Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “Aren’t you coming to the hall?”

  “I’ve got some business to tend to.”

  “All right,” she said. “So long, kiddo.”

  As if by design he went up the street to Romberg’s Turkish Baths and for three quarters of an hour sat in the breathless steam feeling the sweat start from his pores and his body open and grow slippery with sweat and the impurities drain from body and mind. Eventually the unrest created in him by Betty Spahn subsided and he knew who he was again.

  Gradually, as he quieted in the lulling, thick-breathing cubicle, his feeling about the afternoon subtly altered. By the time he dressed and went out, headed for the Harbor Cafe and a hot beef sandwich, it had become a feeling very like triumph. At least when he met Tom Barnabas again there would be no uncomfortable inferiority. He could look Barnabas right straight in the eye.

  7 San Pedro, July, 1910

  Herb Davis had the usual IWW style of oratory—direct, loud, emphatic, and profane. He pounded his hand and shook his fists and spread his arms, thrusting his face down close from the soapbox and bawling out what he had to say. But Tom Barnabas, who followed him, was a different kind of public speaker. His voice was deeper and richer; without effort he could make it carry twice as far as Herb’s. He did not swear and he did not denounce, but broke the opposition on a wheel of irony. And he had one infallibly successful trick: at any moment the rich voice would drop until people leaned and strained to hear what he was saying with such profound and confidential feeling. And just as they lost the sense of his low murmur the big booming volume would burst out in their faces, rattling their wits. He was as soft and insinuating as an actor and as irresistible as a firehose. It made no difference what he said. The slightest triviality, bursting suddenly from the middle of a confidential and conversational discourse, sounded like the thunder from Sinai. At eight o’clock, in a doorway on Beacon Street, Joe and Art Manderich and Frank McGibbeney stood at the edge of a good crowd and listened.

  “By damn,” McGibbeney said, “if we only had him around here for a while we could lick the b’Jesus out of the S.P. I think he could convince even a scab.”

  “You t’ink he iss dot goot?” Manderich said.

  “He’s pretty good,” Joe said. He had just caught himself leaning to catch the lowered voice, and now as he looked at his companions he saw that they were both leaning too. “See?”

  “… our mothers used to tell us,” Barnabas was saying. “… taught us in Sunday School. Remember how it used to go? Honest toil … tell us. Labor is an honorable condition. In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread. Man’s lot on earth. Sure, there were bosses, but the bosses were decent fellows, generally. So if you’d just do right by the boss he’d do right by you.”

  Big and well dressed and handsome, with eyes that were eloquent even in the broken dusk of the street, he stood above the crowd smiling, waiting for the laughter to die. His voice accepted them all as brothers to whom one could talk freely. “There are scissorbills all around us who go through a whole lifetime without knowing that stuff for what it is,” he said. “You and I know what it is.” He paused, broke contact with the crowd as if for a moment’s thought. Almost to himself he added, “There’s a lot of it in cow pastures as well as in Sunday Schools.”

  Then his voice went out over the spreading laughter, shouting it down, cracking over them like a whip. “I don’t have to tell you these things, fellow workers! You don’t have to come to a meeting and hear me talk to know these things! You know without me telling you that you can work till you get a hump on your back like the sacred ox of India, and when you can’t work any more does the boss take care of you, that decent fellow? The cemeteries and charity hospitals in this land of liberty are full of workingmen who tried to do right by the boss!”

  McGibbeney was shouting with the rest. He wet his lips and pounded his hands together and then held his applause to hear Barnabas’ voice.

  “… our fellow workers the railway trainmen,” it said. “The IWW is behind this strike with everything it’s got. You’ll see us in the picket lines at the yards and the docks, not because the IWW itself has got a thing to gain or a dollar to make out of this strike, BUT BECAUSE WE STAND FOR THE SOLIDARITY OF ALL LABOR! BECAUSE WE WON’T SCAB ON OUR FELLOW WORKERS!”

  Joe kept himself back from the flow of the oratory, refusing to give his full acceptance to it, because he was busy appraising Barnabas, the smooth head dully shining under the light, the wide reassuring shoulders. But he felt no real envy, only curiosity, a watchfulness that might teach him something, and he was practicing in his mind how the words of a speech might go when the heckler broke out off to the left. “Shovel it somewheres else!” the voice bawled. At Joe’s elbow old Manderich stiffened and half turned like a dog stopped by a sudden hot scent. Barnabas went on without interruption.

  “I have one thing to say to you tonight, and only one. I can’t give you the lowdown on this strike. I’ll leave that to Herb Davis and the other local boys. But I can tell you this because I have lived it and worked for it and I know. This is the message of the One Big Union. There is only one way for the workingman to fight the bosses and obtain his rights. Industrial unionism, the solidarity of all labor …”

  Granite-faced and stolid, Manderich took a step or two out of the doorway. Joe followed, alert for a repetition of the catcall. They moved smoothly among standing men, a sailor and his girl, a skirted, smiling, out-of-place priest, drifting toward the left where the voice had come from. They had to wait several minutes before the heckler opened his mouth again, and when he did, they were within ten feet of him. He looked like a workingman, young, hat on the back of his head, hands in his pockets, a big grin on his face, enjoying himself. The veins swelled in his neck with the strength of his bellow: “If you don’t like it here why don’t you go back where you come from?”

  A look passed between Manderich and Joe. Manderich went right, Joe left. From the soapbox Barnabas’ big laughing voice came back: “Because where I came from they teach this crap about honest toil!”

  Laughter smothered whatever else Barnabas said, but the heckler, either drunk or stupid, bawled delightly, “Bullshit, fellow worker!” He squeezed his shoulders together and said it again. “Bullshit, fellow worker!”

  A man close to him caught Joe’s eye and stepped back. Manderich had come within arm’s length of the heckler on the other side, and McGibbeney was behind. Laughter and angry muttering rumbled off in the crowd, but in this close pocket there was sudden quiet. The man who had caught Joe’s eye backed up another step.

  Across the heckler’s shoulder Manderich looked at Joe, his face as expressionless as wood. Then he lurched awkwardly, shoving the heckler back into McGibbeney.

  McGibbeney snarled, “Watch where you’re going, for Christ sake!” and shoved him back. He turned with his hands up, ready for fight, but Joe swung silently from the side and the wind went out of the heckler with a grunt. His hands came down just as Manderich hit him, then Joe swung again, a hard bone-jarring blow to the head, and the man was down. The three of them stood in a little eddy in the crowd, Barnabas still speaking, everything done so smoothly that there was hardly a disturbance. Of the four involved, only McGibbeney had made a sound. Now Manderich stooped, got the heckler under the arms, and dragged him against the wall, where he propped him. In another minute the three of them had melted into the crowd and got across the street.

  McGibbeney was so delighted he could hardly speak. He pounded Joe’s shoulder and stared with respect at the iron-jawed, saturnine Manderich. “I never saw anything done so slick,” he said. “You guys must have worked on goon squads before.”

  Manderich grunted. “We worked out that technique when Jack London was running for mayor of Oakland.”

  “Is that a fact? Do you know Jack London?”

  Manderich winked at Joe and said heavily, “Frank iss like a liddle boy. He hass neffer been in a fight.”

  “Any old time you want anyth
ing!” McGibbeney said. He shadowboxed, doing fancy footwork on the sidewalk, ripping the air with jabs and hooks. The grim face of Manderich almost smiled. In the look he gave Joe there was something humorous and comradely, recognizing a bond that set the two of them apart from a magpie like Mac. As for Joe, he had always thought of himself as a reckless man; he had never doubted his own nerve. But old Art, he thought, had never backed up from anything in his life. If he started coming for you you would have to kill him to stop him.

  Singing was spreading raggedly across the street—“Casey Jones hit the river bottom, Casey Jones broke his blooming spine …” The boys were already working through the crowd selling song cards for a dime each. One thrust a card into Joe’s face, peered and saw who his customer was, and passed on laughing, saying, “What the hell!”

  “So you are getting famous,” Manderich said.

  Herb Davis was making the pitch for relief funds for the striking trainmen, bellowing over the stir and break-up of the crowd. Joe dropped fifty cents in the hat as it went by. It was just-dark, the air misty and soft on his face. Standing back against the wall he saw how the dew settled and clung to metal and stone, how it condensed and ran down the tin sign tacked against the bricks.

  The brief flurry with the heckler had left him aroused and unsatisfied; he waited like an actor for another cue that would bring him onstage, and as he waited beside McGibbeney and Manderich, Davis came by with Barnabas and Betty Spahn, hurrying them toward their hotel. Barnabas stopped long enough to shake hands.

  “You’ll hear from me soon as I get back to Chicago. If you write any more, shoot them on to headquarters.”

  To Manderich and McGibbeney, turning to them as if not to distinguish Joe above them, he said, “You boys down here are doing a fine job. Just keep on organizing, that’s the ticket.”

  McGibbeney said, “How does it look to you? How do you think well come out?”

  “This strike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can win.” It was in the tone of his voice that he already thought this strike lost. His voice rose on the oratorical boom. “Even if we don’t, we’ll use it to build with. We get stronger all the time. Just keep on bringing the boomers in.”

  He saluted them and turned away, Betty Spahn with him. She had not said a word, but as she turned she smiled at Joe in the dusk, and he nodded in return. That way, as casually as she had come into it, she went out of his life. He had a feeling that he would never see her again and that it would not matter if he didn’t, but he bore her no ill will. He even liked her rather vaguely. She had taught him something. The hand he raised in answer to Tom Barnabas’ salute was as casual and easy as Barnabas’ own.

  Their hands behind them against the bricks, they leaned back again. After a minute old Manderich growled, “Ve vill build! Gott damn, vy don’t ve fight?”

  “How?” Joe said. “It isn’t really our strike.”

  “It iss alvays our strike,” Manderich said. “It iss alvays our strike and a strike iss a fight. It iss all right for trainmen to valk up and down only. Trainmen are only fair vages for a fair day’s vork people. But it iss not all right for IWW’s. The IWW iss for fighting. Valking up and down, dot iss no way to beat the S.P.”

  McGibbeney said, “You should have got up there and soapboxed, Art,” but Manderich brushed the irrelevant gabble aside. “Today I vas down on dot picket line. A big cop vas dere, a big bull-necked cop. He says to me, ‘Vy all the time valking up and down? Don’t you get tired? Vy don’t you go home so ve can all take a rest?’ I says to him, ‘Efen valking iss better as kissing bosses’ asses.’ ”

  Joe laughed. McGibbeney, delighted, said, “What’d he say then? He get sore?”

  “Vot should he say? He said, ‘Probably you haff kissed enough so you know all aboudt it.’ ”

  His great head ducked, and he spit. “So I said to him, ‘I haff kissed plenty. Vunce I used to be a cop.’ But dot cop vas right. Vot good iss valking up and down?”

  The knuckles of Joe’s right hand were still stiff from the blow he had landed on the scissorbill—a satisfying slight pain that kept him aware and awake. He was thinking how seldom you got a chance like that, a clear punch at a clear enemy. He knew the dissatisfaction that lay beneath old Art’s grumbling. Solidarity, sure. Make speeches, organize, take up collections, strike, join the picket line, sit in smoky halls and plan strategy, meeting moves with countermoves, trying to make your little strength match everything that the bosses could bring to bear, writing protests and petitions, carrying placards and banners—the clear sense of a fight got lost in the machinery of labor tactics.

  “What we need is a few tough old lumberjacks down here,” he said.

  “Shit,” Manderich said in contempt. “Vot do ve need of lumberjacks? Vot iss the matter vit us?”

  “They always roll out the paddy wagon,” McGibbeney said. “That’s what makes you sore. There’s always a batch of coppers around, and the first move you make you land in jail.”

  “Let me tell you,” Manderich said. “In such a system it iss a distinction to be in jail.”

  It seemed to Joe that they had been standing there indefinitely. He flexed his fingers; the itch to be doing something made him kick the brick wall. Up the street the electric sign above the Peerless Pool Parlor jerked into brightness, its hundreds of little globes glowing steadily for a few seconds before it took off on its mechanical night-long repetition of movement. First there was a pool table and a bending player outlined in white lights. Then a cue flashed on in the player’s hand. Then the triangle of colored balls appeared at the far end of the table. Then the cue jerked backward, jerked forward. The cue ball blinked down an unerring line, the colored balls broke and ran in every direction and one after another blinked out in corner or side pockets. Then cue and table and bending player went black too, leaving only a single clicking light that crawled around the outline of the sign, unhurried and inevitable and purposeless as the days in a man’s life.

  Joe recognized the sign and everything it said. It said that in the friendly surroundings of the Peerless Pool Parlor players of unerring accuracy made mechanically perfect shots. It implied that at the Peerless everything was arranged for a man’s pleasure and relaxation; friendly games of skill to pass the time. It intimated that it must be a pretty good world if on a workingman’s street there could be palaces of pleasure like the Peerless, open to everyone, and that in these places the shot never missed, the ball never kissed or rebounded, the cue never scratched, the cushions were never dead or crooked. The sign said this to him three or four times with a rigid, automaton inflexibility; on every break, every ball ran unerringly toward a pocket. And all the time the little clicking insinuating light crept around and around and around the edge.

  “I wonder what would happen if that guy missed sometime?” he said. Manderich and McGibbeney looked, but he saw that they had no idea what he was talking about. To break the inertia that pressed too heavily upon him he said, “Let’s go on down to the docks and see if anything’s stirring.”

  “Jeez, I don’t know,” said McGibbeney. “I was just thinkin’ I better be gettin’ on home before the old lady throws a fit.”

  “They keep running scabs through there. The bigger we keep that picket line the better.”

  “I did a trick down at the yards this morning,” McGibbeney said.

  “All right,” Joe said. “You go on home.” He half expected McGibbeney to follow as he and Manderich turned down the street, but when he looked back from the corner the sidewalk was empty. Contempt for McGibbeney tightened his mouth. A spare-time milker, a milk-and-water rebel, a big bag of wind.

  Crossing the web of tracks on the way to the waterfront they were yelled at, and a man put a bull’s-eye lantern on them. “Where do you guys think you’re going?”

  “Down to the dock,” Joe said.

  “What for? What do you want?”

  “Vot difference does it make?” said Manderich.

  �
��Go on,” the yard dick said. “Get on back where you come from. You don’t go across here.”

  They retreated. “Dot iss a sample,” Manderich said. “Dey own the gott damn vorld.”

  Circling, they crossed the tracks at an intersection. The watchman in the door of the switchman’s shanty stared at them but made no move to stop them, and they came out on the dock side to see the glow of lanterns and the popping fizzle of the arc lights out on the dock. Evenly spaced along the horizon, the breakwater lights strung out beyond. Between lanterns hung on both sides of the dock gates, two policemen sat their horses and talked with the gatekeeper.

  “Vorking overtime,” Manderich said, and jerked a hand at the figures out along the dock. “How does a scap figure?”

  Joe saw how it was arranged like a stage, how the shadows of the skeleton picket line moved back and forth in the street below the platform, how the dock stretched vaguely outward, spotted with lights and the small dark figures of men. He put his foot up on the edge of the platform, silently watching.

  Then he felt the silence, and into the silence came the soft plop of hoofs. One of the cops was above them, leaning on his pommel. “What are you boys doing down here?”

  “Standing,” Manderich said. “It iss a public street.”

  “Ah, Dutchy,” the cop said. “I didn’t recognize you at first.” For a considerable quiet time he looked them over. “You guys better move on,” he said.

  “Yes?” Manderich said. “Vy?”

  “Want to argue it?” the cop said softly.

  “We’ve got a perfect right to get into that picket line,” Joe said.

  The cop straightened up. “If you’re getting into the line, get in it. You can’t just hang around here.”

  Bringing his foot down from the platform edge, Manderich grunted, “I vould argue aboudt my rights to stand on a public street, but ve are not arguing now. Ve are valking only. So ve vill go valk.”

  They passed contemptuously close to the putteed calf, the swelling thigh, the uniformed wrist with the billy hanging loosely from it. Neither horse nor rider moved. Behind a shadow who turned out to be Whitey Blattner, a Wobbly trucker from a brewery warehouse, they shuffled into the line. Joe lagged, turning to see who else was on, and recognized Coscarart, a longshoreman, and Bill Sever, a sailor. The other two he did not know. Across the street the temporary headquarters shack was dark.