Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

  “I told you you could come in the last night. But until then nobody sees him, and he can thank his friends for it.”

  So the preacher goes back to his hotel and counts his money and thinks out his personal problems and writes his father asking for a loan. Having come this far with Joe, he will stay to the end, for the end is now inevitable.

  Once, sometime during the days and weeks of waiting, Lund was stopped on the street by a crowd that overflowed the sidewalk and spread out across the car tracks. The eyes of the crowd were turned upward to the stone face of the Salt Lake Tribune building, and looking up with them Lund saw outside the second-story windows a great board, like a child’s game but of enormous size, shaped like a baseball diamond. All around the board were little tabulations, a scoreboard marked off by innings, places for the indication of balls and strikes, outs, hits, runs, errors, sacrifices, and an opening past which rolled one by one the names of players as they came to bat. The scoreboard read

  Red Sox 0 0 0 1 2

  Phillies 1 0 0 0 1

  He had forgotten. The World Series.

  Streetcar bells clanged, and cars pushed through the crowd that moved and packed and ebbed back again onto the tracks. Up on the ingenious board, by some intricate system of telegraphic reports and electromagnets and a sweating crew of technicians, the newspaper brought the game across twenty-five hundred miles and replayed it in the Salt Lake City street. Every player’s position was marked by a red and a white light; the pitcher’s mound was bald in the center of a green acreage, as in a real diamond; rows of small white lights ran along the baselines. At home plate a swiveled bat waited; on the pitcher’s mound a magnetized iron ball wavered and started toward home.

  The bat swung, a light went on, strike, in the balls-and-strikes tally. The count was one strike and two balls. The ball rolled back to the mound, hesitated, started again for the plate. Again the bat swung, and the steel ball rolled with dignity out past first base into right field, and in right field the red light blinked. A fly to the outfield. In the corner of the board yet another fight went on. One out.

  Lund watched through half an inning, then another half, then through the sixth and seventh innings. The crowd stood good-naturedly in the street and good-naturedly got out of the way of streetcars and took its seventh-inning stretch and passed remarks and watched intently every time the ball moved, every time the bat swung, every time one of the intricate system of fights blinked on. If the white light went on at any position when the ball rolled that way, it was a hit. Then there was the delighted suspense of seeing the runner blink down the baseline, past first, on to second while the ball rolled around in center field, then past second and on toward third to an outbreak of yips and groans. A triple. Now he’s in the hole. Only one away. Let’s see him get out of this without a score.

  They talked to the hitter, advised the manager, rode the pitcher. With great nimbleness, with an instant and infallible understanding, they kept all the complex fights in their eyes and minds. Excitement went with the frantic serial blinking when the next batter hit a fly to left and the baseline lights, hesitating for a moment, started toward the plate from third. The ball rolled in in a straight unhurried line, the runner was paralyzingly slow, there were eight lights, seven, six, and the ball already past the third baseman on its way in, and five and four and three and the ball almost home, and then the white light at the plate and a new light in the scoreboard under “Runs.” He had beaten the throw. Still another fight burned steadily a moment: Sacrifice.

  Standing in the street with the sun on them they cheered and booed and groaned and laughed, awaiting the outcome of a game that seesawed and fluctuated and was tied up in the seventh and went on into the eighth and ninth still tied, and on into extra innings.

  Lund waited with them. The noise of the crowd was like the noise of a real bleachers; he followed the lights like real players, real base hits. He even had a favorite: for some reason he was rooting for Philadelphia, though he had no notion why unless from pure under-dog sympathy. He assumed that the favoritism of others in the crowd was based on things just as trivial: a onetime residence in Philadelphia or Boston, a liking for an individual player, a prejudice against New England. He himself intensely wanted Philadelphia to win.

  And why? Here, twenty-five hundred miles from a ballgame between teams not ten of the crowd had ever seen play, men stood for hours in the street and for trivial reasons heated themselves with partisanship and delighted themselves with suspense. They threw their voices at the board, trying to influence it, and obscured the afternoon traffic with their planted bodies. And behind the board were technicians who worked like Fate but who took their orders from a telegraph wire.

  Everybody he knew was taking his orders from a telegraph wire, even the ones who appeared as unchangeable as Fate. And the score of that game would not be affected by his partisanship, the technicians would not refuse to record runs when runs were scored, his bleacher enthusiasm could not make a fly ball fall out of the reach of an outfielder. The game was in the hands of the players; the rest of them were recorders and spectators. The events that ground their way along the magnetized board were events that the players themselves would shape.

  Though it seemed to him somehow a shameful thing to remain a spectator he knew of no other thing that he could be.

  But some were not content to be simply spectators. They wanted to influence the magnetic board, throw pop bottles and cushions, kill the umpire.

  Ten days after Joe Hill was resentenced and his execution set for November 19, an “Open Letter to the Board of Pardons” appeared on trees and poles around Salt Lake City. It attacked Utah justice, the Copper Trust, the Mormon Church, the prejudiced public, all who had conspired to bring about the legal murder of Joe Hill, and it was signed by Judge Hilton. Chief Barry sent out a special detail which tore all the posters down. Next night more went up. Next day they came down.

  Police and special deputies were now guarding every bank and public building in the city to forestall IWW dynamiters. Special guards were posted around the capitol and the governor’s home. One of these deputies was startled one afternoon by an explosion on the next corner. He ran down, found that somebody had set off a cannon cracker, and came back to his post. Beside the sidewalk was a paving brick he did not remember seeing before. With his foot he pushed it over. It looked peculiar, as if it had been sawed in two and cemented together again.

  A powder company expert took it apart later. It contained a nitro charge big enough to blow up the whole capitol, with an arrangement of sulphuric acid which was supposed to eat down through to detonate some giant caps. The deputy’s kick had spilled the sulphuric and spoiled the bomb.

  After that the governor called in Ricket and was locked in with him for an hour. To reporters, when he came out, Ricket said nothing about what the governor had talked about. But the bomb, he said, was a phony, a dud, a plant set out there by the deputies themselves in order to make their jobs last.

  There was a fifty-fifty chance that he was right. But the fear of dynamiters was by now even beginning to keep people away from shows. In secure parlors there was talk of vigilante action to clear the town of red agitators, and there were letters to the papers asking why the authorities permitted a whole city to be terrorized.

  The Swedish Minister engaged a lawyer to go over the Hillstrom case (because of pressure behind the scenes from Joe’s father, or only because he would do his best for a Swedish citizen?). President Wilson was called on by Gurley Flynn and promised to make a complete investigation. In San Francisco Samuel Gompers presided over an AFL convention which memorialized the Utah authorities asking clemency or a new trial for Joe Hill. (Ricket was ribald and delighted over that triumph. Now, he said, the heat was really on Wilson. Gompers had to be listened to.)

  By grapevine among the rank and file of the Wobblies the word was out that the Wobs were gathering in Salt Lake to free Joe Hill by force, if necessary. In Oakland, eight men grabbed a fre
ight and started eastward. In Denver, stopped by ordinances against IWW street meetings, Wobblies crossed the street to a Salvation Army meeting where they sang Wobbly songs to Army tunes and later passed the hat for the Joe Hill defense. There were a half-dozen men reckless enough to march on Salt Lake. By now, an IWW street meeting in Salt Lake drew hundreds, and there was always bad feeling, heckling, a street full of cops, fights and arguments. In the hall the baggage room was jammed with stiffs who had drifted in quietly, looking for trouble.

  The game dragged on through the extra innings, the perfect autumnal weather darkened, the days shortened, the nights were cold. From any high point the smoke was like a dark gray quilt over the valley in the mornings, and on the mountains there was snow.

  The city was in a state of siege. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll raid you and close the hall?” Lund asked Ricket. “I’m surprised they never raided you long ago. They certainly hate you enough.”

  “They’re scared,” Ricket said. “The whole damn world has got its eye on what they do. They’re scared to make a pass.”

  But one night Lund was reading in his room, wearing out another few hours of the waiting. The room was stuffy, the radiators knocking with pressured heat, and he opened the window an inch or two to clear away the smoke of his pipe. He sat half stupefied, despondent and tired and confused in his mind, thinking that his presence here, his whole involvement in the case, was absurd and useless, a sentimental concession to himself rather than any help to Joe. He had his own life to untangle. With the fundamentalists in control, there was no chance of his getting another missionary assignment. He might as well admit that he was out of the ministry. But instead of making decisions for himself, he sat bewitched in Salt Lake City waiting for a death that was postponed and postponed and postponed but never called off.

  Through the crack in the window he heard street sounds, voices, steps, and then a sudden clamor of angry shouts. Someone yelled above all the noise, a cracking yell. Someone ran hard down the sidewalk; further up a police whistle shrilled. These days, a fight couldn’t start anywhere without a cop’s showing up in thirty seconds. But now a silence, a wild shout full of fear or warning that went up into a scream and was blown away by a shot.

  Lund threw open the window and leaned out. The night was so smoky that he could see little except vague shapes of men running, halfway up the block. There was no more yelling, but a murmur of crowd sound began to grow, and within minutes a patrol wagon careened around the corner and clanged to a stop.

  By the time Lund got outside, the wagon was coming back, forcing its way through the crowd. The crowd, Lund with it, moved aside and then curved back behind, trying to see into the rear end, but the view was blocked by the body of a policeman hanging to the handrails.

  It was an hour before Lund could find out exactly what had happened: a standing feud between two men had culminated in a shooting and a death. The one was now in jail, the other in the morgue. But the one in the morgue, a man named Roy Horton, was an IWW.

  Lund made his way back to his room filled with a sick, resistant certitude that what had happened would lead to worse and worse things. The violence that began this, the remote and ambiguous murder on West Temple Street almost two years ago, and the unexplained shot that somewhere, that same night, had torn through Joe Hill’s chest, led by an inevitable course through greater and greater violences.

  What had been passion before would be murderous hatred now. Tomorrow there would be even more special deputies patrolling the streets. The desperate talk of storming the prison and liberating Joe Hill by force would spread. The fingers of policemen would be nervous on their guns; citizens would check the locks on their doors; no IWW would think it safe to go abroad unarmed. It was utterly mad, and the shooting of Roy Horton might have no connection whatever with the IWW—no more, perhaps, than the shooting of John Morrison or Joe Hill had—but this killing would be sucked into the general vortex and made to do service as a hate breeder.

  At the center of all this, generating lines of force that went through the whole world, was a sailor friend of his, a Swede with a knack for drawing pictures and writing poems, a man with little education but with a strong inclination toward the arts, a man who used to drop in and drink coffee and argue social rebellion in the mission kitchen. He was as remote now as a vague great name in the papers. The errand Lund had come on was an arrogance for which he could hardly forgive himself.

  Involved in this whirlwind of violence, and hating violence as the father of all evil, wanting only to speak humbly and with understanding to a friend, he felt sad and incapable, and he shrank from the thought of going to Joe’s cell, as he would certainly have to unless the President chose to intervene a second time.

  Wilson tried. His second telegram, sent on the morning of November 17, asked what his first had asked: a stay pending further investigation of the case. All that day the governor was in a close meeting with the Pardon Board and the warden of the prison. By the time the afternoon papers went to press he still had made no statement. Lund, waiting in the halls of the capitol with a handful of IWW’s and newspapermen, was put out with the others when the building closed.

  He slept badly and was up before six, but the hotel newsstand was not open and no paper boys were on the streets. It was seven o’clock before he got a Tribune and saw the headlines.

  Governor Spry’s telegram in reply to the President’s was long, more than a column. It reviewed the case and the interventions in the case, and it withheld its decisive meaning until the final paragraph:

  It is a significant fact that those only are appealed to who have no knowledge of the facts and those only demand clemency who are either prejudiced in Hillstrom’s favor or who demand his release regardless of his guilt. I am fully convinced that your request must be based on a misconception of the facts or that there is some reason of an international nature that you have not disclosed. With a full knowledge of all the facts and circumstances submitted, I feel that a further postponement at this time would be an unwarranted interference with the course of justice. Mindful of the obligations of my oath of office to see to it that the laws are enforced, I cannot and will not lend myself or my office to such interference. Tangible facts must be presented before I will further interfere in this case.

  6

  There was a period when they sat on the two ends of the prison cot and said nothing at all. If there were things to be said of the soul and of the peace that passeth understanding and of the possibilities of a blessed Beulah Land or a perhaps more blessed obliteration, they were not things that Lund could introduce. He was here at Joe’s insistence; he had his mind locked against the thought of daylight tomorrow morning; he was waiting for Joe to say the things that he had apparently wanted Lund to hear. He wanted to know what lay on Joe’s mind, but he would not for a fortune have tried to pry. He wanted to hear Joe say for sure that he was innocent, but he would not ask. And he wanted to touch Joe’s hand or shoulder in brotherhood and somehow communicate pity and sympathy and a shared terror of what would come, but there was no way to begin.

  Joe had been alone and a prisoner for almost two years. It was not being sentimental to guess that the mere presence of a friend, without a word spoken, might be enough for him. It did not matter, really. Lund was eager to be used in any way he could be helpful. He stole glances at Joe from under his thoughtful hand, appraising the silence between them, trying to guess if what only made him uneasy were comforting to Joe.

  Joe looked as if he saw visions. His eyes were a little glazed; muscles worked in his lean jaw. His face under the hard light was pale, ascetic, absolutely expressionless except for the air of seeing that it wore. Lund thought in surprise, watching him, that even with the scars it was an almost beautiful face.

  Joe’s head turned; his eyes, wide in the blue stare, touched Lund as if without recognition, wandered past him, came back. “Quiet night on Skid Road,” he said, and stood up abruptly to take one long step toward the door
, then two shorter ones back to the cot. He stood above Lund and said, “We ought to have some coffee. They give you comfort for your soul but not for your belly.”

  Before Lund could answer, he was back tapping with a pencil between the bars. Steps came down the empty steel corridor, the key rasped in the security door, the steps came on and a moon-faced guard stood outside.

  “We’d like some coffee,” Joe said. “Don’t you suppose at a time like this they’d think of that themselves? I’ve got Reverend Lund in here and we’d both like coffee.”

  His voice was loud and peremptory. For a second or two the guard stared into the cell. “Okay, Joe,” he said. “I’ll see what we can do.”

  “Bring plenty. Tell ’em to bring a pot full.”

  As the guard went back up the corridor Joe sat on the cot’s end. “They’re trotting out the best in this old hotel now,” he said. Learning on one elbow, he looked away from Lund and talked jerkily as if he had been running. “I went through this once before, just before the President wired the first time. They had me all fixed—that time too. Steak dinner, baked potato—big slab of pie. Same tonight. It’s the special firing-squad blue plate.”

  Opening and closing the hand, he rubbed at the bumpy knuckles where the policeman’s bullet had gone through. “It’s a fright how polite they can get just before they shoot you full of holes. This guard—runs errands for me as if he was my gunsel. If I asked for a hot-water bottle I bet he’d try to rustle it somewhere.”

  “I expect he’s had orders.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. Something went out of his face, some artificial animation. The nervous rubbing of his hands stopped, and he held both hands flat against his thighs. “I expect they’ve all had orders.”