Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  Fuzzy shook his head. His eyes were glassy. His voice stuck and he cleared it. “No.”

  “They’ll be back with riot squads or the Guard. The crowd won’t stand up to them again. Look at them!” He was excited himself. He heard the chattering of Kirkham’s teeth and realized that his own hands were shaking.

  “I know,” Fuzzy said. “They’re scared now. But I started this. Ill see it through.”

  “They’ll hang you,” Joe said. “They’ll hang anybody they can catch.”

  Fuzzy looked down at the bodies in the white dust. Someone groaned, and Joe saw that the sheriff, under the body of the man in the Panama hat, was stirring and feebly moving his arms and legs. They watched him try to lift his head, and they saw how the weight of the other body bore on him. Finally Kirkham, still chattering, went and rolled the body off the sheriff and backed away again.

  “You go, Joe,” Fuzzy said. “There’s no need of everybody sticking. One’s enough. You go on.”

  Joe looked down again at the dead and trampled face of Art Manderich. His teeth ached clear to the roots of his jaw. The automatic was still in his hand, and he put it away. “You can’t fight them in jail,” he said.

  “No,” Fuzzy said. “You’ll do more good outside. You go. All of you go. I’ll stick here.”

  The sheriff was stirring again, rolling his head. Dust was in his black hair as if it had been rolled in flour. In a few minutes he might be awake enough to recognize people. Whatever Joe did he had better do it fast.

  “You’re crazy, Fuzzy. What good can you do letting them hang you?”

  “Maybe they won’t hang me,” Fuzzy said. “We wanted to show up what went on at this ranch, didn’t we?” His lips pulled back so that the long front teeth showed clear to the gums in a sick, starveling grin. “Maybe this is as good a way as any.”

  Joe’s head had cleared. He could see now with perfect clearness the course that events would take. If Fuzzy wanted to fight them that way, by being their prisoner, it was his lookout. As for Joe Hill, he had better ways. Only Manderich and Fuzzy Llewellyn had known who he was; to the others he was only “Swede.” If Fuzzy kept his mouth shut, there was no reason for Joe Hill to be involved in this at all.

  His eyes strayed again, a last time, to Manderich’s bloody face. Somebody would have to get even for old Art. Somebody would have to be free to carry on and redouble the fight.

  He reached up and shook Fuzzy’s limp hand. “Maybe you won’t hear from me directly,” he said, “but you’ll know I’m working.”

  There was no time to do more than cross past their camp and pick up his bindle, and then he was one of hundreds on their way. The camp was emptying, people everywhere were in flight. The road was already jammed. It was a fool notion people had that they could get away by the road. The riot squad would be coming in from both sides in a matter of an hour. If there was any chance of getting away, it was over the hills and in toward the old gold country. From there it might be possible, taking it easy and slow, to work on down the coast and out of reach of suspicion. For the moment, at least, he did not worry about Fuzzy, staying back there on the chair to wait for the cops. He had enough to think about, just getting away.

  5 Gaviota, August, 1913

  I don’t see what you expect to gain by it, he said to Fuzzy many times. For a minute they were organized, you had them coming. They were full of the class war and they wanted their rights and they were ready to resist when the deputy went for his gun. But look what happens afterward. They get scared, they back off. They see a couple of their own people and two or three of the law dead in the melee and they wilt. So what is there to be gained by waiting for the law to come back with riot guns? What possible good can it do the movement or anybody else to have you rot in the Sacramento jail and maybe fry in San Quentin?

  It was just a grandstand play, he told Fuzzy. You liked the look of yourself waiting there with your arms folded. You felt the way you feel in a free-speech fight when the bulls roll around, but you were wrong. You gain something by getting yourself pinched in a free-speech fight, but you don’t gain anything here except to get all the hatred and fear of the bosses poured out on you alone. Maybe you like it that way.

  Suppose I’d stuck too, he said to Fuzzy’s insistent image. Suppose I’d stood up there with you. I had a gun on me. This preacher saw it, maybe others did too. I had it in my hand when I got down out of that tree. Plenty of people could have seen it on me, and even if they didn’t a smart D.A. could make a dozen of them swear they did. So they’re all at the trial to testify that I had a gun in my hand during the fight. I haven’t even shot it off, but I’m guilty of murdering everybody that’s dead there, even old Art. Probably nobody does any shooting but the deputies, they shoot each other in the uproar, but some Wobbly has to burn for it. Well, I can do more good out organizing somewhere else than I can giving Hale the satisfaction of executing me. Art was enough to lose in that fight.

  Old Art. It seemed to him that he had liked Manderich better than any man he knew. The image of the smashed face kept rising into his thoughts and stopping them. Nobody would ever know how Art got it, whether from friend or enemy, deputy or picker. He was just smashed in the jam. Perhaps the bullet that had buzzed past Joe’s face as he got to his feet. He had heard its wet puk as it hit something behind him. Or perhaps the treacherous preacher. From the moment the man jumped him and they went down under the struggling feet Joe had not seen the preacher at all. He could have risen up in the dust with a rock in his hand …

  Joe picked a pebble from the sand between his feet and threw it angrily. His hands were shaking. If only there had been some triumph in it, if the crowd hadn’t quit just when it began to get militant, if it had stayed together and they could all have faced the returning law coolly, with a set of demands and a clear irrefutable statement of how the trouble had started. If it were possible to say that Art died helping three thousand pickers to some of the decencies of life. But you couldn’t say that. You couldn’t say anything but that he got trampled in the mob, unable even to put up the kind of grim slugging battle he was capable of. A stray bullet, a stray rock, a stray blow, and a good man dead and nothing gained. It seemed to Joe, sitting on the beach and thinking it over for the hundredth time, that inevitably the fight ended up in running. He was always running, every strike and brawl and revolution and mass meeting ended the same way, in a choice between being a willing sacrifice for no real purpose, and running like a scared animal when the law moved in.

  Who pays for Art Manderich’s death? he asked empty air. The public howls for the blood of the Red agitators who killed the deputies and the D.A., but who pays for the life of Art Manderich and the Mexican or Puerto Rican kid who died there too?

  He was all alone on the empty curve of beach. He said it again aloud, like a curse: Who pays for Art Manderich? Who gets hanged for putting a bullet in the Puerto Rican picker?

  It was late afternoon. Through the low mist clinging to the sea the sun was weak and pale on the water, the sand, the railroad embankment behind him. Between two horns of rock that jutted to enclose the beach the sand curved evenly, and the waves were bent and came in in v-ing angles, trying to conform to the curve of the shore. Though the tide was coming in, there was no stir about anything. The surf was small and sad, the noise it made was only a murmur and a hiss, with none of the boom that big surf had.

  Ahead of the soapy edges of the waves as they ran up the beach the sand fleas hopped by millions, some of them more than an inch long. The thin sun shone through their transparent lobster-like bodies. They hopped and fell and hopped again, as automatic as snapping mousetraps, all around him, and he caught one in his hand and felt the strength of its leg-kick once before it hopped loose and hit the sand. Almost instantly its powerful legs dug it in and covered it over. When he scraped the top off the loose damp sand he exposed a half-dozen that hopped and burrowed out of his way. They were all coming higher up the beach as the tide rose, and he thought how there
were two classes, the masters and the slaves, and how the difference between them was power and only power, and how the individual worker was as helpless as a sand flea swept ahead of the incoming tide, but how together the workers could organize, resist, defy. Yes, defy? Build a wall, maybe, to keep out the sea? In a moment of hopelessness it seemed to him that the working class had about as much chance of bucking the power arrayed against it as the sand fleas had of making a sea wall with their frail transparent shells.

  A wave licked up almost to his feet, wetting and darkening the sand in scallops, driving the frantic fleas before it, burying some so that they threshed and struggled in the wet sand. Standing up to give the tide room, Joe heard the sound of a train coming. As he had done all day when trains came by, he picked up his bindle and moved down the beach a few yards to where the culvert came through. Though he was several hundred miles in space and a week in time from the hop camp where Manderich had died, he was not taking chances. Moreover, the beach was too private and useful a place for jungling up to let every S.P. railroader in on it.

  When the sound of the train was close above him he stepped inside the eight-foot cylinder, standing spraddle-legged to keep his feet out of the slimy trickle at the bottom. Inside the culvert the train’s noise was instantly muted, almost shut out. It became indistinguishable from the sound of the surf, which inside here sounded louder and hollower. He knew when the train was past only by the passing of the slight tremor in the corrugated steel under his feet. From inside the culvert he looked out as through an enormous round eye. He could see to Japan, and it was lonely all the way.

  For a minute he remained standing inside, facing a decision that he should have made long before. There was nothing but a little coffee left in his bindle. That meant getting out and rustling something, or beating his way on down the coast, or looking for a bunkhouse job at one of the ranches. He was not yet ready to go back to San Pedro; some dissatisfaction, some qualm, something unresolved in his mind, kept him from that. And with the dragnets out, probably, for hundreds of miles around because of the hop-camp riot, it would be safer to show himself as a picker looking for a job than as a bo bumming through, and it would be safer to come in as if from the south.

  Slinging his bindle, he went through the culvert to the land side. From there the far end was smaller, mistier. It was like looking through a reversed telescope, and the sad noise of the surf beyond was the sound of a country he had left in a childhood dream. A little prickle of gooseflesh touched him again on leaving this sad and lonely and private place.

  On the land side, tall eucalyptus trees grew beyond the right-of-way fence. From the edge of the grove he looked across disced ground and the neat sweet-smelling regular trees of a lemon orchard. Beyond that, across the top of the swale through which the trickle of water made its way to the culvert, he saw ranch houses and a red barn, and to the left a string of workers’ shanties and a tar-papered building that he took for a bunkhouse. He might as well start here.

  He walked a half-mile south along the tree-protected tracks before he plowed down the grade, cut through an orchard, and got onto the dusty stretch of the King’s Highway leading from Santa Barbara to Gaviota. Nothing passed him, wagon or horseman or buggy or automobile, until he was almost to the line of palms that curved in along the road to the ranch. Then a car squawked behind him and he turned, hugging the shoulder of the road, to see a red Locomobile boring at him trailing a long funnel of dust. The car rushed by, and its wind and dust swallowed him so that he cursed, standing shut-eyed and shut-mouthed until the air partially cleared. When he could see again he saw the car almost in to the ranch up the side road.

  Oh fine, he said. A boss a man can look up to and admire, a man who scorches around kicking dust in people’s eyes and probably owns ten thousand acres of tomatoes or lemons or walnuts, and a docile herd of stoop laborers to pick them for him.

  Mister, have you got some work for a man, you …

  He spread his blanket on the bunk the Mexican foreman pointed out, slid onto a bench at mealtime, washed at the plank trough with the others, kept his mouth shut and did his work. There was a day of leaning from a ladder in among the sweet-smelling trees, cutting lemons. There was a day of hauling to the packing sheds in Goleta. There was a day with a pick and shovel grubbing out a sugar palm the boss’s wife wanted removed to open her view of the far eucalyptus grove along the railroad, and the sea beyond.

  No job had ever used him up as cutting out that tree did. For one thing, he worked under the eye of the boss and the boss’s wife, who came out and cut roses while he hacked away at the rocklike adobe. He was all morning digging a trench around the tree so as to get at the roots, and in the hot afternoon, waist-deep in the trench, he swung till his arms ached and went numb, swinging the axe at the thousands upon thousands of ropelike roots that wilted before his blows but seldom would cut cleanly. And always, when he had cut away a hundred, there were hundreds more. He had to deepen the trench to get under them, and still the tree stood, balancing upon more hundreds of intertwined roots he had not yet cut. Two or three times he looked up out of the hole, his arms dead, his shirt soaked with sweat, and saw the boss with a cigar in his mouth watching. The boss was a ruddy-faced man with a crisscross of tiny broken veins in each cheek, and he smiled and took the cigar from his mouth and all clean, cool, unsweated, made comments on how tough a thing a sugar palm was to root out. Joe wiped his face and leaned on his shovel and took a considerable, deliberate rest under the boss’s eyes.

  McHugh watched him for another half-hour, interested as city people are interested in construction jobs, and watch the drillers and the hod carriers with an endless curiosity and patience. He appraised objectively the strength of every blow Joe swung with the double-bitted axe; he estimated the difficulties of new roots that came in sight, and his eyes followed Joe’s as Joe got down to shovel away underneath and get a clear look. He smoked his cigar and the fragrance blew over Joe as he sweated in the hole. Eventually, late in the afternoon, McHugh said suddenly, “Why don’t I get Pablo over here with a team and see if we can’t pull that sucker over?”

  Joe straightened without answering, and watched McHugh walk away. The boss affected shirts of fine French flannel: every time Joe had seen him in three days he looked as if he had just put on a fresh shirt. His collars were high and immaculate, his cuffs bound with heavy gold links. He wore a belt, not suspenders, and his pants were snug across his well-padded rump. Joe spit in the hole, hating him.

  He would quit tonight. His three days’ work would give him stake enough to make Pedro. And from sleeping on the beach he had learned that every night about ten-thirty a southbound passenger train waited five or ten minutes at a siding a half-mile north of the culvert to let a northbound express go by. This far out of town, there would be no dicks. He could ride the blinds into Santa Barbara and hitch onto something else there, be in Pedro tomorrow, hearing the news from Sacramento, getting busy around the hall: defense committee, fund-raising, enlisting sympathy and help for Fuzzy and anybody else the law might have collared. Tonight was Saturday, payday. After supper he would roll his bindle and be on his way.

  As he thought about it, curiosity began to burn him. Up to now, running and keeping low, he had not even let himself learn much of what had happened up north, as if his own ignorance of what they had done to Fuzzy and the others were a kind of protection. But he wanted now with a great impatience to know where and how they had buried old Art, whether the Sacramento local had held any protest meetings, whether they might even have got up a parade for Art and the Puerto Rican, given them a big public funeral. Or had they carted old Art off to the boneyard without a mourner or a song?

  He should have stayed. At least he could have … what? Or should have beat it right on back to Pedro and got the boys working.

  Pablo, the foreman, came with a team from the big red barn, walking behind the dragging doubletree that clanked and sawed in the dust. Joe climbed out of the hole and threw t
he axe aside. Together they squinted, estimating the height of the tree and the length of chain they would have to use to keep the team clear of the top when it fell. Joe put his hand against the pineapple-like stubs of old fronds and pushed. The trunk seemed as solid as granite. The foreman grinned at him and shook his head, but he hooked a log chain around the trunk ten feet above the ground and drew his team off and hitched on. The boss’s wife came out on the porch to watch, and two Mexican maids pulled the kitchen curtains aside. Pablo chirped to his horses.

  The chain tightened and quivered, the team paused, then dug in again, snapping the chain tight as a fence wire. The palm shuddered. From the hole came a tearing and popping of little roots. Pablo shouted at his team, looking back over his shoulder. The tree shuddered more strongly, tilted suddenly a foot or two, strained with a dry clashing of its big fronds, and then slowly and reluctantly, its braided roots giving one by one and two by two, it came over. Even when it was almost flat its roots did not let go completely, but hung like rubber. Joe had to get down into the hole and swing the axe on them for another ten minutes, and when the last one snapped the heavy butt kicked back in the hole and almost caught him. He climbed out shaking with a blind, pointless fury, and when he saw McHugh pull out of the yard in the red Locomobile and head out toward Santa Barbara he contrasted the aching of his own muscles, the dead-tiredness of his back, the near-accident that might have squashed him like a bug down in the hole, with the red and brass of the automobile, the clean shirt, the cigar, the careless security of McHugh, and he felt that McHugh personally owed him something, some satisfaction he could not name. The Boss. The sonofabitching Boss.

  “Aha,” Pablo was saying, backing his team to loosen the chain. “Tomorrow we get this cabron sawed up and haul it away.”

  “Not me,” Joe said. “I’m quitting tonight.”