Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  Hilton’s hand was narrow and fragile after Ricket’s big paw. He seemed withdrawn and thoughtful. In three minutes he looked twice at his watch.

  “On your way back to the coast?” Ricket asked.

  “No,” Lund said. “Joe sent for me.”

  They both gave him their instant, speculative attention.

  “He did?”

  “Four days ago. He wired me.”

  “The day he went before the Pardon Board,” Hilton said. “Did he say what he wanted? Have you talked to him?”

  “I haven’t tried. I thought visiting hours were only on Sundays.”

  “They are. He didn’t say what he wanted?”

  “Just that he’d like me to come.”

  “I conferred with him yesterday,” Hilton said. “It’s funny he didn’t say anything about wiring you.”

  Lund turned away from their intent eyes. He knew of no possible reason for Joe’s wire except desperation. It had sounded like a cry for help, and he did not like to think of Joe so borne down that he would bend his pride that far. He looked down at his swinging shoe, and up again when Hilton spoke.

  “Do you know something about Joe’s case?”

  “I’ve read the papers, that’s all.”

  “Because if you do, you’d better tell it now. There isn’t much time.”

  His eyes were pouched like a hound’s. From above sagging lower lids the hazel irises looked out with a remote and uninterested air that matched the frowning thrust of the rest of his face no better than his face matched his body.

  “I don’t know anything,” Lund said. “I haven’t even had a letter lately.”

  The lawyer looked at his watch again, his attention already turned away. “You know what he did to us before the Pardon Board,” he said. “Something comes over him and he goes crazy. I don’t know.”

  “We had it all planned,” Ricket said. “The judge asked for everything, new trial, pardon, commutation, the whole works at once. They’ve been getting letters by the thousand, they’re all excited and worried, and they know damn well if they execute Joe they’ll have some kind of an explosion. I think they’d give anything to get out of it whole. So we asked for everything, and hoped to get a commutation because the evidence was all circumstantial. But right when Judge McCarthy is practically begging him to give them a good excuse to turn him loose, he gets on his high horse and won’t take anything but a complete whitewash. So they turn him down.”

  Hilton grunted. “He wants to die a martyr, he says.”

  In the next office Lund heard the regular sound of the press. “Is there any chance? Anything else you can do?”

  The truculent face looked past him, the hound eyes staring at nothing out in the hall. “Pressure. More letters. Public indignation. Maybe we can scare ’em enough so he gets a last-minute pardon whether he wants it or not.”

  “I hoped the woman might speak up and clear him when she saw he wouldn’t be freed otherwise.”

  They both moved their hands. Ricket said, “If there’s a woman, she won’t show now.”

  “Nobody knows anything!” Hilton said angrily. “He’s been at cross-purposes with his counsel ever since the trial began.”

  “Well, cheer up,” Ricket said. “Those letters are coming in twice as fast as ever. You never saw such a response. If we can get a big enough public protest, we can force Spry to grant a stay, at least.”

  “One thing,” Hilton said. “If they shoot Joe I wouldn’t want to be Spry.”

  “Retaliation?”

  “You know how the Wobblies are. They get sore the way they are now and nobody’s going to keep them in bounds.”

  “I wonder if all these threats don’t do Joe harm, and harden the authorities against him?” Lund said.

  But all he got was Ricket’s obsidian glance and phantasmal one-sided smile. “Got any other suggestions?”

  They were silent. Lund heard feet clattering down the brass-bound treads of the stair. Other steps came up more slowly, came up the hall and hesitated. He looked over his shoulder to the doorway and saw Ingrid Olson standing there.

  A single question, an alert concentration of interest, pulled all three of them to their feet, Lund knew precisely how Ricket and Hilton had felt momentarily at the news of Joe’s wire. An answer might he behind any out-of-the-way fact. The girl’s presence here now might mean something important.

  Her eyes were dark, her long white hands nervous. Without greeting, she recognized and acknowledged Lund, but her eyes went back immediately to the others. “Yes?” Ricket said. “What can we do for you?”

  “There didn’t seem to be anything more that could be done,” she said. “I thought …”

  “Come in,” Hilton said. “Sit down.”

  He held a chair for her at the cluttered table, and something in his face made her sit down quickly with her cheeks flaming. “My name is Ingrid Olson,” she said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  Watching her as keenly as the others, Lund saw enough in her face to be convinced that she was incapable of dishonesty and that she was unlikely to have anything important to tell. But he watched her face with the blush paling almost instantly under the transparent skin, and he wished with a hard quick brutality that she might be guiltily involved.

  “Well?” Hilton said.

  Impassive as a rock except for the fleeting tic at the corner of his lips, Ricket put out a foot and shoved the hall door shut. The girl shook her head at him and opened and shut her purse. Massed tears glittered suddenly in her eyes.

  “It isn’t what you hope it is,” she said almost sullenly. “It’s just … Joe and I grew up in the same town in Sweden. His mother was a friend of my mother’s.”

  With his finger and thumb deep in his vest pocket, Hilton stood before her. “Yes?”

  “Joe’s father and mother weren’t married,” she said.

  The lawyer moved his lips slightly. A shadowy frown had started to tighten between his eyes. “Yes?” he said, more sharply.

  “Mother and I talked it over,” Ingrid said. She had better control of her voice now; she spoke more plainly, less in a hurried breathless rush. “We thought maybe if it was known who Joe’s father is. His mother was just a seamstress in Gefle, but his father is important. He’s a politician now, a member of the Riksdag. We thought maybe if he knew he might do something.”

  Hilton’s fingers tapped on the table. He looked out the window and a flatted, breathy whistle emerged from his puckered lips. Still looking out the window he said, “Is Joe still a Swedish citizen?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Does he know who his father is?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “That god damn clam!” Ricket said.

  Hilton had a notebook out. “What’s his father’s name?”

  “Hegglund.”

  That brought Lund leaning forward in surprise. “Sven Hegglund?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know him?” Hilton said.

  “I’ve heard of him,” Lund said. “He’s well known. He’d have weight.”

  Hilton was already back at Ingrid. “What’s the name of this town in Sweden?”

  “Gefle.”

  “Who’d be the head man there? What’d he be? Mayor, burgermeister, what?”

  “I don’t exactly know who …”

  “That won’t matter. We’ll find out and get a cable to him tonight. Who’s Sweden’s Minister to this country?”

  “Ekengren,” Lund said.

  Excitement had touched them all. Both Hilton and Ricket were standing. The girl looked from one to the other and moistened her lips. “Do you think something can be done?”

  “Not much,” Hilton said. His voice boomed and filled the office. “Not very much. This might just save Joe’s life, that’s all.”

  She went so pale that Lund was afraid she might faint, and then her skin burned a fiery red as she stood up among them. “What … how will you do it?”

  “There’s a
Swedish vice-consul here,” Ricket put in, but Hilton waved him impatiently down.

  “We don’t fool with any flunkeys. Look. We cable the burgermeister, or whatever he is, that a boy from his town has been condemned without a fair trial, and we ask him to do what he can. We wire the Minister, or better yet we wire Virginia to go see him in Washington. She’s in New York, she can run down. We get the Minister to intercede. Through him we work on Wilson …”

  “The President?” Ingrid said, with her eyes widening.

  “Exactly. The President. This thing has got international implications. Wilson can’t afford to overlook a frame-up that involves organized labor, and he can’t permit it if it might get us in bad with a friendly foreign state. He’s got to intervene. All the pressure we could apply up to now has been through working stiffs who couldn’t spell. Wait till Spry starts getting letters on White House stationery or with diplomatic franks!” He took Ingrid by the shoulders and shook her with a kind of slow violence. “Thanks, many thanks! My God, imagine if we hadn’t found this out till it was too late to do anything. As it is, we’ve only got a week. We’ll have to break our necks. You go on home and if we need you we’ll let you know. All right?”

  “All right. Only …”

  “What?”

  “What about Joe?” she said. “He hates his father. He wouldn’t take a favor from him even to save his life.”

  The lawyer looked at Ricket and rubbed at the thin gray hair on the back of his head. He said, suddenly soft in his manner, “You’re afraid he’ll be down on you for telling.”

  “Yes,” she said directly.

  Hilton walked to the window and back, moving the change in his vest pocket with thumb and finger. “What’s the alternative?” he said at last. “That’s the only way you can look at it. I imagine I’ve had as much experience with Joe’s pride as anybody. But if we submit to his pride in this he’ll be dead this time next week.”

  She nodded, gathered her purse against her, nodded again in a motion that included not only the three of them but all the inevitabilities of the situation, and went out. Halfway down the stairs they heard her footsteps become a quick hurrying patter.

  Hilton had flung himself down and was already composing a cable. In the midst of an impatient scribble he looked up and said, “You’re going to see Joe Sunday.”

  “I expect so.”

  “He’d better not be told what we’re doing.”

  “Can it be kept from him?”

  “For a while, maybe altogether. I don’t want him throwing any tantrums and spoiling this. The best thing he can do right now is sit there in his cell and write poems.”

  “Well,” Lund said, “I suppose he must have something to say to me or he wouldn’t have wired. I’ll limit myself to that.”

  “What about this Hegglund?” Ricket said. “How’s he going to like publicity like this? He could just deny he ever heard of Joe.”

  “He would if it came out publicly. My God, you wouldn’t go at him with a meat axe. He’s going to hear this very confidentially as a whisper from the Minister or somebody, all very discreet. For all anybody needs to know, we’re taking it to the Swedes because Joe’s a Swedish citizen.”

  “We can line up the Swedish labor unions, too,” Ricket said. “And the Young Socialists. Joe used to be one, he still wears that gambler tie of theirs. I’d better get off a cable to them too.”

  He clapped Lund across the back and came out in the hall with him, and as they walked toward the stairs he swung his mallet fist gently and knocked it on the wall at every other step. He was looking off beyond somewhere, a mile or two past the stairs, and he said, “Can you imagine this working out any better for the union? They try to frame a nameless worker in a backwoods burg and bingo, they get a public uproar as if they’d collared John D. He turns out to have friends, he turns out to be a name you can rally support around, he’s a poet, now he’s the son of a Swedish bigwig.” His knuckles rattled along the wainscot. “An international stage. It couldn’t have been planned prettier.”

  “Joe might not like it handled this way.”

  “He’s in no position to squawk.”

  No, Lund thought as he went back toward his hotel. Joe was not in a position to squawk. If he didn’t want the fact of his parentage used to save him, what could he do about it? A dozen kinds of people wanted to save him for a dozen different reasons, because they loved him, because they hated capital punishment, because they thought him unjustly accused, because he was a Swede, because he was a workingman, because he was an IWW, because he had written songs. Every reason could be manipulated skillfully by his defense committee and Joe could be built up as a symbol and a martyr, and except when he was personally brought forward, as before the Pardon Board, he was helpless to approve or disapprove. The best thing he could do for the next week would be to sit in his cell and write poems.

  And what had been in his mind when he wired? A wish to tell things that up to now he had kept hidden? And would he tell them to a friend though he refused to tell them to the Pardon Board and save his life? Or had he, simply and desperately, called for help when he knew his last hope was gone?

  In his room after dinner he spent a long time over the evening paper. The IWW had practically taken over the front page, crowding out the war, crowding out everything. There were IWW-led strikes in Colorado and Montana. Railroad detectives had dispersed a march of disgruntled harvest workers in Aberdeen, South Dakota. In New York there had been a brush between police and IWW pickets outside the offices of John D. Rockefeller. An IWW speaker in Denver had said that the blood of the innocent victims of the Ludlow massacre would stain the name of Rockefeller forever. The national guard was still out in three Colorado camps and a mass meeting in sympathy for the strikers had been refused a permit by the Denver city authorities. And there were two items on the Joe Hill case. There was a release from the governor of the text of several of the letters he had received. One said that there would be ten thousand IWW marching on Salt Lake from all parts of the West if the state of Utah persisted in its bloody plan to murder Joe Hill. Another advised the governor to look to his own family; there were men who would see to it that two lives in his own immediate family would be taken if Joe Hill died.

  The other item was a long statement from Joe Hill himself to the Pardon Board. Lund read it, and read it again, pondering every paragraph, trying to extract from the text some clue of wording or tone, something in or between the lines, that would unequivocally reveal Joe’s state of mind. For this statement to the Pardon Board was the statement of an innocent man who wanted to live; it contained no heroics about wanting to die a martyr.

  But there were too many statements that Lund could not verify, too many which contradicted the evidence of witnesses or the reports of the papers, and he had no way of telling which was the truth. He could not even tell whether Joe’s logic was honest or specious, and in the end he was left wondering whether the document was really designed to convince, or whether it was an elaborate and enigmatic hoax. Its whole burden was the demand for a new trial—a demand which Joe knew was hopeless. Though he seemed to plead for his life, he took the same position he had taken before the board. He was not interested in a commutation or a pardon. Since he had already assaulted the board with a demand that was out of its jurisdiction, and been refused, why should he go to these elaborate lengths to do it over again for the press and the public?

  “I want to die a martyr,” he had said before the board. “The cause I represent means more than any individual’s life, including my own.”

  But what cause? Labor’s? If one could grant the premise of a frame-up, yes, but Lund had never been able to grant that premise. He had been too close to Ricket and the forces which had created the whole myth. There was not a thread of evidence that anyone had even known who Joe Hillstrom was until Ricket himself began to go to work.

  There was some deception, or self-deception, even in this final statement from the death house. Unhapp
ily Lund bent his head and read the whole statement for the third time:

  A FEW REASONS WHY I DEMAND A NEW TRIAL

  When I was up before the highest authorities of the State of Utah I stated that I wanted a new trial and nothing but a new trial, and I will now try to state some reasons why I am entitled to that privilege. Being aware of the fact that my past record has nothing to do with the facts of this case, I will not dwell upon that subject beyond saying that I have worked all my life as a mechanic and at times as a musician. The mere fact that the prosecution never attempted to assail my reputation proves that it is clean. I will therefore commence at the time of my arrest.

  On the night of January 14, 1914, I was lying in a bed at the Erickson house in Murray, a town located seven miles from Salt Lake City, suffering from a bullet wound in my chest. Where or why I got that wound is nobody’s business but my own. I know that I was not shot in the Morrison store and all the so-called evidence that is supposed to show that I was is fabrication pure and simple. As I was lying there half asleep, I was aroused by a knock on the door. Somebody opened the door and in came four men with revolvers in their hands. A shot rang out and a bullet passed right over my chest, grazing my shoulder and penetrating my right hand through the knuckles, crippling me up for life. There was absolutely no need of shooting me at that time because I was helpless as a baby and had no weapons of any kind. The only thing that saved my life at that time was the officers inefficiency with firearms.

  I was then brought up to the county jail where I was given a bunk and went to sleep immediately. The next morning I was pretty sore on account of being shot in three places. I asked to be taken to a hospital but was instead taken upstairs to a solitary cell and told that I was charged with murder and had better confess right away. I did not know anything about any murder and told them so. They still insisted that I confess, and told me they would take me to a hospital and “treat me white” if I did. I told them I knew nothing of any murder. They called me a liar, and after that I refused to answer all questions. I grew weaker and weaker, and for three or four days I was hovering between life and death, and I remember an officer coming up and telling me that according to the doctors statement I had only one more hour to live. I could, of course name all these officers if I wanted to, but I want it distinctly understood that I am not trying to knock any officers, because I realize that they were only doing their duty. In my opinion the officers who were in charge of the county jail then were as good officers as can be found anywhere. Well! I finally pulled through because I made up my mind not to die.