Joe Hill

by Wallace Stegner

  Lund put out a hand and shook Joe’s knee slowly, and as if to acknowledge a joke Joe turned his head and smiled. The silence came back, broken only by a faint, reverberatory hum as if they were inside a great barrel; across the hum went the unmeaning steps of a guard. The toilet five feet from Lund gave off a strong smell of disinfectant; he had a moment’s mad illusion that he was in a pool hall on Beacon Street in San Pedro with the ventilator dragging at the thick air and the smoke. Here the smell and the big humming emptiness were the same.

  “You’ve had a long wait,” Joe said. “Over a month and a half.”

  “That’s all right. I wish I …”

  He caught Joe’s eye, stopped. Joe stood up again.

  “I expect there are a hundred things I ought to be doing,” he said, and his eyes went from corner to corner, from cot to toilet to door.

  “Can I do anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said, still looking around as if trying to remember something he had lost. His voice was as jerky as his eyes. Restlessness or excitement was in his limbs. He sat down and almost immediately stood up again, feeling for the pencil in his shirt pocket. “Maybe there isn’t anything to do, at that. Maybe everything’s done.”

  “Any letters?”

  “Maybe one or two. There’s plenty of time.”

  Plenty of time.

  In the outer corridor steps again, and after a moment the directioned hollow noises of the guard coming. Joe went to the door to look. “Aha! He got that coffee, at that.”

  The guard set down the tray and unlocked the door and shoved the tray with its pot and two cups into the cell with his foot. Joe stooped for it.

  “The very best in their crummy old hotel,” he said. “They even asked me last night if I wanted a stimulant. I told them I wasn’t a drinking man. I bet they’d let you get stiff drunk. It’d suit them fine if you went out there in the morning too sopped to know what was going on. But I’m not taking any of their stimulants. I’m going out there sober.”

  His voice was high and brittle. Pouring two mugs of coffee, he slopped some on the tray. “Here,” he said, and held one toward Lund. He ignored the guard, who watched for a few seconds and went away again.

  Looking at Lund over the rim of his cup, Joe made a short, harsh gesture with his free hand, cutting sideward at the air. Lund felt how since he had come in here the flesh had shrunk on his fingers. He was bloodless from the shoulders down, though it was not cold in the cell. For a while he warmed his hands around the mug, and then he could stand to keep still no longer. He had been with Joe an hour, and there had been nothing but pretense or silence.

  “Don’t be sore at me, Joe,” he said. “But why don’t you speak and save yourself?”

  Everything about Joe’s face, nose and lips and cheeks and chin, was pinched and sharp. It seemed that his skin had tightened across his bones. Carefully his hand reached down the empty cup and set it between his feet, but hardly had he straightened before he had stooped to pick it up again. Concentrating on the motions of his hands, he poured the cup full.

  “Maybe I don’t feel like speaking,” he said at last in a silky whisper. He seemed to nurse some fierce thought. His palely beautiful face was expressionless, but even in profile the eyes seemed to Lund to glow and burn.

  “But it’s such a miserable waste!” Lund cried. “Why must you throw yourself away?”

  He found it impossible to read the stare that Joe turned on him. “Waste?” Joe said. “Throw myself away? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What else can you call it?”

  The grin that grew over Joe’s pinched face was of an incredible impudence. “You might call it an organizing job,” Joe said.

  “I’m glad you can joke about it.”

  “It’s no joke. The union stands to gain more if they shoot me than if they turn me loose.” Bending, he set the cup on the floor again, and suddenly he was very excited. A faint pink jumped into his cheeks, the unmutilated side of his nose flared, in his neck a vein stood out rigidly, parallel with the rigid scar. “Here’s the President of the United States after them to free me! Here’s the Swedish Minister sticking his nose in. Here’s even old Sam Gompers the union scab-master, people all over the world writing and wiring in here. You think that doesn’t do anything for solidarity? You’re supposed to be an educated man. What do you think the Mormons would have amounted to if they hadn’t shot Joe Smith? How would Christianity have got along in Rome if the Romans hadn’t liked throwing them to the lions? They’d have been just another little sect about as big as the Holy Rollers are now.” He barked out a laugh. “For that matter, what if nobody had hung Jesus Christ on a cross?”

  Lund looked down. It embarrassed him to watch Joe’s violence, because he could not rid himself of the feeling that the violence was faked. The sudden brief tirade had the artificiality of an act, like his tirade in court when he fired his lawyers. It wasn’t like Joe; right now Joe was breathing harder and faster than he needed to, working himself up to a passion for some obscure reason.

  And how could it be said to him now, a few hours before his death, that his martyrdom was tainted by the dubious methods his friends had used in advertising or—concede the suspicion-promoting it? Joe Hill as he lived in the minds of well-wishers around the world was a fiction, the product of deliberate manufacture.

  He said at last, “Of course. A martyr catches the imagination. You can build a church on one martyrdom. But why should you be the one?”

  “I think it was kind of predetermined,” Joe said. To Lund’s amazed glance he appeared now to be entirely sincere. His lips firmed until the outline of his teeth was molded under them, and he said, “When I first came into this burg I had a cold hunch, and I kept having it. Something was due to happen to me in this place. I could feel it.”

  “And you think this is what it was.”

  “Yes.”

  Lund shook his head and studied his hands. Without raising his head he said, “But you could have stopped the whole trial at any point by telling your story. That doesn’t make it look predetermined. It makes it look as if you had determined it.”

  He caught Joe’s lips curving, his eyes wide in the look of lamblike innocence. “Suppose I never had any story to tell?” Joe said softly.

  For three breaths Lund was conscious of how the air sucked into his lungs and was forced out again. He breathed as if by conscious effort, and he felt the blood drain and gather in a painful clot under his ribs. He had always been afraid of this; he had always half believed it.

  “Suppose I really was in Morrison’s store,” Joe said in the same soft monotone. “It didn’t have to happen the way they said it happened. All those dicks and lawyers were guessing. My own lawyers were guessing too, but they had a different guess. It didn’t have to be the way any of them said. Suppose it was. Suppose I was in there with Otto, the way they said I was, and we were going to collect a contribution from Morrison. Suppose the boy grabbed in the icebox for the gun and I had to shoot in self-defense. Or suppose Otto did the shooting. Then suppose I’m wounded and feeling ashamed of myself for getting in a jam like that, and sorry about the boy and his father. There isn’t anything I can do. It’s all finished. But keep on supposing. Suppose the union insists on defending me even when I don’t especially want to be defended. They figure an injury to one is an injury to all, and they’re ready to give it everything they’ve got. But with them in it I’ve got to be innocent, don’t I? I can conduct a silent defense, but I’ve got to be innocent, and say so, or the union can look bad. And if the union is going to get the most for its money I’ve got to be shot.”

  Lund did not trust himself to speak, but he watched Joe walk to the end of the cell, turn, stoop to shake the coffeepot, pour a little lukewarm coffee into his cup. At last, when it appeared that Joe was going to say no more, Lund said, “Is that the way it happened, Joe?”

  “That’s a suppose story,” Joe said. “You can think up a lot of i
nteresting yarns sitting around a jail.”

  “Then you really weren’t in Morrison’s store.”

  “Does it matter whether I was or not, so long as the union is able to make people think I wasn’t?”

  “It might matter to you, personally.”

  “How?”

  “It might be on your conscience.”

  “What’s on my conscience won’t matter to anybody this time tomorrow,” Joe said. Already his mind seemed to be on something else. He jumped up from the cot and snatched the pencil from his shirt pocket. He seemed ready to do enormous labors. With his thumbnail he broke away the wood from the tip of the pencil to improve the point, and he squeezed in past Lund and sat down and wet the pencil with his tongue. His concentration, like his passion, struck Lund as manufactured. He was like a man playing charades, acting out words for others to guess. Though he was within two feet, Lund felt that he wanted to appear unaware that he was not alone.

  A sad discomfort, a rankle of hurt feelings that he instantly diagnosed and repudiated, made the preacher stir on the cot. Joe spread his paper on the seat of the chair and wrote carefully for a minute. From above the toilet he reached down the stamp pad and the rubber stamp with which he signed his name, and he inked the stamp and impressed it under what he had written. As if Lund were furniture, he moved around him to the door and rattled his pencil between the bars. As the guard’s steps came near, Joe turned and held the paper so that Lund could read it. It was a telegram addressed to Bill Haywood in Chicago; it read, “Goodbye, Bill. I’ll die like a true-blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize. Yours for the OBU. Joe Hill.”

  Waiting for the guard, he was drawn up like a prince. The light falling from above poured over his fair hair and his slim rigid shoulders. He was limned with light as he thrust the paper through the bars. Every slightest motion was exaggerated, theatrical, posed—or was it kingly? Inscrutable, wrapped in dignity or clothed in affectation and an actor’s sense of his own conspicuousness, he stood alone under the floodlights of a stage watched by hundreds of thousands, and he spoke his curtain line and it rang like a blow on iron.

  What was on his conscience would not matter.

  For a long time Lund had felt that he was in Joe’s cell more to watch than to do anything else. Joe did not want to talk. He wrote, or he walked the three steps of the cell back and forth, or he stood in attitudes of thought until he seemed to have fallen asleep on his feet.

  A compulsion for oracular utterance was upon him. Once, when Lund asked if he didn’t want to he down and get some sleep, he stopped pacing and chopped out a laugh and said, “There’ll be plenty of time for that later.” Around nine-thirty he rattled his pencil in the bars and ordered another pot of coffee, but when it came he was sitting at the chair with the tablet before him and he did not even notice that the guard had come. Lund poured him a cup and he let it sit at his elbow and grow cold. He was full of electric energy even when he sat still; he wrote a furious sentence and crumpled the paper and threw it on the floor and sat thinking again.

  At ten he sent another telegram, again to Bill Haywood. Again he showed it to Lund and again he stood under the drench of light like a general in his headquarters and gave a message to the world. This time it was no battle-cry but a mordant joke, a play on words. “It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming,” he wrote. “Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? Don’t want to be found dead in Utah.”

  In two hours he had said hardly fifty words to Lund, who sat feeling helpless and out of place and watched Joe burn with an incandescent energy into his last hours. Only once did Lund try to break through to him, and then he spoke only because he felt his obligation as friend and counselor heavy upon him.

  “Joe, have you got any family that I could write to? Anyone you’d want to hear?”

  “No. No family.”

  “Isn’t your father living?”

  That made Joe turn half around, his neck corded from the strained position. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess so. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether he is or not.”

  So there was no point in pressing or discussing that. If the small-town baron had bequeathed anything to his bastard son it was nothing but an encysted hate. If he had done anything in the last few weeks to save him, he had done it weakly and under cover, not to hurt his own career with publicity. Joe didn’t even know that the IWW had appealed to him; he would never forgive them if he found out.

  Lund’s legs were asleep from long cramped sitting on the cot. It seemed dismally late. He stood up and looked quickly at his watch, but the wide alert eyes raised up and caught him. Joe flung down his pencil—whether in anger at him or petulance at some thought that was hard to phrase Lund didn’t know. He stood looking at the narrow head and the prison-shrunken figure: a bundle of scars, a temperate way of life, a name, a number, a sentence. But he could not bring himself to believe that he was doing Joe any good, or could ever again do him any good. Joe’s mind was outside himself; he had no need now for human talk or the arm of a friend.

  “Joe,” he said, “I don’t think you really need me or want me here. I’ll stay as long as you like, but wouldn’t you rather I left you alone?”

  Joe chewed his upper lip, regarding him steadily. “What time is it?”

  “Ten thirty-five.”

  He saw the computation go through Joe’s mind; momentarily the eyes were vacant and dull.

  “I’ve got quite a lot to do,” Joe said.

  Wanting to cry with the futility of his attempt, Lund reached the rolled-up overcoat from the head of the cot, and Joe watched him without moving to stop him. But when Lund stood at the bars and tapped for the attention of the guard, Joe caught his arm in a hard grip.

  “Messages,” he said. “Not much time. But come back. Get some sleep and come back. I’ll be through then.”

  “I don’t know whether I can arrange this at all,” Lund said. “The warden may insist that I stay, now I’m here. He might not let me back in in the morning.”

  “Well, call him up,” Joe said. “There’s no use you losing a whole night’s sleep.”

  “I’d gladly lose a hundred times that if you wanted it.”

  But he got no answer, and now the guard was outside. Lund turned, feeling sick, from Joe’s face, which seemed suddenly ghastly. “Joe’d rather I went away a while, and came back in the morning,” he said. “Could I talk to the warden on the phone, or get a message to him, to make sure it’s all right?”

  “I don’t know if he’s still up.”

  “Could you see?”

  Before the guard could answer, steps sounded in the outer corridor, turned into their cell block, stopped while the key clanked in the security door midway down. Then the warden himself, with another guard, was looking in through the bars. He looked at Joe and Lund but he spoke to the moon-faced guard.

  “How’s he been?”

  “Okay. Writes. You saw the telegrams.”

  With his head sunken and thrust forward, his frown pinched in, his bald head shining under the light, the warden looked steadily at Joe. “Everything all right with you?”

  “I could use some hot coffee.”

  “You’d better lay off the coffee and give your nerves a rest.”

  “Coffee never hurt my nerves.”

  “All right,” the warden said, hardly moving his lips. “You can have coffee if you want it.”

  “I was just asking the guard if I could talk to you,” Lund said. “Joe and I seem to have about talked it out. He’d like to be alone a while to write some letters.”

  “I thought he wanted you here all night.”

  “I did too. But I think I bother him. He wants to get some things written.”

  “He could come back early in the morning,” Joe said.

  The warden stared in silence. Then he grunted at the guard. “Let him out.”

  The door grated and swung, and Lund went out. Through the bars he shook
Joe’s lumpy hand.

  “You don’t mind, Gus,” Joe said.

  “Of course not. Whatever you like,” Lund said. “You’re your own best judge.” Gripping the hand harder, he said ineffectively, “Try to stand right with yourself, Joe,” and was led out. Before he left the prison the warden gave him a spectator’s pass that would admit him in the morning.

  Near midnight, walking the block and a half from the streetcar stop to his hotel, he saw the armed guards slowly patrolling, their breath steaming and their shoulders muffled in sheepskin coats, before the doors of downtown office buildings.

  Sick, confused, a failure both as preacher and as friend, torn between morality and compassion, and bewildered at the way Joe had gone beyond him, Lund left a call for four-thirty and crawled up to bed in the stuffy steam-heated room. He was tired out; merely sitting in Joe’s cell had been grinding labor. But it was a long time before he slept, a long time before he could rid his mind of the image of Joe Hillstrom, full of some ecstatic vision, living out in his last hours not his own life but his forming legend.

  7

  The city was cold-dark as they came through it. The streets were empty and silent; intersections under the mortuary shine of the arc lights looked so cold and forgotten that he shivered under the heavy coat. He could see his breath in the side-curtained gloom.

  The taxi turned left up Twenty-First South and climbed the hill around a curve, bouncing in the rutted gravel. Lund peered out, and abruptly the high stone walls were there, alert lights on the towers, an automobile’s lights flaring as it pulled through the gate between two guards with rifles on their arms. That car could contain the firing squad. He tried to follow it, but the wall shut it off and its lights vanished somewhere inside. Beyond the walls and the guard towers the sky over the Wasatch was just paling toward dawn. The air was dry, bitter with smoke, perfectly still, cold as iron.

  “Say!” his driver said, rousing from a chilled torpor. “They’re shooting a guy out here this morning.”

  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.