Joe Hill (45 page)

Two young men stood up below the high bench, a shock-headed farm boy and another with a long bony jaw and a face humped and knobbed with some skin disease. The judge sentenced them to indeterminate terms in the state prison for second-degree burglary. Joe watched their heads, wondering what they were thinking,
whether the indeterminate sentence was a relief or whether the uncertainty left them empty and unsatisfied. He saw the shoulders of the farm boy sway, and then the two turned away, the old dry voice stopped, the fat bailiff left over from earlier acts of this repetitive dream stood up at his table and read in his goose-voice. Raleigh unlocked the handcuff.

Without being told to do so, Joe stood up. A moment ago he had been hot, but now he felt like a fish frozen in a cake of ice. It seemed that no sound could penetrate into where he stood; the room and the people were outside, in another element, and he looked up at the judge through a thick layer of almost solid air.

He was surprised when the judge’s voice came through, crackly as paper, saying the words not his own, the words also left over, inherited from centuries of criminal courts, an echo of what hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands had heard as they stood up for the next to the last time to face the society that hated and feared them. It was a ritual, a remembered line in a ceremony. Joe had heard it once already.

“Have you anything to say why the sentence of death should not be passed upon you at this time?”

Now his own voice, and he heard it too with surprise, strong and clear, saying words that were not his either, but formal law-court words that he had been coached in by Hilton. “I have this to say, your honor,” his distant voice said. “I want to know why jurymen were arbitrarily appointed by the court in my case, instead of being drawn as is the case in similar proceedings. And I want to know how such a proceeding can be called legal in my case.”

He said the words, quibbling about a technicality, because it seemed proper to say them now and here. Something sharpened in Judge Ritchie’s eyes, the impersonal mask perceptibly wizened. “The court is not here to answer questions, but to hear from you any statement you may care to make regarding why you should not be sentenced to death at this time.”

“I repeat my request to be informed why I was not given a chance in the impaneling of the jury like that given defendants in similar cases,” Joe said.

The judge leaned forward, his face and voice still impassive but his eyes like hot little augurs boring into Joe’s. “That assertion,
or intimation, is entirely false!” he said. He drew back again, and it came: “According to the laws of the state of Utah the penalty for murder in the first degree may be death by hanging, death by shooting, or life imprisonment. You have been found guilty of murder in the first degree, and have once already had the death penalty imposed upon you. In conformity with the law, a prisoner sentenced to death may choose the manner of his death, as between shooting and hanging. Which do you choose?”

There was a remote ringing in Joe’s ears. He hated the cold control and the utter implacable power of the man on the bench. His voice came out louder than he intended from his stiff mouth. “I told you before, I’ve been shot a number of times lately and I’m getting used to it.”

In the silence Judge Ritchie brought his gavel down lightly, for emphasis. “Joseph Hillstrom, for the crime of first degree murder of which you have been adjudged guilty, I sentence you to death by shooting, the execution to take place on October first of this year within the walls of the state penitentiary, and I call upon the sheriff of Salt Lake County to make such arrangements as are necessary for the carrying out of this sentence.”

The judge turned his head stonily aside. A hand caught Joe’s elbow, and Hilton was there, Job’s comforter, the undiscouraged, the indefatigable. Other hands were at him, Raleigh’s and Young’s, and he went out into the corridor surrounded, with Chief Barry ahead and Sheriff Coues behind. Hilton crowded with them into the elevator. “That pious old hypocrite!” Hilton said. The police chief looked at him hard, but said nothing.

As they crossed the tiled hall Joe kept looking for Ricket, Carpenter, any of the boys from the hall, but there was no sign of any of them. Either the threats Coues had spoken about were all in the imagination of the law, or deputies and cops had scoured the place in advance. Otherwise some of the boys should have been in court today.

On the cement steps of the jail he stopped and said to Hilton, “What’s the date?”

“You mean today?”

“Yes.”

“August second.”

“August second,” Joe repeated. Two months, less one day. One more month of summer and the first month of the fall.

Like a parade they went in, waited for the unlocking of the steel door, marched through. “There are some things we should settle,” Hilton said. “You feel like talking them over now, Joe?”

“Sure.”

The chief’s huffy, sputtering voice said, “When you start planning that next move, you can tell the I-Won’t-Works to stay out of it. You can tell ’em from me that blackhand notes and bomb threats and all the rest won’t get you or them a god damn thing, see? We’re ready for ’em and if they start anything somebody’s going to get hurt.”

“I haven’t any control over the
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,” Hilton said. “If you want to calm them down, maybe you’d better revise Utah justice a little.”

“All I want to say to you,” Barry said, “is that there’s enough justice in Utah to take care of any Wobbly that wants to start anything.”

He turned on his heel. “Or any workingman without the means to defend himself,” Hilton said after him. “He’s got it bad,” he said to the sheriff. The sheriff looked as if his stomach pained him.

“The governor’s been getting these threatening letters,” he said. “He’s probably been building a fire under the Public Safety Department.” His hand went into his sagging coat pocket and rattled the handcuffs there. “I know he’s been building a fire under me,” he said almost plaintively. “I suppose you guys have to make a noise and beat on the tubs, but if they don’t behave I’ll have to run the whole bunch out of town.”

“I wouldn’t try,” Hilton told him. “Did you ever sit in on a free-speech fight?”

Waving the guard ahead of them down the corridor toward the conference room, the sheriff said, “That’s what I can’t figure out. What in hell do all these outsiders know about it?”

Hilton rapidly stroked the tip of his nose between thumb and finger, and blew twice to clear some tickling obstruction. He looked at the sheriff and a hint of his courtroom manner came over him. “They don’t have to know anything about it but the name of the man who’s been framed. You don’t seem to realize even yet that you’ve got a great man in your bastille.”

“Well,” Coues said with his mild country-preacher air, “I’m willing to take your word for it. That’s fair, isn’t it? How about it, Joe?”

“Fair enough.”

The sheriff let them into the conference room and locked them in and went away. “Well, that’s that,” Joe said. “Two months to live.”

“Forty years to live!” Hilton said. “They can’t do it to you. I honestly think that if they try to carry out this sentence there’ll be ten thousand Wobs in Salt Lake to prevent it. They’d take down this town brick by brick.”

He sat down and spread his briefcase open between his feet and stooped to look into it, and his easy, big-toothed smile invited Joe to confidence. “Now listen,” he said. “The next step will have to be the Pardon Board. You’ll be called before them for examination, probably, and there are certain things you want to hammer on …”

Joe listened, and tried to think the strategy important, but all during the twenty minutes of their talk he was wishing for the quiet and security of his cell.

He noticed how they all watched him: the other prisoners, trusties in the corridors and yard with their careful voices and their sheathed eyes, the guards whose bored watchfulness sharpened with speculation. A kind of urgency and importunity walked with him and dignified the guards who walked with him, made contemptible and unnecessary the handcuffs on either wrist. They had him manacled like a madman, as if he were likely to spring at the Pardon Board and tear their throats out.

Both Hilton and Soren Christensen were waiting in the outer office. One after the other, they shook his manacled hand and smiled hard and encouraging into his face; they appeared to be looking for the Pardon Board’s answer in his eyes.

One of the guards unlocked himself and went away. The other motioned Joe toward one of a row of chairs and sat down beside him. Before them Hilton planted himself with a thumb and forefinger in the pocket of his vest. He looked like some school-history-book picture of Webster replying to Hayne. But a closer look showed that his eyes were darkly bagged, his eyeballs streaked and watery as if he had been up all night reading fine print.

“Well, Joe.”

“Ninth inning,” Joe said.

“Many a game’s been won in the ninth.”

“I suppose.”

They fell silent; if there had been anything for the condemned and his defenders to talk about the presence of the guard would have inhibited it. With a sigh Hilton sat down and stretched his legs. After a moment he took the folded newspaper from his pocket and passed it across the guard toward Joe. The guard stirred, looked questioningly at the lawyer, and then sagged back, acquiescing in the fiction that he wasn’t there.

The paper was rolled with the back page out. Hilton’s finger tapped at a headline and Joe read.

GOVERNOR SPRY IS THREATENED

More than 300 letters and telegrams, received today, protest against Hillstrom Execution. One from Hindustan. Warnings and Arguments

More than 300 more letters from different parts of this and other countries were received at the governors office yesterday demanding that Joseph Hillstrom be not put to death for the murder of J. G. Morrison. Some of the letters are threatening in character, and many of them bear resemblance in phraseology and arguments
.

It appears that most of the letters were written
 …

The second guard came back. His eyes jumped from the paper to Joe’s face. “Whose paper?”

“Mine,” Hilton said.

The guard took it from Joe and tossed it in Hilton’s lap. The lawyer shrugged and busied himself working at something between his teeth.

“They’re ready,” the guard said. He led them into the warden’s office, where a group of men sat between desk and windows. Turning at the guard’s tug, Joe saw that Ricket and Carpenter were there too. Carpenter shook his clenched hands at him in a boxer’s gesture.

And here, as he sat down and got a chance to look quietly, were the men upon whom he depended for his life. One by one he marked them down: a shaggy man with a senatorial haircut, a solid square one with his hair parted in the middle and a womanish red mouth, a thin old man, a much younger one who sat with his hands clasped on the desk and studied Joe directly and soberly. And the chairman, the governor, complete with gavel and briefcase. A man ready with pencil and paper—apparently a stenographer—who sat just behind the governor. Joe wondered what the governor was thinking. He wondered what he thought about Joe Hill, for whom three hundred people every day wrote from countries as remote as Hindustan. When the governor’s eyes touched his he sat stiff and proud, a man more widely known and more fervently admired than any of the well-fed well-educated men who would judge him.

The governor’s gavel tapped the desk lightly, his eyes circled from the two
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’s around defendant and attorneys and the board itself, and came back to Hilton. “Mr. Hilton, you have a plea to make before this board?”

Hilton rose, the indefatigable, the undiscourageable, as he had risen before other tribunals and other boards through all the steps of Joe Hill’s fight for life, and Joe felt how all the past failures rose with him, how Hilton this time was at bay and perhaps without hope. His voice was harsh and his words angry as he went through the arguments that Joe knew now by heart. The arguments sounded to Joe’s critically tuned ear like inconsequential graspings at straws, the lawyer’s anger seemed general and unimportant. He was apparently denouncing the Pardon Board for the District Court’s errors in selecting jurymen. He was annoyed at the whole state of Utah because his client had been left for a time without counsel and had been forced by the court to accept the services of counsel who were not to his liking. Remote as a spectator, Joe listened while one of the board questioned Hilton tartly in the matter of counsel. Hadn’t Mr. Hilton’s client selected Attorneys Scott and McDougall himself, or at least had not his friends of the
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defense committee selected them? And as for his being without counsel at one time during the trial, wasn’t that by his own choice?