Joe Hill (22 page)

They were roaring it out by the end. When the center was finished it heard the delayed but enthusiastic fringes coming on in with the whole last line. It was only after the final trailing off of the song that Joe heard the peremptory voice shouting, and saw Henry Kirkham and another man slide toward the soapbox.

Fuzzy Llewellyn looked out over the heads, his arms still wide in the gesture of leading the singing. For one flicking instant his one good eye dropped to meet Joe’s, then Manderich’s. His mouth formed a sidelong word. “Law.” Joe made a motion to Kirkham to come in closer, to help form a ring around the box.

Now Fuzzy let out his voice again, and the nasal, penetrating half-whine seemed twice as loud and twice as penetrating as before. “They’re comin’ in here right now!” he shouted. “What are they comin’ for? To stop me from talkin’. To run me into the calaboose and stop my mouth, or knock it off. They don’t want any meetin’s like this, and you know why? Because they work you like horses and pay you starvation wages and don’t give a good god damn whether you live or die. Because they want that last bloody nickel you sweat out for them out in the sun. They want that last nickel even if it comes to them red with the blood of your children! And if you squawk, here come the finks and the deputies with pick handles and barrel staves.
HERE THEY COME RIGHT NOW
!”

The peremptory authoritative voice shouted again. Joe could see the crowd buckling and swirling compactly out in the sun of the
road, and as the swirl came inward Joe saw the red head of Russ Kirkham coming with it, backing before it. Other men, four or five, seemed to be doing the same.

“They’re comin’ in right now!” Fuzzy yelled. “What I want to know is what you’re gonna do about it. Do they shut us up? Do they bring out their dirty hired law and do we knuckle under? Do we submit to their god damn gunmen
OR DO WE STAND UP TO THE SONSABITCHES? DO WE CLOSE RANKS AND FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS? I’M ASKIN’ YOU, FELLOW WORKERS, AND YOU AIN’T GOT LONG TO DECIDE!
”

Manderich looked at Joe, and they shoved the preacher forward a step so as to be free. Joe made sure the automatic was loose in the holster. Manderich’s grim smile deepened the creases in his face; for the first time Joe noticed that his hair was thin, that in his neck there was the beginning of an old man’s dewlap of sagging skin. Pushing the preacher again, they moved out another step or two to meet the incoming disturbance of the law. Women were clearing out; there was a quick, hurried, anxious pressing-away from the direction of the disturbance as Fuzzy, useless now and unlistened to, kept shouting from the elevated chair.

The swirl of the in-pressing law was close now. Into the space the women had left, Kirkham and four others were thrust suddenly, retreating ahead of a solid group of more than a dozen. The deputies were sweating, their shirts sticking to them, their nickeled badges sagging the wet cloth. All had guns buckled around them. With them was one dressed like themselves but wearing a tie and a white stetson. Joe guessed him to be the sheriff. And behind the sheriff was a man in a Panama hat and an alpaca coat, smooth-faced, pink with heat—boss or lawyer, a different breed, and wearing no gun.

Kirkham’s group fell back with Joe and Manderich and the others. A narrow lane formed itself between them and the tightly grouped law. Back of him Joe felt the continuous stir of people getting out of the way; what should have been a silence as the men faced each other was full of a steady, ponderous rumble, a heavy stir in the air like the sound of wagons crossing a plank bridge.

The sweating deputies were looking at the sheriff, but they were nervous and their heads kept turning and their hands stayed
close to the guns on their hips. They braced a little against the curious weight of the crowd.

“Llewellyn!” the sheriff said. “I’ve got a warrant for you. You’re under arrest.”

Joe was up on the balls of his feet. He watched the sheriff and the man in the Panama hat, and he heard the rumble of the crowd closing in like silence after the sheriffs words. Behind him Fuzzy Llewellyn screeched in a cracking voice, “
WELL, FELLOW WORKERS, HERE THEY ARE! I’M UNDER ARREST, THE SHERIFF SAYS. OKAY, I’LL LET MYSELF GET PINCHED. I’LL GO WITH THIS BUNCH OF GOD DAMNED LAW WITH THEIR SAPS AND SIX SHOOTERS. THAT’S ALL I CAN DO, ALONE. BUT IF YOU’RE WITH ME I CAN DO SOMETHING ELSE. I CAN TELL THIS SHERIFF THERE ARE ALMOST THREE THOUSAND WORKERS HERE THAT WON’T
 …”

It came as both a sound and a thrust of movement, a slow crescendo coming inward from the far edges of the crowd. Joe heard it rising and growing; he saw it take hold on the clustered deputies and saw them brace against it. He saw fear leap into the face of the pink-faced man in the Panama and saw with sharp clarity how the deputies elbowed and hampered each other, half turning to resist the pushing from behind. They shouted; one drew his gun half out.

He had completely forgotten the preacher who stood beside him, and only the flickering impression he caught from the corner of his eye of some danger, some blow, kept him from being taken completely unaware. He ducked, crouching, so that something came over the top of him and bore him down with a mauling weight. But even as he went down he heard the three quick shots and the terrible cresting roar of the crowd.

For a minute he was utterly helpless, tossed under trampling feet, smothered and squashed under struggling bodies. A shoe came down on his hand and he rolled, trying to break free. Blows were landing on him, and he struck back and kicked and rolled again until the feet thinned and he made his feet, throwing the long hair out of his eyes as he came up, his right hand diving for the gun. A bullet went past his cheek so close that he felt the wind of it and heard the soggy
puk
it made as it hit something behind him. But as he turned the crowd picked him up like a chip and carried him along. His feet tangled in the yielding mass of a body so that
he almost went down again. The noise of the crowd now was an unbearable tense continuous stream.

He was borne struggling against the trunk of one of the pepper trees, a tree where children had made a ladder out of the stubs of old branches. As the pressure swirled past on both sides he caught one of the stubs and pulled himself up out of the tumult, the gun ready in his hand.

But already the thing was over. He saw fierce-eyed men whirl in the choking dust, fearful of enemies, but there were no enemies, only pickers like themselves. They fell back warily, mistrustful of everyone else, many of them nursing hurts, away from the soapbox where miraculously Fuzzy Llewellyn still stood, and as they fell back and the dust cloud stilled and cleared Joe saw the bodies on the ground, the bloodied, dirtied white shirts patched with adhesive dust, the fallen hats, the darker curving figures of fallen men.

At the first opening below him he jumped and landed running, coming up beside Fuzzy. One of the Kirkhams was there, blood streaming from his nose. Twenty feet away, one across the other, lay the pink-faced man and the sheriff, and near them a picker. Joe could not see his face, but his hand was brown. Still beyond, doubled up with his face against his knees, was a deputy. The rest of the deputies, as well as the preacher, had disappeared. And close up against the backless chair where Fuzzy stood, his dead face trampled and smashed by the fury and panic of the crowd, lay old Manderich.

Kirkham’s teeth were chattering. He looked at Joe and shook his head and wiped his streaming nose with the back of his hand.

Up on the chair Fuzzy stood with his hands at his sides, his squirrel teeth bared, looking out almost abstractedly across the road. The short, savage flare of mob anger had lasted only a matter of minutes, the surge inward upon the deputies had been a reaction as sudden and automatic as impulse and blow. Now men were sneaking away, retreating from both instigator and result of their fury. The few who stayed stayed with an awed, scared look on their faces. A hush was over the whole meeting place, the whole camp. Even yet the dust had not settled completely. Joe knelt by Manderich and felt the thick wrist, but he knew before he knelt that Manderich was dead. From the brutally battered face he
looked up into Fuzzy’s. He felt himself wet as a drenched dog with sweat. “Let’s get out of here!” he said.

Fuzzy shook his head. His eyes were glassy. His voice stuck and he cleared it. “No.”

“They’ll be back with riot squads or the Guard. The crowd won’t stand up to them again. Look at them!” He was excited himself. He heard the chattering of Kirkham’s teeth and realized that his own hands were shaking.

“I know,” Fuzzy said. “They’re scared now. But I started this. Ill see it through.”

“They’ll hang you,” Joe said. “They’ll hang anybody they can catch.”

Fuzzy looked down at the bodies in the white dust. Someone groaned, and Joe saw that the sheriff, under the body of the man in the Panama hat, was stirring and feebly moving his arms and legs. They watched him try to lift his head, and they saw how the weight of the other body bore on him. Finally Kirkham, still chattering, went and rolled the body off the sheriff and backed away again.

“You go, Joe,” Fuzzy said. “There’s no need of everybody sticking. One’s enough. You go on.”

Joe looked down again at the dead and trampled face of Art Manderich. His teeth ached clear to the roots of his jaw. The automatic was still in his hand, and he put it away. “You can’t fight them in jail,” he said.

“No,” Fuzzy said. “You’ll do more good outside. You go. All of you go. I’ll stick here.”

The sheriff was stirring again, rolling his head. Dust was in his black hair as if it had been rolled in flour. In a few minutes he might be awake enough to recognize people. Whatever Joe did he had better do it fast.

“You’re crazy, Fuzzy. What good can you do letting them hang you?”

“Maybe they won’t hang me,” Fuzzy said. “We wanted to show up what went on at this ranch, didn’t we?” His lips pulled back so that the long front teeth showed clear to the gums in a sick, starveling grin. “Maybe this is as good a way as any.”

Joe’s head had cleared. He could see now with perfect clearness the course that events would take. If Fuzzy wanted to fight them that way, by being their prisoner, it was his lookout. As for
Joe Hill, he had better ways. Only Manderich and Fuzzy Llewellyn had known who he was; to the others he was only “Swede.” If Fuzzy kept his mouth shut, there was no reason for Joe Hill to be involved in this at all.

His eyes strayed again, a last time, to Manderich’s bloody face. Somebody would have to get even for old Art. Somebody would have to be free to carry on and redouble the fight.

He reached up and shook Fuzzy’s limp hand. “Maybe you won’t hear from me directly,” he said, “but you’ll know I’m working.”

There was no time to do more than cross past their camp and pick up his bindle, and then he was one of hundreds on their way. The camp was emptying, people everywhere were in flight. The road was already jammed. It was a fool notion people had that they could get away by the road. The riot squad would be coming in from both sides in a matter of an hour. If there was any chance of getting away, it was over the hills and in toward the old gold country. From there it might be possible, taking it easy and slow, to work on down the coast and out of reach of suspicion. For the moment, at least, he did not worry about Fuzzy, staying back there on the chair to wait for the cops. He had enough to think about, just getting away.

I don’t see what you expect to gain by it, he said to Fuzzy many times. For a minute they were organized, you had them coming. They were full of the class war and they wanted their rights and they were ready to resist when the deputy went for his gun. But look what happens afterward. They get scared, they back off. They see a couple of their own people and two or three of the law dead in the melee and they wilt. So what is there to be gained by waiting for the law to come back with riot guns? What possible good can it do the movement or anybody else to have you rot in the Sacramento jail and maybe fry in San Quentin?

It was just a grandstand play, he told Fuzzy. You liked the look of yourself waiting there with your arms folded. You felt the
way you feel in a free-speech fight when the bulls roll around, but you were wrong. You gain something by getting yourself pinched in a free-speech fight, but you don’t gain anything here except to get all the hatred and fear of the bosses poured out on you alone. Maybe you like it that way.

Suppose I’d stuck too, he said to Fuzzy’s insistent image. Suppose I’d stood up there with you. I had a gun on me. This preacher saw it, maybe others did too. I had it in my hand when I got down out of that tree. Plenty of people could have seen it on me, and even if they didn’t a smart
D.A.
could make a dozen of them swear they did. So they’re all at the trial to testify that I had a gun in my hand during the fight. I haven’t even shot it off, but I’m guilty of murdering everybody that’s dead there, even old Art. Probably nobody does any shooting but the deputies, they shoot each other in the uproar, but some Wobbly has to burn for it. Well, I can do more good out organizing somewhere else than I can giving Hale the satisfaction of executing me. Art was enough to lose in that fight.