Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “Tventy-eight hundred peoples,” Manderich said. “It iss a city.”

  “Some city,” Joe said. “Some City Beautiful.” It bothered him that the sounds the camp made were not more obviously unhappy sounds, the vocal anguish of the oppressed. There was no doubt that the pickers in this camp were beaten down like slaves, yet the sounds they made were light, almost hopeful. The chunk of an axe had a purposeful and solid ring; the noise of the children was full of laughter. If people didn’t have such a capacity to take a beating, the revolution would come ten times faster. He looked across the ditch into the great hopfields, unbroken, apparently without end. As far as he could see southward the geometry of the frames angled and changed and set up rows and lines. It was incredible that one man should own so much, and incredible that by the mere fact of owning it he could acquire the use of twenty-eight hundred human farm animals, and incredible that twenty-eight hundred people would consent to be used like animals, or worse than animals. An animal you valued, you took care of.

  A hundred feet away, left in the center of a small discreet open space, was a weathered privy. Three children hung around it, and as Manderich and Joe came along the welt of the ditch Manderich’s elbow dug Joe’s body. “Here iss one t’ing.” Loitering, they watched.

  From back among the camps a man came, walking fast, and when he saw the privy with no crowd around it he speeded up almost to a run. But the privy door was locked, and when he had rattled it impatiently once he turned away scowling. A cloud of flies, luminous in the sun-struck dust, lifted from the half-open flap behind and slowly settled again. The man walked a few yards away and sat down on a stump to which a camper had guyed his tent. On the other side of the privy the three children lingered. One of the girls wrapped her legs together and hopped, grimacing, and the three giggled. A man with a boy by the hand came along the ditch, saw the man waiting on the stump, and wordlessly fell in behind him, starting a line.

  The privy door swung back and a gaunt woman stepped out. The waiting man rose smartly from his stump, but the children raced as if in a game and piled in and slammed the door before the man had taken three steps. He went back to the stump, and he and the gaunt woman exchanged looks of hatred as she passed.

  Old Manderich’s face was like brown worn rock. “It iss for pigs,” he said. “In all dis camp, eight backhouses, all mixed up for men and vomen, no lime, everyt’ing oferflowing vit flies and cherms. Three, four hundred peoples to one backhouse, and plenty of dysentery. Iss it for human beings or iss it for pigs?”

  They moved aside to let a woman and two children pass. The drawers of one child, a girl, hung down dirty and sopped, and her face was tear-streaked. As her mother yanked her and the little boy down the embankment toward the privy the man on the stump saw her coming, and raised his head with an expression of warning on his face. The woman, glancing aside from her concentrated dragging of the two children, saw him, and the man and boy behind him, clearly a forming line. Her mouth tightened; she hung indecisive, hesitating. At that instant the three other children swarmed out of the privy, whamming the door back against the wall, and before the door had swung halfway back into place the woman was running, dragging her girl and boy along. Her hair flew across her face as she yanked the girl inside, stood sideways to let the boy slide past her, and pulled the door shut.

  The man had risen from his stump. Now he looked across at Joe and Manderich, shook his head, said something to the man behind him. His look of outrage had given way to amused disgust. He sat down on the stump again and pinched his face together and shook his head and laughed. He said, “In about five minutes I’m going over and let fly right on old Hale’s doorstep.”

  “Dot vould be a goot idea,” Manderich said.

  He touched Joe’s elbow and they went on, out of the more orderly area of tents and in among the camps scattered across the open field. Huddles of quilts and blankets, a few leanto shelters of stretched tarpaulins, some parked wagons and buckboards, smells of manure and smoke and rank fermented garbage and burning eggshells, and over it all the terrible dusty pressure of the heat. There were makeshift tables on packing boxes, overturned pails, stumps or rocks. Under one frame with a blanket thrown over it an old Mexican woman sat unmoving and stared into space with eyes of a startling blind blue. Hairs grew on her upper lip, and her hands lay like dark dry leaves in her lap.

  Manderich said, “I haff been in some stinkholes, but neffer one like dis.”

  “What are they here for?” Joe said. “Why have they stood it this long?”

  A family eating around a spread quilt watched them as Manderich kicked a tin can and sent it rolling. “It iss a bunch of foolish sheepy peoples,” old Art said. “Plenty Mexicans, some Japanese and Chinese, some Puerto Ricans, plenty bums from skid road, quite a few riffraff, Lumpenproletariat. It iss a matter of not speaking English, of not knowing anyt’ing, of being mad one at a time. Dey haff no organization, it iss a helpless mob.”

  “Too many women and kids,” Joe said. “A family man is a natural-born scab. The whole labor movement gets betrayed at the cook-stove.”

  “Vell, we shall see,” Art said. “Ve haff you and me and Fuzzy and a few more.”

  They had moved through the whole camp and were at the edge of the highway leading northward. The sun was riding the low hills to the west; behind them over the great camp the smoke lay blue and still. But north of them, shining in the last gold light, was a grove of trees sheltering the white wings and green roofs of a house.

  “That the Boss’s castle?” Joe said.

  “Dot’s it.”

  It could have been only a dusty ranch house in a grove, but that was not the way his mind wanted to imagine it. He could see gleaming floors, thick carpets, carved furniture. A Chinese cook was in the kitchen and there were Japanese houseboys in white coats. Women would come down to dinner with jewels on neck and hands. Everything in that mansion pulled fastidiously back from the dusty highway and screened among its trees was subdued and quiet and rich. He saw the boss, the king, as plainly as someone he knew, a man with careful eyes, a senatorial figure, a heavy gold chain across his vest—the pot-bellied Moneybags of the cartoons. He had drawn him plenty of times himself. To keep Hale in that style, twenty-eight hundred slaves labored in the killing sun and lived like animals.

  Manderich stopped, grunted, and turned left along the fence to where a family sat eating around a fire. There were five of them, a man, a woman, a gangling daughter in runover high-heeled shoes that came halfway up her legs and showed dirty white stockings at the top, and two half-grown boys. The man stretched his wrinkled sunburned neck and lifted his tin plate to Manderich in recognition.

  “Goot efening,” Art said. The rest of the family watched silently until the father had swallowed his mouthful.

  “Set down,” he said, and waved his plate. “Pull up a rocker.”

  They sat down under the still watchfulness of wife and children. “Hot,” Art said.

  “Ain’t it? I don’t know’s I ever seen it any hotter. Well, maybe once down by Merced, down there in the fig country.” He swabbed his plate with a piece of bread and chewed and swallowed. “You fellers ate?”

  They nodded.

  “Good thing, I guess,” the man said, and cackled suddenly, thrusting his head forward and pulling it back. “Grub’s about used up around here. Have a drink anyway.”

  He reached for the dipper in a tin pail. Joe shook his head, but the picker said, “You don’t need to be afraid of this, I went way the hell and gone up the ditch, way up above camp, to get this just for drinkin’. Lots of folks drink her right out of the ditch down here, but that don’t look healthy to me. It ain’t had a chance to run long enough to purify itself. Here, you try this.”

  Joe took the dipper with a wink and a smile and drank. The water was tepid, weedy-tasting. As he handed the dipper back the gangling girl said unexpectedly, mewing and spitting the words, “It’d be a nickel for that much of a drink down in the field.”


  Her mother stuck a quick finger in the kettle of water steaming at the edge of the fire. She was flat-chested and bony, with hard repressed lines around her mouth, and she glanced up once, quickly, when Manderich said, “Oh no! You are mistaken. Vater does not cost at the stew-vagon. All you haff to do iss buy a lemonade first.”

  “Boy, ain’t it a system!” the father said. “Tell me that stew-wagon guy is Hale’s cousin.”

  Moving around among them, the mother gathered the plates and slid them into the kettle. Her husband took out a section of plug and sat contemplating it with a relaxed, abstracted smile. Remembering himself, he offered it first to Joe and then to Manderich, and then he set his teeth in the corner and wrenched and twisted it off. For a while he was busy getting the chew shaped and pocketed in his cheek. Joe sat quietly, content to leave this all in Art’s hands, content for the moment to sit still and learn what he could.

  “Now it’s funny they wouldn’t have any water at all down there,” the father said gently after a while. “Folks get mighty dry workin’ all day in the sun. I seen two women faint down by me. I expect there was others, too. Well, you was workin’ right down there, you seen those two.”

  “It was 105,” the girl’s harsh voice said. Her eyes moved from Manderich to Joe, assertive and insistent. “I saw the thummometer inside the stew-wagon.”

  “… if you had a canteen with a strap to it, that’d be good,” her father said. “I took a pail down the second day, after we most boiled alive the first time, but a pail ain’t good. There’s no handy way to tote it with you, and you set it down dogs come drink out of it and it gets all full of dirt.”

  “You’re supposed to drink lemonade,” Joe said. He winked at the two boys, and they snickered. The daughter sniffed, standing close, ready at any time to contribute her share of the talk.

  “Marian,” her mother said, and wagged her head toward the rock where the washed dishes were piled. Marian moved sideways, keeping her eyes on the men, and groped up a gray towel from a stump and started wiping. The boys sat hugging their knees, their thin wedged faces turned toward their father. The going-down of the sun left a grateful even twilight restful to the eyes.

  “Takes a pretty mean man to refuse a drink to a little old dusty kid,” the father said. “Lots of folks shell out and buy crackajack or lemonade so’s their kids can get a dipperful, but a man can’t afford that as often as it’d take.”

  Grunting, old Manderich shot a pebble across the fire with his thumb and squinted and pulled his suspender. “It iss one big Fourt’ of Chuly picnic. Lots of peoples, a chance to make lots of money.”

  Joe kept watching the faces, hoping to read in them what response the camp might make to an organizer. The daughter’s was sharp with resentment—good; the mother’s was tight and expressionless as if she had only strength enough for work, and could spare none for anything else, as if she doled out her strength for daily jobs, cooking, dishes, picking, shaking the blankets, and anything else would be a leakage that would drain her dry. Not so good. The father’s was ruminative, mildly reproachful, the face of a good-natured man confronted with things he didn’t want to believe. Good or bad, it was hard to tell.

  All through the camp there were families like this, and if anything were done it would have to be done through them.

  “Don’t you enjoy the great out-of-doors?” he said. “It’s worth a little trouble and discomfort just to get the chance of camping out here in the open and getting all this sun and air. People come from all over the world to camp out in the California sunshine.”

  They stared at him. The girl snickered tentatively, but the others only stared. There seemed nothing that any of them could think of to say. Finally Manderich grated out, “By Gott, vy do ve stand it?”

  To Joe, alertly watching, it seemed that something hung in the balance, as if a mixture of things had been stirred in a flask and now out of the cloudy solution something new might appear. The tin dishes clinked lightly as Marian laid one on another. The father looked around. “Don’t seem to be much a man can do.”

  “Not alone,” Art said. “You vas here two days ago ven some peoples sqvawked. Dot night come the finks, and out dey go. Now Fuzzy Llewellyn vears knobs on his head from a beating.”

  “Not alone,” Joe said. He picked up a stick and broke it between his fingers. “But suppose everybody squawked. Suppose twenty-eight hundred of us got together and squawked. You don’t beat up twenty-eight hundred people, or throw them out of camp.”

  The picker’s look was long and careful, not so much hesitant as deliberate. “You guys organizin’ somethin’?”

  “Efferybody iss organizing somet’ing,” Manderich said. His look told Joe to hold back, let him handle it. “I haff talked to fifty peoples today. All are mad to pay a nickel for vater in the field, all are mad to see a camp so dirty, vit tents for only half and no place for garbage, and vater from a ditch. It does not make cheers to haff a man’s daughters sleep on the ground or stand in line a half-hour to use a stinking backhouse. If dere iss a meeting tomorrow it vill be not organized but an uprising.”

  “While you’re adding it up, don’t forget the company store,” the girl said, and her father said, shaking his head on his red neck, “Marian ain’t so far off, at that. I figured with three of us pickin’ we could gain a little, but I forgot there was five of us eatin’. I won’t have nothin’ to do with workin’ little kids, but it’s a fact we don’t much more’n stay even with the grub bill. Peaches, now. This afternoon we bought a little old can of peaches …”

  Old Art moved his eyebrows at Joe and stood up with a grunt. “So!” Abruptly, almost as if he were angry, he nodded all around. “Goot night, missus. Goot night, young lady.”

  Uncertainty was in all their faces now. The girl said, “Is there going to be a meeting?”

  “Ve vill haff to vait and see,” Art said.

  Joe shot a pebble at the two boys and ducked away when they grabbed wildly around them for something to throw. “Boys,” the woman said, “is that a way …”

  They left the family all looking after them and went back along the ditch toward the central sheds and the tent camp. Art walked with his hands behind him, thrusting out his lower lip and watching the ground. “Dis iss a system I learned long ago,” he said. “You must not be sore because I took it avay from you. Long ago I learned how you leaf peoples vondering. If we said come to a meeting, make a protest, raise some hell, many vould be scared and stay avay. If ve say maybe vill be a meeting, maybe peoples soon going to get mad and get togetter, anybody who sees fife peoples in one place will come running to see and find out.”

  “You know more about it than I do,” Joe said. “I’m just out to learn the ropes before tomorrow.” He was ashamed now of the pique that had touched him momentarily when Art had stopped his spiel. It didn’t matter who made the spiel or did the work. Everybody had to do the work. The camp lay around them in the dusk, an enormous sprawling helpless mass awaiting only the brain to make it obey as one body. It was an army of slaves, but an army nevertheless. If Hale could move it as if it were one man, and do it only by reason of ownership and the power of the job, then men with an idea could do the same. Once you got control of it, an army was a single weapon, like an axe.

  Stumbling in the dusk along the ditchbank, he thought of how men might rise up behind the right man or group of men, the leaders and organizers, and come on like a wave. How hesitating, good-natured people like the family they had just talked to might become one with the big general voice, the big irresistible mass movement, and how the Hales of the world would be nothing but matchsticks before such a wave as that.

  Fires winked everywhere. The smell of eucalyptus wood was fragrant in the dark, and he could no longer smell the garbage or the privies. Off under the peppers someone was playing a guitar; there was a jangle of girls’ laughter and a squeal. The camp might have been an immense picnic, some Sunday School outing settling down to marshmallows and romantic songs aft
er a day of baseball and canoes. He hated them suddenly, every apathetic and good-natured and stupid and enduring man, woman, and child of them, for the way they stood anything, bore anything, took anything, and still were able to play guitars and make light laughter in the evenings. Why couldn’t they see what they had to do? Why couldn’t they get and hold the savage anger they ought to have and would have to have if they were ever to be anything but the slaves and animals they were now?

  Along the ditch people were already stretching out in their blankets, there were movements as they spread their beds among the stumps. A woman’s voice called ahead of them, and a child’s answered. Joe saw the child come up on the ditchbank, a small obscure figure in the near-dark, standing spraddle-legged. The boy bent backward, thrusting out his stomach. In the quiet there was the silvery tinkle—night-sound, garden-sound, fountain-sound, a sound out of a Spanish love song, as he urinated in the ditch.

  Hours later, long after the camp had all but quieted and he had lain a long time on his blanket watching the processional passage of the stars, it was cool. His old curse of sleeplessness was on him. Like an instrument into which all the sounds of the night and the camp were conducted, he lay vibrating, recording the individual breathing noises of the five men around him, the barking at various distances of the three separate dogs, and far off and higher in key the yapping of coyotes in the hills. He heard furtive splashings from the irrigation canal—swimmers or muskrat or coon or the gray rats that fed on the garbage heaps. Along the road west of camp an automobile passed, its motor sweet and purring in the night, and faded out and was gone, unknown and lonely, leaving his ears humming a little like wind-vibrated telegraph wires.