Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  The three were near the heart of the crowd, where a little breathing space had been left around the preacher’s backless chair on which he stood and shouted. Joe looked around. There were too many women; in close the crowd was two-thirds women, yet even they did not seem to be taking in what the preacher said. Some were Mexican women he was sure did not understand one word in ten.

  Once more he looked carefully around, tiptoeing to see better, but he spotted no finks whose faces he knew. The heat of the crowd packed him in; he wanted to break away and fight himself free and into the open. The red-faced preacher roared on, streaming sweat. “Jesus, my friends. Keep that name in mind. When He first visited this sinful world, coming from the city of jasper and pearl and pure gold, He stepped down out of that glory just to save sufferin’ humanity, just out of the pity of His great heart, and I want to say to you, brothers and sisters, He’s still ready to save, He’s still got His hand stretched out to the poor and needy …”

  The eyes of the three met. In two smooth steps Joe and Manderich were beside the preacher’s chair. Joe took hold of the preacher’s pocket and yanked, tearing the seam so that the white lining showed; instantly the preacher’s hand shot down to grab his wrist, the preacher’s hot face turned down on him, glaring. Then Manderich reached, and together they yanked so that he had to hop off backward to keep from toppling. His hoarse roar of anger was chopped off short as he leaped, but he was threshing his arms free as soon as his feet hit the ground. Manderich’s heavy clutch pinioned one arm, but he broke the other free from Joe’s lighter weight, and as he did so Joe grabbed a handful of the man’s wet shirt with his left hand. His right dove halfway under his own coat, and held it there on the gun butt, his eyes inches from the preacher’s furious face, until the man’s eyes chilled and understood and the furious threshing of his arms quieted. With a final cautious half-meant twist he freed himself and stood still. Joe slipped around behind him, next to Manderich, his eyes swooping in one comprehensive glance across the faces near at hand. They looked merely astonished. A couple of the women had begun to edge away. But no trouble, not a peep. Ahead of him the preacher stood, breathing hard, his blue shirt wet and dark. Sweat ran as Joe watched down the pink scalp under the thinning fringe of hair, a crooked drop crookedly running until it came to the roundly shaven neck, and then it skidded and disappeared under the wet collar. Art Manderich, breathing formally through his nose, his face set like the face of a hussar at inspection or an usher in a church, stood with his arms folded.

  Up on the chair Fuzzy Llewellyn was shouting in the preacher’s place—a sharper, more cutting voice, saw-edged and nasal and penetrating. “We’re takin’ over this meeting right now! Why are we talon’ it over? I’ll tell you. Because we all got more important things to meet about than the size of somebody’s private pack of sin. We got a lot of grievances in this camp, and a lot of conditions have to be improved. How do you get a drink of water in this stinkhole? You’ve tried it down at the field. You’ve hit up the stew-wagon guy. What’d it get you? And how long did you stand in line by one of those backhouses this mornin’? There was a line of twenty-six people waitin’ when I came down. Just put your mind for a minute on what you was linin’ up for. Waitin’ in line to use a thing like that. I don’t know how yours was, but mine would’ve made a hyena throw his lunch. That’s what we’re takin’ over this meeting for. To see if anybody here agrees with us something ought to be done about it.”

  The preacher’s sweat was as strong as a horse’s. He looked straight ahead and said nothing, but his breathing hissed and gurgled, and his neck was beet-red, shining wet.

  “I want to ask you somep’m else,” Fuzzy shouted. He turned his body, shouting for the far edges of the crowd. “I want to ask you is anybody sick around you. Everybody near you healthy?”

  He waited. A mutter of sound, a growl, came from here and there in the crowd. Joe was not satisfied with it. It seemed too small, maybe only the noise made by the Kirkhams and their squads. He searched the faces near him, and saw that their attention was split between Fuzzy and himself; they listened to Fuzzy but they watched him and Manderich and the captive preacher. It was hard to tell whether they understood anything or not, whether Fuzzy could touch them at all with a catalogue of their wrongs. To quiet his own fear that they were a bunch of meek cattle, he whispered to Manderich, “Did you say two hundred? We got half the camp.”

  Manderich grunted unintelligibly. The preacher looked over his shoulder, and Joe seized his arm in warning. Under the man’s fat he felt the bone and muscle of power, and in the cold blue eyes that swung on him he saw hatred and watchfulness but no fear. For a moment he let his eyes lock with the pale eyes. The pupils were mere dark pinheads in the glassy, marbled irises, and it was a long time before the eyes would let themselves be beaten down. It would not do to give this preacher any rope.

  Listening past Fuzzy’s shouting, his ears alert for sounds of trouble in the crowd, he thought once he heard the beginnings of uproar, but Fuzzy let out his voice another notch, and by the time he took breath the sound was not there. A baby began to squawl. Again Fuzzy raised his voice, whipping and goading their apathy.

  “… unless we do it together! You can see my face, some of you can anyway. If you’re close you can see my back.” He yanked his shirt out and whipped half around to display his back crisscrossed with dark bruises, welted and scabbed from blows. “All right!” he shouted, whipping around again. “All right, you want to know how I got it? I’ll tell you. Two days ago three other guys and I got sick of the filth in this camp and we squawked. We went over to the super and we raised some hell. You know what happens after that? Just by accident we all have callers that night. They take us out on the south road and beat hell out of us and make us run the gauntlet while a dozen of them whale away at us with barrel staves. Just a great big Hallowe’en party. Then they point us down the road and invite us not to come back.”

  He paused, his squirrel teeth exposed by the back-drawn lips. For a moment it was so quiet Joe heard his breath hiss, and heard the sound of a motor starting on the other side of the sheds. He looked for anger in the sheep faces of the crowd and saw none, only the alert, half-expectant listening look.

  “But I come back!” Fuzzy shouted. “By God I doubled around and I limped back in that same night, and I been here ever since. You want to know why I came back? I’ll tell you. I came back because I knew if enough of us squawked it wouldn’t be possible to take care of us with barrel staves. Let just a hundred of us out of this whole mob get together and stand together, and they ain’t goonin’ us off the ranch. They ain’t doin’ nothin’ then. They’re listenin’, because they’ll have to listen.”

  The last faint lingering suspicion that Joe had had of Fuzzy was gone now. Fuzzy was going good. He was militant and he had guts and he could pour it on from up on the box. And no matter how his eyes and ears searched the crowd, he could catch no premonition of trouble, no shouldering stir of deputies coming in, no sound of heckling, no fighting. Nothing but this waiting.

  “I want us to sing a little,” Fuzzy was shouting. “Anybody that’s going to work together can start by singing together. I want us to sing a song about a scissorbill that didn’t know which side his bread was buttered on. This is a song by Joe Hill, and it goes to the tune of ‘It Looks to Me Like a Big Time Tonight.’ I’m going to say over the words and when you get the idea how she goes, we’ll sing her all together.”

  For a second Joe felt a twitch in his solar plexus, a spasm of jealous protest. Joe Hill himself should be up there bringing them on, forming them from a mob into a single weapon of power. But the preacher moved restively and Joe tightened his grip on the fat arm. Fuzzy was the soapboxer, he was the one who could do it best. He listened intently to the words as Fuzzy bellowed them out, halfway between speaking and singing.

  Please give me your attention and I’ll introduce to you

  A man that is a credit to the red white and blue.

 
His head is made of lumber and solid as a rock,

  He is a common worker and his name is Mr. Block.

  And Block he thinks he may

  Be President some day.

  “Any day now,” Fuzzy’s can-opener voice confided to the crowd, “any day now I’ll own this ranch.” He stuck out his face. “Anybody got any doubts?”

  That brought the first real response, a riffle of laughter that was lost as Fuzzy lifted his arms and started the singing. Joe sang, and old Art, tuneless as a sea Hon, growled at his ear, but there was only a scattering of support through the crowd, a thin unconfident singing, a few voices singing loud and trying to sound like many, saying

  Oh, Mr. Block, you were born by mistake,

  You take the cake,

  You make me ache.

  Tie a rock to your block and then jump in the lake,

  Kindly do that for liberty’s sake.

  Joe thought it would die out altogether, but the few of them carried it to the end of the chorus, and then Fuzzy was shouting out the second verse, about Mr. Block and the job shark, and then waving his hands wide again, inviting the big chorus.

  This time it came fuller, louder, wider-spread. Joe could see people near him trying to pick up the words as they sang. He bellowed at the uncompromising red neck of the preacher.

  It grew with every verse. Mr. Block tried the great A.F. of L. and got stung; he tried the ballot box and elected a Socialist mayor and got rapped on the block by a big Socialist cop; he grew angry at Spain and joined the army and lost a leg in Cuba and went around afterward on his peg shouting “Remember the Maine! Hurrah, to hell with Spain!”; and at length he died and met St. Pete and expressed a wish: He’d like to meet the Astorbilts and John D. Rockefell.

  Old Peter said, “Is that so?

  You’ll meet them down below.”

  Oh, Mr. Block, you were born by mistake,

  You take the cake,

  You make me ache …

  They were roaring it out by the end. When the center was finished it heard the delayed but enthusiastic fringes coming on in with the whole last line. It was only after the final trailing off of the song that Joe heard the peremptory voice shouting, and saw Henry Kirkham and another man slide toward the soapbox.

  Fuzzy Llewellyn looked out over the heads, his arms still wide in the gesture of leading the singing. For one flicking instant his one good eye dropped to meet Joe’s, then Manderich’s. His mouth formed a sidelong word. “Law.” Joe made a motion to Kirkham to come in closer, to help form a ring around the box.

  Now Fuzzy let out his voice again, and the nasal, penetrating half-whine seemed twice as loud and twice as penetrating as before. “They’re comin’ in here right now!” he shouted. “What are they comin’ for? To stop me from talkin’. To run me into the calaboose and stop my mouth, or knock it off. They don’t want any meetin’s like this, and you know why? Because they work you like horses and pay you starvation wages and don’t give a good god damn whether you live or die. Because they want that last bloody nickel you sweat out for them out in the sun. They want that last nickel even if it comes to them red with the blood of your children! And if you squawk, here come the finks and the deputies with pick handles and barrel staves. HERE THEY COME RIGHT NOW!”

  The peremptory authoritative voice shouted again. Joe could see the crowd buckling and swirling compactly out in the sun of the road, and as the swirl came inward Joe saw the red head of Russ Kirkham coming with it, backing before it. Other men, four or five, seemed to be doing the same.

  “They’re comin’ in right now!” Fuzzy yelled. “What I want to know is what you’re gonna do about it. Do they shut us up? Do they bring out their dirty hired law and do we knuckle under? Do we submit to their god damn gunmen OR DO WE STAND UP TO THE SONSABITCHES? DO WE CLOSE RANKS AND FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS? I’M ASKIN’ YOU, FELLOW WORKERS, AND YOU AIN’T GOT LONG TO DECIDE!”

  Manderich looked at Joe, and they shoved the preacher forward a step so as to be free. Joe made sure the automatic was loose in the holster. Manderich’s grim smile deepened the creases in his face; for the first time Joe noticed that his hair was thin, that in his neck there was the beginning of an old man’s dewlap of sagging skin. Pushing the preacher again, they moved out another step or two to meet the incoming disturbance of the law. Women were clearing out; there was a quick, hurried, anxious pressing-away from the direction of the disturbance as Fuzzy, useless now and unlistened to, kept shouting from the elevated chair.

  The swirl of the in-pressing law was close now. Into the space the women had left, Kirkham and four others were thrust suddenly, retreating ahead of a solid group of more than a dozen. The deputies were sweating, their shirts sticking to them, their nickeled badges sagging the wet cloth. All had guns buckled around them. With them was one dressed like themselves but wearing a tie and a white stetson. Joe guessed him to be the sheriff. And behind the sheriff was a man in a Panama hat and an alpaca coat, smooth-faced, pink with heat—boss or lawyer, a different breed, and wearing no gun.

  Kirkham’s group fell back with Joe and Manderich and the others. A narrow lane formed itself between them and the tightly grouped law. Back of him Joe felt the continuous stir of people getting out of the way; what should have been a silence as the men faced each other was full of a steady, ponderous rumble, a heavy stir in the air like the sound of wagons crossing a plank bridge.

  The sweating deputies were looking at the sheriff, but they were nervous and their heads kept turning and their hands stayed close to the guns on their hips. They braced a little against the curious weight of the crowd.

  “Llewellyn!” the sheriff said. “I’ve got a warrant for you. You’re under arrest.”

  Joe was up on the balls of his feet. He watched the sheriff and the man in the Panama hat, and he heard the rumble of the crowd closing in like silence after the sheriffs words. Behind him Fuzzy Llewellyn screeched in a cracking voice, “WELL, FELLOW WORKERS, HERE THEY ARE! I’M UNDER ARREST, THE SHERIFF SAYS. OKAY, I’LL LET MYSELF GET PINCHED. I’LL GO WITH THIS BUNCH OF GOD DAMNED LAW WITH THEIR SAPS AND SIX SHOOTERS. THAT’S ALL I CAN DO, ALONE. BUT IF YOU’RE WITH ME I CAN DO SOMETHING ELSE. I CAN TELL THIS SHERIFF THERE ARE ALMOST THREE THOUSAND WORKERS HERE THAT WON’T …”

  It came as both a sound and a thrust of movement, a slow crescendo coming inward from the far edges of the crowd. Joe heard it rising and growing; he saw it take hold on the clustered deputies and saw them brace against it. He saw fear leap into the face of the pink-faced man in the Panama and saw with sharp clarity how the deputies elbowed and hampered each other, half turning to resist the pushing from behind. They shouted; one drew his gun half out.

  He had completely forgotten the preacher who stood beside him, and only the flickering impression he caught from the corner of his eye of some danger, some blow, kept him from being taken completely unaware. He ducked, crouching, so that something came over the top of him and bore him down with a mauling weight. But even as he went down he heard the three quick shots and the terrible cresting roar of the crowd.

  For a minute he was utterly helpless, tossed under trampling feet, smothered and squashed under struggling bodies. A shoe came down on his hand and he rolled, trying to break free. Blows were landing on him, and he struck back and kicked and rolled again until the feet thinned and he made his feet, throwing the long hair out of his eyes as he came up, his right hand diving for the gun. A bullet went past his cheek so close that he felt the wind of it and heard the soggy puk it made as it hit something behind him. But as he turned the crowd picked him up like a chip and carried him along. His feet tangled in the yielding mass of a body so that he almost went down again. The noise of the crowd now was an unbearable tense continuous stream.

  He was borne struggling against the trunk of one of the pepper trees, a tree where children had made a ladder out of the stubs of old branches. As the pressure swirled past on both sides he caught one of the stubs and pulled himself up out of the tumult, the gun
ready in his hand.

  But already the thing was over. He saw fierce-eyed men whirl in the choking dust, fearful of enemies, but there were no enemies, only pickers like themselves. They fell back warily, mistrustful of everyone else, many of them nursing hurts, away from the soapbox where miraculously Fuzzy Llewellyn still stood, and as they fell back and the dust cloud stilled and cleared Joe saw the bodies on the ground, the bloodied, dirtied white shirts patched with adhesive dust, the fallen hats, the darker curving figures of fallen men.

  At the first opening below him he jumped and landed running, coming up beside Fuzzy. One of the Kirkhams was there, blood streaming from his nose. Twenty feet away, one across the other, lay the pink-faced man and the sheriff, and near them a picker. Joe could not see his face, but his hand was brown. Still beyond, doubled up with his face against his knees, was a deputy. The rest of the deputies, as well as the preacher, had disappeared. And close up against the backless chair where Fuzzy stood, his dead face trampled and smashed by the fury and panic of the crowd, lay old Manderich.

  Kirkham’s teeth were chattering. He looked at Joe and shook his head and wiped his streaming nose with the back of his hand.

  Up on the chair Fuzzy stood with his hands at his sides, his squirrel teeth bared, looking out almost abstractedly across the road. The short, savage flare of mob anger had lasted only a matter of minutes, the surge inward upon the deputies had been a reaction as sudden and automatic as impulse and blow. Now men were sneaking away, retreating from both instigator and result of their fury. The few who stayed stayed with an awed, scared look on their faces. A hush was over the whole meeting place, the whole camp. Even yet the dust had not settled completely. Joe knelt by Manderich and felt the thick wrist, but he knew before he knelt that Manderich was dead. From the brutally battered face he looked up into Fuzzy’s. He felt himself wet as a drenched dog with sweat. “Let’s get out of here!” he said.