Joe Hill (2 page)

John Looney, Felix Baran, Hugo Gerlot—Irishman, Frenchman, German, three young migratory workers, hardly more than boys. The speakers told their story and the story of the others who had stood on the deck of the steamer
Verona
when Sheriff MacRae’s gunmen and the good citizens of the Commercial Club swept it with murderous rifle fire from their hiding places in the warehouses on the Everett dock. We heard it all: how MacRae tried for weeks to keep the
IWW
out of town, how he raided and closed the hall time after time only to have new organizers open it again, how he arrested street speakers, beat them up, exposed them to the saps and brass knuckles and “Robinson clubs” of special deputies,
how he led pickets of the striking shingle weavers into a trap on the trestle, where they were ganged by scabs, how he ran forty-one Wobblies through the gauntlet and the bloody cattleguard on the tracks out by Beverly Park. We heard it all, though we knew it already: how young Hugo Gerlot was up on the mast cheering and waving as the
Verona
nosed into the Everett dock, yelling greetings to the thousands who had assembled for an open-air meeting to protest MacRae’s tyranny and the bloody oppression of the lumber trust. Those thousands were watching from the hill when the deputies opened fire. We heard again how at the first volley young Gerlot threw his arms wide and plunged like a diver from the mast. He was the youngest; there were tears among the crowd to be reminded.

Four known dead, unknown others left in the bloody water of the bay, more than forty wounded: that was the toll of martyrdom MacRae’s deputies took at Everett. And sixty still in the Seattle jail, charged with everything from riot to murder.

The sober crowd stood quietly during the speeches, and it watched in silence while two more martyrs were added to the three already there. It watched the ashes of Jesse Lloyd and Pat Brennan shaken into the air from the knoll, and a low murmur grew as the two small dense clouds of white dust blew downward over the hill. But the murmur swelled and grew when it came time to scatter the ashes of Joe Hill.

Not many in that crowd had known Joe Hill; all of them knew about him. All knew that on that May Day, in every civilized country in the world and every state in the Union except one, tiny envelopes of Joe Hill’s dust were being scattered. They were giving him to the air from a ridge of the Coast Range south of San Francisco, they were letting the mountain wind take him in Colorado. All except Utah, where they killed him, where he did not want to be found dead.

The sound of the crowd was a low, continuous murmur like the sound of the sea on a quiet day; then it fell to silence so still the tick of poplar leaves could be heard a long way. On the knoll one of the speakers stood up again, a skinny man with a great bush of hair, a high collar, a big nose. He read three verses, the verses of Joe Hill’s last will.

After the speaking of the last words, that name that was like a promise of final triumph for the workers of the world, and an assurance that even death could not prevent it or even slow it down, the speaker stood with his head back, his eyes far out over the crowd. The silence ticked away as he stood; it was so still we heard the bells of some steamer nosing into a slip on the sound—perhaps the very steamer
Verona
on which so many
IWW
had died and shed blood.

Then the speaker raised his hand, tossed the envelope into the air. A sigh like a wind went through the hundreds watching, for as the envelope fluttered and began to fall, a puff of breeze came from nowhere and blew the thin pinch of dust outward and upward away from its container. It seemed to us that like the dust of a great volcano thrown high into the upper air, that pinch of white ash might blow all the way around the world.

The two of them sat on the stern of the floathouse and looked across the water to the gasworks on the island. Worms of red and yellow light crawled on the lake surface, and the barge hull rocked softly and heavily in the ghost of a swell. Joe squinted his eyes, shutting out everything but the swimming, trembling rods of light. He had let the kid talk for a half-hour without himself saying a word. Now he said without lifting his chin off his chest, “You ever read
The Ancient Mariner?
”

The kid said doubtfully, “That the one about the old whaler from New Bedford?”

“No, it’s a poem. I read it once when I was learning English.”

“What about it?”

Joe did not answer. After a minute the kid said, still doubtfully, “I guess I never read it.”

The silence spread out again, dark and circular, from the momentary disturbance of their speech. Joe squinted his eyes more narrowly, drowsily melancholy and dreaming, letting the light wriggle across the water and in between his lids. Lights on water. A thousand nights of his life there had been lights on water. The air was cool, with the dense moist texture of air near the sea, the kind of air you could feel between your fingers. But there was a strangeness about this air because there was not the salt smell of the sea in it. It had a brackish smell of mud.

“Ship coming in the canal,” the kid said.

Now that his attention was called to it, Joe was aware that he had been hearing the engines for some time. Against the dark loom of the hill across the lake the ship’s lights came on steadily,
and the sound of the engines gained on the whisper of city noise that trembled on the air back on shore. The sound grew, the engines turning over slow, but there were no voices from the ship, even when she got within a few hundred yards. There was about her something mysterious and sad and dark; a wayfarer, a homeless wanderer, she slipped into a strange harbor by night. Then the high bow shoved across the lights of the gasworks, and just as it did so the gasworks opened a coke oven. The white-hot light flamed like a sun, outlining the freighter’s stubby masts; the upraised spider arms of the booms stared like a hangman’s tree against the light.

“I didn’t know you’d been a sailor,” the kid said.

As a matter of fact, he didn’t know it now. Some connection his mind had made, hooking his companion up with the ancient mariner, with a freighter coming in the canal. Joe let his eyes follow the ship’s bulk with the fading glare of the oven behind it as it slid smoothly into Lake Union. It seemed to him that a salt whiff came with her, a fresher breath than the flat damp air of the lake, and for a moment homesickness was an utterly unexpected knife between his ribs, and he smelled the bay and the wharves at Gefle and the stiff wind running between the islands in the Alandshaf.

The kid’s uncertain, feeling voice groped out again. “You from Sweden?”

Vaguely irritated, Joe let the words run off him, and after a minute he heard the elaborate yawning and stretching of the legs that covered the momentary awkwardness. But there was talk in the kid, an eagerness to be liked and responded to. His chair squeaked as he tilted it back against the wall; his voice was fake-hearty, false-assured.

“Boy, this is all right,” he said. “This is better’n rapturin’ a gut on a crosscut and sleepin’ in a stinkin’ bunkhouse.”

Joe made a low, indeterminate sound. The boy’s voice ran on. “Bottles is a fine guy,” he said. “You meet a lot of fine guys. Just boomin’ around, you meet stiffs from all over, and all kinds of them are fine guys.”

By turning his head a little Joe could see the boy’s face with the last dying glow of the coke oven on it. It was a good-natured kid face. He had a lot to learn.

“Just for instance,” the kid was saying, “who’d ever expect to light in a place like this? You blow in from somewhere, I blow in from the woods, we both know somebody that knows Bottles, and bingo, here we sit like millionaires on a private yacht.” He laughed and stretched out flatter in the tilted chair with his arms locked over his head.

Joe said nothing. He watched the delayed coming of the freighter’s wave. The gasworks lights bent like glowing rods in the water, and then the smooth wave reached the floathouse, shouldering it heavily upward and passing under and losing itself against the shore. The following waves rocked them, slapping under the flat hull.

“I’m sort of surprised,” the kid said. “I expected to run into all kinds of rough stuff on the road. You know the kind of stories you hear. I thought I’d be runnin’ into nothin’ but a lot of stew-bums and fruits. But Jesus, it’s mainly nice guys you meet, just ordinary guys like you are yourself.”

He yawned again, and the front legs of his chair hit the deck. “Well, it’s a great life,” he said, and yawned a third time, not so convincingly. “Always some’n new,” he said. “You gonna ship out, or stick around Seattle, or what?”

It was only because he had been thinking about the same thing that Joe bothered to answer. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll head south.”

“Yeah,” the kid said vaguely. He hung around, leaning against the wall. “The shark was signin’ ’em up for a lumber camp over by Redmond the other day. You know anything about Redmond? That’s the Snohomish outfit, I think.” When Joe was silent he went on, “Hell, I don’t know whether to go back to the woods or not. That’s a rough god damn job. I walked out the last camp I was at.” For a moment he waited, as if expecting Joe to say something or act surprised. His laugh was short, almost a giggle. “I told the boss to kiss me behind and I up and beat it.” He labored to a halt, but then beat his way ahead again, fumbling and uncertain. “If I had my druthers I’d stay right here on Bottles’ yacht and play jungle-buzzard all summer, but I don’t s’pose Bottles’d want boarders that long.”

Joe made the indeterminate sound again, wishing the kid didn’t insist on being so important to himself. The people he met, the places he went, the plans he made, what he said to the boss. What
difference did it make? He could get to be a pest, making adventures out of every two-bit thing that happened to him.

Now the kid yawned a last time, almost with determination; his feet shuffled determinedly on deck. “Well, guess I’ll go see if Bottles has got paper and a pencil. I haven’t wrote a letter to my Sis for six weeks.”

“You better do that,” Joe said.

“She takes an interest in what I do,” the boy said. “She sits there in Akron, ironin’ shirts in a laundry all day, and the places I get around to seem pretty exciting to her. If I know I’m gonna be someplace around a certain time I give her a general-delivery address, and she writes me these big long letters. If I let her, she’d quit tomorrow and hit the road out here. That old laundry stuff has got her goat pretty bad.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Well, you go write her.”

Eventually the kid broke his embarrassed hanging around and went inside. After a minute the lamp bloomed yellow, pushing light through the window back of Joe and showing the worn deck planking, the unpainted stern rail, the broken armchair where the kid had sat. Across on the island the gasworks twinkled on, as remote as the stars, and as incomprehensibly conducted. The few lights that had shone high on the hill had gone out. The night air was growing chilly. For a long time Joe sat back in the dark by the window. Once he leaned to put his face against the pane and saw the kid at the table, still writing.

The tantalizing sea-smell that the freighter had trailed past was still in his nostrils. The past was in it, and pictures blew like smoke across his mind, the hills and the bay and the rivermouth and the ships, the schoolyard with the lush summer grass, the
YMCA
reading room where sailors had come, the smoke of boats coming down from the copper mines at Falum. He could have drawn every street and building in that seaport town, and yet when he tried to bring it closer, to put himself back in the cottage, to come in on some winter evening with the red muffler three times around his neck, and image his mother in the kitchen amid the warmth and the smell of food, something in him turned away and held it off. By an effort of will he could summon the house he had grown up in, but he couldn’t hold it. It ran out of his mind like water from a leaky pail, and left him only an irritable, empty sense of loss.

Names wouldn’t do it, either. He tried, softly and to himself, the singing Swedish sounds, naming every street of Gefle, stores and shops he remembered, people he knew. None of them meant what he kept trying to make them mean, and he felt himself watching and testing himself for the effect he wanted. He tried naming his mother’s name, Berta Hillstrom, and waited for the emotion that had ground like hobnails through his childhood and youth. But his mother’s wrongs and her skimped dejected life stirred in him only a vague unhappiness now. It was 1910 now; she was twelve years dead.