“Hey you guys,” McGibbeney says. “Listen to this!”
As Alberg plays and sings, the blue-suited man sits almost uncomfortably in his chair, poker-faced. With his pale skin and his neat fair hair and his string tie he looks like a gambler. It is as if Alberg applauded him with eyebrows and lips, singing directly at him, but the cousin cracks no smile in reply. Once when two men edge closer behind him to hear he half turns and looks at them, but he is stiff in the face of the applause that comes when Alberg is through. The man next to him now is Herb Davis, the secretary of the IWW local, and he is saying something into the cousin’s ear. The cousin shakes his head, a quick, impatient motion.
McGibbeney is very excited. “By God, a thing like that can win for us! Come on, Alberg, the meeting’ll be on in ten minutes. Come on down there and sing it once.”
Other voices are saying the same thing. “It’ll have ’em breaking up chairs,” Herb Davis says. A kind of delegation forms, and McGibbeney carefully picks up and folds the paper with the song on it. “They’ll want you to take a bow,” he says. “I didn’t quite get your name. Hill, was it? Joe Hill?”
“That’ll do,” the cousin says.
They go out, ten or a dozen of them working between the tables, Herb Davis with his hand around the cousin’s arm, talking seriously. Over their heads John Alberg shakes his guitar at Tinetti, who has rolled down his cuffs and is adjusting a heavy gold cufflink. “Dese boys vant me to do a little yob,” Alberg says. “I be back pretty qvick, Nino.”
They go on out, and the doors they hold open as they pass let in a brief breath of evening air, the lugubrious sound of a Salvation Army band down on the corner, and the sad ragged voices singing “In the Sweet By and By.”
The man called Joe Hill walks with the others, unsmiling, light and easy on his feet but unbending, almost ill at ease. Under the expressionless pale face lies another face, mercurial as an actor’s, eager-eyed and tugged at by responsive smiles; inside the erect blue serge is another man, no laborer but an artist, fine-tendoned and blue-veined and white-handed, a skinless man, avid for praise.
4 San Pedro, June, 1910
The shack was hot from the stove and the blaze of sun on the tin roof, and full of the laundry-smell of boiling rice, the sweet-sour fragrance of Chinese cookery. Joe Hillstrom, delegated cook, an experienced hand who knew what he was about, watched over the kettles, draining the gluey liquid from the rice, pouring dipperfuls of cold water in to separate the grains, draining that. Out on the back platform above the tide creek the boys were kidding Moe Dreyfuss and Moe was retorting in excited, staccato bursts. A cool little wind blew through the shack and drew Joe to the back door, where he stood looking down.
He was amused at their variety: Pete Dimitrios, a black-browed Greek from Macedonia; Alberg and Applequist, Swedes; Art Manderich, an Austrian anarchist; Moe Dreyfuss, a philosophical Alsatian Jew; Herb Davis, indistinguishably American, with the kind of face that looked out from racing-driver’s goggles on the cover of Police Gazette. The great American workingman, straight from Ellis Island.
“Sure,” Herb Davis was saying. “So what do you want the boys to do when the company puts gun guards on the trains and fills the yards with finks?”
“Do?” Moe said. “Why do they have to do anything? Why do they put these guards on? To keep people from throwing coal at locomotives going by, isn’t it? So don’t throw any coal, that’s easy.”
“Just … let ’em ride over you, is that it? Let their scab trains go right on through.”
“Moe,” Dimitrios said, “start the jug.”
Art Manderich, his eyes lidded and sardonic, spit over the edge of the platform into the mud. Like a fallen Goliath, John Alberg lay flat on his back, squinting vaguely into the air, making helpless motions with his arms.
“The yug!” he said, feeble and faint. “The yug!”
But Moe kept the jug protectively between his feet. Mongrel-smart, scarred by smallpox, he looked up at Joe and smiled a quiet, confidential grin even while his angry finger waved and his voice burst out at John and Dimitrios. “I should follow your advice!” he said. “Wine is for meals. You uncivilized Schlemiels would sour your stomachs for good food.”
John groaned and rolled his head. Against the wall Otto was working at his nails with his knife. The argument started up again, nagging and unheeded. Davis said, with a wink at Joe, “I was reading in the Industrial Worker the other day, the Wobblies got a new slogan. ‘A kick in time saves nine.’ ”
Like a dog stepped on Moe Dreyfuss’ voice came up; his skewerlike finger stabbed the air straight upward. “You want vigilantes, eh? You want to bring out the mobbers and burners. A kick in time saves nothing, it is only a kick, it will get you back two for one. I leave it to Joe.”
But Joe shrugged, grinning, keeping one eye on the kettle of chow yuke.
“I ask you!” Moe was yelling. “What good is chunks of coal at an engineer’s head except to get a policeman shooting at you? What is to be gained by it, please explain this. What is the matter with argument, why do we have to have this force, force, force all the time? They have ten times as much force as you. This kick in time only raises hell.”
Before anyone could answer his finger was trembling upright again. “Another thing. This stealing from freight cars and warehouses. This is something that you justify too, maybe. We are fighting the S.P. and so we are entitled to steal from them, is that it?”
Otto Applequist dug in his ear, interested but apart; Manderich spit over the rail again. Herb Davis said, “Everything the boss makes is stolen from labor anyway. Labor creates all wealth. What’s wrong with taking a little of it back?”
“Show me an open boxcar some dark night and see how fast I equalize things,” Dimitrios said, but he and Davis were drowned out by Moe’s yelling. “Such logic! Such a way to think!”
“It sorts of depends on what you do it for, doesn’t it?” Joe said.
“The yug!” John said from the tomb.
“Moe,” Manderich’s grating voice said, “you’re just a yellow sheeny socialist. You remember v’en Alexander II vas assassinated? John Most wrote all over the front page of Die Freiheit how pleased he vas, and they t’rew him in jail. But he vas right, all the same. He knew it iss nezessary to fight. He said the same t’ing v’en McKinley vas shot.”
“Sure, and they threw him in jail again.”
“Does dot prove he vas wrong?” Manderich said.
With a wild gesture Moe raked his hair on end and gazed for a moment heavenward. The others were laughing, sprawling back on their hands.
“Listen!” Moe said. “Let me ask you something! You talk sabotage, you talk syndicalism, or anarchism, or whatever it is you talk. You talk like one of these assassinating people. You believe in dynamite under bridges and bombs at the policeman’s ball. You are one of these kick in time saves nine fellows that think they can persuade the Southern Pacific with lumps of coal …”
“Vell, there iss vun t’ing …”
“Let me tell you! I do not believe in murder as a means of propaganda. I don’t like stealing for a way of redistributing the wealth. I don’t like my free speech protected by continuous riot. Direct action! I would not want the smell of it on my clothes!”
“Moe’s a ballot-box boy,” Davis said. “Vote us right into the millennium.”
“There is more in it than ballot boxes,” Moe said. “If a man cannot use any arguments but punches in the nose, those are the arguments he will have used against him. There is such a thing as honesty and dishonesty, and right and wrong, and keeping your own hands clean.”
Manderich’s heavy body heaved up. His face was warped with contempt. “Vot business has a vorkingman got vit right and wrong?” he demanded, standing over Moe. “Right and wrong has notting to do vit us, nor neffer did haff.” His head swung at them, and with his lips clamped shut he clumped inside the shack and lay down on the brass bed and stared at the ceiling, breathing hard through his nose.
Moe Dreyfuss made a monkey gesture of dismissal, and they all laughed. “Old Art,” Dimitrios said. “He’ll blow some’m up yet.”
“He is a foolish man,” Moe said, almost quietly. “He is a person who would use sulphuric acid to cure a burn.”
“What you don’t make any allowance for is what they do,” Davis said. “You pull this kind of stuff for yourself, you’re just a hood and a strongarm man, but you do it in a fight, when they started it, and that’s another thing. It’s like Joe said, it depends on what you do it for.”
“Well, how far do you go?” Moe said. “Sabotage? Stealings? Assassinations?”
Joe’s eyes wandered to Otto, slumped against the wall, steering a bug with his finger as it crawled on the planks. His hand came up and he picked his nose lightly with his thumbnail. On either side of a center part his hair hung lank and limp. He was paying no attention to the talk.
“Do you see?” Moe said pityingly. “That is where you fool yourselves.”
Quietly John had rolled over behind Moe. Now, on hands and knees, he motioned at Dimitrios, who rose. There was a rush, a squawk as Moe went over backward, and a pounce on the jug of red wine. Putting his hand over Moe’s whole face to silence him, John said gently, “You vait for Moe or the S.P., you starve or die of t’irst. Sometimes you yust have to take t’ings avay.”
The jug was already uncorked and being passed around, while Moe watched in puckered disgust. He bent his head while John took a swig, but when John held the jug toward him he refused.
“Two things you get from wine,” he said. “Benefits or belly-aches. I am telling you this seriously. Benefits or belly-aches.”
When he had jumped to stir the chow yuke, Joe came back to the doorway. He felt rested and at ease, warmly among friends. “What benefits?” he said.
Now Moe’s inevitable finger was up again. “Ah,” he said, “you speak as a non-drinker. How should I tell you? But I bet you something. I bet you never felt one hundred per cent good in the stomach yet in all your life.” The finger dipped to jab at Moe’s breastbone between the open flaps of his vest. “You know about ulcers? Stomach ulcers? You know what it means, stomach ulcers?” His hand made squeezing and relaxing motions, as if crumbling dry bread. “This is your stomach. Grinding, grinding, always grinding, day in and day out, grinding away. A hen has gravel in her gizzard to help her grind, but what have you got? Nothing. A stomach only, always grinding. No wonder are ulcers.”
His look swept them all; his hand worked in the air. “Grinding, always grinding. No wonder are ulcers. Now! You put a little wine in your stomach when you eat. You oil up this grinding. What happens? Grinding, sure, but with lubrication. Ha? A little oil in the machinery. This is the benefits of wine.”
The finger trembled upright in the air. “With meals.”
“Art,” Dimitrios called, “you want a swig of Moe’s benefits?”
Manderich did not answer. With a winning, mischievous lifting and working of the eyebrows, Moe said, “Maybe he is afraid it is poisoned. That is what an anarchist would do. That is the anarchist way to win arguments, with strychnine.”
The dishwashing crew made a game of it. Davis, back against the wall as far as he could get from the stove where Dimitrios had his pail of suds, smacked his fist in his hand and crouched, waiting for the throw. Like a shortstop pivoting in a double play he took a slippery, spinning plate, swabbed off the suds, and spun it toward John, who clutched it in meaty hands and slid it into the packing-box cupboard. “All right in there!” Davis said—a terrier, the pepperbox of an infield. “That’s the way to go in there, boys! One away, two to go. Whaddyasay!”
In the open door Joe sprawled between Otto and Moe. He had a piece of paper stuck on the back of a broken washboard and he was sketching old Manderich, asleep against the house, his scowling face fallen half open, his breath sighing through loose lips. With his face lax in sleep he looked like a drunk. The lines from cheekbone to jaw were so deep they might have been made by a cleaver. He was an easy man to draw.
Crockery smashed inside, and Joe leaned in to see. Davis was stooping over the fragments of a cup. “Woops, error on the second baseman,” he said. He threw the fragments in the slop bucket and turned just in time to see a whirling iron skillet coming. He sprang backward, grabbed, and miraculously caught it by the handle. “Jesus,” he said, “take it easy!” Dimitrios, inspired, filled the air with knives and forks, and Davis fled, holding the skillet as a shield for his backside.
Joe looked back at his sketch, accenting the harsh sag of Manderich’s cheeks. Otto’s sleepy voice said, “You sticking around Pedro for a while?”
“Maybe.”
“Longshoring?”
“Not as long as this strike’s on.”
“I mean afterwards.”
“Maybe.”
He looked at Otto for an explanation of the questions, but Otto was staring across the flats, faintly smiling, and when he caught Joe’s eye the smile broadened.
“Ready to grease that lousy dock boss to get on his star gang?”
Joe shrugged, going back to the sketch.
“Because that’s the only way you’ll get any work,” Otto said.
Joe drew the hint of a wall behind Manderich’s shoulder and sketched the crumpled coat. “All right,” he said, at ease, among friends, not caring much, not paying much attention. “If there isn’t anything here I can try the lumber schooners.”
“Know any mates?” Otto said. “They’re the same god damn breed.”
“Listen!” Moe Dreyfuss exploded at Joe’s shoulder. “What is that of dock bosses and lumber schooners?” His finger tapped the sketch, and the washboard under it thumped like a drum. “Look what you can do. What do you want of star gangs and drinks for the mates? What are you after, anyway, a fellow like you?”
For one odd minute, in the warm shade, it was as if he had been caught asleep, torpid and full-bellied, and propounded a question that he must answer for his life. He looked at Moe as he would have looked at a dwarf suddenly materialized from the earth, and he answered cautiously, stalling.
“Do I have to be after something?”
The dwarf’s eyes were on him, bright as a bird’s. “You know what I am talking about,” Moe said. “Sometimes you remind me of a dog I had once. Did you ever know that dog? He was a foolish Chesapeake spaniel, and he had no brains, only energy.”
“That sure describes Joe,” Otto said.
“Only energy,” Moe was saying. “This dog would run all day, and you know what he ran after? Bird shadows. Up and down the shore, running with his nose to the ground, chasing bird shadows.”
A hand from behind pushed Joe’s head down until his nose was on the washboard, and John’s great feet went past. Dimitrios and Davis came after him, so that the odd importunity of Moe’s question was relieved. Manderich awoke, clopping his jaws. “Here comes McGibbeney,” Dimitrios said, and Joe looked across toward town and saw the railroader coming along the path through the salt grass.
Horsy and full of beans, John Alberg placed himself in McGibbeney’s way and postured like a prize fighter, throwing out his butt and cocking his fists. McGibbeney, who came to his shoulder, thumped him hard on the chest, and when John reached for him in earnest, beat a nimble tattoo on the big Swede’s arm and shoulder and skipped away.
“Ohol” John said. The railroader was grinning.
“You big hunk of beef,” he said. “I warn you. Just try laying your dirty paws on me. I’ll cut you up like stew …”
John lunged for him; there was a brief swift flurry of grunts and blows, the railroader ducking back out of reach, his hands light and fast against John’s bulk. But as he ducked sideways his foot turned, and John’s hand closed in the back of his jumper. As McGibbeney went up in the air he flipped nimbly and whipped a headlock around John’s neck, but John pawed with one hand, broke loose the hold, and like a man trying to control a struggling cat, turned McGibbeney upside down and held him out by the
ankles. Then he vibrated. There was no other word for it. His face red with effort, grinning back at the circle of men around him, he jiggled up and down so fast that McGibbeney was unable even to double back and get hold of a leg. He was vibrated out as stiff as clothing in a wind, and in a moment he began to disintegrate.
The laughter of the watching men exploded as McGibbeney’s jumper shook down over his head and his fat watch came out and jerked and flipped on the end of its thick chain. Small change scattered out of his pockets; a smothered strangling yowl came from inside the dangling jumper; McGibbeney threshed, trying to twist and catch John’s leg. With a final mighty effort, leaning far forward and jigging like a minstrel, John shook him loose. There was another squawk, and McGibbeney’s upper teeth flew ten feet sideways and landed in the dust.
They collapsed on the ground and howled. Even Manderich was laughing so hard that Joe, wiping his suffused and streaming eyes, felt laughter weaken and melt his bones. John dropped McGibbeney on his shoulders in the dirt and staggered, purple-faced and helpless, to the shack wall.
When Joe could see again he wiped the backs of his hands across his eyes and watched McGibbeney getting himself assembled. McGibbeney was jerky with wrath as he stooped and hunted for dimes and quarters. With his teeth out his sharply hooked nose almost touched his chin, and as he bent to retrieve his teeth from the dirt he looked impossibly like a hen eyeing a bug just before pecking it. They died again with mirth.
“Big god damn ape!” McGibbeney said as he passed them. They fell out of his way in mock terror as he stamped into the shack and washed off the teeth in a dipper of water.
“Laugh!” he said, coming out again. “Laugh your damn lunatic brains out! I’ll take on anybody my weight here, and by God I’ll make hash of him.” He dusted off the shoulders of his jumper, slapping the stiff denim.
“Nobody here your weight,” Herb Davis said. “You’re in a class by yourself, Frank.” His head perked sideward. “Unless maybe Moe …”
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 5
