Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “I’ve just been talking to Joe Hillstrom,” Lund said, and took a deep breath, for he felt that his words were lost as soon as uttered, smothered and absorbed in the warden’s unfriendly silence. He plunged desperately, talking too fast, knowing he should be cunning and persuasive but unable to halt the rush of his babbling speech. “Joe is writing you, or will be. You can check all this with the guard that brought him into the visiting cage. Joe has a last request. He’d like me to be his spiritual adviser the last night. I’m a minister, I’ve known him for years. He’s a boy I … There’s a good deal to him, I’m very fond of him, do you see, I … It seems something you might be able to grant, even it it is a little irregular.”

  There was absolutely no light in the warden’s opaque eyes. His hands were quietly folded on the desk. Lund stumbled on, in despair at his own ineptitude, but watching the warden’s face for a wavering or softening of the granite. “I know a lot of people have been making threats, you have to be exceptionally careful. But I can prove I’m who I say I am, I have plenty of identifications, you could wire the synod, or I can give you any number of references.”

  The warden spoke, and his voice was as impersonal as crackling paper. “Where did you know Hillstrom?”

  “In San Pedro. I conducted a seamen’s mission there until last year.”

  He was terrified that the warden would catch that up, ask why he no longer conducted it, drag out the fact of his dismissal and make it into a demonstration of his fraudulent intentions, but the warden glowered at him across the gleaming scratched surface of the desk with the window’s bars dimly reflected in it, and spoke as if filling out some form.

  “What denomination?”

  “Lutheran.”

  “Is Hillstrom a Lutheran?”

  “I think he was baptized a Lutheran.”

  “Is he a religious man?”

  “No,” Lund said honestly. “I’m afraid he isn’t.”

  “Then what do you expect to do for him?”

  “Anything I can. He wants very much to talk to me.”

  “As a minister?”

  “No. More as a friend. He’s a strange, bottled-up boy. I don’t think he’s ever been able to talk to most people …”

  “If we started opening the death cell to the friends of prisoners, where would we be?”

  “He wired me,” Lund said earnestly. At least it was easier to answer specific objections, it was better than trying to be persuasive in the face of stony silence and suspicion. He leaned against the desk and held the opaque eyes. “He wired me to come on clear from Minnesota because he wanted to talk to me. Is that so different from the service a chaplain could perform? I was in there just now to see him, maybe for the last time. There were four or five people saying goodbye, and he sat there in that cage with a guard on his wrist. How could he talk?”

  “It isn’t our function to see that he gets opportunities for conversation,” the warden said. “Our function is to hold him until justice can take its course.”

  “But there’s real doubt in his guilt!” Lund said. He looked past the warden at the pouring light from the window. A bare tree swayed its twigs in the wind beyond the bars. “It may be you’re holding an innocent man who is too honorable to save himself at someone else’s expense.”

  “Do you believe he’s capable of that?”

  “He’s capable of anything.”

  The warden looked away, drawing down the corners of his lips. When he looked back the frown was pinched deeper between his eyes and his voice was heavier, deeper in his throat, like a growl. “So are his friends, evidently. How do I know you’re not one of the ones who have threatened to murder the governor and the prosecutor and me and a half-dozen other people, or storm this prison and take Hillstrom by force, or blow up every business building in Salt Lake?”

  “Those are not Joe’s threats, or mine either.”

  “They’re his friends’.”

  “His friends are extreme because they value him,” Lund said. “He’s become a symbol for them. They think they can save him that way.”

  “And they’re very much mistaken!”

  “Yes,” Lund conceded. His shakiness had passed as he found the warden capable of speech, capable of anger. He sat alertly, waiting, feeling that if the warden would argue it he could be convinced. The warden drummed his fingers on the desk as if impatience had come upon him abruptly. His eyes were hard and unfriendly.

  “What precisely is it that you think you could do in Hillstrom’s cell if you were permitted in?”

  “I don’t know. He wants me there. I think it might calm him to talk.”

  “Confession?”

  “I don’t think he has anything to confess. But maybe some of the things he has refused to tell.”

  The warden drummed again, rose and went to the door. “Bring me the register,” he said, and waited there until one of the clerks put it in his hand. Back at the desk he opened it, thumbed the pages. Lund, looking at the upside-down sheets, saw long tabulations, and at the top of each page two pictures, Bertillon photographs, full face and profile. When the warden stopped turning and sat studying a page, he could recognize, even in reverse, the thin face of Joe Hillstrom.

  “What denomination, did you say?” the warden asked.

  “Lutheran.”

  “Do you think the Lutheran God is any better than any other?”

  “You mean for Joe? No,” Lund said. “Ill be honest with you. I wouldn’t try to pray with Joe. He wouldn’t have it. He’s a religious nature, I’m sure of it, and he’s sensitive, and moral ideas mean something to him. But his religious impulses have all gone toward rebellion. He’s politically religious, if you know what I mean. Even so, I’m sure I can bring him some kind of consolation that no prison chaplain could, because I’m his friend. In a big inhuman institution it must be hard to hang onto your identity. I think I might reassure him.”

  The warden brooded a moment, holding his jaws in his hand. Then he swung the ledger around so that Lund could read it. “There’s what he is to us,” he said, and in his voice Lund heard something like humor or bitterness, some irony evasive and unacknowledged. He looked at the photographs: the profile that of a workingman with a tough, scarred face, a cold and almost repellent face; the front view of a workingman with the eyes of a seeker or a saint. The warden was silent while Lund read the entries down the page:

  “A bundle of scars,” the warden said, watching Lund with an odd fixed brightness in the eyes that had up to now seemed dull and opaque. “A bundle of scars, a temperate habit of living, a physical description, a number, a date, and a sentence. They sound a lot alike by the time they come to us.”

  “Joe’s different. He has a quality. He could have been something.”

  “Most of them could.”

  Rising, the warden leaned on the window sill and looked out into the enclosed patch of garden. For a moment he watched something, bird or gardener or animal, intently, following some motion with his eyes. Then he turned his eyes almost absently toward Lund and said, “All right, Bestor. You can come out.”

  The door of a closet near the outer door opened and a guard came out. Lund stared from him to the warden, and the slow red rose in his face. The guard looked at the warden questioningly, and went on out of the office at the warden’s nod.

  “That was hardly necessary,” Lund said.

  “If you read my mail,” the warden said, “you’d think maybe it was.”

  Still angry, Lund rose and looked across the desk. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I thought there might be a chance.”

  The warden had closed the register, and now stood with his fingers on it. “Have you some sure way of identifying yourself?”

  “I could get the synod rolls, they would show me as a missionary. And things like these.” He emptied his pockets and wallet and found a library card on the San Pedro Public Library, two letters addressed to the Rev. Gustave Lund, an old calling card, one of a batch he had had made years ago for
formal church purposes. “I can get you more,” he said. “Any sort you suggest.”

  Leaning until his weight bent the fingers backward, the warden seemed not to have heard. His eyes had barely glanced at the papers Lund showed. “There’s been a lot of loose talk about Utah justice,” he said. “I don’t know whether Utah justice is any different from justice in other places. It’s not my business to question the decisions of the courts. I’m here to take care of people after the courts have decided.” He chewed his lip briefly; his voice was a drone. “Justice is a complicated maneuver,” he said. “It takes a hundred different kinds of men doing a hundred different things, and any of them can be wrong. But you can’t throw it out or blow it up because of the chance of error, or even because of some particular error. You can’t obstruct the operation of the due process of law by vigilantism and bomb threats and half-baked nonsense like these threats to storm the prison. You have to go ahead and do the best you know how, doing your own part of the job, or there’s no security for anyone anywhere.”

  “Yes,” Lund said, wondering if the identification had been not enough, wondering if even yet there was a chance the warden would yield. He thought he heard a strain of self-justification in the warden’s voice, as if the storm over Joe Hill had made him examine the foundations of his own job. He watched the warden shake his thick shoulders irritably, and he met the sudden eyes.

  “You’re a minister,” the warden said. “You deal in life and death, you ought to know something about it.”

  He came around the desk. “Get some more identification from your synod,” he said. “Come around here prepared to be searched clear down to your skin, and bear in mind that you’re dealing with a man who’s up against his last hours on earth. Strength is what he needs, not sob-sister sympathy. You can come in Thursday night after supper and you can stay through to the end if he wants you.”

  Angrily he walked to the door with the prison register under his arm. Lund’s gratitude could find no words, but he could not go without saying something. He thought ruefully how all through this interview both he and the warden had been assuming the worst. As he went through the door at the warden’s curt gesture he said, “Maybe none of this will be necessary. There’s still a chance something will happen.”

  “And if you value your peace of mind, and don’t want the permission rescinded,” the warden said, “you will keep this whole transaction to yourself.”

  He nodded stiffly and Lund went past him and out through office and hall and court, where a guard opened a narrow pedestrian gate and let him into the street. He was exultant about the permission he had gained, and yet it struck him as a sad cause for exultation, and the prospect of the night-long vigil with Joe made him flinch as if at a vivid imagining of physical pain. More and more, as he rode home on the rocking streetcar, he felt depressed and hopeless. It would take more than Hilton’s manipulation of Swedish officials to halt the forces that closed in upon Joe.

  He sent two telegrams and called on a local Lutheran pastor for identifications, knowing that he would need them.

  But he underestimated Hilton’s ingenuity and Ricket’s vigor and the devotedness of the agents they had set to work across the world.

  By the time he had dressed the next morning and gone to the hotel newsstand for his paper, word of the unjust conviction of Joseph Hillstrom had been cabled to Gefle and the burgermeister had cabled back to the Swedish Minister in Washington. Virginia Stephen had called upon the Minister, Ekengren, and talked with him privately for an hour. Ekengren had wired the Swedish vice-consul in Salt Lake to investigate the case, and he had telephoned Secretary of State Polk and made an official request. The Secretary of State, after consulting with President Wilson, had wired Governor Spry asking for a stay of execution pending more complete investigation. Two professors at the University of Utah had made public statements denouncing the proposed judicial murder of Joe Hill, and the Pardon Board had called them to come before it the next day and state their position.

  In the crowded front page of the Salt Lake Tribune all of Lund’s fatalistic certainty was wiped away. The forces closing in on Joe Hill might be ponderous, but forces even more ponderous were rallying to his defense.

  He waited, and he bought every edition of every newspaper, and he hung around the hive of the Wobbly hall. Swept up and carried along by the tide of jubilant, intense activity, Lund was reminded of a party headquarters during a bitter election, or of that moment in a tug-of-war when after a long wavering stalemate one side begins to surge and haul the opposition off balance, forcing them to give a step, to slip, to brace and give again, bringing them in by hard weight and strength.

  Ricket was in the office eighteen hours a day, Hilton was in and out, the exultation grew while they waited for the inevitable cracking of the opposition. But on the morning of September 29 when Lund went over the jubilation was gone, faces were grim, Ricket’s phantom smile was jerking his cheek three times a minute. The vice-consul had reported to his Minister that in his opinion Joe Hillstrom had had a fair trial. The Pardon Board, questioning the two professors, had found them both ignorant of key facts in the case and had dismissed them as moved more by partisan zeal than by considered evidence. Governor Spry had told the press that unless the State Department specifically requested a reprieve, none would be granted.

  A fury like battle-fury possessed the Wobbly hall. A fight broke out and Ricket plowed out of his office like a locomotive to break it up, yanking the two battlers apart and throwing them halfway across the room. Lund stayed in the separate office, his own temper frayed, irritably wishing the Wobblies had more sense and less courage, more capacity to think and less to swing a blow. But he waited there because in this one day that remained anything that happened would have to happen through Hilton and Ricket. Hilton had been on the telephone to Washington three times during the morning and was trying again now.

  Nothing happened, no word came through. Eventually Lund straggled back to his hotel room and lay on the bed, hearing in the street below the passage of people free to move around and go and come. He thought of Joe deep in the steel and stone of the prison, and wondered if he knew of the breakdown of this last chance after the high and exultant hope. It occurred to him too to wonder if Joe really would want a reprieve, or if the stiff serenity of the last Sunday still armored him.

  One more night. Tomorrow night at this time he would have to enter that deep cell and try to give hollow comfort from a hollow heart. The thought made him turn in impotence and anger on his bed.

  But again he reckoned without the tenacity of those who had gone to war in Joe’s name. The morning paper reported a telegram from Woodrow Wilson himself, requesting a reprieve while reports of prejudice and irregularities in the trial could be investigated.

  Without comment, Governor Spry had granted a stay until October 16.

  5

  The case of the State of Utah versus Joseph Hillstrom brightens and darkens like a day when wind brings clouds across the sky and the threat of rain thickens only to be burned away again. In the Wobbly hall there is a week of something almost like relaxation, almost like confidence. Hilton has gone to Washington to confer with Minister Ekengren; the moguls who have interested themselves in labor’s singer go about their ponderous inspection of the records. Still dredging in an attempt to strengthen the conviction, the police dig up the arrest of Joseph Hillstrom in San Pedro in connection with some streetcar robberies, but since they can prove only that the police held Joe for a few hours for questioning, their net gain from the maneuver is a hornet’s nest of counterattack from the Wobblies who resent the attempt to smear Joe’s character.

  The letters still pour in upon the governor and warden and the Supreme Court judges, but the threatening tone of many of them diminishes somewhat, as if their authors were waiting to see what happened. Lund, waiting too, moves to a less expensive hotel and measures out the days that for him tighten and grow tenser as the reprieve wears away. He has not seen Joe;
by now Joe is allowed no visitors at all.

  He is troubled by the inconclusiveness of the reprieve and the thought of what will come after it. “What evidence can we get?” he keeps asking Ricket. “What is there to show Wilson and Ekengren? Has Hilton got anything new, or do we have to depend on technicalities again?”

  All he gets is a shrug, an intense black stare, a twitch of the nervous cheek. “The records of the stinking District Court ought to be enough.”

  “Those have already been reviewed three times.”

  “Sure, but not with the whole United States including the President looking over their shoulders. They know they can’t get away with this cover-up now. They’ll find some way to crawl and save their faces, but they’ll have to let Joe loose eventually.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “Wait and see,” Ricket says. “If they try to push this legal murder through they’ll get the surprise of their life. This thing grows like a snowball. Look at that!”

  He waves his hand at the desk heaped high with letters and papers. It seems to Lund that the contemplation of how big the thing has become brings a glitter to his eyes. The state may finally execute Joe Hill, but a wonderful and world-wide protest will have been stirred up. From this little IWW local have gone out appeals and denunciations and cables that have brought out a solid front of support from Melbourne to London, and pulled in the unexpected great of the world. Lund suspects that Ricket looks with awe on the thing he has started. For that matter, Lund does too.

  But he waits uneasily, because it is clear that there is no new evidence, no fresh approach, and he is afraid that the investigation by the Minister and the President will only corroborate the investigations by the Superior Court and the Supreme Court and the Pardon Board and the vice-consul. There is nothing new; there is only the plea, made in spite of Joe Hill’s own expressed wishes, for clemency and pardon, and the insistent threat of violence.

  He waits, and on October 16 the Pardon Board meets again, and again it finds no ground for clemency. Joe Hill is sentenced for the third time, and the execution set for November 19. When Lund tries to obtain permission to see him, the warden is abrupt.