Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  He had jumped to the left because the siding lay on that side. Now he saw the headlight of the waiting passenger begin to grope and swing along the tall white-trunked trees as it came back onto the main line. The noise of the express was already small, almost gone.

  Joe hit the ditch, lying flat while the weeds became black silhouettes before his eyes and the glare felt over him and went on. He was going to be lucky. The train would still be crawling when it passed him. He heard its slow, warning, heavy chuffs with a wonderful, panting exhilaration, and when the locomotive shoved past and the light was gone he stood up almost casually, waited for the tender to move by, and swung up into the blinds with ridiculous ease. With his back against the door he felt the motion of the train jiggle through him; the taste of coal smoke was bitter in his mouth. But he felt safe, and he knew he was going to be continuously lucky. By the time pursuit could be organized he would have ditched the train and got out on the road across San Marcos Pass. He could catch a stage if he wanted to, go inland and come way around. There were plenty of ways to change your looks; with money and half a chance, he could make himself look like a clerk or a theological student in a half-hour, as far from the description of the holdup man as McHugh was himself.

  The thought of McHugh standing before the gun with his skin mottling sickly was a pleasant image, and he thought, There are ways and ways. If the slaves won’t organize and fight for their rights, if they fold up just when they should hang together, then there will have to be other ways. The trouble with the soft-pedal wing of the union was that they never carried their logic to its conclusion. They believed in the class war, they swore by the Preamble, but they didn’t admit it was really war. Strikes were okay, free-speech fights were okay, sabotage was fair in a really bitter fight like some of the fights up in the lumber woods, but they tried to stop there, halfway.

  He would have liked to talk, and the man he wanted most to talk to was Manderich. Art had been all through it, he had been a rebel for thirty years and fought the Austrian cops and lain in Austrian and German and English jails. He spoke with the voice of authority and experience. Joe could hear him:

  –Right and wrong haff notting to do vit us, and neffer did haff.

  –But you were ready to slaughter Otto for pinching a few rugs from the S.P.

  –Dot iss different. Dot sonofapitch vas stealing for himself, he vas using the union for a hiding place.

  –Well, what about tonight? What do you make of what I just did?

  But he couldn’t get an answer out of old Art. All he got was another of the old man’s maxims: It iss alvays our strike.

  He sat alert, but his mind wandered erratically and somewhat warily among images and ideas and formulas. It iss alvays our strike. Right and wrong haff notting to do vit us. I vill show you the difference between a revolutionary and a gott damned t’ief.

  Once more Manderich’s bloody trampled face rose up in his mind, and the wariness with which he was poking among his thoughts was obliterated in a rush of anger. Who pays for old Art? Who pays for the Puerto Rican kid?

  But one thing he kept returning to, one picture had the power to fill him with voluptuous satisfaction, one thing he knew for sure old Art would have approved: the splinter and crunch of expensive glass and gold as he ground McHugh’s watch under his shoe.

  For the first time he began to wonder how much money he had.

  6 San Pedro, August, 1913

  The Sunday morning class in reading and writing for illiterate members is over, the folding chairs are back on the dusty stack against the wall of the outer room. Most of the home guards, at least the married ones, have gone home for Sunday dinner, but in the inner room, which during big meetings is thrown together with the outer one, a half-dozen bindles are piled neatly under the windows, and from the stove rises a meaty, fragrant steam mingled with the syrupy sweetness of stewing prunes.

  Eight or ten men, home guards and go-abouts, are sitting around waiting for the biscuits and mulligan to be done. There does not happen just now to be a spittoon philosopher among them; there is no talk of Lawrence and Patterson, the Black International, the Haymarket martyrs, the organizational strategy of Haywood and St. John and Barnabas, the perfidy of the A.F.L., the inevitability of industrial unionism. The talk is relaxed, unpolemical; they are more interested in biscuits and mulligan.

  The cook is warm over the stove, his bare arms are tattooed to the shoulder, the cigarette between his lips is dead. He moves about the stove squinting and with puckered lips, slipping his hand in his pocket and using the pocket for a potholder, swinging his hip around sideways and standing on tiptoe to move things on or off the hot part of the fire. He is like a man unlocking a high door with a key chained to his belt.

  –That’s a hell of a goddam way to take hold of anything. Why don’t you get a dishrag?

  –Peace on you, fellow worker.

  –Piss on you too, Judge.

  –When are them biscuits gonna be done?

  –Don’t get your ass in an uproar.

  He tips the lid of the stew kettle, stirs the bubbling stew, moves about the stove with jerky movements, stabbing his hand in his pocket, poising tiptoe over the stove to shove the coffeepot against the stovepipe where it is hottest. He opens the oven door and looks in upon the biscuits, and another fragrance is let out into the room. Though it is August, it is like fall, pleasant to be inside, with smells of good cooking. Outside a gray, foggy day.

  –Hey, Doyle, let’s see your tattoos.

  The cook holds a match against the stovelid until it explodes, lights the broken cigarette in his mouth, lets his dangling arm be passed around like something amputated. He is indifferent but obliging, and he never takes the cigarette from between his lips and never seems to puff at it, so that he has to keep his head thrown back and his eyes squinted against the smoke. They pass him on down the line.

  –Every tattoo a blind drunk. What a dehorn.

  –Did anybody ever get tattooed when he was sober?

  –Who’s Bernice?

  –Beatrice, you dumb bastard. Can’t you read?

  –Well, who is she?

  –Girl I knew in Sydney.

  –What’d she ever do for you?

  –She stuck by him, that’s a cinch. Good old Bernice.

  –Beatrice, you ignorant patoot.

  –That’s one thing I could never figure out about guys that get tattooed. You can never get rid of the damn things. Guy gets himself all done up like wallpaper and he has to wear the same pictures all his life.

  –Somebody told me once if you got yourself needled all over again with milk, right in the same dots, it’d …

  –That’s a lot of crap, you can’t get it off.

  –It is ineradicable. (This is a Frenchman, a kind of nutty intellectual, who keeps books for some company and lives in a furnished room and comes down on Sundays to give reading lessons at the hall. An eager, wet-lipped, bright-eyed little man.) Let me tell you a story about that. When I was younger I lived in Algiers …

  –Well, Algiers, I guess yes. That’s where you see the tattooing. Fella told me once he seen a French soldier that had a whole general’s uniform done on him, clear up to his ears.

  –Exactly, but let me tell you. In Algiers there was a famous prostitute—not a prostitute, really, a courtesan …

  –What’s that, a higher-priced name for the same thing?

  –I never saw that the price made much difference, myself.

  –A courtesan. And right between her breasts, right here, she had a motto tattooed, pour la vie, and under it the name of her lover. Pour la vie, for life.

  (The cook goes back to the stove. For a moment he stands wiggling his fingers, staring at the flag on his forearm that waves with the movement of the tendons and muscles, and then he opens the oven door and looks in at the biscuits. The little Frenchman’s voice hurries as if he is afraid it will be cut off.)

  –Life, that is a long time for a courtesan—for anybody. Soon this
lover is out of favor, he is unfaithful, she tires of him, something. He is out. But his name is indelible, here. (He clicks his tongue and snaps his fingers, stiffening to a kind of seated attention.) Alors. She is furious at herself. This name is an embarrassment in her business. Men see it and ask questions. It is worse than a last-year’s election poster with a picture of someone who was not elected. What does she do? She takes a cigarette, lights it, crushes it out, here, on the name of her lover. Thus she erases him, pouf. He is a scar, nothing more.

  –That’s what I’m telling you, it’s too hard to get rid of. This cigarette method ain’t practical, except maybe for high-priced whores.

  –Harder to get rid of than bedbugs. Everybody that gets needled wishes he hadn’t, sometime or other. Ain’t that so, Doyle? Ain’t that why you all swear you was stiff as a plank when you done it?

  –But wait, wait! There is more. Now this courtesan has a second lover’s name tattooed below the scar of the first, under the same motto, pour la vie. Alas, in two months he is out with the first one, and again she has this embarrassing label on her bosom. Again she takes a cigarette, again she wipes him out.

  –Fatima, the human ashtray.

  –Wait, I am not finished! (The little Frenchman throws out his hands in an overboard gesture and cackles invitingly, looking around with bright eyes, his mouth hanging a little open.) She is a woman of mettle, this courtesan, and of an amazing optimism. When I live in Algiers she is famous, for on her bosom is still this motto, pour la vie, and under it like crossed-off items on a grocery list are thirty-two names.

  –What number were you?

  –Jesus. just like an apartment entrance with a row of mailboxes.

  –Was she tattooed anywhere else?

  –Where’d you learn all this story, respectable old bookkeeper like you?

  –He got it out of the Algiers papers.

  –It ain’t practical. Would you put out a cigarette on Bernice, Doyle?

  –The name is Beatrice. And I’d put out more’n a cigarette on her.

  –I still think it’s a foolish thing to do. It don’t give you any chance to change your mind.

  –How about having a union button tattooed on you? I heard of a guy in Spokane that had “One Big Union” in red across his chest.

  –Gives you away to the town clowns too easy. These days, you’d spend your life working off vag raps on the bullgang.

  –Even politically, it is sometimes a mistake. (It is the little Frenchman again.) Remember Bernadotte, Napoleon’s general, who had “Death to All Kings” tattooed on his arm? When he becomes King of Sweden later, this must be as embarrassing to him as the courtesan’s names.

  –What do you mean by that? (Now there is a slight, puzzled pause. The talk suspends itself while the little Frenchman squirms for having suggested that faith in the One Big Union may be as impermanent as a general’s convictions or a whore’s affections. By a kind of subsidence they let him off, and someone picks up the thread of talk again.)

  –Well, I wouldn’t have a button tattooed on me. I’ll wear one, any old time or place, town clowns or no town clowns, but no tattoo. It disfigures a man. There ain’t anything beautiful about an anchor on a guy’s arm, or a bleeding heart with a dame’s name under it. You think you’re beautiful, with all that crap inked into your hide, Doyle?

  –The ladies like me.

  –It’s just a way for punks to brag they been to Singapore or somewheres.

  –Singapore, shit. Some skid road, you man. You can get tattooed ten places in this town.

  –But they’ll always tell you they got it in Burma.

  –Yeah, and you can get a hell of a lot more’n pretty pictures, too. My old man told me once about a guy name of Kelly, went through the country tattooing dancing girls on guys. He was pretty good, my old man said. He could make a man look like a walking art gallery. But this Kelly bastard has syph, see? His mouth is full of sores. And every time he dots some color into a sucker, he wets the needle or the color with his tongue. My old man says they finally caught up with him after he’d give about two hundred guys a dose of Old Joe. That’s the kind of crap this tattooing can get you into.

  –How about it, Doyle, you got syph?

  –He walks kind of funny, ever notice it?

  –I seen him pickin’ a scab the other mornin’.

  –Peace on you, fellow workers.

  –DOYLE, WHEN THE HELL IS GRUB?

  –Don’t get your ass in an uproar.

  –Maybe one little motto or picture or some’m, that’s all right, but my God the stuff some guys get themselves done up with! It’s a bunch of whorehouse crap. You ever see a guy had had the snake job done on him? I knew a kind of fruity bird back in Chicago that used to travel with a sideshow, only by God if he showed all he had to show it was some sideshow. He had snakes all over him, around his arms and legs, around his neck, two great big goddam snakes on his chest with his tits for eyes, and the way his hair grew it looked like they both had a big bushy head of hair like a Fuzzy-wuzzy. Scare the hell out of you. And down in his belly button he had a little tiny blue snake all coiled up like it was crawlin’ out, and on his ass two big red ones that was all ready to start in. But that ain’t all he had …

  –Don’t tell it, I can’t bear it.

  –How did you find this out? Peekin’ again.

  –Right around his tallywhacker, by God, coiled round and round and lookin’ out big as life. You could damn near see it squirm.

  –I sh’d think that’d kind of fix his wagon. He’d scare off any woman in ten miles.

  –Some women I bet’d go for a thing like that, damn if I don’t think so.

  –You better go get yourself prettied up.

  –I get along all right the way I am. I don’t need any needles down there. Holy Christ.

  –A lot of guys have spurs tattooed on their peckers.

  –A lot of guys? What the hell you talkin’ about?

  –This is a fine uplifting conversation.

  –Yes, a lot of guys. I’ve seen two-three myself. Great big boot with a spur on it.

  –What’s the significance of that kind of a thing?

  –Shows he’s a rough rider, maybe. I don’t know. I ain’t got any spurs. I’m just tellin’ you about interesting sights I’ve seen.

  –I can imagine.

  –There was another famous piece of tattooing in Algiers …

  –Here we go again.

  –The filthy French.

  –Another high-priced piece, or was this one cheaper?

  –This was a man, a zouave, a soldier of the Foreign Legion, which your probably know is full of rough specimens. This man, so I heard …

  –So you heard.

  –was killed in a fight, and the undertaker who embalmed him told at his club about the tattooing, so that it was spread around. He said that on this man’s buttocks, one on each side …

  –That’s normal, anyway.

  –on each side was a soldier with his bayoneted rifle held out so that the bayonets crossed in the middle, as at a gate, and up above he had a sign, like a road sign, saying on n’entre pas.

  –Onnontray pa?

  –No one enters.

  –Jesus, the filthy French.

  –Shows you what kind of people get tattooed, eh Doyle?

  (Doyle does a realistic imitation of spitting in the stew. He looks apologetic and puts the lid back on with his crabwise pocket hold.) God damn sores in my mouth keep me spittin’ all the time.

  –I don’t see anything wrong with havin’ a union button tattooed on you, though. It ain’t the same as havin’ some dame that you forgot before you even sobered up. I’ve heard of outfits back in India or somewhere that had secret tattoo marks they could recognize each other by. That wouldn’t be such a bad idea, with so many god damn stoolies and spies …

  (What has briefly formed is beginning to disintegrate again. Restlessness for food breaks up the group. One goes to the window, another picks up a copy of
the Industrial Worker. Two or three, reluctant to leave a good topic, carry it on.)

  –You ever hear that “French Tattooed Lady” song?

  –I don’t know. How’s it go?

  –Hasn’t got much of a tune. Let’s see—(he begins to sing)

  I paid five bob to see

  The French tattooed lady.

  She was tattooed from head to knee,

  She was a sight to see.

  All up and down her spine

  The king’s guard stood in line,

  And all around her hips

  Was a row of battleships,

  And just above her kidney

  Was a bird’s-eye view of Sydney,

  But on her chest was what I like best

  –GOD DAMN, DOYLE, WHEN ARE THEM BISCUITS GONNA BE DONE?

  –was my home in Tennessee …

  –Come and get it then, you damn wolves.

  They have all but finished, and pipes are going. Somebody has suggested that somebody else go out for a Sunday paper. Then the outside door opens, and those in the inner room lean a little to see who has come in. Two or three stand up.

  –Joe! How the hell are you?

  –Just in time for grub. Grab a plate.

  He stands before them, shaking their hands formally around; taller than most of them, slim as an adolescent, his hair a little lank, his smile diffident. His eyes are wide, gray-blue, and have a kind of stare in them, as if he is always looking beyond you. But when they level into yours there is a shock in them like ice water. Strange eyes. If it weren’t for them he would look like any other stiff.

  Without doing anything, without more than a bare word of greeting as he shakes hands, he has taken over the room. The moment you see his face and eyes clearly, and feel the leashed intensity, the indescribable cold eagerness of his face, you find yourself watching him. Even the ones who do not know him are watching him now. His face is scarred as if it has been whittled on with a broken bottle; the lines from the corner of his mouth to his nose are accented on the right side by a white welt of scar. His voice is neither loud nor soft, but even, rather toneless, with the merest suggestion of a Swede singsong, and there is in it something of the reined-in quality of his face, an effect of controlled impatience. He looks like a man who would blow straight up if he were crossed.