore. And one generation of workers worked and got nothing and bore children and died, and another generation labored and was cheated and begot children and died, and all the days of every generation were sixty or seventy years of sweat and sickness and wage slavery, and they died.

  He threw the Bible on the floor and looked out the window. Across a narrow court was the brick back of a shop, with two windows shedding light across the littered court. What went on behind the windows was so apt to his mood that it might have been staged for his benefit alone.

  A baker in a white hat and short-sleeved underwear worked at a big table. His motions were jerky and precise, reduced to an inflexible routine. From a tub he reached a pillow of dough, slashed once with his knife, slapped the dough on the table, kneaded and flopped and kneaded and stretched and flopped, and tucked the wad in one of a string of pans. Another slice, and again the slap knead flop stretch flop. A row of filled pans grew along the table, magically moving ahead of the magical mechanical motions of the baker.

  Watching him, Joe was reminded of the sign above the Peerless Pool Parlor in San Pedro. Both baker and sign had the mechanical perfection, the rigid regularity, of a string of begats. This was the way life was arranged. They sliced you off and slapped you in a pan and smeared you with lard and shoved you into the ovens, and after a while out you came, one more loaf of bread. Or maybe they had you scheduled for something fancy. Maybe you were due to be coffee cake, and then they ran you through a different mill and sprinkled raisins and chopped nuts around on you and baked you a little less or a little more.

  What good does it do to fight it? a treacherous little voice said in his mind. You’re on a treadmill, you just waste your strength. But he put the voice down, and he assured himself that even though Marx said the domination of the proletariat was inevitable, and that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself, yet there had to be agents and workers and fighters to bring the destruction about, and maybe hurry it.

  But it was really unfair the way they mixed life up for a man. They carelessly dropped nuts and raisins around in ordinary dough and produced something like himself, neither bread nor coffee cake. The whole futile cloud of his ambitions rose up before his eyes and offended his sight. A poet. An artist. A musician. Akh!

  He stayed at the window a long time, watching the jerky unalterable motions of the baker, until the baker pitched three tubs one inside the other and slid them down the table and the light clicked off to leave only a vague interior glow in which shadows of movement went on, incomprehensible for all his peering and staring and straining to penetrate the smeared light-struck glass.

  2

  The morning newspaper told him that the cornerstone had been laid at a new Mormon ward house, and showed him the faces of the men and women who had participated in the ceremonies. It informed him of a controversy between a Better Government committee and the sheriff about conditions at the county jail, and of the death of a tramp who had been found along the Western Pacific tracks between Salt Lake and Black Rock, and of a family stabbing in Bingham. It gave him the information that ore shipments from the Silver King, Daly-Judge, and Apex mines were up thirteen per cent above the same period of the preceding year, and that the Second International was meeting in Switzerland and
denouncing nationalism and war. But it told him nothing about what was happening in Sacramento, and he looked carefully among strange names and strange faces up and down the columns of the whole paper without finding any clue to the expectancy he felt. It was as if he had come here to meet someone and could not remember who.

  At noon he ate in a workingmen’s eatery on Second South, and came out afterward to pick his teeth and lean against the wall, watching people pass. A bum panhandled him for a cup of coffee, and Joe gave him a nickel. Another bum struck him for a match, but Joe didn’t have any. He learned comfortably against the wall, watching faces.

  Along the sidewalk came a dapper young man with a mustache, his legs encased in peg-topped riding breeches, his calves booted in glistening British boots. In his hand he carried a crop with which he tapped the side of his leg as he walked. His heels were crisp and confident on the sidewalk.

  Looking at him come, Joe was moved by ribald amusement. He was astonished that such a dude would have the nerve to appear on the street. With the corner of his mouth he chirped twice, sharply, as if to a horse.

  The dude looked sideways, startled, his crisp walking uninterrupted but his hand forgetting to tap the crop against his boot. He had large soft brown eyes and his mustache was brown and luxuriant. As his eyes met Joe’s they went angry and hard, and his mouth stiffened. Joe gave him a still, intent look, one the poor prune couldn’t misunderstand.

  “Giddap!” he said, and removed the toothpick from his mouth.

  For a hopeful instant he thought the dude was going to take the challenge, and he shoved his shoulders away from the wall eagerly. But the dude’s face, a face like a girl’s with an artificial mustache pasted on it, turned ahead again, reddening, and the crisp bootheels clicked on. Two men standing across the doorway looked at Joe and shook their heads and laughed.

  Joe let himself back against the wall, taking advantage of the narrow ledge of shade. As he leaned, his eye caught a glimpse of a man who passed and hesitated, turning; a man with loose shoulders and loosely hanging arms, and a face that took on a hanging, sheeplike grin.

  Otto Applequist.

  As they shook hands he felt Otto’s eyes all over him, like the slapping hands of a cop, slapping the corduroy pants, the worn shoes, the shirt that he had washed himself at Mother Wynn’s. Otto himself looked prosperous. His shoes were new and shiny, he wore a collar and tie and a straw skimmer.

  “Well, well, well, well, well!” Otto said. He pumped Joe’s hand and studied Joe with a secret smile. What he saw seemed to tickle him. His smile broadened. “I heard you was in jail.”

  “It’s a fright what stories get around,” Joe said.

  “How’d you get out?”

  “You can’t get out unless you’re in.”

  Otto’s smile widened until his eyes almost closed. “Same old Joe. Still keeping the mouth shut.”

  “Same old Otto, still trying to get something on somebody.”

  That brought a burst of coughing laughter from Otto. For a moment, still laughing, he watched two girls go by. Turning back, he said, “How’s old Manderich?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “You hear all the stories,” Joe said. “You should have heard that one. They killed him at Oatfield.”

  “Well I’ll be damned.” Otto’s loose shoulders moved. “That old gorilla,” he said. “He was all right, I guess, but he sure took his politics hard.”

  Joe said nothing. Otto, working his genial white eyebrows, looked him over again. “You been in Zion long?”

  “Just got in.”

  “Damnedest place you ever saw,” Otto said. “Town’s full of Swedes. The Mormon missionaries must’ve cleaned out the old country. I’m forgetting how to talk English.”

  They moved back into the shade against the wall of a drugstore, putting their hands behind them on the wall. Joe was glad enough to see Otto. He was a petty-larceny thief, and he liked to snoop out every scrap of information about anything, but if he had no hard feelings about that night in Pedro there was no reason Joe should. And he was somebody familiar; he took the edge of strangeness off this town.

  “Doing anything?” Joe said.

  “Murray smelter.”

  “Honest working stiff, uh?”

  “Want to see my letters of recommendation?”

  “I’m afraid I’d recognize the handwriting.”

  They laughed together, two old acquaintances gabbing in the street.

  “Where you staying at?” Otto said. “Wobbly hall?”

  “Mother Wynn’s. You know it?”

  “I heard of it. Bughouse rest home. Whenever the cops want an agitator they look there.”

  “They do?”

  “What do you care?” Otto said with a laugh. “The cops aren’t nothing to you.”

  Joe shrugged.

  “You got quite a rep since I saw you last,” Otto said. “You’re the kind of an agitator the cops’d really be interested in. You still writing songs?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Sticking around long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bound anywhere special?”

  “Nowhere special.”

  “Jesus, you don’t know the answer to anything, do you?” Otto said.

  “My father was a Pismo clam,” Joe said.

  “I wouldn’t be suprised.” Otto crossed his feet and raised his hat to cool his forehead. With his hat still off he turned, as if a thought had surprised him, and said, “Say, you know who I met here?”

  “Who?”

  “Woman that used to know you in Sweden. Anna Olson.”

  Alertness awoke in Joe. He felt in the pit of his stomach the kind of paralyzed expectancy that had come in childhood games when his hiding place was discovered, the moment of staring exposure before the screaming race for the goal. “Sweden?” he said carefully. “That’d sure be a freak. You sure it was me?”

  “Joe Hillstrom. She said you went away to be a sailor when your mother died.”

  “I don’t remember any Anna Olson.”

  “Well, she remembers you. She was a friend of your mother’s.”

  Joe raised his shoulders vaguely. The street lay hot and sun-drowned before him, and it was suddenly as strange as a street in a dream. Beyond it, over the flat roof of a building, he saw the slopes of the mountain rising. It was a strange place, and he the strangest thing in it, with the past washing in on him. “Maybe she’s changed her name,” he said. But he remembered Anna Olson all right, in her house and his own, summer afternoons on the streets of Gefle. His mother’s friend, one of the few.

  “She lives right near where I’m boarding, out in Murray,” Otto said. He shoved Joe’s shoulder. “Say, you know what you could do? There’s a kind of a potlatch of Mormon Swedes out at my place tonight. You could come on out.”

  “That’d be a treat.”

  “Do you good,” Otto said. “Stick around by yourself too long, you’ll begin to smell your own breath.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. He rubbed the scar at the corner of his mouth, and from under his hand said, “What kind of a potlatch?”

  “Whist,” Otto said, “Coffee and cake. Just a bunch of good Mormons getting together to talk Swedish.”

  “What’ll you be doing at this party?”

  “Why not? I can talk Swedish.”

  They laughed together again. With an appropriate and calculated carelessness Joe said, “All right, I haven’t got anything to do. I might come along. You sure it’s all right?”

  “All right? You’re a Swede, that’s enough. For that matter, I can introduce you as the big IWW song writer.”

  “I guess we can get along without that.”

  “Plain Joe Hillstrom, uh?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Okay,” Otto said. He took out his wallet and found a scrap of paper in it and scribbled an address. “This’ll be a new experience for you,” he said, and the sly grin spread and curled his
lips. “Respectable churchgoing people to associate with.”

  “I guess I can stand it,” Joe said. “What time?”

  “Seven-thirty maybe.”

  “Vell,” Joe said, “Ay see you dar.”

  “Plenty of Svenska flikas,” Otto said. “All these Mormons got twelve pretty daughters.”

  He crossed the street, natty in his straw hat, and Joe turned back toward Mother Wynn’s. It was hard to figure what Otto was up to, or whether he was up to anything. It could be that he had found out something about Joe from Anna Olson and thought he could use it. But what could he use it for? Plenty of people had no fathers. It made no difference who knew where Joe Hillstrom came from.

  But the cold expectancy, like the sensation of cold against a decayed tooth, was still with him. This whole town was prickly with the sense of something due to happen.

  In store windows he examined himself as he walked, trying to label himself, looking himself over as if he were Anna Olson seeing the son of her old friend for the first time in sixteen years. He observed what thirteen years of knocking around and three years in the labor wars had done to Joseph Hillstrom of Gefle, Sweden. With the eyes of these Mormon Swedes he gave himself the once-over: a pretty glum customer, long-haired, bag-kneed, with an intent scarred face.

  The moving arms of a taffy-pulling machine in a candy store window stopped him momentarily, and watching his own image in the glass he cracked his face just to see if he could look human. Ghostly among trays of panoche and peanut brittle, a reflected stranger smiled at him.