Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “Well, Joe,” the big Wobbly said. “You sort of derailed the express.”

  “That’s sure a shame.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “I told you. I don’t like my lawyers. I don’t want you wasting money on them.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  Joe shrugged. His eyes flicked over to the girl, dwelt on her soberly, moved on to Lund and recognized and acknowledged him, without ever altering the watchful, sullen expression of his face. “What’s right?”

  Scott said, “Joe, I wish I could convince you we’re both doing our best. God knows you don’t give us much to work with …”

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Joe flashed. “You’d like all the details about the woman. If I’ll give you the whole story and prove I’m innocent, then you can prove it to the jury and make yourself look good. But if you have to keep the D.A. from proving I’m guilty, that takes work and you don’t do so well.”

  “Well, look at it this way,” the big Wobbly began, but Joe continued without moving his stare from Scott.

  “Every time a woman’s name comes up, here you come galloping to snoop something out. The minute you got that wire from Virginia Stephen saying she’d got Hilton to come into the case you trot around to ask if maybe I got shot in her house.” Again his eyes moved to dwell somberly on the girl, who stood hanging to the rim of her pocketbook. “Tonight you’ll be around to see if Ingrid isn’t the one.”

  Under the circumstances the words were as brutal as a blow. Bright red flamed in the girl’s face, a blush that looked so violent it seemed it must be accompanied by physical pain.

  “What you can’t get through your head,” Joe said, “is that I don’t have to say where I was that night. I don’t have to tell anybody how I got shot. That’s not the question. The question is how Morrison and his boy got shot. The only part of this business that concerns you is keeping them from convincing the jury I was in Morrison’s store.”

  “I must say that with your attitude that’s a little hard to do,” Scott said, and spread his hands at the big Wobbly. “You see, Ricket?” McDougall continued to look out the window across the pigeon-messy sill.

  “Joe,” Ricket said, “Soren Christensen is coming in to act for Hilton this afternoon. Couldn’t you just ride it out till then?”

  “Sure. Alone. Without Christensen or Hilton either, for that matter.”

  “You have to have somebody around that knows the law.”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “Maybe the new ones do. These two don’t.”

  Joe’s expression was that of a man bored with too much discussion of the obvious. Impervious to argument, he shrugged them all off. But Lund, having thrust himself forward, had to try. He waited until he could catch Joe’s eye, and he forced his smile, and he said, “It’s so easy to miss a trick if you’re not trained to this. Your life could depend on some petty little triviality or a technical point. A jury can convict you because it takes a dislike to your face.”

  “That shows what their justice is worth.”

  “It doesn’t do much good to prove justice is blind and get hanged for your pains.”

  “Shot,” Joe said with a white grin. “In Utah they give you a choice.”

  Out of their reach, his back against some invisible wall, he sat and rubbed his broken knuckles with the ball of his left thumb. Scott looked at Ricket and then significantly at his watch. A pigeon fluttered onto the stone sill, and McDougall, elaborately holding himself out of the discussion, chirped at it in the silence and snapped his fingers lightly. The girl stood where she had stood since coming in, both hands on her bag, her body leaning a little, her posture awkward, and said in a voice with a faint echo of Swedish singsong, “Maybe if I talked to him alone.”

  Joe did not even turn his head. “You stay out of this.”

  Trying the faces of the others for a reflection of understanding, Lund saw that all of them were curious, none of them knew. Scott stood with his watch in hand, his legs spraddled, his brows clenched in a frown. McDougall had turned away from his contemplation of the outdoors. Ricket studied the girl with his glowing liquid eyes.

  “Please,” Ingrid said to them all.

  Now Joe was very erect in his chair. In the strong light every mark on his bitten face showed, the scar from nose to jaw, the clipped wing of the nose, the ridged welt on his neck. His lips were thinned together. For perhaps half a minute he seemed to ponder something intense and inward. Then he said, “Maybe you all better chase out for a minute.”

  People were still at the rail, two reporters among them. Lund felt their curiosity as more professional but no more insistent than his own, and he felt the exact moment when the courtroom realized that the girl had not come out with the rest. From the edge of the jury box the district attorney and the judge looked on remotely.

  “I don’t know,” Scott said, and shook his head repeatedly at the reporters. He was like a man trying to shake off a persistent fly. “Her name is Ingrid Olson, that’s all I know.”

  “She’s a musician,” Ricket put in. “She helps Joe with his songs.”

  “What songs?”

  “He’s a song writer. He wrote half the IWW songbook.”

  “Is she an IWW?”

  “No.”

  “You think she’s the woman in the case?”

  “No.”

  “How’s she mixed up in it, then? What’s going on in there now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You staying in, or is he going to act for himself?”

  “Wait five minutes and well all know,” Scott said.

  “How does Hillstrom act with this girl? They seem to be pretty thick?”

  McDougall said sourly, “An hour ago you fellows all thought the woman story was a pretty weak alibi.”

  The clock clicked at the half-hour. The judge climbed to the bench, looking a question at Scott in passing. Just as Scott put his hand to the door of the chambers, the knob turned and Ingrid Olson came out. In a breathless swallowed voice she said, “It’ll be all right,” and with her face held sideward and downward she hurried through the gate and to her seat. Behind her came Joe with the bailiff holding his arm.

  So the entr’act was over, its ending punctuated by three measured strokes of the gavel and the bailiff’s henyard gabble of invocation. It was something of a surprise to Lund to see Mrs. Seeley mount to the witness chair. He had the feeling that they should be far beyond Mrs. Seeley, into some other scene. But here she was, careful and with a prim mouth, determined to answer thoughtfully and accurately. Lund thought that as she sat holding her white gloves in her lap she looked out across the court with an air of pride.

  Justice groaned on.

  –Look carefully at the defendant, Mrs. Seeley. Would you be able to identify him positively as the man who passed you under the arc light at Eighth South and West Temple on the night of January 9?

  –Well, not exactly. He’s about the same build, and his nose …

  –He resembles closely the taller of the two men you saw?

  –Yes, I would say he …

  –Will you describe again how this man was dressed?

  –Well, he had a felt hat pulled down over his eyes, and a bandanna around his neck, cowboy fashion, and no overcoat.

  –How tall would you say this man was?

  –Oh, pretty tall, close to six feet, and slim.

  –I will ask the defendant to stand up. Now, Mrs. Seeley …

  Lund shut his eyes, listening carefully but with detachment. He had no faith in the district attorney’s ability to extract the truth from however willing a witness. He had no faith that having committed himself as public prosecutor the district attorney was any longer interested in the truth. A conviction in the legal sense was not quite the same as intellectual conviction. And he had no faith in any human being’s ability to be a witness, and he did not believe that anything he himself thought important could come from all the elaborate and intricate
formalisms of this court. What could emerge was a barren what and an equally barren how. The elusive who, as the case seemed to him, was certain to be settled by implication and inference and interpretation of circumstances, without clear proofs. And if the court decided against Joe Hillstrom, if Joe Hillstrom were in fact guilty, there remained the final and wretchedly insoluble why.

  If Joe Hillstrom were guilty, how explain it? What chain of circumstances, what dark impulse, what private fury or sudden crystallization of long impersonal hostilities, what tie-up with revolution or what need for money, what accidents and what plans and what influences, the whole web of the why was forever hidden, beyond the jurisdiction and beyond the capacity for inquiry of this or any other court. The answer might lie in Joe Hillstrom’s mind, or Joe Hillstrom might be as ignorant of the whole action as he said he was. If it lay in his mind and memory, then how important was it that Joe’s mind was a labyrinth of prejudice and devotion and idealism and half-baked revolutionary ardor and a personal hostility against fate or society or capitalism or some yeasty Enemy called the System? Lund had seen enough criminals to be impressed by their stupidity and their animalism. Joe was neither stupid nor animal. Then what could be learned, what known?

  He opened his eyes and saw the back of Joe Hillstrom’s head and thought how strange it was, how suddenly unbelievable, that that little round skull could contain all it contained. Like a Pandora’s box, if it were opened it could overflow the world. But it remained sealed, neatly trimmed by the jail barber, dense with the things it knew, and utterly opaque even to the eyes of justice, of friendship, or of love.

  That there was love involved, he needed no more looks at Ingrid Olson’s face to know. He kept his eye on her, and when, five minutes before the noon recess, she rose and went out, he followed her.

  The elevator door was just closing. Dourly the one-legged elevator man—some precinct worker rewarded with a job—held it open for them. In silence they rode down the creaking old rig. Lund saw that the girl’s face was drawn; her starched waist was wilted a little by the heat. At the ground floor she started toward the south entrance, and when Lund followed she stopped and turned, her face a mixture of impatience and pleading.

  “Please—I haven’t anything to tell you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Lund said, stopping dead still. “I’m not a reporter. I’m a friend of Joe’s.”

  Her eyes searched his; he found them candid as well as troubled. “Even then,” she said.

  “I don’t want to force myself on you,” he said, “but I’d like to talk. Could you go with me somewhere and have lunch?”

  “I’m on my way home.”

  “Can I come along?”

  “I live clear out in Murray.”

  “Out where Joe lived?”

  “Near there.”

  “All the better.”

  Smiling to reassure her, deliberately working the warmth that he knew people found in him, he waited. “All right,” she said, and turned again toward the door.

  In the hot noon the trees hung still, lush with the jungle growth of summer. Birds ducked and shook themselves under the sprinklers on the park lawn. Out by the sidewalk a fox terrier lay with its hindquarters spraddled flat in the dust. As they passed, a drop fell from its jerking pink tongue.

  “Why do you come to the trial?” Lund said, and felt at once that the question sounded blunt.

  Without turning her face she answered, “He should know his friends are standing by him.” She led him to the corner and across the street and stopped under a tree.

  “Of course,” he said. “I meant … it’s a brave thing for you to do.”

  “Braver?”

  “Considering how people talk. You expose yourself to all kinds of guesses.”

  “I didn’t expect to get involved,” she said. “I just went there so he could see me.”

  Up the street he saw the yellow car coming, and he let his glance slip sideward, hoping to surprise something in her expression, but she was looking in her purse for carfare.

  “He wasn’t pleased to see you brought into it,” he said.

  She shook her head, her lips tightening. “No.”

  “Though you were the only one who could do anything with him.”

  The car started from the next corner and came rocking. They stepped down off the curb to meet it, and she surprised him with an absolutely direct look. “If I were the woman,” she said, “would it be any harder for me to go and tell how he got shot than to appear in court and let everybody guess?”

  He was embarrassed. “I didn’t mean …”

  “If he’d got shot over me I’d have told long ago,” she said. The car passed them, slowing and grinding, with a whiff of ozone and oil and a billowing of disturbed hot air.

  “Do you think he got shot over a woman?” Lund said, following her toward the front end.

  The folding doors opened. “He says he did,” Ingrid said over her shoulder, and mounted the steps.

  They were in a seat at the rear, away from the handful of other passengers, when Lund spoke again. “You’re very loyal.”

  “His friends should be,” she said, aiming it so directly at him and his doubt that he kept silence. In the next few minutes he stole looks at her face. She was pale, and she kept her head turned to look out the window. The inconsequentialities of the trackside occupied his eyes and at least part of his brain. The car ran through a little concentration of business buildings, past the board fences of a ball park, and then into something more country than city, with only scattered houses, with big gardens, with orchards and privies. They rocked along at a clattering pace, stopping only at main intersections where the houses momentarily thickened.

  “I’m sorry if I seem to keep at you,” he said finally. “I’m trying to understand. Ever since I first heard, yesterday, of the trouble Joe was in, I’ve been trying to fit the Joe I know into this. I can’t.”

  “Nobody can,” she said.

  Ingrid Olson’s skull, like the skull of Joe Hillstrom, might contain some of the answers Lund craved, but he saw now, as he should have seen earlier, that there was no digging them out. His methods were the methods of the district attorney. There were no other methods available. Learning what he needed to know was like trying to weigh the impalpable air with a freight scale.

  “Have you known Joe long?” he said.

  “Since September.”

  “September. That’s when I saw him last. He must have come straight up here from San Pedro.”

  He wondered if this decent, clean, troubled young woman knew that Joe carried a gun, and what she would make of the theory that it was for his own protection as an organizer. He wondered what she would think if he told her the story of the wad of money thrown at him frantically for hiding when the police knocked on the alley door. And yet wasn’t it a demonstration of Joe’s soundness that he should have been keeping company with this kind of girl, this decent clean troubled obviously good and loyal and dependable young woman? Or at least keeping part-time company with her. There was always the nameless source of his wound, if she existed.

  The confusions in his mind began to communicate themselves to his body; on an empty stomach, the rocking of the car and the smells of ozone and oil and straw seats and cigar butts began to make him queasy. He sat swallowing down his uneasy gorge, making no attempt to press the conversation further, and he was glad when Ingrid Olson stood up to get off.

  The two-block walk to her house quieted his stomach, but still he said nothing, because he felt there was nothing he could say. The instruments he had were inadequate for understanding or measurement. When the girl finally stopped at an unpainted wooden gate, before a house with a bow window in which stood a cardboard sign saying “Ingrid Olson, Piano Lessons,” she put one hand on the gatepost and stood waiting, and he knew she was only being polite, she wanted him to say goodbye and be gone.

  Opening his hand ruefully, turning it upward, he smiled. “I wish I knew what to th
ink. It’s almost as easy for me to think Joe guilty of murder as to believe this story about the woman. He just isn’t the man for either one. I don’t understand.”

  Under a catalpa tree drooping with long pods, her hand on the gate, she stood quietly, a quiet girl with her own dignity about her. Her voice was low. “Is it so necessary to understand?” she said. “Isn’t it enough just to take his word and try to help?”

  “I should think …” he began.

  Massed tears had gathered in the girl’s eyes, but she did not turn her face. She stared at him through the tears, it seemed to him angrily, and her mouth twisted in an uncontrollable grimace.

  “Do you think I understand?” she said, and turned swiftly up the walk and into the house.

  5

  The Wobbly hall looked like every other Wobbly hall he had ever been in—a single big bare room with folding chairs piled against the wall and a “baggage room” in the back corner where migrants stacked their bindles. In the broken-down black-leather hotel chairs along the window side a half-dozen men were arguing. The room smelled of cooking and tobacco smoke and printer’s ink from the old flatbed press shoved against the inside wall where a man in a canvas apron was setting up a stick of type.

  At first he saw nothing of Ricket, but a second look showed him the cubbyhole office with its door half ajar, and he leaned in to see the secretary sprawled in a swivel chair before a desk tempestuous with papers and pamphlets. He was too big for the chair, the room, the overflowing desk. His movement of welcome made the chair squeal, and he lunged to keep papers from sliding off onto the floor.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Glad to see you.”

  Lund did not take the offered chair. “I’ve got to catch a train in a few minutes. I just dropped in to leave something for the defense fund.”

  “Sure thing.” Pawing among papers and drawers in a half-hearted attempt to find something, Ricket said, “If I could locate the damn book I’d fix you up a receipt.”