Joe Hill (12 page)

“Aren’t you coming to the hall?”

“I’ve got some business to tend to.”

“All right,” she said. “So long, kiddo.”

As if by design he went up the street to Romberg’s Turkish Baths and for three quarters of an hour sat in the breathless steam feeling the sweat start from his pores and his body open and grow slippery with sweat and the impurities drain from body and mind. Eventually the unrest created in him by Betty Spahn subsided and he knew who he was again.

Gradually, as he quieted in the lulling, thick-breathing cubicle, his feeling about the afternoon subtly altered. By the time he dressed and went out, headed for the Harbor Cafe and a hot beef sandwich, it had become a feeling very like triumph. At least when he met Tom Barnabas again there would be no uncomfortable inferiority. He could look Barnabas right straight in the eye.

Herb Davis had the usual
IWW
style of oratory—direct, loud, emphatic, and profane. He pounded his hand and shook his fists and spread his arms, thrusting his face down close from the soapbox and bawling out what he had to say. But Tom Barnabas, who followed him, was a different kind of public speaker. His
voice was deeper and richer; without effort he could make it carry twice as far as Herb’s. He did not swear and he did not denounce, but broke the opposition on a wheel of irony. And he had one infallibly successful trick: at any moment the rich voice would drop until people leaned and strained to hear what he was saying with such profound and confidential feeling. And just as they lost the sense of his low murmur the big booming volume would burst out in their faces, rattling their wits. He was as soft and insinuating as an actor and as irresistible as a firehose. It made no difference what he said. The slightest triviality, bursting suddenly from the middle of a confidential and conversational discourse, sounded like the thunder from Sinai. At eight o’clock, in a doorway on Beacon Street, Joe and Art Manderich and Frank McGibbeney stood at the edge of a good crowd and listened.

“By damn,” McGibbeney said, “if we only had him around here for a while we could lick the b’Jesus out of the
S.P.
I think he could convince even a scab.”

“You t’ink he iss dot goot?” Manderich said.

“He’s pretty good,” Joe said. He had just caught himself leaning to catch the lowered voice, and now as he looked at his companions he saw that they were both leaning too. “See?”

“… our mothers used to tell us,” Barnabas was saying. “… taught us in Sunday School. Remember how it used to go? Honest toil … tell us. Labor is an honorable condition. In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread. Man’s lot on earth. Sure, there were bosses, but the bosses were decent fellows, generally. So if you’d just do right by the boss he’d do right by you.”

Big and well dressed and handsome, with eyes that were eloquent even in the broken dusk of the street, he stood above the crowd smiling, waiting for the laughter to die. His voice accepted them all as brothers to whom one could talk freely. “There are scissorbills all around us who go through a whole lifetime without knowing that stuff for what it is,” he said. “You and I know what it is.” He paused, broke contact with the crowd as if for a moment’s thought. Almost to himself he added, “There’s a lot of it in cow pastures as well as in Sunday Schools.”

Then his voice went out over the spreading laughter, shouting it down, cracking over them like a whip. “I don’t have to tell
you these things, fellow workers! You don’t have to come to a meeting and hear me talk to know these things! You know without me telling you that you can work till you get a hump on your back like the sacred ox of India, and when you can’t work any more does the boss take care of you, that decent fellow? The cemeteries and charity hospitals in this land of liberty are full of workingmen who tried to do right by the boss!”

McGibbeney was shouting with the rest. He wet his lips and pounded his hands together and then held his applause to hear Barnabas’ voice.

“… our fellow workers the railway trainmen,” it said. “The
IWW
is behind this strike with everything it’s got. You’ll see us in the picket lines at the yards and the docks, not because the
IWW
itself has got a thing to gain or a dollar to make out of this strike,
BUT BECAUSE WE STAND FOR THE SOLIDARITY OF ALL LABOR! BECAUSE WE WON’T SCAB ON OUR FELLOW WORKERS!
”

Joe kept himself back from the flow of the oratory, refusing to give his full acceptance to it, because he was busy appraising Barnabas, the smooth head dully shining under the light, the wide reassuring shoulders. But he felt no real envy, only curiosity, a watchfulness that might teach him something, and he was practicing in his mind how the words of a speech might go when the heckler broke out off to the left. “Shovel it somewheres else!” the voice bawled. At Joe’s elbow old Manderich stiffened and half turned like a dog stopped by a sudden hot scent. Barnabas went on without interruption.

“I have one thing to say to you tonight, and only one. I can’t give you the lowdown on this strike. I’ll leave that to Herb Davis and the other local boys. But I can tell you this because I have lived it and worked for it and I know. This is the message of the One Big Union. There is only one way for the workingman to fight the bosses and obtain his rights. Industrial unionism, the solidarity of all labor …”

Granite-faced and stolid, Manderich took a step or two out of the doorway. Joe followed, alert for a repetition of the catcall. They moved smoothly among standing men, a sailor and his girl, a skirted, smiling, out-of-place priest, drifting toward the left where the voice had come from. They had to wait several minutes before the heckler opened his mouth again, and when he did, they were
within ten feet of him. He looked like a workingman, young, hat on the back of his head, hands in his pockets, a big grin on his face, enjoying himself. The veins swelled in his neck with the strength of his bellow: “If you don’t like it here why don’t you go back where you come from?”

A look passed between Manderich and Joe. Manderich went right, Joe left. From the soapbox Barnabas’ big laughing voice came back: “Because where I came from they teach this crap about honest toil!”

Laughter smothered whatever else Barnabas said, but the heckler, either drunk or stupid, bawled delightly, “Bullshit, fellow worker!” He squeezed his shoulders together and said it again. “Bullshit, fellow worker!”

A man close to him caught Joe’s eye and stepped back. Manderich had come within arm’s length of the heckler on the other side, and McGibbeney was behind. Laughter and angry muttering rumbled off in the crowd, but in this close pocket there was sudden quiet. The man who had caught Joe’s eye backed up another step.

Across the heckler’s shoulder Manderich looked at Joe, his face as expressionless as wood. Then he lurched awkwardly, shoving the heckler back into McGibbeney.

McGibbeney snarled, “Watch where you’re going, for Christ sake!” and shoved him back. He turned with his hands up, ready for fight, but Joe swung silently from the side and the wind went out of the heckler with a grunt. His hands came down just as Manderich hit him, then Joe swung again, a hard bone-jarring blow to the head, and the man was down. The three of them stood in a little eddy in the crowd, Barnabas still speaking, everything done so smoothly that there was hardly a disturbance. Of the four involved, only McGibbeney had made a sound. Now Manderich stooped, got the heckler under the arms, and dragged him against the wall, where he propped him. In another minute the three of them had melted into the crowd and got across the street.

McGibbeney was so delighted he could hardly speak. He pounded Joe’s shoulder and stared with respect at the iron-jawed, saturnine Manderich. “I never saw anything done so slick,” he said. “You guys must have worked on goon squads before.”

Manderich grunted. “We worked out that technique when Jack London was running for mayor of Oakland.”

“Is that a fact? Do you know Jack London?”

Manderich winked at Joe and said heavily, “Frank iss like a liddle boy. He hass neffer been in a fight.”

“Any old time you want anything!” McGibbeney said. He shadowboxed, doing fancy footwork on the sidewalk, ripping the air with jabs and hooks. The grim face of Manderich almost smiled. In the look he gave Joe there was something humorous and comradely, recognizing a bond that set the two of them apart from a magpie like Mac. As for Joe, he had always thought of himself as a reckless man; he had never doubted his own nerve. But old Art, he thought, had never backed up from anything in his life. If he started coming for you you would have to kill him to stop him.

Singing was spreading raggedly across the street—“Casey Jones hit the river bottom, Casey Jones broke his blooming spine …” The boys were already working through the crowd selling song cards for a dime each. One thrust a card into Joe’s face, peered and saw who his customer was, and passed on laughing, saying, “What the hell!”

“So you are getting famous,” Manderich said.

Herb Davis was making the pitch for relief funds for the striking trainmen, bellowing over the stir and break-up of the crowd. Joe dropped fifty cents in the hat as it went by. It was just-dark, the air misty and soft on his face. Standing back against the wall he saw how the dew settled and clung to metal and stone, how it condensed and ran down the tin sign tacked against the bricks.

The brief flurry with the heckler had left him aroused and unsatisfied; he waited like an actor for another cue that would bring him onstage, and as he waited beside McGibbeney and Manderich, Davis came by with Barnabas and Betty Spahn, hurrying them toward their hotel. Barnabas stopped long enough to shake hands.

“You’ll hear from me soon as I get back to Chicago. If you write any more, shoot them on to headquarters.”

To Manderich and McGibbeney, turning to them as if not to distinguish Joe above them, he said, “You boys down here are doing a fine job. Just keep on organizing, that’s the ticket.”

McGibbeney said, “How does it look to you? How do you think well come out?”

“This strike?”

“Yeah.”

“We can win.” It was in the tone of his voice that he already thought this strike lost. His voice rose on the oratorical boom. “Even if we don’t, we’ll use it to build with. We get stronger all the time. Just keep on bringing the boomers in.”

He saluted them and turned away, Betty Spahn with him. She had not said a word, but as she turned she smiled at Joe in the dusk, and he nodded in return. That way, as casually as she had come into it, she went out of his life. He had a feeling that he would never see her again and that it would not matter if he didn’t, but he bore her no ill will. He even liked her rather vaguely. She had taught him something. The hand he raised in answer to Tom Barnabas’ salute was as casual and easy as Barnabas’ own.

Their hands behind them against the bricks, they leaned back again. After a minute old Manderich growled, “Ve vill build! Gott damn, vy don’t ve
fight?
”

“How?” Joe said. “It isn’t really our strike.”

“It iss alvays our strike,” Manderich said. “It iss alvays our strike and a strike iss a fight. It iss all right for trainmen to valk up and down only. Trainmen are only fair vages for a fair day’s vork people. But it iss not all right for
IWW
’s. The
IWW
iss for fighting. Valking up and down, dot iss no way to beat the
S.P.
”

McGibbeney said, “You should have got up there and soapboxed, Art,” but Manderich brushed the irrelevant gabble aside. “Today I vas down on dot picket line. A big cop vas dere, a big bull-necked cop. He says to me, ‘Vy all the time valking up and down? Don’t you get tired? Vy don’t you go home so ve can all take a rest?’ I says to him, ‘Efen valking iss better as kissing bosses’ asses.’ ”

Joe laughed. McGibbeney, delighted, said, “What’d he say then? He get sore?”

“Vot should he say? He said, ‘Probably you haff kissed enough so you know all aboudt it.’ ”

His great head ducked, and he spit. “So I said to him, ‘I haff
kissed plenty. Vunce I used to be a cop.’ But dot cop vas right. Vot good iss valking up and down?”

The knuckles of Joe’s right hand were still stiff from the blow he had landed on the scissorbill—a satisfying slight pain that kept him aware and awake. He was thinking how seldom you got a chance like that, a clear punch at a clear enemy. He knew the dissatisfaction that lay beneath old Art’s grumbling. Solidarity, sure. Make speeches, organize, take up collections, strike, join the picket line, sit in smoky halls and plan strategy, meeting moves with countermoves, trying to make your little strength match everything that the bosses could bring to bear, writing protests and petitions, carrying placards and banners—the clear sense of a fight got lost in the machinery of labor tactics.

“What we need is a few tough old lumberjacks down here,” he said.

“Shit,” Manderich said in contempt. “Vot do ve need of lumberjacks? Vot iss the matter vit
us?
”

“They always roll out the paddy wagon,” McGibbeney said. “That’s what makes you sore. There’s always a batch of coppers around, and the first move you make you land in jail.”