Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “The whole file from then to now?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble, please.”

  “It may be at the bindery,” she said. “If you’ll wait a minute I’ll see. This month’s are all on the rack over there.”

  Against the wall where she pointed, the papers hung in their wooden holders. But he didn’t want to get the story backwards; he wanted to follow it as it had unfolded. It was important to him to know, and to know straight.

  In five minutes the girl was back, sliding two ponderous volumes in new red binding across the desk. “Just came back,” she said pertly, smiling. She shoved a card at him, and he signed, took the volumes in his arms, found an unoccupied table, sat down. The new binding opened stiffly; he pressed it down, turning the pages until he found the date he wanted: January 9, 1914.

  The front page showed him nothing that he was looking for, and he had hunted through two more pages before he realized that January 9 was the night it had happened. It wouldn’t have been reported until the next day.

  In the January 10 paper there was no need to hunt. It was there in black headlines, a two-column story clear down the page, and more over on page 4. He read it through carefully, and on to the next day, and so on, hunting up every item. At noon he was still reading. When the reading room emptied he went obediently too, found a lunchroom on the corner, spent fifteen minutes there, and came back to read again. It was nearly one o’clock when he finished.

  For a considerable still time he sat thinking. Around him was a dry rustle as readers turned pages. He saw, out of his abstraction, the faces of strangers, strange windows in a strange room, strange light through the windows from a strange city outside. In this foreign place he sat like a parent brought to hear accusations against his son, and though he willed disbelief he was forced to admit that there were puzzles, ambiguities, qualities of Joe Hillstrom’s character and fragments of Joe Hillstrom’s history, that lent some credibility to the charges. Even the story Joe told about the woman: anyone who knew Joe Hillstrom would instantly doubt it. Yet it was his only defense.

  Things he did not want to remember came to the surface of his mind like corks that could not be held under. Except for stretches of longshoring, he did not know of a job that Joe had held in three years. In spite of his apparent idleness, there were those forty dollars in crumpled bills that he had thrust on Lund in the kitchen of the mission. There was the gun he had thrown him for hiding at the same time. There was that earlier time when he had come in with his face cut and the gun in his pocket. There was the long schooling in violence, the whiplash temper, the fights that had marked his face and jaw.

  He thought of the way Joe could look sometimes when he was interested and animated, chasing down an idea, how his eyes could widen in the innocent stare while his lips twisted with irony. With that image sharp in his mind he turned again to the picture of Joe in the clipping he had torn from the paper on the train. Before he looked at it again he had repudiated the implications of that face.

  Joe’s cheeks were emaciated, blackened with a week’s beard. The lips were drawn back wolfishly. Out of hollow sockets the eyes smoldered half-lidded and contemptuous. Joe must have known when the picture was taken that he had a face to scare babies, yet he had turned it straight into the camera in bitterness and contempt. It was the face of a desperado—or of an El Greco martyr before suffering or art or both had refined the passion and defiance out of the eyes and mouth. He tried to read it, to see behind it, but he could not for his life have said whether it was the face of a guilty man showing his teeth or that of an innocent one bitter at injustice. If it had not had a caption under it he would never have known it for the face of Joe Hillstrom.

  There was more to be learned—there had to be—but not here. He closed the volumes and carried them back to the desk, where the librarian stood up to receive them, an anonymous young woman in a green eyeshade and glasses. She looked at him and smiled an indistinguishable smile. “Did you find what you wanted?”

  “Yes. Yes, thanks.” Looking at the notes in his hand, he said, “I wonder if you can direct me to a couple of places? Is the county jail somewhere near here?”

  The girl’s glasses flashed up. “The jail?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s down on Second East, between Fourth and Fifth South. You’d go four blocks down and one left.”

  “Good. Now how would I get to Eighth South and West Temple?”

  She drew him a little map on the back of the sign-out card. Eight blocks south, two west. “But the blocks here are long,” she said. “You’d better catch a streetcar down on the next corner and ride as far as Eighth South. Either a 6 car or a 12.”

  She was a pleasant and helpful young woman, and he thanked her. It occurred to him that Joe had probably, during his stay in Salt Lake, used the library. He was tempted to describe him, or show his picture, and ask the librarian if she had ever noticed him around, but that seemed a fruitless sort of investigation, and he thanked her again and left, to emerge from the strange reading room into the strangely brassy and unmisted sun. A sprinkler was going on the library’s lawn, badly gone to plantain weeds. Somewhere chimes rang the half-hour. He had still two hours before he could see Joe in the jail. Down the steep sidewalk, under the freckled shade of trees, he walked to the corner and waited for a car.

  Eighth South was wide and dusty. In vacant lots the weeds were head high, with a strong pulpy smell. Big cottonwoods grew along the parking strip, shading the whole street. Their leaves were an intense, varnished green; June cotton blew from their opening pods and drifted the street like snow. Sprinklers going on the lawns made erratic pools of cool air that he walked through.

  Crossing Main Street, he passed three boys hunting sparrows with slingshots. Ahead he could see that the street dwindled off after a couple of blocks, and across the end he saw the smoke of a switch engine. The telephone wires were beaded with blackbirds that suddenly darted up in a cloud and left the looped wires swinging.

  It was a calm, quiet, neighborly street. West Temple, when he came to it and stopped to fix it in his mind, was another of the same. But he saw the butcher shop and grocery on the corner. Cowan’s Market, Morrison’s Grocery, two neighborhood shops side by side under the same roof, and he walked up West Temple on the opposite side, trying to visualize how this block and these stores might have looked on the night of January 9. The newspaper reports had been detailed. He knew a good deal about the outward events of that night, and they built up for him now like something played on a stage:

  The night was mild for winter, with the temperature on the edge between thaw and freeze. The streets were muddy, the slush at the sidewalk-edges just crusting the slightest bit. Except in the shelter of bushes and houses the snow was all melted off. Overhead the sky was opaque, without moon or stars, low and shut in by smoke. The winter smoke cloud was an acrid bite in the nostrils, a taste in the mouth like a railroad tunnel.

  Up this street, coming from the west under tight poplars that even leafless would throw solid pillars of shadows, walkers would have come out of the winter murk like characters out of a story by Poe. First the footsteps, hard to locate; then the shadows, darker than the dark and smoke, more fluid than the poplars, emerging and taking shape. They came toward the corner, a tall man and a shorter one, and near the intersection, within the glow of the arc light, they met a couple returning from a show. Neither man made a move to step aside. They came straight on, crowding the woman off into the slush. As she swung indignantly she saw the taller one for a moment plain: a thin face and a sharp nose, a soft felt hat, no overcoat, a red bandanna tied loosely around the throat.

  Lund walked in the tracks of the two men to the corner, turned with them up West Temple toward the store. When he stopped before the entrance he saw that the store had been closed for some time. Putting his nose against the window he shaded his eyes and looked in upon two dusty counters, empty vegetable bins, bare shelves, the cash register with its drawer hangi
ng open, the icebox with its door ajar. His imagination peopled the stage as the news reports and the testimony of witnesses directed: front left, Morrison trundling a sack of potatoes toward the bins. Back, left, his seventeen-year-old son Arlin sweeping the floor in front of the icebox. Back, right, the younger son, Merlin, at the entrance to the stock room.

  Experimentally he put his thumb on the latch and depressed it, feeling how it might have been for the burglar the moment before the act, this moment with the cold latch under the left hand, the right hand pulling the handkerchief up over his face and then going under the coat for the gun.

  He felt how it might have been to enter the store swiftly, gun in hand, breath hot under the handkerchief, and to shout the words that young Merlin Morrison heard: “We’re got you this time!” How Morrison would have started up from his stooping position, his hands still around the ears of the potato sack; how Arlin and his brother would freeze at their cleaning-up jobs at the rear of the store.

  He felt it as vividly as something remembered, but at that point of confrontation his imagination balked. The story that Merlin Morrison had told in court didn’t contain enough of the essential details. A terrified boy of thirteen, he had dilated some points and totally missed others. And even if he had seen everything that happened, there was nothing in what he would have seen to tell Lund or anyone else why the two men had come to this dusty little store at nine forty-five on a winter night with guns in their hands and bandanna masks over their faces. To Lund, at least, that why was everything.

  Revenge, as the newspapers assumed? A deliberate murder—the quick step in the door, the shout, the shots, the getaway? Morrison had been a policeman, and had made enemies. Also, since leaving the force to open his grocery, he had twice stood off holdup men with a gun, wounding one of them in the second encounter last September. Revenge, quite possibly. And if revenge, and if Joe Hillstrom had really been involved, then Joe might be guilty of a double murder, premeditated, in cold blood.

  Or robbery? Merlin Morrison had not seen who fired the first shot. He had fled, and turned running to see the taller robber fire the second shot into his father’s body, and as he stumbled into the stockroom in panic he had heard a fusillade. But who fired first, the robber or Arlin Morrison, who grabbed his father’s gun from the open icebox and died with it in his hand, one cartridge exploded?

  For some time Lund stood looking through the window into the abandoned store, trying to make the pattern come clear, but failing. There was no pattern, only the shout and the shots and the two slumped bodies and the slam of the door as the murderers fled. He turned and looked down to the corner, the way they had run, and he saw how they had looked in the dark to the women, neighbors, who had hurried to their doors and looked out. He saw the shorter man sprint from the shadow of the trees across the dim intersection and disappear in the murk down Eighth South, and after him he saw the taller man run stooping, his hands to his chest, and heard him call that he was shot.

  Like a second-rate melodrama—except that real death had been died in the store, and except that Joe Hillstrom might have been the man who ran with his hands pressed against his chest. Lund tried to think how it would be to run hard, along slippery sidewalks and through slushy alleys, with a .38 bullet through the lung, and he tried to imagine what might have been in the mind of someone who had just killed a man and his son, but he could not get his mind around either. It seemed to him only that in the chest there would be a desperate burning, and in the mind a pounding of fear.

  Everything in the quiet, closed-up scene of murder led him farther from what he was after. He could not get Joe Hillstrom into it; the tall thin-faced man who took Arlin Morrison’s bullet in the chest remained a stranger, the villain of a thriller.

  Across the street a man came out of his driveway and stood in his shirtsleeves, watching Lund so that he swerved away from the window with guilty suddenness. The place was saturated with guilt. He did not want to stay around it. With his mind groping among contradictions, trying to fit the Joe Hillstrom he knew to the Joe Hillstrom who might have run from this corner five months ago coughing blood from a punctured lung, and repudiating the whole case the law made as preposterous, unbelievable, out of character, Lund started walking north toward his hotel.

  The man who might have been Otto Applequist (and that part of the case was convincing enough, considering what Lund knew of Otto) was lost in the black alleys, separating from his wounded companion, abandoning him, making a clean getaway. The man who just possibly could have been Joe Hillstrom also disappeared in the alleys below Eighth South. He might have hidden away somewhere, he might have made the tracks and crawled into a boxcar and lived, or got away to die somewhere else.

  But the real Joe Hillstrom appeared just before midnight on the porch of a Dr. McHugh in Murray, several miles from the scene of the crime, and asked to be treated for a bullet wound in the chest. He was weak, but holding himself stiffly. When he took off his coat to expose the wound, an automatic fell from a shoulder holster. The doctor did not examine it to see whether it was loaded or empty; he dressed the wound and said nothing to Joe Hillstrom’s request that the whole affair be kept private. There was a woman involved, Joe said. There had been a quarrel over a woman. He was as much to blame as the other fellow, and he did not want to make any complaint against the man who had shot him. Neither did he want the woman to be dragged into any unpleasantness.

  That was all that anybody really knew—the fact of his wound and the unwavering consistency of his story, or of his refusal to tell a story. The gun he threw away when a colleague of McHugh’s drove him home, and it was never found. In pain, weak from loss of blood, he whistled twice, sharply, on his fingers as they approached the house where he boarded, and then the doctor helped him in.

  He was half dead of his wound three days later when McHugh told his story and the police came down to get him.

  2

  At three-fifteen Lund was at the door of the county jail. The door let him into a little vestibule with an office on the right and closed doors on the left and a grilled steel gate straight ahead. A man and a woman were waiting in the office. Behind the gate a fat policeman in an office chair looked him over with puffy yellow eyes.

  “I’d like to see Joseph Hillstrom, if he’s back from court.”

  The jailer’s eyes went over him in silence, and Lund stood them as he might have stood a crawling yellow-jacket. Living at the mission and working with sailors and hoboes and the drift that washed up and down Beacon Street had made him jumpy around police. If you were on the bottom you were at the mercy of every grafter and sadist and petty exerciser of power. But no matter how steadily he looked back into the jailer’s dead eyes, the eyes did not change. A fat freckled hand shoved out a book like a hotel register, and Lund signed.

  “Fifteen minutes,” the jailer said. “Couple ahead of you. Wait in there.”

  He yawned, his yellowish eyeballs swam with sudden water, he looked past Lund as if he had already forgotten him.

  As Lund sat down the woman on the next chair drew her knees together, holding her pocketbook on top of them primly. Her consciousness of him had in it a wan echo of coquettishness; her eyes fixed themselves in a businesslike way upon the opposite wall, strayed, touched him again, jumped back to the wall. Beside her on the other side a chinless little man smoked the fierce stump of a cigar. Behind the desk a deputy read a magazine. There was a noise of flies at the high windows.

  Somewhere a bell rang, and after a couple of minutes a man came out of the door on the left. The man and woman in the office stood up uncertainly. From the chair in the hall the fat jailer said something, and the man and woman crossed the hall and closed the door behind them. The deputy turned a page, rolling half the magazine under in his left hand.

  No more sure of what he would find, or of what he hoped to find, than he had been on the train in the morning, Lund sat on. The papers had given him details but no explanations; the visit to Eighth South and W
est Temple had done no more than upset him and accentuate his doubt. He was unable to visualize what Joe would look like: like himself, or like the bearded desperado of the morning paper? And what would they say to each other? No moral lectures, he said to himself. Above all, no moral lectures.

  And yet there were questions he must ask, things he felt he must know.

  After a long time the bell rang again. Though he had found the waiting tedious, marked only by the swish of the deputy’s pages, it seemed now that the fifteen minutes allowed visitors would not be enough even for a greeting. As he stood up and looked to the jailer for a sign, the left-hand door opened and the couple came out. The woman was crying, her eyes puffy. She held her handkerchief against her mouth, and in passing looked for a moment full at Lund with an expression of brave suffering. Her tears were for herself and for spectators; she savored herself as sufferer. “You see?” her upturned eyes said. Her husband went with his arm across her shoulders, his weak little pucker of mouth clenched on the dead stump of cigar.

  Oh Lord, Lund thought, and wondered why self-consciousness made even real anguish look like a pose, and went through the door at the jailer’s nod feeling furtive and brittle. Inside a chair was pulled close to a barred wicket like a ticket window in the wall. A policeman leaning against the far wall nodded him to the chair. After a few seconds there was a scraping beyond the wicket.

  His first emotion was relief that the face did not look like the face in the paper, and the instantaneous explanation came to him: that picture had been taken while Joe was still sick from his wound. Now, though his face looked pale and so sharp that the slight bulge of his teeth showed under the drawn mouth, he was clean-shaven and his hair was cut so short that he looked like a boy. His eyes were wide and surprised; Lund thought they were pleased.

  “Well, holy smoke! What are you doing in this burg?”