Joe Hill (18 page)

He saw it below him small and cluttered and shabby, pinched down under the shadow of the river bluffs, ringed by dark trees, one inconsequent battleground among ten thousand battlegrounds, but as important as any, as legitimate a place to fight in as any. It seemed to him as he looked down that he saw with great clarity, not in any new way but with a new freshness, the meaning of the words in the Preamble: “There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system …”

But as he walked along, his sight was blurred by the ties, the alternate solidity and empty space beneath his feet. A wind puffed down the gorge toward the sea; he felt the trestle strain the thin pressure of the air, and a second or two later saw the feathers of smoke rising from the town bend seaward like candleflames in a blown breath.

It was fantastic. Ordinarily he was as steady and sure-footed on a trestle or scaffolding as on solid ground, but now his knees tightened with the fear that something might break the strong rhythm of his walking, that his eyes might misjudge the blurring alternation of the ties, that he might step through and fall. He felt the trestle sway lightly, dangerously, and he stopped and stooped, almost grabbing for support.

Alone and high above the chicken yard where he would soon pounce, he did not feel like a hawk. He felt scared and queasy,
and in anger at himself he stopped and stood straight until the uneasiness went away. Then he looked around.

He was almost in the middle. Swiftly he squatted, broke the waxy sticks of phosphorus into short pieces, and using the piece of newspaper like a glove, laid them along a six-foot stretch of the sheltered eastern angle of the truss beam. Over them he scattered the pocketfuls of fir needles he had gathered. He worked quickly and surely, with no more shakiness of the knees though he had to lean out to arrange the sticks as he wanted them. When he was through he stood up and slapped the needles from his clothes. The covered phosphorus sticks were entirely out of sight. At 83° Fahrenheit they would burst into flame.

As he walked on, steadily stepping across the open ties, his mind was working like a clock. He was in search of a black German named Schermerhorn and a Frenchy named Tisserand. Tonight, with any luck, the Wobbly hall would be open for a while at least and a certain number of the strikers would be signed up and wearing buttons. Still later, while selected people threw stink bombs and kept the deputies busy over across the river, there would be a street meeting. Even a half-hour would be enough. Contact would have been made, solidarity established, a core of the
IWW
planted in the town so that the union could move in its heavy support.

This time tomorrow he might be in jail or on his way out of town with the marks of clubs on him, but by then there would have been a job done. And before this time tomorrow there was going to be a nice fire that would cripple the operation of the mill and go up above the firs at the rivermouth like a yell of defiance.

The spot where they had unrolled their blankets was a long way from the ditch, and outside the edge of the old orchard whose sawed-off stumps were put to use as stools all through the camp.
They were on the fringe, a little higher, up where dry oatgrass and tarweed spread under the fence and up the first slope of the hills, and they could look down over the camp sprawling across the old orchard and bunched under the pepper trees along the ditch. The sun, which had poured down heat all day, was almost flat; they sat with their backs to it, waiting for it to go down.

“Yes,” Joe said finally. “But how mad are they? Can we do anything with them, or are they like most of these stoop laborers?”

Fuzzy Llewellyn lifted his face and gave Joe a distorted look. One cheek wore a puffy discolored bruise, and the eye on that side was swollen nearly shut. He talked stiffly past a split lip. “I think there’s a …”

His one good eye sharpened and focused, staring past Joe. Quite slowly and smoothly he folded back onto the ground, crawled into the shelter they had rigged from two bent strips of corrugated iron culvert hammered flat, and pulled a blanket clear up over him. “Keep on talkin’,” he said from underneath.

With hands hanging at their knees they sat on, facing half away from a man in breeches and laced boots who came up from along the edge of the camp. Backs to the sun, drooping, they sat still. Without appearing to look, Joe saw the man giving their outfit a sharp once-over as he came.

Joe caught his eye when he was within thirty feet. He nodded. “Evenin’,” the man said. The others lifted hands and let them fall again, not quite looking around.

“You’re pretty far from water up here,” the man said.

No one answered for a moment, until old Manderich said, “More preeze.” Virtanen, a slow-headed Russian-Finn, smiled. Joe and the Kirkham twins hugged their knees.

“I guess you’re right, at that,” the man said. He laughed and drew his shirtsleeve across his forehead, replaced his hat. His feet had not quite stopped moving. Now he was almost past, walking a little sideways in order to watch them. “She’s a hot son of a bitch, for fair,” he said, and passed on. They watched him plod along the fence and eventually drift down into the edge of the camp again. Fuzzy waited a long time before he poked his bruised face out.

“Ve vould show up less if ve camped down in the crowd,” Manderich said.

“It ain’t safe,” Fuzzy said. “I’m too easy to spot, with a tow head and a buggered-up face. They prowl this place like cops on a beat. There must be a dozen special deputies and finks around.” He sat down among them again and ran a finger tenderly along his leaking eyelid.

“That doesn’t seem so many for a camp this big,” Joe said.

“It’s enough to show they’re jumpy. If they wasn’t jumpy they wouldn’t have taken the trouble to goon me out of camp.”

“What’d you do, exactly?”

“I called a meetin’,” Fuzzy said. “I come in here and I took one look and I called a meetin’.” His lips pointed sharply, alertly, and like a bird pecking he spit between his feet. His bruises gave his grin a cocky, one-sided leer. “Troublemaker!” he said.

Joe watched him. “What’d you have in mind when you came back?”

“Call another meetin’!”

They laughed, a short, unanimous acknowledgment of Fuzzy’s cockiness. “When?” Joe said. “Tomorrow?”

“That’s what I figured. What do you think? Sunday mornin’ they’ll all be sittin’ around smellin’ the backhouses, or waitin’ in line to get in one.”

Joe kept watching him, trying to appraise this Llewellyn. He knew nothing of him except what he had learned in the last six hours, and it didn’t pay to take chances. “How are you on the soapboxing? Can you start her off?”

“Listen!” Fuzzy said, “just let me up there and I’ll soapbox the livin’ Jesus out of ’em. I got somep’m to tell ’em about this dump. Only I won’t dare show my mug around too much beforehand. You boys’ll have to set it up.”

“We’ll set it up,” Joe said. He rose, beating the dust from the seat of his corduroys. “Before we settle any strategy I’d like to take a look around. You feel like a walk, Art?”

“Come on,” Manderich said. “I show you.”

He led Joe down to the edge of the ditch that cut at an angle through the immense camp. All through the city of tents and shelters and tarp-covered wagons the sawed-off orchard stumps made a regular pattern. Along the ditch people had crowded in
close to take advantage of the shade of the pepper trees, and their tent ropes stretched to the edge of the path.

Even at seven o’clock it was hot. The ground was beaten bare; the sun caught in a golden haze of dust among the tents. Children were wading at the edge of the ditch, but a man with a pail chased them out angrily and stood a moment, his mouth grim, waiting and looking for a clear spot, before he reached far out and hooked a pailful from deeper water. The mealtime smoke of many fires rose and mixed with the dust, and all over the tent city and over the crude shelters and the shelterless bedroll-camps that spread for a quarter of a mile there was a light, sun-dazzled haze. Men chopped wood, women stooped and squatted around campfires, there was a calling and yelling of children. All the sounds, in the last heat of the day, had a dragging, tired resonance, the shrillness taken out as distance takes the shrillness from a train whistle. In the evening the sounds that rose above the camp had an almost musical hum.

“Tventy-eight hundred peoples,” Manderich said. “It iss a city.”

“Some city,” Joe said. “Some City Beautiful.” It bothered him that the sounds the camp made were not more obviously unhappy sounds, the vocal anguish of the oppressed. There was no doubt that the pickers in this camp were beaten down like slaves, yet the sounds they made were light, almost hopeful. The chunk of an axe had a purposeful and solid ring; the noise of the children was full of laughter. If people didn’t have such a capacity to take a beating, the revolution would come ten times faster. He looked across the ditch into the great hopfields, unbroken, apparently without end. As far as he could see southward the geometry of the frames angled and changed and set up rows and lines. It was incredible that one man should own so much, and incredible that by the mere fact of owning it he could acquire the use of twenty-eight hundred human farm animals, and incredible that twenty-eight hundred people would consent to be used like animals, or worse than animals. An animal you valued, you took care of.

A hundred feet away, left in the center of a small discreet open space, was a weathered privy. Three children hung around it, and as Manderich and Joe came along the welt of the ditch Manderich’s elbow dug Joe’s body. “Here iss one t’ing.” Loitering, they watched.

From back among the camps a man came, walking fast, and when he saw the privy with no crowd around it he speeded up almost to a run. But the privy door was locked, and when he had rattled it impatiently once he turned away scowling. A cloud of flies, luminous in the sun-struck dust, lifted from the half-open flap behind and slowly settled again. The man walked a few yards away and sat down on a stump to which a camper had guyed his tent. On the other side of the privy the three children lingered. One of the girls wrapped her legs together and hopped, grimacing, and the three giggled. A man with a boy by the hand came along the ditch, saw the man waiting on the stump, and wordlessly fell in behind him, starting a line.

The privy door swung back and a gaunt woman stepped out. The waiting man rose smartly from his stump, but the children raced as if in a game and piled in and slammed the door before the man had taken three steps. He went back to the stump, and he and the gaunt woman exchanged looks of hatred as she passed.

Old Manderich’s face was like brown worn rock. “It iss for pigs,” he said. “In all dis camp, eight backhouses, all mixed up for men and vomen, no lime, everyt’ing oferflowing vit flies and cherms. Three, four hundred peoples to one backhouse, and plenty of dysentery. Iss it for human beings or iss it for pigs?”

They moved aside to let a woman and two children pass. The drawers of one child, a girl, hung down dirty and sopped, and her face was tear-streaked. As her mother yanked her and the little boy down the embankment toward the privy the man on the stump saw her coming, and raised his head with an expression of warning on his face. The woman, glancing aside from her concentrated dragging of the two children, saw him, and the man and boy behind him, clearly a forming line. Her mouth tightened; she hung indecisive, hesitating. At that instant the three other children swarmed out of the privy, whamming the door back against the wall, and before the door had swung halfway back into place the woman was running, dragging her girl and boy along. Her hair flew across her face as she yanked the girl inside, stood sideways to let the boy slide past her, and pulled the door shut.

The man had risen from his stump. Now he looked across at Joe and Manderich, shook his head, said something to the man behind him. His look of outrage had given way to amused disgust.
He sat down on the stump again and pinched his face together and shook his head and laughed. He said, “In about five minutes I’m going over and let fly right on old Hale’s doorstep.”

“Dot vould be a goot idea,” Manderich said.

He touched Joe’s elbow and they went on, out of the more orderly area of tents and in among the camps scattered across the open field. Huddles of quilts and blankets, a few leanto shelters of stretched tarpaulins, some parked wagons and buckboards, smells of manure and smoke and rank fermented garbage and burning eggshells, and over it all the terrible dusty pressure of the heat. There were makeshift tables on packing boxes, overturned pails, stumps or rocks. Under one frame with a blanket thrown over it an old Mexican woman sat unmoving and stared into space with eyes of a startling blind blue. Hairs grew on her upper lip, and her hands lay like dark dry leaves in her lap.