Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  Almost the first thing he says is a challenge.

  –What about the boys at Oatfield?

  –They killed Art Manderich.

  –I know that. But what about him? Where’d they bury him? What about the others? I’ve been out in the sticks, I haven’t heard a thing.

  –Llewellyn and three others are up for murder.

  (His mouth twists and his eyes change subtly. For a moment he looks blind.) What other three? Virtanen and the Kirkham boys?

  –I thought you hadn’t heard anything.

  –I heard a little. Where’d they bury old Art? Some ditch?

  –Not on your life. The boys from Sacramento gave him a bang-up funeral, marchers for five or six blocks. It’s in the Worker, around here someplace. We got a lot of public support. The deputies got too god damn gay for once, and then pinching four of us on this phony murder charge. Probably they planned the whole thing. The pickers was gettin’ pretty sore and Llewellyn had them all organized for a showdown when the bosses get scared and send down these gunmen to break it up …

  –What are we doing about it? Got a defense committee?

  –They organized one right away in Sacramento, soon as the boys were hauled in. We’re just gettin’ goin’ down here.

  (His eyes are restless around the room, on the walls where One Big Union pennants are tacked, the glass-fronted bookcase full of songbooks, pamphlets, books. His eyes stop momentarily at the row of pictures of May Day picnics, with men and women sitting and standing, some of them holding banners spread before them, their faces full of smiles and pride and zeal. Joe Hill’s own face is lean as an axe blade.)

  –We ought to have a poster up here to keep the boys reminded.

  –I was gonna see Sanson about that in the next day or so. He’s the only guy that can do anything like that.

  –I’ll do it, you won’t have to see Sanson. (The sudden eyes, the leashed and baffled look.) You on the committee?

  –I guess I’m chairman of it.

  –Made any collections yet? They got lawyers hired up there in Sacramento? They’ll need money.

  –They got lawyers, sure. So far all we did was beat it up at a street meeting last night. Picked up eight-fifty.

  –Eight-fifty! (His eyes are incredulous, his hard mouth twists.) How far will eight-fifty go to save four men’s lives? What’s the matter with you down here? You ought to be able to raise that much from every man in the local.

  –I don’t know. Things are tight. We been havin’ trouble payin’ the hall rent even. We’re a month behind on that.

  (The scorn in his face troubles the men in the room. They shift under his glare, and sit sullenly like children being scolded. The toneless voice does not rise, but there is a whip in it.)

  –Twenty-two bucks a month. We could pay that with what any three of you spend for beer.

  (They continue to sit quietly, waiting for some other one to speak. Through the window, across the Sunday quiet of the town, comes the snorting of a switch engine in the yards. Joe Hill’s hand goes into his pocket and comes out with a roll of bills. The rubber band breaks as he takes it off, and flips across the floor. One of the men stoops quickly and retrieves it. The eyes are on Joe’s hands. He smooths off bills one by one—a twenty, four tens, two fives, two ones. Seventy-two dollars. The roll is reduced to a flat little wad, only four or five bills in it. Joe’s eyes change again, fill for a moment with the blind blue cataract look.)

  –There’s a month’s hall rent, and fifty dollars for the defense fund.

  –Jesus, Joe, that’s nearly your whole stake …

  –Don’t waste your time worrying about me. Start thinking about those boys in Sacramento.

  (They watch him closely but not too openly. He has come in upon them as something hard, alien, and compulsive, so that they cannot recapture the relaxed kidding tone of their conversation. The whole Sunday atmosphere of slow inconsequential talk, food, digestion, rumination, has been fractured by Joe Hill’s coming. In the next few minutes several men sheepishly shell out fifty cents or a dollar for the defense fund. Others, broke, look pushed around and a little rebellious. They phrase their rebellion in their minds, arranging how they will tell it to other boys who may drift in during the afternoon. They find the words and the ideas for it as a couple of cribbage games and a game of cooncan start up. Seventy-two bucks, just like that, they put it to themselves. Just peels it off his roll. Where does a working stiff get that kind of dough?)

  (But it was something to see, they admit. He gave away more than he kept. If the whole working class was in the One Big Union the way Joe Hill was in it, those instruments of production would be taken over already, and the workers would be beating up their chains into plowshares.)

  7 San Pedro, September, 1913

  Now when the mission doors are closed for the night and the last stew-bum steered off to a cot in the dormitory, protesting all the way his shame before Jesus for his unclean life, a preacher who has long since lost his illusions about his ability to reweave the un-meshed character of the defeated may relax in half-amused communion with himself, and in the bare clean kitchen may examine the justifications of a clean bare life.

  There is a ritual to coffee at midnight, and whatever reflections Lund may have, however the day may have tried his patience or his faith, however his private catechism may run, it is a ritual that calms him. He is a Swede, one of those for whom coffee softens the stiff fibers of the mind. He drinks twenty cups a day, strong as lye and hot enough to crack tooth enamel, but this last cup of the day is the best, the most leisurely. In this hour of privacy and meditation his feet sound hollow and pleasantly lonely on the linoleum. The room contains nothing but himself; for a while there is no fretfulness in his mind. Though he may indulge his scepticism, he doubts without bitterness; though he may debate the premises of his whole existence, he confronts himself without heat or self-accusation. For this short while he can afford to be a puttery philosopher, as quiet within and without as trees dripping in the stillness after a rain.

  Coffee at midnight is a Low Mass performed without deacon or incense: a ritualistic laying-out of mug, spoon, sugar bowl, milk can, with something like a genuflection and a wordless intonation as the big pot, never empty or cool through the long day, is pushed onto the gas ring. There are formal movings and stoopings as before an altar; the pouring, the measuring of milk and sugar, are liturgically deliberate; and when the mug is finally held between the hands, warming them, the lips approach it as if it might contain the Host. To move through the ritual itself is one sort of pleasure; to contemplate it in these mildly impious terms is another. A man trained for the ministry acquires a respect for ritual; a man conducting a mission on the waterfront has little enough opportunity to practice it.

  Into this compline service one night, coming after canonical hours and tapping with his knuckles on the kitchen door that opened on the alley, came Joe Hillstrom, sailor, longshoreman, common worker, IWW organizer and composer of labor songs. He wore corduroys and a blue work shirt and a gray and red coat sweater, and as Lund put out a surprised and inquiring head he slipped in sideways to stand faintly smiling while Lund shut and bolted the door.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I saw your light still on.”

  “You’ll get shot sometime, sliding up alleys like a burglar,” Lund said. He waved at the table and pulled out a chair. “I was just having a cup of coffee.”

  Joe sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. He seemed to Lund little changed by three years in the labor wars. A little tighter in the mouth, perhaps—a little tighter in every way, as if an inner tension strung the rather flat voice, sharpened the eyes, screwed up the cords of the muscled neck, pulled and stretched the whole face so that it looked older, colder, less responsive. He sat loosely, slumping in the chair, and his big workman’s hands were quiet on the oilcloth. He sipped, and grinned, and for a second he was boyish.

  “You still haven’t learned how to make coffee,”
he said.

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “I was just trying to make up my mind. Something you put in it, or wash the pot in. Varnish, or turpentine, or something.”

  “Well, there’s only a dash of turpentine,” Lund said. “For flavor.”

  Joe emptied his cup into the sink. “I better make you some fresh as an antidote.”

  “You’re a fine Swede,” Lund said. Amused, he watched Joe dump and rinse the pot and fill it again with water and coffee. In the midst of measuring the coffee Joe turned.

  “You weren’t planning to go to bed, were you?”

  “What if I had been?”

  “That’d be too bad,” Joe said. He lighted the gas and stood with the curling black match in his hand, listening for a moment, head bent, his attention far off. Then he snapped the match at the rubbish pail and stared with hard concentration at Lund.

  “How many hours a day do you put in in this place?”

  “I don’t know,” Lund said, surprised. “I live here. It’s not like working on a job.”

  “Eight or nine in the morning till after midnight,” Joe said. “Seven days a week.”

  “I tried once to get you as my helper,” Lund said. “If I’m sweated, you’re responsible.”

  But he could not catch and hold Joe’s eye for the mutual amusement he intended. Joe tipped the coffeepot and looked in, went to the back door and stood spraddle-legged, his head tilted, looking the length of the kitchen at Lund. As if he had not intended to, he fell to listening again, and Lund watched him curiously, thinking that he had the air of not paying attention to what he himself said.

  “Quiet,” he said, and shook his head slightly and came back to sit down.

  “The best time of the day,” Lund said. “Souls all saved, sheep all brought into the fold, everything snug.”

  Including the whole mission with a circular jerk of the head, Joe asked, “Who pays for this?”

  “The mission?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mainly the synod. I get some help now and then from two churches in Los Angeles, and the one here. Once a year we get a contribution from the old country.”

  “Rich church members.”

  “No. Mostly just ordinary people giving a few dollars. We’re always in the hole.”

  “Who makes up the deficit, you?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m trying to figure out why you bury yourself in a place like this. It ties you down, it costs you money, and you don’t really believe you’re saving any souls. What are you in it for?”

  The direct blue stare was challenging, the face sharp and intent as if much hinged on Lund’s answer. The missionary said mildly, “What are you in the IWW for? Are you making your fortune out of that?”

  “No,” Joe said impatiently, and struck Lund’s words away with his hand. “I’m asking you now.”

  Eventually Lund had to shrug. “A lot of people need a helping hand.”

  The coffee boiled over and put out the fire, filling the room with the stink of burning grounds. Joe pulled the pot off the ring, turned off the gas, reached to the sink and got a half-cup of cold water which he poured into the pot. After a half-minute’s wait for the grounds to settle he filled Lund’s cup and his own.

  “That sounds kind of smug,” he said unexpectedly.

  Lund was stung. If there was one thing he feared it was the thing he had seen too often in his own profession, the self-righteousness that could creep up on a man like fat or baldness, greasing the mind and clouding the vision and making a good man over into something almost detestable. In an unappreciated profession it was so easy to take comfort and justification from one’s own sense of blamelessness. A hot retort jumped into his mind, but he held it back, glaring across the table into Joe’s narrowed eyes. He saw the amusement there, and after a moment he could laugh. He was being baited again, and by one who knew how to find the tender spot.

  “Self-righteousness is the vice of the meek,” Lund said. “I’m not that meek. I’d just rather do this than be pastor in some Minnesota town.”

  But oddly Joe seemed already to have lost interest in exploiting the advantage he had gained. The argument that Lund was now prepared for died away before it was begun, and Joe eyed Lund over the rim of his coffee mug. His Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. “You know you’re an enemy of the working class, don’t you, not really a helper?” he said, and set the cup down.

  “I hadn’t been informed,” Lund said politely.

  “Then I’ll inform you.”

  Across from the missionary he sat and pursed his mouth, thinking—a complicated and difficult young man with a mind that could never quite be predicted. He was tough, ironical, sharp, intolerant, full of stereotypes and tired revolutionary clichés and yet prickly with unexpected observations and the echoes of unexpected books, sometimes soggy with sentimentality and self-pity and sometimes as unyielding and hostile as a row of bayonets. In the slight pause Lund shifted, mentally on his toes, trying to anticipate where the attack was coming and in what tone. For one clean instant, as Joe looked at him, he remembered something he had read as a boy in some book of western adventure. A white man and a Ute Indian, to settle a difficulty that had arisen between their respective groups, tied their left wrists together and fought with knives. He remembered now how unexpectedly that argument had been settled: instead of stabbing for his enemy’s breast or throat the white man made one quick slash across the Ute’s bound wrist, dropped his knife and seized the Ute’s knife hand and held him until he bled to death. Lund was mentally protecting his wrists as well as his throat while he watched Joe and waited.

  “All right,” Joe said, “let me tell you about preachers. Preachers and politicians. You can’t be either one and be on the side of the workingman. You can talk and preach and pray and say come to Jesus, but you’re still part of the system, and the system is against the worker. It’s made special just to keep him down, and there are a lot of ways. One is the way Engels talks about, the armed men. That’s all the state is, a body of armed men hired by the bosses. It doesn’t matter what armed men. Deputies, cops, National Guard, Pinkertons, they’re all part of it. They slam it on the worker or the down-and-outer and they tip their hats to the boys in the high collars …”

  “Now just a minute,” Lund said.

  “Or the politicians. They’re part of the system too. They come around on Election Day with butter oozing out their pores, with their secret Australian ballot and their manhood suffrage and all the rest. Holy smoke! That’s a pretty bum joke. You don’t elect your representatives. You swap masters. Fire one and get another one just like him, and this should make you feel fine. What good is the ballot box? A workingman gets freedom from it just about the way he gets protection from the law.”

  Cramming his pipe while he watched the intent thin face, Lund saw that what he was talking about meant something to him. It was something he had thought about and wanted to say out. The vagueness, the wandering of his attention, were gone. He talked seriously and a little pompously, as if reciting a lesson.

  “I don’t own a single ballot box,” Lund said, to give him the proper amount of irritating prod.

  Joe did not smile. “You’re part of the system, just the same. Armed men to hold the oppressed class down, politicians to promise them everything and pull wool over their eyes and make them think they’re controlling their own business, and then preachers to make heaven so wonderful a man will stand for anything down below. It’s a thimblerigger’s game. The pea isn’t under any of the shells.”

  “So I shouldn’t feed a hungry man or give a bed to a bum?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Joe said slowly. “But just the same, if you didn’t the slaves might get mad quicker and rise up and take the rights they’ve been done out of.”

  “Let’s be practical,” said Lund. “These are down-and-outers, stew-bums, derelicts, a lot of them. If somebody doesn’t take care of them they’ll p
robably not live to rise up.”

  The wide stare was oddly hard to meet, pale and intense. “The down-and-outers are licked anyway,” Joe said. “They’re the casualties of the system, and they wind up scabbing on their real friends. Once they take the handout they’re gone. It’d be better they had to die off than hang around taking scraps and licking the masters’ hands and beating down wages with their scabbing. It’s the handout that does it. In the old country they oppress labor with bayonets, but here we do it with handouts. That’s where you come in.”

  “Is this part of some soapbox spiel?” Lund said, not really meaning the sneer.

  Joe was abstracted, thinking. “I go down to the docks a lot when I’m in Pedro. I take down a piece of bread or something and sit on the dock and after a while the rats come out and start nosing around. In about two days I can have the toughest old rat on the waterfront eating out of my hand in broad daylight like a squirrel.”

  Lund was silent, sloshing his mug around on the oilcloth and studying the circles like a penmanship exercise that it made. He laughed. “Well, I’m sorry for all the souls I’ve bribed over onto the boss’s side with coffee and doughnuts.” He was disappointed in Joe. The power to discriminate was no longer there; the hard uncompromising arrogance of the self-righteous was in his voice and in the sterile doctrines he preached. It was as if he looked out on the world through a set of ideas as rigid as the bars on a jail window, and everything he saw was striped in the same pattern. For a moment Lund was tempted to toss back at him the word “smug,” but just then Joe looked up slyly and smiled and pulled down his mouth.

  “Bad coffee, too,” he said. Somehow that one remark took the insistent pressure out of what he had been saying. Lund found himself thinking that Joe could be absurd, as the intelligent but under-educated could always be absurd, and he could perhaps be dangerous, a really deadly partisan, but he would also be something of a seeker always, and something of an artist.