Joe Hill (16 page)

“It might be better than spending your time in fist fights down on the docks.”

Joe was smiling, shaking his head, beginning to laugh. “You’d get stung, Gus,” he said. “You need somebody with the gift of gab and a big bright smile.”

Eventually Lund laughed too, threw up his hands, handed Joe his coat, and stood spraddle-legged looking at him.

“Well, don’t say I didn’t try. Only sailor that ever came in here who didn’t drink and smoke and chase women, and he has to turn out an
IWW
.”

It was a way of saying that their friendship was unimpaired, Joe understood. He knocked Lund’s shoulder lightly and dropped the gun and clip into his pocket. “I’ve got to go.”

“Where?”

“The hall, I guess.”

“If there was a riot, and the
IWW
was involved, they may have raided that already,” Lund said. “If you’re going to be an agitator, at least be a smart one. Stay here.”

And that, Joe knew, was the reason he had come to Lund in the first place. The preacher was sanctuary, a neutral corner. “Sure it’s all right?”

“Any time,” Lund said. “Any time, and as long as you like. If you won’t come as a helper we’ll have to take you as a guest.”

Together they went through the darkened mission after Lund had stuck his head into the snores and sighs and faintly foul air of the dormitory where his night’s catch of drifters slept. He locked the front door and they stood on the empty sidewalk sniffing the soft, moist air. It was almost perfectly still; only a few lights showed down the dark street. Joe glanced up toward the Peerless Pool Parlor sign, but it had melted into the black cliff
of brick and stucco and stone. Not even the single unhurried light crawled around to show where it was, and the sumptuous parlors where workingmen could while away their leisure time in games of skill—rotation, callshot, bottle pool, snooker, billiards, monte and blackjack in the back room—were dark and vanished. Beacon Street’s saloons were all closed, the windows of rooming houses and hotels blind and lost, the shooting galleries, shows, tintype booths, lunch stands, emptied for the night.

Lund said something that made Joe feel how close, momentarily, he and the preacher were, how somehow the last hour had given them similar words to say. He looked the length of Beacon and said, “What a street! I don’t know whether it’s more frightening when it’s quiet or when it’s going like a house afire.”

He took Joe upstairs and unlocked a door and showed him a clean bare room, still stuffy from being closed up all day. “Goodnight,” he said, and looked as if he might have said more but had decided not to.

Before he went to bed Joe stood at the open window by the slack unstirring curtains and looked out, down Beacon Street that stretched like a topless sewer between the buildings. A workingman’s street, mean and cheap, crammed with all the cheap stores a workingman could patronize and all the cheap amusements a workingman could afford and all the cheap opiates to make a workingman forget who he was and how he created all the wealth in the world for others to enjoy. A sad, gray, unlovely street—but such a street as men could march up thirty abreast. He saw it suddenly smoky and red with torches, packed with people, like a print in an old school book showing the storming of the Bastille.

It had not occurred to him until Lund spoke of it, but he had unquestionably made a choice.

The land goes grandly westward, a mighty sweep of plain, from the dividing-line rivers, from the Red, the Big Sioux, the Missouri. Wheat country mainly, so big there seems no end to it, it is pinpointed by clusters of sun-whitened buildings whose names are Hutchinson, Salina, Grand Island, Pierre, Bismarck, Minot, Aberdeen, and patched with rectangles and squares broken through the prairie sod and colored in the green, yellow, brown, or misty blue of grain or summer fallow or flax. In the fall, following a cycle of harvest from Oklahoma up through Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and on westward into Montana, threshing rigs lumber from ripening homestead to ripening homestead, wheat wagons draw up in lines at the scales of elevators, farm women work with a driven excitability to feed the crews of go-abouts dropped briefly among them. On the long freights that creep westward deeper into the land of promise the men who follow the harvests perch like cowbirds on the placid hipbones of pasturing cattle.

Westward the plains are broken, the horizon becomes uneasy with low buttes and the exposed even strata where creeks and rivers have cut down in. The line between land and sky is broken only by the glint of a far lonely windmill, and now abruptly the outliers of the mountains, the Little Rockies and the Bearpaws thrust up out of the plain, and the combining rivers come down over the Great Falls of the Missouri past the stacks of silver and copper smelters and the shacks and boardinghouses of the many-languaged workers who run them.

There are construction jobs in the mountains, bridges and trestles, spur tracks; the gulches are pitted with tunnels and drifts and shafts and prospect holes, the mountainsides staired with stamp mills and flotation plants. The migrants trickling into Butte and Anaconda may go to work as muckers or drillers or black-powder men, but more often they do not. The established workers look
upon them with suspicion as potential strike-breakers, wage-level destroyers, flooders of the labor market. The companies and the police have convenient vagrancy laws to handle them unless some labor trouble brings on a temporary need for scabs.

They work or they move on, skinning mules in Idaho construction camps, fighting fires in the Cascades, picking apples in the Yakima Valley, wintering in the mildness of the Pacific slope, filling the skid roads of Seattle and Portland and Frisco and San Pedro, or catching on in the shingle mills and lumber camps along Puget Sound. Coxey’s Army, Kelly’s Army, the army of the dispossessed, the unskilled migrant perennially unemployed labor pool which is a stronger weapon than terror or police persuasion in the companies’ fight against organized labor, these are the men who must be organized if workingmen are ever to be united in the strength and solidarity of the One Big Union.

And a man who is both dedicated and committed, who has made a decision and bent his life to a cause, is a man whose life is no longer his own. He is not his own man, but labor’s; he speaks not for himself but for the One Big Union; he goes not where he wishes but where the fight draws him. An organizer is more wandering than the wanderers, more foot-loose than the migrant jobless. Neither bum nor hobo nor tramp, he lives as much as they in the atmosphere of insecurity and homelessness and accumulated grievance and wrong. He is a man who has been bidden to go forth out of Nazareth and preach in the towns of Galilee.

He began to be a face men knew, a thin face marked with scars from the mouth down over the jaw, the nose sharpened by a cut that had nicked away a flake of the right nostril. Some who had traveled with him said he could get on or off a faster-moving freight than any stiff on the road, and some who had met his stare when he was in anger remembered his eyes like blue ice. A cat on his feet, limber and tough, he traveled mainly alone and herded by himself, but when he talked he talked the OBU and the class struggle.

The Wobblies crammed half the jails from Everett to San Diego with belligerent workers fighting ordinances against free speech and street meetings, piling in until they jammed a town’s whole system of law and order, pouring down from the woods
and the camps, beating their way up from skid roads and winter boardinghouses, streaming in from the harvest country. If they did not like a jail’s food they “built a battleship,” pounding on the walls and floors until frantic police turned firehoses on them or gave up. They organized and kept their jails spotless, and they sang till townspeople gathered laughing outside to listen. But Joe Hill spent no time in jails; he had a horror of jails, he said, and he could do more good outside. He was no soapboxer, anyway, and it was the soapboxers who dared town authorities in the free-speech fights. He was another kind of organizer: a singer, a player of the piano at local meetings, a maker of catchy rhymes and drawer of cartoons. The name of Joe Hill was better known than the man, for it was signed to cartoons pinned up in almost every hall up and down the coast, and his songs in the Little Red Songbook were the kind that men in a crowd discovered they knew. Any time, at any season, he was likely to drop quietly into town, spend a day or two or three, help out with a meeting, get out and work the waterfront or the bunkhouses, and disappear again, leaving behind a cartoon on the back of a laundry ticket, or a song written in a round neat hand that would next year be printed in the songbook but would be known by hundreds of Wobblies before it ever appeared.

He was seen in Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Frisco, Fresno, San Pedro, San Diego, Tia Juana, out in the islands, a silent and almost diffident man. He looked like a man who nursed a grudge, but he was quiet, well spoken, a good jungle cook, full of unexpected sarcasms and humorous remarks. But a man who never led with his tongue; a counterpuncher strictly. At parties he sometimes seemed to want to mix and to be held back and stiffened by some incurable reserve. A singleton, a loner, a man with a hot temper and no really close friends. But a rebel from his skin inwards, with an absolute faith in the One Big Union and nerve enough for five. Though he had a scholarly streak, and spent a good deal of time in the public library when he was around town, he was no spittoon philosopher, no windy debater. What called him, speaking a language he understood perfectly, was trouble. Where trouble brewed, he appeared.

In a shoulder holster under his left arm he carried a Luger .30 automatic.

As soon as the meeting was over, Joe left the hall and caught a streetcar across town, knowing precisely what would have to be done, what he would have to arrange. He did not hold their caution against McCandless and Taylor and the rest of the Seattle boys. They weren’t scared of a fight; they just wouldn’t become real fire-eaters till they were pushed.

The air was gray and close with rain so fine that it hardly seemed to fall, but drifted and hung. On the windows of the car it gathered secretly as mist, until the lurch and joggle crystalized it suddenly into big drops, that ran a clear streak down the glass. Through the streaks and the misted panes Joe caught glimpses of raw cuts through hills, the earth yellow in the rain, of tool shacks of construction crews, piles of sand and gravel, Fresno scrapers and steam shovels, disjointed lines of sewer pipe, bricks and lumber, skeleton studding of new houses, all the raw new forms of a city in boom.

He left the car at the end of the line, took a quick bearing in the mist, cut across a weedy field where children or animals had angled a path that lay now dully shining and slippery in the rain. Eventually he came out on a cindered road between a shingle mill and a straggling line of storage sheds, and so entered a lane he recognized, that ran down through big stumps to the shore of the lake. An old army houseboat lay moored with washing hanging limply in the rain, and a clutter of shacks spread out along the shore. Two hundred feet further down, its windows blurrily alight and its stovepipe leaking smoke that dove and hugged the water, was Bottles’ floathouse.

This was a return, of a kind. Joe felt it, setting his feet on the sagging gangplank—a port he had once gone ashore at, a place he had seen and used briefly and left, one of the hundreds of places a man passed through, one of the few he ever saw again. The sense of completion and purpose, the feeling that now he knew what he had been looking for when he came here in the first place, was probably an illusion brought on by the warmth of Bottles’
windows through the drifting rain, but the memory came back in a quick thrust that on that earlier visit he had been low-spirited and sour, sick of his aloneness and the purposeless drift of his life. He felt the difference between then and now; the very fist he raised to knock on Bottles’ door was no longer a random instrument, but a purposeful one. He almost smiled, wondering what had ever become of the curly-headed green kid who had sat on Bottles’ deck that night two years ago and talked about his sister in Akron. That sister was in the
IWW
Songbook
now, one little girl fair as a pearl.

Bottles’ thrusting shoulders and great buffalo head filled the door. There was a strong chemical stink about him. He had lost his teeth since Joe had last seen him, and his face looked shrunken, collapsed, too small for his tremendous skull. But his eyes were the hard little agate knobs Joe remembered, and his voice was a belligerent grunt. Joe saw him look at the button in his lapel, and then Bottles stepped back out of the doorway silently.

“Remember me?” Joe said. “Joe Hillstrom? I was here a couple years ago. Pat Hiskey from up at Sedro Woolley gave me the steer.”

Bottles shook hands. “If I remembered ever’body that come through I’d be ash good ash Whathisname Mishter Brain on the Pantagesh. Where you in from?”

“San Pedro,” Joe said. “I’m organizing, been down at Hoquiam.”