Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  He continued to look smilingly into Joe’s face. Finally he said, “Life is a battleground to you.”

  “It’s always been a battleground. It’s taken the working class hundreds of years to get to the point where they can fight with a chance of winning.”

  “But you think they’ll win.”

  “It’s inevitable.”

  “And after they’ve won, then what? After they’ve thrown the bosses off their backs and broken up this system, what do they erect in its place?”

  “Then the workers will own the instruments of production and will operate industry for the good of all. After the class war is won there is no more need for the state. The armed men and the ballot boxes and all the rest of it will wither away, and we get a classless and stateless society.”

  Lund knocked hot ash into his palm and held it there till it grew too hot to hold, when he dumped it in the trash bucket. The hope. The unshakable piety! He whistled a moment between his lips and then said, “And you attack me for being a Heaven-monger.”

  “What?”

  “Let it go, let it go.” He thought to himself ruefully that he had taken up the wrong mythology. His own had led him to scepticism and humanitarianism. Joe had a faith that would have shamed a Christian martyr, and it led him to crusades, blood-letting and head-knocking in lofty causes, an assurance that could let the whole lost world of down-and-outers go because their decline would be a mark of the coming millennium.

  There was no reaching him, no communication possible between a sceptic and a zealot, a dubious Christian and a militant IWW. The Wobbly program, what made it attractive to men like Joe Hillstrom, was that it was no program at all. It was as reflexive as a poke in the nose, and about as constructive. We are oppressed; fight back. The other side uses any means to hold us down; use any means to get up. There went the whole weary round, the new hatreds begotten on the bodies of the old. The master class has gobbled the earth; throw it out and put in its place a new master class of workers in the expectation that under its benign rule government and class struggle and injustice will wither away. Wonderful. All it needed was harps and wings.

  –Suppose just once, he said to Joe Hillstrom’s thick contentious skull, that men tried to whittle their world into change and progress instead of blasting it. Suppose we didn’t try to blast them out and burn them and kill them but whittled at them, replacing evil with lesser evil, forcing a concession here and an improvement there and substituting for good a greater good. Suppose we tried overcoming the old sins that have been with us since Adam, and have never left us because we have always elected in our hostility and eagerness and ignorance to fight fire with fire, violence with violence, oppression with oppression? Suppose you fought evil and injustice with your whole might but refused to adopt their methods? Would any more, in the long run, die? Don’t you know that violence is unslaked lime that burns the hands throwing it as well as the flesh it is thrown upon?

  You apostle of hostility and rebellion, I could read you a sermon in brotherly interdependence, I could show you how you and I are both everybody’s servant and everybody’s master, I could demonstrate to you that your way of righting wrongs may cure these wrongs but will surely create others. I could be eloquent to show you that there is no way but the way of peace. You sneer at peace, but I could show you that peace is not quietude, not meekness, not weakness, not fear. It need no more accept current evils than you and your fellows in the violent crusade. It doesn’t even demand what Christianity has been demanding for centuries. It doesn’t demand love, necessarily. It demands only reasonable co-operation, for which men have a genius when they try.

  All the arts are arts of peace. Don’t give me your Jack London Darwinism and your philosophy of progress by class war. Talk to me about class peace and I’ll talk to you. Come to me as a man and I’ll talk to you. But don’t come to me as a partisan with bloody hands and talk about the cleansing and purifying that arises from violence. A partisan is no man any more, he is a man whittled to a sharp point, every humane quality in him, all his compassion and talent and intelligence and common sense and sense of justice pared away in the interest of striking power. The partisan is hooded like a hawk, kept on the wrist at all times except when the quarry is flushed, except when there is enemy blood to let.

  But he did not say this. Neither did he say what he had often thought, and what he thought, almost irrelevantly, now: that humanity moves both ways on a street with a double dead-end, and that Vengeance sits with an axe at one end and Mercy sits in weak tears at the other, and that only Justice, which sits in the middle and looks both ways, can really choose.

  He said none of this, though he thought it with a kind of anguish, because he liked Joe Hillstrom and took him seriously both as a man and as a representative. Instead he said placidly, pulling his heavy mustache, “So here we sit cheek by jowl, the Preacher and the Slave.”

  It was wonderful to him how the lean face lighted up, the eyes warmed, the scarred mouth curled like the mouth of a thin eager boy. “You know that song of mine?”

  “Pie in the Sky By and By,” Lund said. “I sing it every night to my stew-bums to make them satisfied with the kind of coffee I serve here below.”

  “The songs says it all, I guess.” Hesitating, Joe looked at Lund as if waiting for the answer to a question. His hand was in his pocket. “That isn’t what I came down here for, though. I came to do something sort of funny.” He pulled his hand out and dropped a crumpled ten-dollar bill on the oilcloth.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Contribution.”

  “To the mission?”

  “More to you than the mission,” Joe said, and now for an instant Lund saw in the eyes an evasive flicker of that odd feeling that kept them friends. It moved him tremendously. “You never peddle the angel food,” Joe said. “You feed a man and don’t ask questions. I’m ready to respect that.”

  “And I make a bad rebel out of him with my doughnuts,” Lund said, beginning to smile. “I’m an enemy of the working class, remember?”

  Joe’s face had already darkened. He was not one who could be joked, though he sometimes joked others. The impatient hand swept the bill across the table. “Take it. I want to donate it.”

  “All right, Joe,” Lund said. “All right, if you can spare it.”

  Joe’s eyes now were hollow, dark with what could have been anger. “I want to tell you it’s for you and not for Jesus,” he said. “I met another kind of a preacher a while back. Out in a hop camp. There were nearly three thousand people having to live like hogs. Talk about your armed men to keep the workers down! They had ’em there by the dozen. Also there was this ranting preacher in camp, climbing up on stumps and hollering about Jesus. That was fine. That kept people thinking how sinful they were instead of how their bellies were growling.”

  “Yes?” Lund said, watching him.

  “Big pack of sins,” Joe said. “He was hump-backed with ’em. Poor shaking sinner. That’s what the bosses wanted, that stool-pigeon preacher up there bringing the comforts of religion to people.”

  “And what happened?”

  “You read the papers,” Joe said. “Did you ever know Art Manderich?” His eyes were hard, his face pinched and tight.

  “No.”

  “They killed him,” Joe said. “Their dirty hired gunmen came in to break up our meeting and they killed him. And this preacher was right at my throat like a wolfhound. He knew what side Jesus was on.”

  Absently Lund began to fill his pipe again. He had a feeling that he should speak with great quiet and caution. “This was at Oatfield?”

  “I didn’t say,” Joe said. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it was, but you won’t tell that to anybody unless you want me in jail with the others.”

  “That’s right,” Lund said. “Some of your friends are in jail.”

  “And some are dead,” Joe said. He stood up, his fists on the table, so angered by his own words and his recollection that his lips were white.
“You run a good mission, if there is such a thing. You’ve been a friend of mine. There isn’t another preacher in Kingdom Come I’d give a nickel to.”

  There was a sound behind him, at the alley door. Joe spun to face it, his eyes touching Lund’s. Across his shoulder Lund saw the knob turn and heard the thump as someone put his shoulder against the panels. Then the hard, peremptory hammering.

  Joe’s hand stabbed into his pocket, and he threw a loose handful of bills across at Lund, who automatically gathered them up and thrust them into his own pocket. In one motion Joe stripped off his sweater, exposing the holster snugged under his left arm and the flat butt of the automatic. A flip of the chest-strap buckle and the gun was off, in Lund’s hands, and Lund, looking frantically around for a hiding place, was raising his voice and saying to the hard insistent hammering, “Yes? What is it? Who’s there?”

  “Police,” a voice said. “Open up.”

  Lund moved swiftly to the breadbox, thrust gun and holster and strap inside, pulled a loaf of bread over it, shut the lid. Joe was slumped over with his coffee mug in his hands, his sweater buttoned halfway up. Their eyes met again before Lund stepped to unbolt the door, but Lund could read nothing in Joe’s face. He had it fixed like wood to receive the police.

  That night Lund went to bed late and troubled, taking with him Joe Hill’s forty-two dollars and Joe Hill’s Luger automatic to hide them in a bureau drawer. He did not believe that Joe had anything to do with holding up a Point Fermin streetcar, as the police had indicated. The instant unloading of gun and money could as easily be interpreted another way: any organizer was likely to be picked up in any dragnet, and police were not above twisting or even fixing evidence on occasion to put a Wobbly agitator behind bars. Any organizer moreover could feel it necessary to carry a gun for his own protection, but carrying the gun automatically made him a criminal to the police. And Joe was jumpy about the Oatfield riot, where he had evidently been. It was natural that he should have thrust the things at Lund.

  He did not believe Joe guilty, but he did not sleep well, and he was extravagantly relieved next morning to read that a dozen suspects, including Joseph Hillstrom, unemployed stevedore, had been questioned and released for lack of evidence in the Point Fermin holdup case.

  For a good many days he expected Joe to appear and claim his money and his gun. It was more than a week before he finally made up his mind that Joe was not coming, at least not now.

  Well, he would be along sometime. He blew around like tumble-weed, but he always came back sooner or later. Gun and money remained in the drawer waiting for some night when knuckles would tap late at the door, interrupting the ritual of the compline coffee, and the singsong Swede voice would say, “Ay yoost like cop coffee, mister.”

  He was quite a man, Joe Hillstrom, and getting to be almost a legend. His name was heard on Beacon Street, and echoes of his movements up and down the coast came in with casual go-abouts, and songs he had written filled the street when the soapboxers stopped for breath—songs set to hymn tunes and sung by devout men who often bawled extra loud in order to drown out the trombones and trumpets and drums of the Salvation Army working the same street.

  Lund shook his head over him: A John the Baptist with a hard mouth, a lowborn Maccabeus, an inarticulate Paul, a dark Christ migrant for his gospel’s sake. The feeling he had about Joe Hillstrom was almost a yearning, an emotional insistence, as if Joe were a son going stubbornly wrong, and Lund a father helpless to prevent him. Absalom, oh my son, he said, and stood ruefully looking into the bureau drawer at the envelope of obscurely got money and the gun in its worn leather. More than once it struck him, and always as a wry joke, that here was one soul he really wanted to save.

  The Singing Union

  1 Salt Lake City, September, 1913

  There is a city ringed on the east by mountains and on the west by deserts and barren ranges and a dead sea. A city hewed from the wilderness, it is green in the midst of wastelands, and between its barrier deserts and its rampart mountains it lies like sanctuary, extending along its incoming roads the invitation of trees. It wears an inland remoteness, a continental isolation, on its face, and over it yet is some of the aura of belief with which its zealot founders endowed it. It is the appointed city in the valleys of the mountains, the city of the Saints, the New Jerusalem.

  Into it Joe Hill came as a stranger and a pilgrim, weary from riding a freight across the desert, hot and dirty and embittered, all but broke, with a few belongings in a straw suitcase, but without the automatic that for three years had ridden under his arm, and without a clear destination or a clear purpose except the restless and never-satisfied purpose of striking a blow, keeping a promise, exacting a partial vengeance.

  Stripped of the marks and symbols by which he recognized himself, he stood at the trackside in a blaze of white heat and saw a tree-shaded avenue begin at the foot of the mountains and angle upward between the brick and stone and neat paint of houses. Beyond that he saw the granite dome of the new state capitol building, still crated in scaffoldings, thrusting upward from a bench of land; and beyond that, rocky and spruce-darkened, the peaks that went southward to rim the valley.

  Also he saw, just across the highway from him, a low concrete building huddled under the hill, with a sign that said “Warm Springs.” As if this were something appointed and planned he crossed the highway and entered. For a quarter a toothpick-chewing attendant gave him a towel, a gray cotton bathing suit, and a key on an elastic ring, and with these in his hands he went along a corridor and into a dressing room with sweaty cement floors and a pervasive, blurred odor of sulphur water.

  At a numbered door his key fitted a lock; there were hooks for his clothes and a bench to sit on. When he came out he hunted past the deserted showers, past the doorway that opened into a swimming pool hollow with the yelling of boys, until finally he saw a door with a sign over it: “Steam Room.”

  Like the dressing room and the showers, the room was empty. It smelled faintly rotten, and its walls were clammy as a cave, with great drops congealed on them. For a moment he was afraid the place was out of order, or closed because of the hot weather, but then he saw the big valve on the wall, and turned it.

  There was a hissing, an internal bubbling and rumbling; a few drops of water trembled from the vent and were overtaken by a white gush of steam. As he stepped back he felt pleasure in merely watching how it came, a jet as big as his wrist rolling in clouds to the ceiling and spreading, moving, filling the corners and eddying lower, reaching out tendrils, sinking and billowing and driving the cold air downward and mixing with it until the whole room was murky, so thick with steam that the door swam and vanished. The smell of the steam was strong, a living, meaty, half-foetid, rotten-egg smell that was like many bad smells, offensive until it had been breathed awhile, and then almost pleasant. Like the smells of his own body, this steam seemed a part of him.

  He was in the midst of a deep hot cloud, and as the steam hissed steadily into the room the heat grew. The goose-pimples that the damp had raised on his legs and arms were smoothed away; his scalp began to prickle with the first sweat. At a certain stage of heat he took off the bathing suit and threw it on the bench; stooping, he rubbed gently at his ankles, black with travel. Under his fingers the warm moist skin gave up its dirt, the black rubbed off and the skin was white. Without haste he rubbed himself all over, and finally he stretched out on the bench with his head on his arms. For a time the bench was cool against his skin, but before long even that sensation melted away and he became one with the enduring lubricative warmth. He stretched his arms, as supple as rubber.

  The prickling of scalp and skin had passed. Every pore in his body was open and breathing. The drops that rolled down his body were sweat or steam or both, the inward and outward waters merging, impurities gently washing out of him, warmth washing in. His mind was stunned. In a long time, his only movement was to pull himself up from the bench, which was growing hard against his belly and hipbone
s, and draw himself up with his arms clasped around his shins, his forehead on his knees. There, watching with half-open eyes how the vapor changed and rolled, he felt his lungs softened and moistened and warmed until it seemed that he breathed with gills like a fish. The angular corners of the room were gone. As flexible as rubber, he sat folded together, and the steamy room enclosed him like a sheath.

  He all but slept. Lulled, protected, sluiced in and out with moisture and warmth, his lungs working evenly like gills, his heavy head drooping against his knees, he drifted for an indefinite time without a conscious sensation, a thought, or a memory.

  A bang and clatter and outcry shocked him awake. The door slammed open, a draught of cold air rushed across him bringing tension and resistance and anger. He sat as he had been, but stiffly now, and willed the intruders to go away, while his mind yearned backward and downward toward the comfort and safety from which he had been aroused. But the makers of the racket stayed in the door, shouting for someone else to come. They came in coughing and choking and one bumped against Joe and startled himself into an exclamation. Joe twisted away from the touch, hating the way they coughed and laughed and spatted each other with wet hands.

  The sheath was ripped, the hammock broken, the light let in, the cold admitted, the spell gone. After a minute of rebellion, Joe took his suit and went out of the steam room to stand under the hard insistence of a cold shower. The shower drove the dream deeper and washed away the anger. He was feeling good, clean, awake, when he passed again through the corridor and threw his towel in the hamper and slid suit and key across the metal counter top toward the attendant.

  Now he stood purged and clean on the outskirts of the city, most of which was cut off from his view by trees and by the benchland on which the capitol stood. There was something hidden and contained about the city that pricked his curiosity; he wanted to get up on some high place and get a good look at this pious Mormon burg he had alighted in. Also, the steam and the cold shower had sharpened and multiplied his perceptions. He felt like a person with second sight. Something hovered ahead of him in the tree-shrouded city, and he saw himself as a small, clean, shriven figure approaching the city under the hot dome of afternoon. Something about this town made him move alertly. He sniffed, searching for familiar smells, and when he met people on the slanting street going up toward the capitol he glanced sharply into their faces, half expecting to recognize them.