Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “I didn’t ask them to defend me,” Joe said through his teeth, holding McCarthy’s eyes. It was coming out in the open now.

  “Perhaps not,” the justice said. “That’s between you and them. What is at stake now is your life. If you are innocent, as you have persistently claimed, this is your last chance to prove it.”

  “I’ve told you all it was up to you to prove I’m guilty,” Joe said. “If your law and your justice is worth anything, why doesn’t it live up to its claims?” He let his hate pour out through his eyes at this one lawyer-mouthed representative of the System, but he did not, as he obscurely hoped to, force McCarthy to anger. The man looked at him coolly, with an intolerable quiet.

  “Your counsel has been correct on that point. You have been convicted on evidence in a trial that the reviewing court found impartial. At this point you are guilty unless you prove your innocence.” His white finger tapped the desk, he held Joe to the duel of eyes. “You doubt the integrity of this board. Here is what the board will do. If you will, in strictest confidence, tell any two members of it the circumstances under which you were shot, and to their satisfaction prove what you say, the board is ready to pardon you instantly without making the evidence public. What you tell will never go any farther, even to the other members of the board.”

  Joe braced himself against a feeling like slipping in loose sand. His insides twisted; with a suddenness as if something had been thrown in his face he felt himself go red. He saw the faces at the table stiffly watching him, and he saw that some of them hated and feared him and would be glad of his death, but that McCarthy did not hate him. McCarthy might demand his death, but McCarthy did not hate him.

  But he knew his part; he knew what words must be said. From a tight throat he said, “I don’t want a pardon. I want a complete vindication or nothing. I want a new trial.”

  “We’re past that stage,” McCarthy said. “The board is giving you a chance at life, Mr. Hillstrom.”

  The internal shaking had worked outward until it trembled in Joe’s hands and shoulders and knees; his throat was clamped as if in paralysis. For a long time he stood before them and said nothing, while Hilton and Ricket went quickly to the desk and leaned over it and talked in quick sentences with McCarthy and the governor. But when their bodies moved aside again McCarthy’s eyes were on him as if nothing had interrupted their look. It was the imperturbable steadiness of the eyes that infuriated him; they could not be made angry. If there was any expression in them now aside from McCarthy’s judicial calm it was pity, and the very thought that he was being pitied scalded Joe’s mind.

  He twisted his hard mouth. “I said I’d get a new trial or die trying. I guess I’ll have to die trying.”

  Ricket and Hilton and Christensen pulled him aside. Their faces were anxious and he heard their anxious words: “… last chance.… couldn’t do her any harm … think they mean it … wouldn’t get out …” But he pulled away from them and turned, seeking the eyes of McCarthy. All the rest of them he ignored. It was to McCarthy that he had to justify himself, McCarthy who had to be challenged and defied.

  “I won’t tell you anything,” he said hotly. “It’s not up to me to tell you anything. If I’d had a fair trial I wouldn’t have been convicted on such flimsy evidence. I won’t take any offers and I don’t want a pardon. I want a new trial or nothing.”

  Hilton’s restraining hand dropped from his arm; he saw the expressive weary lift of the lawyer’s shoulders as he turned away, but he saw them only from the corner of his eye. His glance was still leveled like a spear with McCarthy’s. He drew himself straighter until he was rigid.

  “I want to die a martyr,” he said.

  The words were like the striking of a light, for having said them he knew that they were true, and had been true from the beginning.

  So he stalemated them with his defiance, and though he was the pawn of forces, furiously defended by one side and stubbornly and repeatedly condemned by the other, yet he imposed his will on them. He imposed it even on Justice McCarthy, who was not like the others on that board. The Pardon Board met to decide his fate, and Judge Hilton prepared a desperate contentious confused brief, but it was Joe Hill who decided his own fate, and he left his lawyers pleading not with the board but with him.

  At a certain point they dismissed him (but he knew that even their dismissal was an act of helplessness) and manacled him like a maniac again, and stripped him and frisked his clothes and body for possible weapons, possible escape tools, that might have been slipped to him by his friends in the meeting. Just before noon, aggrandized by his company, two guards took him back to a new cell in the maximum-security section.

  He brought his defiance and pride back with him, and he sat with them all the rest of that day. Admiration for his own devious cunning moved him; he felt an awed wonder at the way events had built toward this precise and inevitable end, all the while that he and his friends had been apparently trying to move them in quite another direction.

  In his thoughts he defied the Pardon Board and its assumptions of power over his life, its capacity to condemn or forgive. “I don’t want a commutation or pardon, I want a complete vindication or nothing,” he had said to them. Playing the words over and over to himself now to test them for flaws and for anything that might ring false to the legendary resolution of Joe Hill, he found them exactly right.

  “I said I would get a new trial or die trying,” he told them again, and rubbed his closely barbered head and smiled. He thought of writing a song or poem to express the defiant excitement he felt, the wonderful exhilarated feeling of everything’s being settled, but he could not sit still to the job. The thought of Otto, ducking in flight from the law, filled him with contempt. He thought, That cheap yegg! but he glanced sideways in memory at the times when he himself had run, all the times when he had convinced himself that he was more useful outside a jail, and working, than inside at the mercy of the bosses and the bosses’ armed men. Very sharp in his mind were nights of doubling and slinking in streets and alleys and freight yards, the watchful progress up and down the coast on the S.P., the panicked scattering in the sun and dust at Oatfield. He knew what Fuzzy Llewellyn had seen, standing on his unshaken soap box above the melee and baring his gopher teeth, staring into some vision more meaningful than the dead and the afraid. Duty and a grander opportunity lay where Fuzzy had been looking while Joe Hill fled. The shame of that flight, always with him and always repudiated, he recognized and accepted now, because here he stood where Fuzzy had stood, saying what Fuzzy had said. “I’ll stick here.” What a continent a man could cross with that one little step! He wondered at it and at himself, feeling in his mind for combinations of steadfast words to say for himself and others how it felt.

  For supper, ignoring the meal they brought him, he ate his thoughts, and he took them to bed with him. He Was used to sleeping in the light: a year and a half in jail and prison had taught him that. But he was still unused to the iron, hollow, reverberant ring of this particular prison, the empty echo that steps made, and he felt the isolation of the empty cell block. He was all alone in this section. All that ever reached him from the other prisoners was a faint drumlike hum, or the clang of their feet on the steel floor as they marched out to work or exercise or meals.

  Now in the light of nighttime that he pretended was darkness, closing his eyes against the cell that was like each of the other cells they had moved him to, he heard only the sounds of his own imprisonment, the footsteps of guards, the clack of keys, the mutter of talk at the head of the stairs. In all the prison he was the only capital prisoner, the only one awaiting death. In his bed he felt his lonely distinction. This blaze of light was for him, these steps that went back and forth and the gates that grated and opened and closed again were measures against his escape. He was the man they feared and would kill, and outside thousands of people wrote angry letters in his defense, and in Australia stevedores were refusing to load American ships because of the trumped-up ch
arges against Joe Hill.

  A letter to the people of Utah began to grow in his mind—to the people of Utah and through them to the world. Craftily he assembled all the contradictory last-ditch arguments that Hilton had had to use: the irregular jurymen, the period when he was left without counsel, the prejudice in the public mind and the public press because the defendant was an IWW organizer. These were evasions and he recognized them clearly as what they were, but they belonged, no matter how widely they avoided the essential problem of his guilt or innocence. He stressed the fact that his past life must have been clean or the prosecution would have brought it up against him. He emphasized his only other time in jail, thirty days on a vag charge during a longshore strike that police and courts had co-operated to break. At some time during the night he got up and wrote for an hour, putting down thoughts that came to him. After he had lain down again he groped through a drowsy indeterminate time for some ringing conclusion, some line that would echo and be quoted and stir the admiration of people who read it.

  When he finally found it, it opened his eyes abruptly onto the lighted bare familiarity of the cell, and he lay on his back trying it out with an exultant certainty that it was exactly what he wanted. He added it to the bottom of his letter to the world: “I have lived like an arist; I shall die like an artist.”

  Into his recollection like something seen from the corner of the eye sneaked the image of the two clerks in the music store. He turned away from it in disgust, as he would have turned upwind to head a bad smell.

  Someone had to be seen, some move had to be made, some letter written, some news carried—he could not tell what, though the knowledge lay just beyond sight or reach. Frantically, tied down by a hundred cords, he struggled to stand up. Furiously he pushed against the inert bodies of thousands who hemmed him in and shut him away from where he had to be. Madly he hurried ahead of something that whipped him with anxiety, and the farther he hurried the more those who now accompanied him fell away, dropping away one by one until he went alone. The wind was at him in gusts, so that he struggled with his eyes streaming and dim, straining to see. Until all at once the wind dropped, the road ended, the urgency behind him quietly vanished. In an enormous silence he stood all by himself, and saw a ladder he must climb. It rose above him higher than a skyscraper, higher than the overhanging iron rungs that went up the stacks at Anaconda or Great Falls, a runged ladder curving upward, belling out and up and out and disappearing from his vision, a beanstalk of a ladder going up beyond the clouds. The mere thought of starting up it brought his heart like a stone to the bottom of his chest cavity. He stared upward, appalled, and the longer he looked the more a still terror overcame him. He was dwarfed by the enormous thing he had to climb. As the terror settled over him he shrank, his throat grew tight and his breath difficult, his arms were frail sticks, as helpless as if no fingers were attached. He wondered in terror how he would take hold of the rungs without fingers, and how he would get a foothold with feet that now were pegs of wood. But the thing whose name he knew and could not say was at the top of the ladder, lost far up in the dome from which came a wind as cold as if off an icefield. He saw that he was naked; the cold paralyzed his bones. And he knew that a shriek would set him free. But when he tried to scream, his voice was gone. Impotence lay on him with the weight of houses; his tongue could not move though he burst his heart in terror and strain. And now the thing whose name he knew but would not say was descending in even, untroubled spirals, the ladder weaving like a flower on its stem, its top describing circles in the sky, at first tiny as dots, but growing and looping outward, descending and toppling upon him, and he fought madly for wind, for voice.

  And woke, panting, slippery with cold sweat, to look into the light in the corridor ceiling and hear the iron tick of silence. He lay breathing deeply through his mouth, telling his heart to slow down, but the empty brightness without a single sound was more terrible than the spiraling void of his dream, far more terrible than darkness. Gray-white steel, stark shadows, the stare of unrelieved and inescapable light, made a world as geometric and unarguable as the world of nightmare. Among enormous triangles and stretching rhomboids and parallels reaching to infinity across the little box of his cell, he lay, an insect caught in the heart of an insanely complex trap, and felt his little life thud thud thud against its cage.

  It was a long time—five minutes, a half-hour—before a guard moved along the outside corridor and sent the vibration of his steps through the steel floor. Joe sat up and rubbed with the blanket along his wet arms and wrists. He felt weak and nauseated, and he hated the skinniness of his arms. He said to himself in indignation and concern, They’ve left me nothing but skin and bones.

  The guard’s steps died out, and the silence lay there, the terrible loneliness remained. More than he had ever wanted anything he wanted to talk to a friend, anyone who knew and trusted and understood him. He could talk for twenty-four hours straight; there was enough to talk about to keep him going for a week. Just to sit with somebody and drink coffee and talk and talk and talk.

  When the guard’s regular inspection time came round and the steps came down the corridor and the security door clanked open and the guard’s face looked in through the bars, Joe was sitting up on the cot. Without hesitation he said, “Can I send a telegram?”

  “In the morning.”

  “I want to send one now.”

  “You can give it to me now. I won’t send it till I go off shift, though.”

  “Well, all right.”

  He grabbed up a piece of paper and a pencil and scribbled a wire to Lund in Weosha, Minnesota. It said, “If you can, I’d like you to come.”

  Then for a long time after the guard went away he lay wondering if Lund would do it. It was a big thing to ask. Lund was a farmer now. He’d be right in the middle of the harvest season. He wouldn’t come. He’d wire or write some excuse.

  But he had to come. They had to talk. Not many days were left. There had to be somebody to talk to, and Lund was the one he had always been able to talk with most freely. But suppose he did come, how would they manage it? They might not even permit visitors on regular visiting days when a man was as close to the end as he was. The way they were moving him to a different cell every day, they might keep him in close solitary the last week or ten days.

  Maybe a last request. He could ask for Lund as his spiritual adviser. A condemned man had a right to that. They would let some prison chaplain come in and irritate a man all his last night with prayers and exhortations, so they ought to let in some preacher that a man could really talk to. His mind went feverish with plans and sleights and arguments and pleas. If they wouldn’t let Lund come in, or give them a decent chance to talk, they were …

  In his mind a squared calendar was posted, and he saw the clear solid week and the part of another. Eleven days. It filled him with panic to think that possibly there would not be time for Lund to get there. Perhaps he would delay, not knowing the date was so close. Sweat like the flushing sweat of sickness broke out of him again. He caught himself on the very verge of whimpering aloud.

  3

  Joe Hill had a week to live when Lund arrived in Salt Lake.

  It was a Friday afternoon, a golden, mellow day, the sort of day that would be like ripe summer until around four o’clock, and then would haze and blur as the sun dropped, the air bluing with afternoon, sharpening toward crispness, the smell of fires hanging in the air until by six o’clock it would be an autumn dusk, with street lamps yellow at the corners and sidewalks obscure under the still-dense shadows of trees and the smells now not the peaty, moist smells of sprinkled lawns and the summer smell of wetted dust, but the cured-leaf and smoke smells of fall. Even at midday, walking up from the station with his coat on his arm and the weight of the suitcase bringing the sweat to his face, Lund saw that autumn had already come down the mountain slopes in scarlet and bronze and toned brown. He had a fancy that it lay there like a threat, though he had always held fall to be
his favorite season. The sight of the slow fume of color at the city’s edges, like something furtively creeping in upon the town, deepened his feeling of helplessness. He was a man come a full week early for a funeral, doomed to attend every clock tick until daybreak on October first.

  From his close following of newspaper accounts, he knew that visitors were permitted at the prison only on Sunday afternoons. As before, he was here in Salt Lake with time to kill before he could see Joe. He did not assume that there were any other steps that Joe’s lawyers could take, now that the Pardon Board had refused commutation. Joe was like a checker player, outnumbered and pursued by kings, who ducks and escapes into a double corner where he makes fruitless delaying moves until finally he is trapped within a barricade of pursuers. The delaying moves were all over. There would be nothing to learn from the IWW hall this time, but he went there anyway.

  He found Jud Ricket in the office next door, an extra room rented to take care of the Defense Committee’s activities, heaved back in the chair and idly rolling his tremendous brass-capped pencil between his palms. The automatic nervous twitch had grown on him in the more than a year since Lund had last seen him. It moved the corner of his mouth twice as he sat abstractedly staring, and moved it again quickly when he looked up and saw Lund in the door.

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t remember me,” Lund said. “I’m a friend of Joe’s. Lund. I was through here last year for a couple of days.”

  “Oh sure! We’ve got your contributions.” He reached and shook hands and pulled Lund inside so that he saw another man in the room, a graying man, frail and pot-bellied, with a cool fighter’s face oddly out of character with his sagging sedentary body. “You know Judge Hilton?” Ricket said.