Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  The courtroom was already hot. Not paying too much attention to the circlings of the prosecutor, Lund watched Joe’s head, and he saw with pain, as Joe turned to say something to his lawyers, the theatrical sneer that twisted Joe’s lip. Why did he have to make it worse for himself? Why, in front of the jury in whose hands his life would be placed, did he adopt an attitude that would insult and offend everybody who watched him?

  –It is true, isn’t it Mr. Harms, that some chemists would have no hesitation in identifying this sample as human blood?

  Joe’s head jerked toward Scott again. “That’s leading!” he said loudly. He threw himself back in the chair in disgust so histrionic that Lund wished for some way to shield him from the jury’s eyes.

  –Some chemists might, perhaps. I have had experience enough to know that a sample as old as this one …

  Everyone, even the witness, was watching Joe and his attorneys. Scott was shaking his head, half smiling, at Joe’s whispered vehemence. The room buzzed, and the gavel came down. Almost as it whacked solidly on the bench Joe was on his feet.

  “Your honor, I’d like to make a few remarks!”

  The thin old face looked down at him, a wedge of flesh and bone and legal precedent, the visage of judicial calm. Like an actor Joe whirled on his lawyers. His hair fell on his forehead as he struck a pose with pointing finger. “There are too many prosecuting attorneys in this case!” he said. His voice whined with tension like a bent saw. “I’m going to get rid of two of them. Mr. Scott and Mr. McDougall, do you see that door? Now you get, you’re fired!”

  With alarm in his heavy dark face, McDougall grabbed Joe’s arm, but Joe pushed him against the table. “You can bring on buckets of blood,” he shouted at the district attorney. “You bring on all the blood you like, but I intend to show a few things myself! I intend …”

  The thundering of the gavel drowned him out, but it was at least a minute before the uproar in the courtroom quieted enough so that the judge laid down the threat of his gavel. Noise whispered and frittered away until it was still. Lund could hear the loud crackle of papers as McDougall gathered them up. The lawyer’s face was hard, and dull red burned in his cheekbones. Behind him Joe Hillstrom, drawn up in a posture that Lund cringed for, a posture that was preposterously showy and arrogant, suddenly sprang forward and grabbed the papers from McDougall’s hands. “Get out!” he said. “Those belong to the defense. They’re paid for and I’ll keep them. And you can give the defense back the money it’s paid you, too.”

  The judge was standing, pounding again. His sagging cheeks quivered, his eyes went like swords down over the room. An irresistible pressure had forced Lund from his seat, and he realized now that the whole room was up. A young woman had sprung up from somewhere and was leaning across the rail, crying “Joel Joe! Listen to me, Joe!”

  By the time the room was again quieted the girl had slipped back to a seat near the front on the right side. For Lund she was only one more incomprehensible element in a situation already as incredible and unpredictable as a disturbed dream. That Joe Hillstrom should be in this courtroom on a charge of double murder was incredible enough. That the daughter of an ex-president of the Mormon Church should emerge as his defender, that Joe himself should base his entire defense on an unlikely story of a quarrel over a woman, that there should now be a nameless young woman leaning over the rail crying his name in the midst of the bedlam that Joe had created by firing his counsel in the middle of his trial—these were enough to compound the incredible with utter confusion. Looking again for the girl to study her face, he saw only the top of her hat among the crowded spectators.

  The judge held his gavel in his hand like a weapon. His voice crackled drily over the quieting room. “Now, Mr. Scott,” he said, “I warn you I will not tolerate this sort of thing in this court. You will keep your client under control, or I will have the bailiff do so.”

  Scott glanced sideways at Joe, and the left side of his face twitched in an irritable grimace. “Mr. Hillstrom’s conduct is a complete surprise to me,” he said. “Last night we were on perfectly friendly terms.” With a very white fresh handkerchief he wiped the palms of his hands. “I think he is beside himself,” he said.

  But Joe was not yet through. He was up again like a man stabbed from behind, shouting at the judge. “Can’t I conduct my own case? I did it in the preliminary hearing. Can’t I examine witnesses and recall any I want to?”

  “That is your legal right.”

  “Then I’m through with my attorneys! I want them to get out. I’ll prove a lot of things without them, and I’ll prove I wasn’t at Morrison’s grocery store that night …”

  “I object!” the district attorney said. “Your honor, I object to the defendant’s making a statement of his own case.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Hillstrom,” the court said.

  Joe remained standing. “And I won’t need you to help me, Mr. Scott.”

  The gavel whammed the bench. “Bailiff,” the judge said, “see that the order of the court is carried out.”

  Lund drew a deep breath and shoved himself backward from where he had been sitting on the very edge of the seat. His hands were clenched, and his mind felt like something entangled in flypaper. That he should carry his frenzy clear to the point of being manhandled by the bailiff.… He must be, as Scott said, beside himself. Or was the whole outburst an act, cunningly devised to get rid of the defense he said he did not want? Did he want to conduct his own defense because he thought he could do it better or because he wanted no defense at all? And if it was an act, how ill-advised an act, calculated to prejudice everyone in the courtroom against him. And again, was that perhaps what he wanted? He seemed perversely determined to do everything backwards.

  From where he had been forcibly planted Joe was still shouting at the judge. “Your honor, I want my attorneys to leave this courtroom!”

  The old cold face looked down; there were broken veins in the flat cheeks. “The court does not believe that it is to your best interests to be unrepresented by counsel.”

  “It’s my legal right.”

  “Nevertheless,” the judge said, and his lower lip thrust slightly out in decision, “it is the ruling of this court that Mr. Scott and Mr. McDougall shall remain as friends of the court, to protect the interests of the defendant. Defendant may do his own cross-examining if he desires.”

  Shrugging angrily, McDougall came back from the bailiffs side door, where he had been on the point of departing. Scott bowed his head, acknowledging the court’s decision with a slightly ironic deference. From his chair, turned sideways so that he could watch them both, Joe regarded them with the contemptuous sneer on his mouth.

  The chemist was still on the stand, a man who had given expert testimony many times on the whiff of chloroform, the taint of arsenic, the contents of stomachs, the condition of bodies. “Proceed,” the court said, and nodded to the prosecutor.

  “I have finished with the witness.’ ”

  “Cross-examination,” the court said.

  Scott stood up and settled his coat across his shoulders. “Mr. Harms …”

  But he was cut off by Joe Hillstrom’s tight voice. “Mr. Scott, there’s the door. Why don’t you go?”

  For the first time Scott looked annoyed. A dark flush flooded up his smooth neck and into his face. “I am here by order of the court.”

  And now, Lund saw with an embarrassment that approached horror, they were back at it. “Can’t I discharge my attorneys?” Joe demanded.

  The judge was perfectly composed, but in his clipped voice and the careful inclination of his head Lund read patience enforced with difficulty, as if the judge were addressing some incorrigible child who strained the endurance but who must be given all the outward forms of consideration. If Joe had, fantastically, been trying to show his contempt of judge and jury, and alienate them all, he couldn’t have succeeded better.

  “I have asked the attorneys for the defense to stay here for a while as fr
iends of the court,” the arid voice said. “They will cross-examine witnesses as before. You may take part in the proceedings if you desire.”

  To Lund’s relief, Joe settled back in his chair and said no more. The machinery of the trial ground on. The bloodspot, still unidentified as sheep, cat, dog or human, was reluctantly passed by, and the chemist stepped down to be replaced by Mrs. Phoebe Seeley. Because Lund had walked out her part of the drama on the corner of West Temple and Eighth South, he attended the questions and answers carefully, with an odd sense of remembering the scene himself.

  Mrs. Seeley brought out her story promptly, as if she had memorized questions and answers in advance: the walk home from a show about 9:30 on the night of January 9. The slushy sidewalks, with just a path beaten along them. The two men who crowded her off into the mud, and the quick indignant look that showed her the taller one plain under the arc light.

  –Were there any peculiarities about the taller of the two men you saw?

  –Well, he had a mark, a scar like, on his neck, and a sharp nose.

  –Such a scar, would you say, as the defendant has on the left side of his neck?

  “I object,” McDougall’s harsh voice said. “The question is leading.”

  Instantly Joe was on his feet. The inopportune fury that had burst out of him twice before was so violent now that his voice cracked. “Who’s counsel here, anyhow?” he shouted. “How many times do I have to fire you?”

  In the momentary astounded silence Scott put his flat hands on the table and with an air of having weightily decided something stood up. “Your honor, I don’t understand my status in this case, and I’m sure Mr. McDougall doesn’t either. I ask for an adjournment until we can talk the situation out with the defendant.”

  The judge glanced briefly over the heads of the attentive jurors. “The court is recessed for three quarters of an hour,” he said. “The jury is excused until eleven-thirty.” The hub-bub that began among the spectators he quieted with a single peremptory rap. “I must warn the spectators. Now and hereafter, if order is not kept, I shall request the bailiff to clear the court.”

  Though the voices dropped again, Lund felt all around him the craning and peering to see and hear what went on inside the railing. People creaked with their desire to know. It was clear that more drama was brewing, for almost before the last juror was through the door the district attorney was leaning across the defense table. He was naturally a bristly man; now he was swollen with anger and righteousness.

  “There are a few things I would like to say,” he said, speaking directly to Scott “I’m not at all surprised at this. I recall that there was a long conference in this room yesterday afternoon between the defendant and his attorneys.” Leaning forward on the spread fingers of his left hand, he poked his right index finger back and forth at Scott’s chest. “I just want to say that if the defense thinks it can start any insanity business in this trial it is welcome to try it. The state is ready to meet this insanity business right now!”

  His head snapped around and his stern eye fixed McDougall. “Do you think the defendant is insane?”

  “No,” McDougall said flatly.

  “Do you?” the prosecutor said, swinging back to Scott.

  Scott was swelling and bridling, pulling in his neck and rolling his shoulders until his face was turkey red. “I do not,” he said. “But I must say I am surprised at the district attorney’s suggestion of an insanity trick by the defense.”

  Oh Lord, Lund thought. Now we will have hurt feelings, and expostulations, and demands for apologies, and those whose business it is to win by whatever kind of trickery will turn their incorruptible faces to the court and lay their hands on their breasts and be martyred by the cynicism of doubters. But was it possible that the whole thing was a defense trick, cooked up between Joe and his attorneys and played out like a memorized act? He considered the possibility and dismissed it, for though Joe’s actions had had a melodramatic unreality about them, the notion of a planned act was too fantastic to bear scrutiny. He did not believe Joe was a good enough actor to do it; he did not believe their talk in the jail could have been part of an elaborate and subtle pretense.

  The district attorney folded his arms and looked Scott over with a little smile. “I have nothing to retract. There is grave doubt in my mind that the conduct of the defense is in good faith.” Another actor, he said his speech in the proper clear, bitten syllables.

  “And in mine too,” Joe Hillstrom said, and again injected his shock of surprise into the routine acts of the court characters.

  Apparently the spectacle of defendant and prosecutor banding together against the defense attorneys amused the judge. With a wintry smile he said, “Bailiff, conduct the defendant into the court’s chamber.” To Scott, as he stepped down, he said, “You’d better go in and settle this in private.”

  As Scott and McDougall, closely conferring, followed Joe and the bailiff out the rear door, the court broke out into delighted clots of talk.

  –This Hillstrom is crazy as a coot. Did you see him jump up there and try to yell the judge down?

  –He isn’t any crazier than I am. He’s smart. He knows as much law as his lawyers. The D.A. had that last one figured right on the line, they’re trying for an insanity verdict.

  –You bet he isn’t crazy. He’s murderous. Have you noticed his eyes? My old man used to say you could never trust a man with those pale eyes. He’d as soon kill you as look at you.

  –Are they going to put him on the stand? Have they found that woman he was supposed to be mixed up with?

  –They haven’t found her because she doesn’t exist.

  –Yes, but I heard this morning there was some jane that had come out defending him, some bigwig’s wife, she got Clarence Darrow interested. Maybe that’s why Hillstrom tried to can his lawyers, he’s got Darrow coming in.

  –What I want to know is, who’s this jane that was yelling at him down there a while ago? You know who she is? She been in this before?

  So I’ll just sit still, Joe had said. Either way, I’ll just sit still.

  He was supremely confident, secure in his own innocence of the crime. Or he was fanatically bent on showing up the cracks in capitalist justice. Or he had some obscure motive that even his lawyers didn’t know for refusing to play his scheduled part of defendant. Or he was guilty and at bay.

  And what was going on in the judge’s chamber now? More extravagant defiance and denunciation of his lawyers? More berserk throwing of anarchy into the orderly machinery? Was that perhaps his motive in all this, simply a delight in throwing monkey wrenches, a refusal to co-operate with any part of society’s institutions? Or was he more subtle and cunning than anyone gave him credit for being, and deliberately cultivating confusion because confusion was his best defense? Or was he a little drunk on the notoriety of his trial, and trying to steal the show from the orderly character actors elected by Salt Lake County?

  This last speculation, Lund admitted, was evidence of how dizzy his mind had got attempting to understand. He must keep firmly in mind, though the circumstances and the staged look of the whole trial and the histrionics of defendant and attorneys kept luring him to forget, that this was no play. Joe Hillstrom’s life was at stake.

  Three or four men had gathered just outside the rail on the center aisle. One of them, as he turned, showed a Wobbly button on his shirt—a massive man with very liquid black eyes, a mouth that twitched in a gritting, unreal smile, and a habit of looking beyond anyone he talked to, as if picking up meaningful hints of movement in corners of the room. He seemed to be the center of the group; it was to him that Scott came now from the inner room. On impulse Lund stood up and joined the handful of men. Scott was saying, “Once Christensen and Judge Hilton enter the case officially I’ll step out if he wants, but it would be suicide to let him handle his own case even for one day.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be the way he figures it,” said a newspaper man with a pad in his hand.


  The big Wobbly looked across him abstractedly, gritting his nervous smile. “Something’s eating him,” he said to Scott. “Can I go in and talk to him?”

  The lawyer threw his hands wide. “I wish you would.”

  “There’s a girl here I think ought to talk to him too.”

  Scott’s eyebrows worked, but he said nothing. And Lund, to whom the whole morning had been unreal, did an uncharacteristic thing. He pushed forward to the rail and said, ‘I’m an old friend of Joe’s, from San Pedro. Maybe I could get him to listen.’ ”

  The black eyes touched him, moved beyond him. “It’s a cinch somebody has to. Wait just a minute.”

  He went through and up the side aisle, and the girl sitting in the third row there came out at his crooked finger. They whispered together in the aisle, the girl blushed pink, her eyes, startled, searched the Wobbly’s face, her head dropped a little. Then the two of them came down and inside. The big Wobbly let his eyes cover them all. “Well, I guess we’re a delegation.”

  The man with the pad started to come along, but the Wobbly good-naturedly put a hand against his chest and held him back. “This ain’t for you,” he said. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Four of them went on through the judge’s door. Going last, Lund turned and looked back into the courtroom. He had the odd unreal shock of seeing the thing reversed, of looking out over the audience while the act was still on, as if he were someone called up from the audience to assist the magician in a trick.

  Every eye in the room was on him—or on the doorway where the blonde girl had been just a moment before.

  4

  Joe was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, McDougall behind the desk. They were not talking. The lawyer was looking out the window, watching the clouds and the sky and whistling softly between his teeth. Joe seemed perfectly calm; he ran a comb through his hair as they came in.