Joe Hill (41 page)

He was supremely confident, secure in his own innocence of the crime. Or he was fanatically bent on showing up the cracks in capitalist justice. Or he had some obscure motive that even his lawyers didn’t know for refusing to play his scheduled part of defendant. Or he was guilty and at bay.

And what was going on in the judge’s chamber now? More extravagant defiance and denunciation of his lawyers? More berserk throwing of anarchy into the orderly machinery? Was that perhaps his motive in all this, simply a delight in throwing monkey wrenches, a refusal to co-operate with any part of society’s institutions? Or was he more subtle and cunning than anyone gave him credit for being, and deliberately cultivating confusion because confusion was his best defense? Or was he a little drunk on the notoriety of his trial, and trying to steal the show from the orderly character actors elected by Salt Lake County?

This last speculation, Lund admitted, was evidence of how dizzy his mind had got attempting to understand. He must keep firmly in mind, though the circumstances and the staged look of the whole trial and the histrionics of defendant and attorneys kept luring him to forget, that this was no play. Joe Hillstrom’s life was at stake.

Three or four men had gathered just outside the rail on the center aisle. One of them, as he turned, showed a Wobbly button on his shirt—a massive man with very liquid black eyes, a mouth that twitched in a gritting, unreal smile, and a habit of looking beyond anyone he talked to, as if picking up meaningful hints of movement in corners of the room. He seemed to be the center of the group; it was to him that Scott came now from the inner room. On impulse Lund stood up and joined the handful of men. Scott was saying, “Once Christensen and Judge Hilton enter the case officially I’ll step out if he wants, but it would be suicide to let him handle his own case even for one day.”

“That doesn’t seem to be the way he figures it,” said a newspaper man with a pad in his hand.

The big Wobbly looked across him abstractedly, gritting his nervous smile. “Something’s eating him,” he said to Scott. “Can I go in and talk to him?”

The lawyer threw his hands wide. “I wish you would.”

“There’s a girl here I think ought to talk to him too.”

Scott’s eyebrows worked, but he said nothing. And Lund, to whom the whole morning had been unreal, did an uncharacteristic thing. He pushed forward to the rail and said, ‘I’m an old friend of Joe’s, from San Pedro. Maybe I could get him to listen.’ ”

The black eyes touched him, moved beyond him. “It’s a cinch somebody has to. Wait just a minute.”

He went through and up the side aisle, and the girl sitting in the third row there came out at his crooked finger. They whispered together in the aisle, the girl blushed pink, her eyes, startled, searched the Wobbly’s face, her head dropped a little. Then the two of them came down and inside. The big Wobbly let his eyes cover them all. “Well, I guess we’re a delegation.”

The man with the pad started to come along, but the Wobbly good-naturedly put a hand against his chest and held him back. “This ain’t for you,” he said. “Not yet, anyway.”

Four of them went on through the judge’s door. Going last, Lund turned and looked back into the courtroom. He had the odd unreal shock of seeing the thing reversed, of looking out over the audience while the act was still on, as if he were someone called up from the audience to assist the magician in a trick.

Every eye in the room was on him—or on the doorway where the blonde girl had been just a moment before.

Joe was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, McDougall behind the desk. They were not talking. The lawyer was looking out the window, watching the clouds and the sky and whistling softly between his teeth. Joe seemed perfectly calm; he ran a comb through his hair as they came in.

“Well, Joe,” the big Wobbly said. “You sort of derailed the express.”

“That’s sure a shame.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“I told you. I don’t like my lawyers. I don’t want you wasting money on them.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

Joe shrugged. His eyes flicked over to the girl, dwelt on her soberly, moved on to Lund and recognized and acknowledged him, without ever altering the watchful, sullen expression of his face. “What’s right?”

Scott said, “Joe, I wish I could convince you we’re both doing our best. God knows you don’t give us much to work with …”

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Joe flashed. “You’d like all the details about the woman. If I’ll give you the whole story and prove I’m innocent, then you can prove it to the jury and make yourself look good. But if you have to keep the
D.A.
from proving I’m guilty, that takes work and you don’t do so well.”

“Well, look at it this way,” the big Wobbly began, but Joe continued without moving his stare from Scott.

“Every time a woman’s name comes up, here you come galloping to snoop something out. The minute you got that wire from Virginia Stephen saying she’d got Hilton to come into the case you trot around to ask if maybe I got shot in her house.” Again his eyes moved to dwell somberly on the girl, who stood hanging to the rim of her pocketbook. “Tonight you’ll be around to see if Ingrid isn’t the one.”

Under the circumstances the words were as brutal as a blow. Bright red flamed in the girl’s face, a blush that looked so violent it seemed it must be accompanied by physical pain.

“What you can’t get through your head,” Joe said, “is that I don’t have to say where I was that night. I don’t have to tell anybody how I got shot. That’s not the question. The question is how Morrison and his boy got shot. The only part of this business that concerns you is keeping them from convincing the jury I was in Morrison’s store.”

“I must say that with your attitude that’s a little hard to do,” Scott said, and spread his hands at the big Wobbly. “You see, Ricket?” McDougall continued to look out the window across the pigeon-messy sill.

“Joe,” Ricket said, “Soren Christensen is coming in to act for Hilton this afternoon. Couldn’t you just ride it out till then?”

“Sure. Alone. Without Christensen or Hilton either, for that matter.”

“You have to have somebody around that knows the law.”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “Maybe the new ones do. These two don’t.”

Joe’s expression was that of a man bored with too much discussion of the obvious. Impervious to argument, he shrugged them all off. But Lund, having thrust himself forward, had to try. He waited until he could catch Joe’s eye, and he forced his smile, and he said, “It’s so easy to miss a trick if you’re not trained to this. Your life could depend on some petty little triviality or a technical point. A jury can convict you because it takes a dislike to your face.”

“That shows what their justice is worth.”

“It doesn’t do much good to prove justice is blind and get hanged for your pains.”

“Shot,” Joe said with a white grin. “In Utah they give you a choice.”

Out of their reach, his back against some invisible wall, he sat and rubbed his broken knuckles with the ball of his left thumb. Scott looked at Ricket and then significantly at his watch. A pigeon fluttered onto the stone sill, and McDougall, elaborately holding himself out of the discussion, chirped at it in the silence and snapped his fingers lightly. The girl stood where she had stood since coming in, both hands on her bag, her body leaning a little, her posture awkward, and said in a voice with a faint echo of Swedish singsong, “Maybe if I talked to him alone.”

Joe did not even turn his head. “You stay out of this.”

Trying the faces of the others for a reflection of understanding, Lund saw that all of them were curious, none of them knew. Scott stood with his watch in hand, his legs spraddled, his brows clenched in a frown. McDougall had turned away from his contemplation of the outdoors. Ricket studied the girl with his glowing liquid eyes.

“Please,” Ingrid said to them all.

Now Joe was very erect in his chair. In the strong light every mark on his bitten face showed, the scar from nose to jaw, the clipped wing of the nose, the ridged welt on his neck. His lips were thinned together. For perhaps half a minute he seemed to ponder something intense and inward. Then he said, “Maybe you all better chase out for a minute.”

People were still at the rail, two reporters among them. Lund felt their curiosity as more professional but no more insistent than his own, and he felt the exact moment when the courtroom realized that the girl had not come out with the rest. From the edge of the jury box the district attorney and the judge looked on remotely.

“I don’t know,” Scott said, and shook his head repeatedly at the reporters. He was like a man trying to shake off a persistent fly. “Her name is Ingrid Olson, that’s all I know.”

“She’s a musician,” Ricket put in. “She helps Joe with his songs.”

“What songs?”

“He’s a song writer. He wrote half the
IWW
songbook.”

“Is she an
IWW
?”

“No.”

“You think she’s the woman in the case?”

“No.”

“How’s she mixed up in it, then? What’s going on in there now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You staying in, or is he going to act for himself?”

“Wait five minutes and well all know,” Scott said.

“How does Hillstrom act with this girl? They seem to be pretty thick?”

McDougall said sourly, “An hour ago you fellows all thought the woman story was a pretty weak alibi.”

The clock clicked at the half-hour. The judge climbed to the bench, looking a question at Scott in passing. Just as Scott put his hand to the door of the chambers, the knob turned and Ingrid Olson came out. In a breathless swallowed voice she said, “It’ll be all right,” and with her face held sideward and downward she hurried through the gate and to her seat. Behind her came Joe with the bailiff holding his arm.

So the entr’act was over, its ending punctuated by three measured strokes of the gavel and the bailiff’s henyard gabble of invocation. It was something of a surprise to Lund to see Mrs. Seeley mount to the witness chair. He had the feeling that they should be far beyond Mrs. Seeley, into some other scene. But here she was, careful and with a prim mouth, determined to answer thoughtfully and accurately. Lund thought that as she sat holding her white gloves in her lap she looked out across the court with an air of pride.

Justice groaned on.

–Look carefully at the defendant, Mrs. Seeley. Would you be able to identify him positively as the man who passed you under the arc light at Eighth South and West Temple on the night of January 9?

–Well, not exactly. He’s about the same build, and his nose …

–He resembles closely the taller of the two men you saw?

–Yes, I would say he …

–Will you describe again how this man was dressed?

–Well, he had a felt hat pulled down over his eyes, and a bandanna around his neck, cowboy fashion, and no overcoat.

–How tall would you say this man was?

–Oh, pretty tall, close to six feet, and slim.

–I will ask the defendant to stand up. Now, Mrs. Seeley …

Lund shut his eyes, listening carefully but with detachment. He had no faith in the district attorney’s ability to extract the truth from however willing a witness. He had no faith that having committed himself as public prosecutor the district attorney was any longer interested in the truth. A conviction in the legal sense was not quite the same as intellectual conviction. And he had no faith in any human being’s ability to
be
a witness, and he did not believe that anything he himself thought important could come from all the elaborate and intricate formalisms of this court. What could emerge was a barren
what
and an equally barren
how
. The elusive
who
, as the case seemed to him, was certain to be settled by implication and inference and interpretation of circumstances, without clear proofs. And if the court decided against Joe Hillstrom, if Joe Hillstrom were in fact guilty, there remained the final and wretchedly insoluble
why
.

If Joe Hillstrom were guilty, how explain it? What chain of circumstances, what dark impulse, what private fury or sudden crystallization of long impersonal hostilities, what tie-up with revolution or what need for money, what accidents and what plans and what influences, the whole web of the
why
was forever hidden, beyond the jurisdiction and beyond the capacity for inquiry of this or any other court. The answer might lie in Joe Hillstrom’s mind, or Joe Hillstrom might be as ignorant of the whole action as he said he was. If it lay in his mind and memory, then how important was it that Joe’s mind was a labyrinth of prejudice and devotion and idealism and half-baked revolutionary ardor and a personal hostility against fate or society or capitalism or some yeasty Enemy called the System? Lund had seen enough criminals to be impressed by their stupidity and their animalism. Joe was neither stupid nor animal. Then what could be learned, what known?

He opened his eyes and saw the back of Joe Hillstrom’s head and thought how strange it was, how suddenly unbelievable, that that little round skull could contain all it contained. Like a Pandora’s box, if it were opened it could overflow the world. But it remained sealed, neatly trimmed by the jail barber, dense with the things it knew, and utterly opaque even to the eyes of justice, of friendship, or of love.