Joe Hill (34 page)

First she laughed, and then she touched four black keys on the piano, and then she looked up at him with the pink washing
again into her face. He saw that she would take him to the show if he asked it. Holy smoke! he said to himself. Aloud he said, “Quit worrying how I live. It’s been two or three years since I even thought about it. Right now, as a matter of fact, I’ve got five dollars that I borrowed from Otto.”

“You’ll have to pay it back sometime.”

“That’s Otto’s worry.”

“You’re a shiftless man, Mr. Hillstrom,” she said, but he jingled the change in his pocket and smiled at her.

“I can afford to be shiftless. The world owes me a living. My labor has created enough wealth already so I could retire on my fair share of it.”

“If you could get it.”

“Yeah, if I could get it.”

That night late, standing under the dark vines, he kissed her and found her lips warm, her body willing. For half a minute his hands were all over her, his mouth hot on hers, but then she strained backward, pushing him away. He reached for her again, his blood thick in his ears and his breath fast, and felt how the thin stuff of her dress slipped on her shoulders.

“No, no Joe, please!”

The hot fit passed, and he saw her coolly: a middle-class, conventional, pious, proper woman, a believer in marriage and property and children and cottages with vines on the porch and a husband with a regular pay enevelope, a Swede girl from Gefle who knew too much about him and didn’t half understand what she knew.

“Okay, no,” he said.

“Joe …”

“What?”

With her hands on his arms she turned him so that the vague glow of the lamp inside the parlor fell across his face. Her eyes looked into his so long that he began to wonder what she was up to. It was as if she hunted for something, her eyes pried at him. But she said nothing. At last she shivered suddenly and crowded against him, pressing her face into his shoulder, and broke away and ran inside.

Walking home, he spoke ironically and with some astonishment
to himself. He said, Joe, look what you’ve just had offered to you on a platter. This is the chance of a lifetime. You can marry this girl and get a house and a couple of acres of land thrown in. All the rest of your life you can sit around the house in carpet slippers and spit off the porch or weed around in the flower beds while your wife earns the bread and butter giving music lessons. You even get a mother-in-law to boot for cook and bottle-washer. You can settle down on Forty-Eighth South Street in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley and to hell with the workers’ revolution. To hell with the troubles of miners in Colorado or gyppo men down on the D & RG or stoop-crop pickers in the San Joaquin Valley. To hell with the radicals in the capitalistic jails. You can sit around the rest of your life eating apples and playing whist with a lot of Swedes and talking about the old country.

That’s a fact, he said to himself—more and more astonished, more and more ironical. All you have to do is reach out your hand.

And be good, he said. You’ll have to promise to be good. You couldn’t be kept around the house unless you were house-broke.

The Erickson house was dark. So was every other house on the thinly built-up street. On the porch he sat down, too restless for sleep, and heard the dry unwearied noise of the cottonwood leaves like the rustling of thoughts in his mind. The loneliness that always lived with him, and especially late at night, came out of the dark and hobnobbed with him on the empty porch: a melancholy nighttime yearning washed in on the barely moving night air. He put his feet on the rail and pushed his chair back against the wall and closed his eyes. After a while he found himself in the midst of people he admired, the uncompromising enemies of the system, men and women he would have gone a long way to see and would have used for the models of his own life.

As if he had been there, he saw Frank Little parading back and forth in the street, up in the Mesabi, his tough, one-sided mouth distorted in jeers and his tongue going in a steady stream of profane catcalls, daring the finks inside their headquarters to come out and get him.
You think I’m afraid of you, you
scabby sons of bitches? I’m a cripple, I couldn’t even run away. What’s holding you back? You hired out to beat up workingmen. Why don’t you start on me? I’m a red, red Wobbly, I’m a radical agitator, and I hate the guts of every scabby fink of you. Why don’t you come out and start to work?
He saw Frank Little throw his crutch fifty feet out in the dust and hobble along without it between silent, watching miners and the company headquarters full of finks. A human flame, a fire of hatred and protest, he dared the whole wage system and its gunmen single-handed.

And Frank Little faded and the picture of Gurley Flynn’s red mane came in. He saw the veritable twist of her lips as she spoke from a soapbox, and felt the electricity she gave off. Another flame. And The Flynn faded into Katie Phar, the kid Katie with her child’s eyes and her child’s silvery voice, a kind of saint, an innocent homely Joan of Arc, no torch like The Flynn but with just as much courage. And behind Katie as she sang outside the Spokane jail came the other faces—the grim creased mask of Art Manderich, the gopher teeth of Fuzzy Llewellyn bared in a still grin, Herb Davis’ cocked jaw, the serious, intellectual intentness of Tom Barnabas, the rocky immovable face of Big Bill Haywood. They came like a parade, the fighters, the devoted and dedicated and incorruptible. They came in crowds—the free-speech fighters in San Diego driven back by the white blasts of firehoses, washed away like chips, and re-forming and coming back to be blasted again, and re-form again, and come on. He heard them singing in the Fresno jail, and opened his eyes on the darkness of this sleeping street, the blotted shadows of trees and houses, the high crestline of the Wasatch cutting off the stars. He remembered himself kissing Ingrid Olson at her front gate, and the way her eyes searched and pried at his for some assurance, and said to himself, No, my God, what are you getting into? You don’t want to wear
that
collar.

Then what was he doing hanging around Salt Lake? He ought to get out of here and hike for Colorado where he could do some good. What he had told Jud Ricket was strict truth. He didn’t want to spend his time in the routine slow groundwork organizing in preparation for something a year or two years away. He was a trouble-shooter and he ought to be where trouble was brewing. Yet there were Fuzzy and the others in the Sacramento jail.
He knew precisely why Fuzzy had stuck to his soapbox in that fracas. As definitely as if Fuzzy had told him he knew that Fuzzy stuck because he wanted to prove he was no dehorn. The Stockton local that had blacklisted him had to be shown that Fuzzy was as true-blue a rebel as lived.

And Joe Hillstrom? Why was Joe Hillstrom breaking his neck to raise money for Fuzzy’s defense? Oh yes, he said to himself, that’s a good question—and saw himself cutting through the clutter of tents, running like a rabbit while Fuzzy stood fast.

His mind ducked and bent, reaching out for the thought of the songs. Down at the hall the cards with “My Old Kentucky Home” still drying on them; over at Ingrid Olson’s the notebook with the half-completed “Workers of the World.” As if talking with some questioner or critic, he framed an orderly plan: I want to stay in Salt Lake long enough to get a lot of songs done. I can always have the use of a piano, and this Olson girl can help me with the harmony when I bugger it up. Maybe I’ll try a popular song or two, waltzes or two-steps, not labor songs at all. If I could get one or two of those published and sold I could turn over the royalties to the defense fund. There’s a lot more money in that kind than in a labor song printed on a card, and besides, the money for a popular song comes out of good bourgeois pockets, not out of workingmen. I could make the system contribute to the revolution that will overturn it …

A vaudeville singer in a straw hat, leaning on a cocky cane, sang from a brilliant stage, and a face, unrecognized but unmistakable, looked at Joe Hill with admiration and said distinctly, “I hear your song all over, everybody’s singing it” singing what turkey trot singing what and he bent his head at the post office window and said “I want a money order for five hundred dollars make it to the General Defense Fund, Industrial Workers of the World.” I can’t get all that on one line, the face inside the window said, and turned his pad, too bad, and Joe said, “Make it
IWW
, that won’t trouble you.” He fell back from the window as Ingrid Olson put her head out, serious, with her hair in thick braids, and she said, “You’re so shiftless, Mr. Hillstrom,” but he held the blue slip of the money order up in front of her nose.

Holy smoke, he said, think what it would mean to the union to have just one rich bird in it. Everybody in the whole
IWW
is a working stiff without a cartwheel to his name, or an intellectual with shiny pants. Suppose just once some old Moneybags died and left a million to the union. Just suppose there was a really fat defense fund, plenty of money for strike relief. What if we had the money to fight them in the courts and in the press and everywhere where money gives them every advantage.

Out of the darkness beyond the porch came Joe Hill, walking erectly in a good blue suit. As he passed along a picket line, men spoke to him in friendship and admiration. He went into a hall and saw a strike committee sitting at a table and he said, “How much of a strike fund do you need to keep from being starved back to work?” The checkbook unfolded before their astonished faces.

Angrily, shaking himself, he stood up in the dark and the silence. The noise of the cottonwood leaves seemed to pause while he listened; then it began again, a dry, clicking whisper. He leaned out to see if he could detect any sign of light down toward the Olson house, but saw none. All alone, he felt how his thoughts and desires warred in him, how much remained to do, how everything he did was not enough. A man could go sleepless for a hundred years, and work like a horse the whole time, and complete not one tenth of what he wanted to do. He thought of Thor, trying to drink the ocean dry and tear up the roots of the Midgard Serpent.

Hell, he said, and let himself in. The house was still, the dining-room clock a loudness in the enclosed dark. He walked along the edge of the stairs, off the carpet, to avoid the squeaks. In the room he scratched a match, found the lamp on the dresser, and touched flame to wick, so that the room brightened around him into enameled bedstead and pottery pitcher and the shine of varnish on the chair arms. The bed was empty; Otto still catting around somewhere.

His pleasure at finding the room empty gave a shove to the vague intention that had brought him upstairs. As if he had planned just this, he got paper and pencil and sat under the lamp with a magazine on his knees for a writing pad. A popular song. Something for lovers and kids in high schools, some tune for bands to play on Sunday afternoons in a thousand parks. A waltz, maybe, some joyride song, something to sweep the country
like
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay
, some song that every good middle-class housewife would have to have on her piano, something every music teacher would give her pupils.

Thoughtfully he opened the magazine, turning its pages, looking among its words and pictures for inspiration, for a starter, an idea that would set him off.

Much later the sound of someone coming in made him look up from his paper with its scratched lines and its tentative annotations for a tune. He looked across at Otto’s alarm clock. Two-twenty. Steps came up the stairs carefully, were muffled for a moment in the hall carpet. Then the door opened and Otto looked in.

For an instant he hung in the doorway. His grin was turned on; in the shadow he looked hare-lipped. Then he closed the door carefully and quietly and crossed to the bed and sat down. He did not look as if he had been out with a girl, or at a show. He wore corduroy pants that were streaked with mud. A patch of white cobweb like cheesecloth clung to the shoulder of his coat. Around his neck he wore a red bandanna handkerchief loosely tied. Joe glanced down at the pockets of Otto’s coat and saw that they sagged heavily as if full of apples.

“You’re up late,” Otto said.

“So are you.”

Continuing to smile, Otto untied the bandanna and threw it on the dresser. He yawned and shook his head with a doglike shudder. “You don’t have to make that whistle in the morning. How’s it feel to be a plutocrat and live without working?”

Joe folded his papers and put them in a drawer. When he scratched himself he felt the lean bars of his ribs. “I’m thinking of making it permanent,” he said. “I can always borrow from you when I need a few bucks.”

Otto turned his back and slipped out of the coat and hung it up on a wall hook. It sagged heavily, and Joe speculated on what it contained. Silverware, maybe. Something compact and heavy and valuable. Or maybe just Otto’s second-story tools. Interested but not especially curious, he watched Otto undress, and thought of Ingrid’s question, “But how do you
live?
” It amused
him to think what she might say if she knew how that jolly whist-playing Mr. Applequist managed to get along.

Or Joe Hillstrom either, for that matter, though he kept himself carefully in another category. At that, he would probably have to do something about a job. He couldn’t coast all winter without a stake of some kind.

“For a while,” Otto said, answering so long after the conversation had stopped that Joe had to hunt back for what he had said. Otto pulled down the striped police suspenders. “Up to a certain point,” he said, and grinned widely, full of slyness, pleased at something he knew, and yawned so cavernously that deep in his mouth the lamplight discovered the spark of a gold tooth.