Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  The man ahead made one circle and stopped, waiting for them. “Who’re you guys? Wobblies? Yeah, okay.”

  “It looks to me as if this was more sympathy than strike,” Joe said. “Where are all your trainmen?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” the man said. “This is all sort of on the spur of the moment. They run in this bunch of scabs about six, and we’re sticking it out till they quit. I been here since four.”

  They started again, moving slowly, Joe and Manderich lagging until they opened a space between themselves and the other. “Holy smoke,” Joe said. “This is a kind of sad strike.” Art only grunted.

  Around and around, shuffling and lag-footed, half asleep, a headless and tailless motion without destination, the line moved. Into darkness, around into murky light, into darkness again, stubborn and dull and ineffectual, seven men walking in protest before a locked gate to shame the scabs who labored on uninterrupted; a handful of impotent men trying to force concessions from an opponent who laughed at them and rode over them and held them off with the blue and brass of the law. To Joe, shuffling with the rest in and out of the light, it seemed as if he had got trapped in something immutable and interminable, without beginning or end, like the little blind light that crawled round and round the sign above the Peerless Pool Parlor.

  Maybe it was always your strike, as Art said, but this was a bad strike, badly organized and already drying up, and it graveled him to sink himself in it and get muddied by its hopelessness. It was a meager satisfaction that being on the line was a defiance to the cop. The cop could run the whole bunch of them off the waterfront if he wanted to call out the wagon, and the S.P. and the newspapers and the law and public opinion would all justify him. Only because the bosses held it in contempt was the picket line permitted to operate at all.

  And out on the dock the scabs were justifying themselves as free American workingmen who weren’t going to be pushed around and told what to do by a bunch of radicals and foreigners.

  Around and around and around, stubborn and shuffling and sullen and confused and too few, the pickets circled. Probably all of them wanted to sit down. Occasionally, for a while, one did, or two, to light a pipe and smoke a few minutes before coming back in again. There was no reason they should not all sit down except that if they did they would admit to the cops and gatekeeper and scabs that militancy had its limits and that rebellion could grow tired.

  So they shuffled along their symbolic frontiers, and as they shuffled Joe with another part of his mind walked in other lines, not in pointless circles but directly and boldly toward a gate, a door, a goal. He walked ahead of multitudes like a troubadour or a pied piper, leading them with songs, scattering sarcasm like acid on the ones who held back and weakened the cause. These were the ones who prepared every defeat: the unconvincibles, the immovables, the Mr. Blocks, the scabs and the scissorbills.

  He was making a song as he went:

  You may ramble round the country anywhere you will,

  You’ll always run across the same old Scissor Bill.

  He’s found upon the desert, he is on the hill,

  He’s found in every mining camp and lumber mill.

  He looks just like a human, he can eat and walk,

  But you will find he isn’t when he starts to talk …

  Scissor Bill the foreigners is cussing,

  Scissor Bill, he says “I hate a coon.”

  Scissor Bill is down on everybody,

  The Hottentots, the bushmen, and the man in the moon.

  Don’t try to talk your union talk to Scissor Bill,

  He says he never organized and never will.…

  He bumped into Manderich, who had stopped. “Dey’re coming oudt,” Manderich said.

  A stir moved among the shadowy figures of the pickets. Blattner and Coscarart had picked up placards from the platform and now had them on their shoulders: “Don’t Scab on Your Fellow Workers—Join the One Big Union,” and “Shoulder to Shoulder-Solidarity of All Labor.” The line was not a line any longer, but a group, and there was more life in it when it stood still than there had been when it moved. A perceptible preparatory intentness had come over the gatekeeper and the cops too. The cops were sitting straight on their horses, the gatekeeper scraped his chair as he rose. The scabs were coming in a compact cluster.

  Just as the gate swung open Manderich’s harsh voice grated at Joe’s ear. “Come oudt! Don’t be a lousy scap! Come oudt and fight on the right side!”

  Now they were all shouting. The cops moved over, holding their horses broadside so that the pickets had to yell across them at the scabs, who moved compactly across the platform and into the street. In the shifting light of lanterns the scabs’ faces looked still and wooden. The further they moved the more furious Manderich’s harsh bellow became.

  “Vot are dey paying you to scap? Uh? Vot kind of dirty sonofapitching money do you get? How does it feel to be a scap? You know vot a scap iss? A scap iss a sonofapitch dot vould steal Christ off the cross for two bits!”

  Someone in the tight group of scabs shouted back. In an instant Manderich had sprung around the shoulder of the protecting horse. “Vot do you say? You sonofapitching scap?”

  The policeman rode him back among the pickets, and as the horse moved Joe saw Harry Piper in the crowd of scissorbills. He had been cool enough before, shouting with the others but not letting himself get mad. But to see someone he knew among the enemy filled him with a strangling fury.

  “Hey, Harry!”

  Piper’s face jerked for a moment sideward, looking blindly into the murk, and turned back. “Come out!” Joe yelled. “You don’t belong in there. Come out and join up!”

  The policeman had pivoted his horse and was coming back, so close that Joe had to jump to avoid being trampled. A dab of saliva from the bit flew and landed wet on his cheek. The touch of it doubled his rage. He ducked, came up, saw that Manderich had again eluded the police and was blocking the way of the scabs, who veered left to go around him. That put them between Manderich and the police, so that they couldn’t ride him out of the way. The cop nearest Joe swore and kicked his horse, which leaped suddenly off to the right. And into the hole he left Joe dove like a ferret, intent on reaching Harry Piper and dragging him out. As he caught up with the retreating edge of the group one of the scabs turned with a thin almost whimpering cry and swung a dinner pail at his head.

  The pail crashed against his shoulder and spilled open, and he leaped in punching with both hands in the midst of a sudden violent melee. At the last moment he saw the horse coming and sprang aside. Something struck him across nose and mouth with eye-watering violence, he was on his hands and knees, covering up, and the weight and power of the horse went past him, missing him by inches. When he shook his head clear and came up among struggling figures and the short grunting outcries of fighting, he saw Manderich holding off several men by swinging a lantern. Art rushed, driving the men back and giving Joe time to scramble in beside him. Then the two retreated slowly, back to back, across the street toward the warehouses and protecting darkness.

  Manderich was wheezing with effort. He fumbled at his suspender and pressed something into Joe’s hand. It was a four-inch hatpin. “The horse, if you get a chance,” he said.

  A man ran diagonally across the intersection pursued by one of the policemen. When the horse was almost on him he ducked, covering his head with his hands, but the cop anticipated him and clubbed him twice before the plunging horse carried him past. As he turned and came back past the puddled shadow of the picket’s body the shadow of horse and man, cast by light from a spilled and broken lantern, leaped clear across the street and up the corrugated warehouse wall.

  With the cops behind them, the scabs were pressing in again. Manderich kept them at arm’s length with the swinging lantern, Joe held the hatpin ready for anyone who rushed. “Vatch him!” Manderich said.

  Joe rose to his toes, ready to jump either way, as the cop came in from the side. He had a moment of
absolute paralyzed panic when the hoofs roared in on him. He saw the flattened ears, the glaring eyes, the foaming mouth, a spark of metal on the martingale, and then he was leaping aside, the swinging club grazed his coattails, and he pivoted awkwardly and swung the hatpin at the passing haunches.

  It went in sweetly, almost its full length. The screaming horse rose up, plunging out of control. He saw the arc of Manderich’s lantern thrown at the faces of the scabs and the two of them were running, in almost total dark now. The black of a wall went past, they turned up a narrow alley between buildings, running cautiously with their hands outstretched, until the sky lightened above and they were in the enclosing walls of a court. Straining in the blackness, his eyes made out regular shapes that he recognized as parked dray wagons.

  Following Manderich’s heavy running shape across the court he put his hand up to his numb face. Cheek and Up and chin were dripping wet, and he tasted the metal taste of blood.

  Manderich hissed over his shoulder and Joe followed him in pitch-blackness down what seemed to be another alley, following him by the crunch of his shoes in cinders. Back of them, apparently far away, he heard the faint noise of riot.

  Now they came again into the open, and their feet felt rails. Over three tracks and around a string of boxcars, and they were headed toward town. But as they stepped out across another track a lantern burst from behind something and its light drove them backward, running again and hearing the pound of feet, the yells of pursuit. They dodged right, sprinted along a string of cars, dodged right again, working back toward the waterfront side. Looking back Joe saw two lights coming now instead of one, and when he turned his head there was a third light ahead.

  Manderich swore. Yells converged upon them, and they ran, only to find themselves abruptly against a high wire fence with buildings beyond. “Left!” Joe said. They should be at the edge of the yards, and there should be a street crossing. If there weren’t, they were done.

  Blood was seeping down under his collar. Whatever had hit him had cut him pretty deep. Trying to run silently, he turned his ankle on loose rock or coal and almost fell. Panic came up in him, and he sprinted.

  Manderich’s soft grunt told him they had made it. The fence turned a right angle, they cut down a narrow street between buildings, crossed two sidings and were out of the yards. It was so black that they had to feel again, slowing to a walk. Ties of a spur track, gritty cinders underfoot, warehouse doors one after another, two feet above the ground. The noise of pursuit had stopped. Perhaps the yard dicks had stopped when they failed to pull the net against the fence. Along the door-broken wall they groped carefully, panting. Then both stopped at once. Ahead of them more wall, solid black. They were in a court, a pocket. If the dicks came in the other end they were trapped.

  Before they had moved twenty feet along the wall, looking for an alley or outlet, the lantern appeared at the far end of the court.

  The court was as bare as a field, no place to hide in, not even a platform to crawl under. There was not a chance to ambush and slug the pursuer. A short block away the light was coming toward them, unhurried and confident.

  Manderich made a soft, furious sound of disgust, and stopped, but Joe leaped along the wall trying every warehouse door in a last deperate hope of escaping. Incredibly, the third door slid open a few inches with a light rumble and squeak. He hissed at Manderich, they slipped inside, Joe put his weight against the door and very carefully slid it shut again. He felt for bolt or hook, but there was none. Apparently some patent lock that had failed to catch. A watchman’s bonehead was their good luck. But there was no way of locking the door against the dicks.

  He whispered to Manderich. “What if he sticks his head in here?”

  “Knock it off.”

  Leaning against the wall in total black, trying to breathe noiselessly through his mouth and hearing Manderich’s asthmatic wheezing six feet away, Joe keyed his ears for sound outside, but he heard nothing. Under the handkerchief he held pressed against his face, his cuts bled steadily. His collar was soaked, and the handkerchief was a wet wad in his hand. Nose and lip had begun to sting and burn.

  His hand, groping cautiously behind him in search of weapons, found nothing. Then he realized that he still held the hatpin. That, then. It ought to take the fight out of a dick as fast as anything else. He listened.

  Abruptly Manderich’s breathing stopped. Steps were coming closer, there was a rattle as a door was tried. Then steps were just outside, stopping. Moving an inch at a time, Joe slid the soaked handkerchief into his pocket and transferred the hatpin to his left hand. Flattened against the wall, he waited.

  The door rattled, moved a little, slid. A crack of light split into the big gloom. Its diffused glow showed the shape of Manderich crouched beyond the opening, ready to spring. Joe gathered himself.

  But in a moment the door slid softly shut again, the crack of light closed, the footsteps went on, and Joe heard the next door being tried, and the next, then a third, and then silence.

  The letdown was worse than a fight would have been. For unbearable minutes they stood rigid, waiting for something—the return of the footsteps, the rush of a whole bunch of dicks possibly gathered now outside, a flank attack from inside the warehouse. Both front and back, the dark was ripe with danger. Joe strained his ears until the faintest sound of a rat rustling somewhere deep in the warehouse, or the tick of a metal door contracting in the night chill, filled his whole head.

  Why should a dick or a watchman, finding a warehouse door unlocked, simply shut it up again and go on without even locking it? It could only be that he was afraid to tackle the place alone, even with a gun and a light. He must have gone back for help.

  “We’d better get out of here!” he whispered to Manderich.

  “Maybe he iss vatching outside.”

  “What’ll we do, then?”

  “Vait,” Manderich whispered. “Vait and see. Maybe he aindt coming back.”

  “He’s bound to.”

  “Vait!”

  In the dark there was no such thing as time. They might have waited fifteen minutes or three hours. Joe sat, holding the soggy handkerchief against his cuts, and felt how his face gradually stiffened and how the wounds began to develop a crust of dried blood. The blackness above and around was hollow and unending. It pressed in and down, and suddenly instead of being infinite it was close and smothering, so that he put out a hand half expecting to touch a silently encroaching wall. He had a moment of white-hot rage at whatever or whoever had hit him in the scuffle by the dock. Once he thought of Betty Spahn and her remark about his hard mouth. Was it the scars? He would have a hard mouth for fair now.

  In the blackness, a mile or a yard away, something stirred. Old Art’s whisper was like something that came across space on a wire. “Dis is damn funny!”

  “I’m for getting out.”

  “Nah,” Manderich said. “Let’s vait a little longer.”

  Joe heard him rustling and groping back into the depths of the warehouse, sliding his feet a few inches at a time across the gritty floor. After an indeterminable time his hissing whisper came back.

  “What?” Joe whispered.

  “Come on back here.”

  He made little pst pst sounds for Joe to guide himself by, until Joe’s hands found bales of something—hemp, by the smell-stacked one on another, and Manderich’s pst came from directly above him.

  “Come up and take it easy,” Art said.

  “Don’t you think we’d better get out?”

  “I t’ink ve better vait.”

  Up on the tight bales they could stretch out. Some of the tenseness went out of the dark. When after a minute or two Joe felt the bales shaking under him, he realized that old Art was lying there laughing silently.

  “That all happened kind of sudden,” he said.

  “Dirty scaps, it’s a good t’ing,” Manderich said. He growled with pleasure. “I vish it had been me got dot cop’s horse. But by Gott you got him good. He
vent up ten feet.”

  “Where’d you get the hatpin?”

  “In Austria ve carried hatpins for the Polizei,” Art said. “I learned dot from Johann Most. Alvays I carry it here, in my suspender. You still got it? Giff it back.”

  Joe handed him the pin and lay back on the bales, staring upward and gently working the stiffened Up and cheek. “What do you think will happen now there’s been trouble on the docks?”

  “More Polizei,” Art said. “Pinkertons and gunmen for scaps.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “If ve don’t know vot to do ven a fight breaks oudt, ve should haff our heads examined,” Art said, and would have said more if Joe’s hand had not leaped out to grab his arm.

  They heard the warehouse door roll gently open, roll shut again. No light came with it this time; it opened and closed in utter darkness. There was an indistinguishable low noise, rustling or whispering, and then feet moved on the gritty floor. In a moment Joe heard clear whispers. At least two of them then.

  Afraid to stir for fear of making a sound, Joe lay on his back and strained to hear. It was Art’s fault. If they had cleared out when they had the chance they wouldn’t be trapped here now. Holding his breath, willing that even the beating of his heart should stop, he waited for them to begin the organized search that would hunt him and Art down.

  Metal clinked, a match flared hugely in the barnlike space, and the steadying glow of a lantern swelled out against the dark. He heard their whispers again.

  Why, if these were dicks or watchmen come to hunt them, were there only two? And why did they light a lantern so casually, making targets of themselves in case the men they were hunting carried guns? And why did they come now so incautiously into the warehouse, moving without hesitation or stealth?