Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  Holy smoke, he said, think what it would mean to the union to have just one rich bird in it. Everybody in the whole IWW is a working stiff without a cartwheel to his name, or an intellectual with shiny pants. Suppose just once some old Moneybags died and left a million to the union. Just suppose there was a really fat defense fund, plenty of money for strike relief. What if we had the money to fight them in the courts and in the press and everywhere where money gives them every advantage.

  Out of the darkness beyond the porch came Joe Hill, walking erectly in a good blue suit. As he passed along a picket line, men spoke to him in friendship and admiration. He went into a hall and saw a strike committee sitting at a table and he said, “How much of a strike fund do you need to keep from being starved back to work?” The checkbook unfolded before their astonished faces.

  Angrily, shaking himself, he stood up in the dark and the silence. The noise of the cottonwood leaves seemed to pause while he listened; then it began again, a dry, clicking whisper. He leaned out to see if he could detect any sign of light down toward the Olson house, but saw none. All alone, he felt how his thoughts and desires warred in him, how much remained to do, how everything he did was not enough. A man could go sleepless for a hundred years, and work like a horse the whole time, and complete not one tenth of what he wanted to do. He thought of Thor, trying to drink the ocean dry and tear up the roots of the Midgard Serpent.

  Hell, he said, and let himself in. The house was still, the dining-room clock a loudness in the enclosed dark. He walked along the edge of the stairs, off the carpet, to avoid the squeaks. In the room he scratched a match, found the lamp on the dresser, and touched flame to wick, so that the room brightened around him into enameled bedstead and pottery pitcher and the shine of varnish on the chair arms. The bed was empty; Otto still catting around somewhere.

  His pleasure at finding the room empty gave a shove to the vague intention that had brought him upstairs. As if he had planned just this, he got paper and pencil and sat under the lamp with a magazine on his knees for a writing pad. A popular song. Something for lovers and kids in high schools, some tune for bands to play on Sunday afternoons in a thousand parks. A waltz, maybe, some joyride song, something to sweep the country like Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, some song that every good middle-class housewife would have to have on her piano, something every music teacher would give her pupils.

  Thoughtfully he opened the magazine, turning its pages, looking among its words and pictures for inspiration, for a starter, an idea that would set him off.

  Much later the sound of someone coming in made him look up from his paper with its scratched lines and its tentative annotations for a tune. He looked across at Otto’s alarm clock. Two-twenty. Steps came up the stairs carefully, were muffled for a moment in the hall carpet. Then the door opened and Otto looked in.

  For an instant he hung in the doorway. His grin was turned on; in the shadow he looked hare-lipped. Then he closed the door carefully and quietly and crossed to the bed and sat down. He did not look as if he had been out with a girl, or at a show. He wore corduroy pants that were streaked with mud. A patch of white cobweb like cheesecloth clung to the shoulder of his coat. Around his neck he wore a red bandanna handkerchief loosely tied. Joe glanced down at the pockets of Otto’s coat and saw that they sagged heavily as if full of apples.

  “You’re up late,” Otto said.

  “So are you.”

  Continuing to smile, Otto untied the bandanna and threw it on the dresser. He yawned and shook his head with a doglike shudder. “You don’t have to make that whistle in the morning. How’s it feel to be a plutocrat and live without working?”

  Joe folded his papers and put them in a drawer. When he scratched himself he felt the lean bars of his ribs. “I’m thinking of making it permanent,” he said. “I can always borrow from you when I need a few bucks.”

  Otto turned his back and slipped out of the coat and hung it up on a wall hook. It sagged heavily, and Joe speculated on what it contained. Silverware, maybe. Something compact and heavy and valuable. Or maybe just Otto’s second-story tools. Interested but not especially curious, he watched Otto undress, and thought of Ingrid’s question, “But how do you live?” It amused him to think what she might say if she knew how that jolly whist-playing Mr. Applequist managed to get along.

  Or Joe Hillstrom either, for that matter, though he kept himself carefully in another category. At that, he would probably have to do something about a job. He couldn’t coast all winter without a stake of some kind.

  “For a while,” Otto said, answering so long after the conversation had stopped that Joe had to hunt back for what he had said. Otto pulled down the striped police suspenders. “Up to a certain point,” he said, and grinned widely, full of slyness, pleased at something he knew, and yawned so cavernously that deep in his mouth the lamplight discovered the spark of a gold tooth.

  6

  The weather in Salt Lake City in late September is likely to be even, temperate, so balmy that the mind sinks into it as the body might sink into a featherbed. There are no dramatics to mark the transitional season: the earth tilts gently, day by day, away from summer and into fall: the oakbrush on the mountain slopes goes dull bronze, and then red-copper; in the gullies the sumac flames, and on the high slopes, among the winter-darkening spruce, the aspens are groves of gold. The morning sun lifts over the Wasatch crest into a faint haze that fills the valley, and as September draws on and the smoke of many fires thickens and mixes with the valley haze, it sets like a bulbous orange. In the wake of the year the poplars yellow along ditchbanks and lanes.

  It is weather for parables of the grasshopper and the ant. The industrious glean and gather and preserve and store, bins and barrels are full, the storehouses of the Mormon bishops bulge with the accumulated tithes in produce. Along West Second South the stiffs with a winter stake begin thinking of California, or settle in against the coming cold in boardinghouses and the rooms of small hotels. In Europe the nations eye one another and hurry the preparations for war; in San Francisco Kelly’s Army is being assembled to beat its way across the continent to storm Washington in protest against unemployment.

  In the reading room of the Carnegie Public Library, which he uses scornfully and of right as a meager compensation for what Carnegie has taken from the pockets of workingmen, Joe Hill sits almost every morning with paper before him, working on verses, or putting into six-by-six drawings the acid of his discontent.

  His pencil is fond of showing a fat man with a big watch chain hiding behind a corner near which lies a wallet labeled “Fair Wages.” Stooping to pick up the wallet is a worker in overalls, but leading from the wallet to the fat man’s hand is a string with many little tags on it. Of the three which can be read, one says “Premium holdback,” another says “Company store,” and a third says “Company boardinghouse.”

  Or many men with strong faces are marching toward a dawn called “Industrial Freedom.”

  Or a man is sweeping a littered street with a big broom entitled “Industrial Unionism,” and the broom is heaping into a trash cart assorted debris named “Starvation Wages,” “Lousy Bunkhouses,” “The Ten-Hour Day,” “Company Spies.” Already in the cart is a dead horse with all four feet in the air, and tied to one ankle a label: “Exploitation of Labor.”

  Or four men press their faces against the bars of a jail window, looking out to a gallows with four dangling nooses. The caption says, “They fought for you. Will you let them die for you?”

  He makes these drawings, or awaits the inspiration of a rhyme, and at noon he goes out for a sandwich and coffee. After that he drops off at the hall what he has ready for Jack Carpenter, the printer, or leaves with Jud Ricket a cartoon to be sent to the Industrial Worker. For reasons that he does not thoroughly phrase even to himself, he does not spend much time at the hall. Sooner or later someone he knows is bound to come through, and he does not want to see anyone he knows. There is the unfinished business at Gaviota, and the n
ear recollection of the police at Lund’s door. He tells himself that he is scrupulous about getting the union involved in anything, and he is honest in this belief.

  His expenses are for carfare and the noon sandwich. The newspapers that he reads religiously he gets in the library or picks up on the street. Though his rent is already a week in arrears, he is not troubled. He does not drink or smoke, and his relations with the only women he knows in Salt Lake are such that they expect to feed him any time he shows up at their door. His musical handmaiden will sit with him at the piano for hours any afternoon or evening. They have finished the “Workers of the World” song; “My Old Kentucky Home” has so far earned eighteen dollars at street meetings. And by himself, secretly, wanting this to be entirely his own, Joe has written words and music of a popular song called “Come Joyride with Me in My Aeroplane,” and begun a waltz to which as yet he has put no name.

  One after another the days pour westward into the dead lake, windless days without stir or commotion or portent. And yet sometimes, looking up at the enigmatic wall of mountains, he feels how close to something these days may be. In this lotused interlude he sometimes thinks of winter, not so much afraid of its coming as sure it will come.

  Until one day he came out onto the library steps in the hazy heat of afternoon and shook the change in his pocket, brought it out to count it in his palm. A quarter, two dimes, two pennies. The quarter would go for lunch, a nickel for carfare. Tonight he would arrive back at the boardinghouse with seventeen cents in his pocket.

  The day was placid, cloudless, a little warmer than usual. On the exposed east side of the street it felt like hot summer. The trees drooped with heat; in the opposite gutter he caught the hurrying gleam of water. Aimlessly he pocketed the change. When he started walking he took the direction that he had taken every day for more than a week, turning right on First South and moseying along under the awnings on the north side.

  Midway in the block he stopped, as he had several times stopped before, and looked in the window. There was a piano there, a new grand piano sleek with varnish, rich with polishing. Its cover was propped up on a stick so that he could see its gilded strings like a harp laid sideways inside the curved wood. He had never played a grand piano; he wondered how it would feel, how it would sound. A chaste card propped against one leg of the instrument told him what it would cost to find out: $984.

  A reverie held him there at the window. A thousand dollars for one musical instrument, and in plenty of homes that he could suppose and imagine, a piano like this one would be standard equipment, as much taken for granted as dishes or beds. There were people in the world who could buy a piano like this as offhandedly as he would buy a hot pork sandwich.

  As he stood looking, his fingers felt the coins in his pocket, sorted them, slid them one over the other. On the carpet between the piano and the plate glass, sheet music was spread in a carefully careless fan so that titles showed, and sometimes the partial face of a man or woman who introduced or sang or played or wrote the music. As far as Joe could see, the faces of these ornately successful people were alike, with oiled hair and little mustaches, except one who wore a derby cocked over one eye. That one was George M. Cohan.

  He supposed that if a song came into the hands of George M. Cohan, and he liked it and sang it, a hundred thousand people would automatically buy the sheet music. If Cohan sang it on a gramophone record, everyone who had a gramophone would want that record, and for every record bought there would be a fee or royalty to the man who wrote the song. Say one cent a record, just to be conservative. A hundred thousand records would mean a thousand dollars to the author. And say two cents on each piece of sheet music, where no George M. Cohan would be involved except as a picture on the cover. That would be two thousand more. Three thousand dollars for one song.

  As gingerly as a man exploring the dangerous surface of a glacier, testing it with axe and alpenstock, his imagination went over the song he had been carrying around in his pocket for a week, neatly copied into sheets from one of Ingrid’s music notebooks. He tried to summarize and catalogue what a song had to have. Sentiment, sure, some talk about sweethearts and how much a lover missed or loved or would do for his girl. And everything had to be like the Garden of Eden, all moonlight and weeping willows, made for spooning. It seemed to him too that there ought to be some twist, some new and catchy note. His aeroplane song had them all, and it had a dancy two-step tune. The slight bulge in his coat pocket might be worth three thousand dollars. The men who wrote the songs that George M. Cohan sang made that much from a song, and they would write a dozen, two dozen songs a year.

  His impulse was to go in, but he hesitated, wondering if maybe he ought to get Ingrid to do this. She knew a lot more about it. But the song was his own, she had never seen it. And a glance at himself in the reflecting window showed him the blue suit and the high collar: he had dressed up that morning because his corduroy pants were in Mrs. Erickson’s washtub.

  Well, why not? What could he lose? If a song had to be sent somewhere, New York maybe, to get it published, then someone in here ought to know. And if there was any chance of publishing it here in town, this ought to be as good a place to find it out as any. He went in.

  Among pianos, spinets, parlor organs, sets of drums, tables of songbooks and sheet music, he stood waiting in the abrupt dark coolness of the store. The place was empty except for two young clerks talking confidentially back at the rear, where the office was. Now one of them came forward, snapping his fingers lightly as he came, his head a little sideways in an inquiring sort of way. He was a dapper, somewhat pudgy young man. His trousers had a crease fit to carve a roast. On his shirt front he wore a rectangular black pin with a single diamond set off-center in it—a lodge pin of some sort, apparently—and on his plump left hand a big black and silver ring of the same design.

  “Yes, sir?” he said. He had the air of a trained seal waiting for a thrown fish. He was deferential, suave, polite; he wore none of that superiority that Joe had instinctively tightened in preparation for.

  Reassured, Joe said, “I want to see somebody about a song.”

  The salesman pivoted as neatly as if executing a dance step and laid one hand on the stacked music table. “Something new? Ragtime? Waltz? Here’s the latest Castle tune, what they call a foxtrot. Everybody’s buying this one. We can’t keep it in stock.” He whipped the music from the stack and held it in his hand, his head bent. “Play it over for you?”

  “No,” Joe said, feeling foolish, standing still. “I don’t want to buy a song. I’ve got one I wrote, I wanted to ask somebody about publishing it.”

  Absently the salesman reached the sheet music back on the pile. Touched by thought, he stood eyeing Joe, and now Joe felt the inspection that took in clothes, shoes, face.

  “I see,” the salesman said. “Well, that’s something a little different. You wrote it, you say.”

  “Words and music,” Joe said. “I’ve written songs before, but never the tunes. This is the first time …”

  The large gray eyes of the salesman remained on him contemplatively. “Who published the others?”

  “You wouldn’t know them,” Joe said impatiently. “They’re in a songbook, eight or ten of them.”

  “Uh,” the salesman said. “I’d like to see them. Happen to have them with you?”

  “Just the new one. I wanted to ask somebody …”

  “Let’s see it.”

  Joe handed it over. He was beginning to feel like a fathead, being quizzed by this dude salesman, but he told himself that if he wanted the song published he would certainly have to show it to somebody. “Maybe that’s not your line,” he said. “Maybe I ought to send it to New York.”

  “Um,” the salesman said. Without raising his bent head or interrupting his study of the notebook sheets he called out, “Eddie, come on up here.”

  The other young man came up, a tall thin young man with pimples, and looked from Joe to the plump salesman. He was one who wo
re boredom as some people wear loud socks. “What’s up?”

  “Man has a song he wrote,” the plump one said. He smiled at his companion and said, “I want you to listen to this,” and then his smile moved over and included Joe. Weaving among instruments, he went to the grand piano fronting the window and slid onto the bench. His soft white hand with the black ring on it touched a note or two, surely and nimbly, and skipped through the verse tune. His beaming good-natured face turned back to the others. “Man wants to get it published. Listen to it, Eddie, give it your critical attention.”

  He propped the notebook sheets on the rack and his hands leaped into the tune, putting into it a lot of fancy frills and variations. Weaving a little on the bench, he leaned toward them like a cabaret entertainer and sang as he played.

  If you will be my sweetheart I’ll take you for a ride

  Among the silv’ry clouds up in the sky.

  Then far away from sorrows like eagles we will glide

  And no one will be there but you and I.

  Say, darling, if you’ll be my little honey dove

  We’ll fly above and coo and love.

  I’ll take you from this dusty earth to where the air

  Is pure and crystal clear and there

  I’ll give you my promise to be true

  While gliding among the silv’ry clouds with you.

  His smile covered his whole face. “Say, that’s all right!” he said, and bent against the light from the window, leaning to read the notes. He tinkled out the tune with his right hand. Joe watched him, uncertain and frowning. As the salesman played, he had heard a couple of sour chords, had even had a feeling that the salesman emphasized them and bore down hard on the words at those points. It was possible that he had played the whole piece to make it sound jingly and cheap. Joe set his teeth. A slow heat began to burn in him, something like shame. He looked at the pimpled youth and marked his sidelong smile.