Joe Hill (54 page)

By the time Lund got outside, the wagon was coming back, forcing its way through the crowd. The crowd, Lund with it,
moved aside and then curved back behind, trying to see into the rear end, but the view was blocked by the body of a policeman hanging to the handrails.

It was an hour before Lund could find out exactly what had happened: a standing feud between two men had culminated in a shooting and a death. The one was now in jail, the other in the morgue. But the one in the morgue, a man named Roy Horton, was an
IWW
.

Lund made his way back to his room filled with a sick, resistant certitude that what had happened would lead to worse and worse things. The violence that began this, the remote and ambiguous murder on West Temple Street almost two years ago, and the unexplained shot that somewhere, that same night, had torn through Joe Hill’s chest, led by an inevitable course through greater and greater violences.

What had been passion before would be murderous hatred now. Tomorrow there would be even more special deputies patrolling the streets. The desperate talk of storming the prison and liberating Joe Hill by force would spread. The fingers of policemen would be nervous on their guns; citizens would check the locks on their doors; no
IWW
would think it safe to go abroad unarmed. It was utterly mad, and the shooting of Roy Horton might have no connection whatever with the
IWW
—no more, perhaps, than the shooting of John Morrison or Joe Hill had—but this killing would be sucked into the general vortex and made to do service as a hate breeder.

At the center of all this, generating lines of force that went through the whole world, was a sailor friend of his, a Swede with a knack for drawing pictures and writing poems, a man with little education but with a strong inclination toward the arts, a man who used to drop in and drink coffee and argue social rebellion in the mission kitchen. He was as remote now as a vague great name in the papers. The errand Lund had come on was an arrogance for which he could hardly forgive himself.

Involved in this whirlwind of violence, and hating violence as the father of all evil, wanting only to speak humbly and with understanding to a friend, he felt sad and incapable, and he shrank from the thought of going to Joe’s cell, as he would certainly have to unless the President chose to intervene a second time.

Wilson tried. His second telegram, sent on the morning of November 17, asked what his first had asked: a stay pending further investigation of the case. All that day the governor was in a close meeting with the Pardon Board and the warden of the prison. By the time the afternoon papers went to press he still had made no statement. Lund, waiting in the halls of the capitol with a handful of
IWW
’s and newspapermen, was put out with the others when the building closed.

He slept badly and was up before six, but the hotel newsstand was not open and no paper boys were on the streets. It was seven o’clock before he got a
Tribune
and saw the headlines.

Governor Spry’s telegram in reply to the President’s was long, more than a column. It reviewed the case and the interventions in the case, and it withheld its decisive meaning until the final paragraph:

It is a significant fact that those only are appealed to who have no knowledge of the facts and those only demand clemency who are either prejudiced in Hillstrom’s favor or who demand his release regardless of his guilt. I am fully convinced that your request must be based on a misconception of the facts or that there is some reason of an international nature that you have not disclosed. With a full knowledge of all the facts and circumstances submitted, I feel that a further postponement at this time would be an unwarranted interference with the course of justice. Mindful of the obligations of my oath of office to see to it that the laws are enforced, I cannot and will not lend myself or my office to such interference. Tangible facts must be presented before I will further interfere in this case
.

There was a period when they sat on the two ends of the prison cot and said nothing at all. If there were things to be said of the soul and of the peace that passeth understanding and of the possibilities
of a blessed Beulah Land or a perhaps more blessed obliteration, they were not things that Lund could introduce. He was here at Joe’s insistence; he had his mind locked against the thought of daylight tomorrow morning; he was waiting for Joe to say the things that he had apparently wanted Lund to hear. He wanted to know what lay on Joe’s mind, but he would not for a fortune have tried to pry. He wanted to hear Joe say for sure that he was innocent, but he would not ask. And he wanted to touch Joe’s hand or shoulder in brotherhood and somehow communicate pity and sympathy and a shared terror of what would come, but there was no way to begin.

Joe had been alone and a prisoner for almost two years. It was not being sentimental to guess that the mere presence of a friend, without a word spoken, might be enough for him. It did not matter, really. Lund was eager to be used in any way he could be helpful. He stole glances at Joe from under his thoughtful hand, appraising the silence between them, trying to guess if what only made him uneasy were comforting to Joe.

Joe looked as if he saw visions. His eyes were a little glazed; muscles worked in his lean jaw. His face under the hard light was pale, ascetic, absolutely expressionless except for the air of seeing that it wore. Lund thought in surprise, watching him, that even with the scars it was an almost beautiful face.

Joe’s head turned; his eyes, wide in the blue stare, touched Lund as if without recognition, wandered past him, came back. “Quiet night on Skid Road,” he said, and stood up abruptly to take one long step toward the door, then two shorter ones back to the cot. He stood above Lund and said, “We ought to have some coffee. They give you comfort for your soul but not for your belly.”

Before Lund could answer, he was back tapping with a pencil between the bars. Steps came down the empty steel corridor, the key rasped in the security door, the steps came on and a moon-faced guard stood outside.

“We’d like some coffee,” Joe said. “Don’t you suppose at a time like this they’d think of that themselves? I’ve got Reverend Lund in here and we’d both like coffee.”

His voice was loud and peremptory. For a second or two the guard stared into the cell. “Okay, Joe,” he said. “I’ll see what we can do.”

“Bring plenty. Tell ’em to bring a pot full.”

As the guard went back up the corridor Joe sat on the cot’s end. “They’re trotting out the best in this old hotel now,” he said. Learning on one elbow, he looked away from Lund and talked jerkily as if he had been running. “I went through this once before, just before the President wired the first time. They had me all fixed—that time too. Steak dinner, baked potato—big slab of pie. Same tonight. It’s the special firing-squad blue plate.”

Opening and closing the hand, he rubbed at the bumpy knuckles where the policeman’s bullet had gone through. “It’s a fright how polite they can get just before they shoot you full of holes. This guard—runs errands for me as if he was my gunsel. If I asked for a hot-water bottle I bet he’d try to rustle it somewhere.”

“I expect he’s had orders.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. Something went out of his face, some artificial animation. The nervous rubbing of his hands stopped, and he held both hands flat against his thighs. “I expect they’ve all had orders.”

Lund put out a hand and shook Joe’s knee slowly, and as if to acknowledge a joke Joe turned his head and smiled. The silence came back, broken only by a faint, reverberatory hum as if they were inside a great barrel; across the hum went the unmeaning steps of a guard. The toilet five feet from Lund gave off a strong smell of disinfectant; he had a moment’s mad illusion that he was in a pool hall on Beacon Street in San Pedro with the ventilator dragging at the thick air and the smoke. Here the smell and the big humming emptiness were the same.

“You’ve had a long wait,” Joe said. “Over a month and a half.”

“That’s all right. I wish I …”

He caught Joe’s eye, stopped. Joe stood up again.

“I expect there are a hundred things I ought to be doing,” he said, and his eyes went from corner to corner, from cot to toilet to door.

“Can I do anything?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said, still looking around as if trying to remember something he had lost. His voice was as jerky as his eyes. Restlessness or excitement was in his limbs. He sat down and almost immediately stood up again, feeling for the pencil in his shirt pocket. “Maybe there isn’t anything to do, at that. Maybe everything’s done.”

“Any letters?”

“Maybe one or two. There’s plenty of time.”

Plenty of time.

In the outer corridor steps again, and after a moment the directioned hollow noises of the guard coming. Joe went to the door to look. “Aha! He got that coffee, at that.”

The guard set down the tray and unlocked the door and shoved the tray with its pot and two cups into the cell with his foot. Joe stooped for it.

“The very best in their crummy old hotel,” he said. “They even asked me last night if I wanted a stimulant. I told them I wasn’t a drinking man. I bet they’d let you get stiff drunk. It’d suit them fine if you went out there in the morning too sopped to know what was going on. But I’m not taking any of their stimulants. I’m going out there sober.”

His voice was high and brittle. Pouring two mugs of coffee, he slopped some on the tray. “Here,” he said, and held one toward Lund. He ignored the guard, who watched for a few seconds and went away again.

Looking at Lund over the rim of his cup, Joe made a short, harsh gesture with his free hand, cutting sideward at the air. Lund felt how since he had come in here the flesh had shrunk on his fingers. He was bloodless from the shoulders down, though it was not cold in the cell. For a while he warmed his hands around the mug, and then he could stand to keep still no longer. He had been with Joe an hour, and there had been nothing but pretense or silence.

“Don’t be sore at me, Joe,” he said. “But why don’t you speak and save yourself?”

Everything about Joe’s face, nose and lips and cheeks and chin, was pinched and sharp. It seemed that his skin had tightened across his bones. Carefully his hand reached down the empty cup and set it between his feet, but hardly had he straightened before he had stooped to pick it up again. Concentrating on the motions of his hands, he poured the cup full.

“Maybe I don’t feel like speaking,” he said at last in a silky whisper. He seemed to nurse some fierce thought. His palely beautiful face was expressionless, but even in profile the eyes seemed to Lund to glow and burn.

“But it’s such a miserable waste!” Lund cried. “Why must you throw yourself away?”

He found it impossible to read the stare that Joe turned on him. “Waste?” Joe said. “Throw myself away? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What else can you call it?”

The grin that grew over Joe’s pinched face was of an incredible impudence. “You might call it an organizing job,” Joe said.

“I’m glad you can joke about it.”

“It’s no joke. The union stands to gain more if they shoot me than if they turn me loose.” Bending, he set the cup on the floor again, and suddenly he was very excited. A faint pink jumped into his cheeks, the unmutilated side of his nose flared, in his neck a vein stood out rigidly, parallel with the rigid scar. “Here’s the President of the United States after them to free me! Here’s the Swedish Minister sticking his nose in. Here’s even old Sam Gompers the union scab-master, people all over the world writing and wiring in here. You think that doesn’t do anything for solidarity? You’re supposed to be an educated man. What do you think the Mormons would have amounted to if they hadn’t shot Joe Smith? How would Christianity have got along in Rome if the Romans hadn’t liked throwing them to the lions? They’d have been just another little sect about as big as the Holy Rollers are now.” He barked out a laugh. “For that matter, what if nobody had hung Jesus Christ on a cross?”

Lund looked down. It embarrassed him to watch Joe’s violence, because he could not rid himself of the feeling that the violence was faked. The sudden brief tirade had the artificiality of an act, like his tirade in court when he fired his lawyers. It wasn’t like Joe; right now Joe was breathing harder and faster than he needed to, working himself up to a passion for some obscure reason.

And how could it be said to him now, a few hours before his death, that his martyrdom was tainted by the dubious methods his friends had used in advertising or—concede the suspicion-promoting it? Joe Hill as he lived in the minds of well-wishers around the world was a fiction, the product of deliberate manufacture.

He said at last, “Of course. A martyr catches the imagination.
You can build a church on one martyrdom. But why should you be the one?”

“I think it was kind of predetermined,” Joe said. To Lund’s amazed glance he appeared now to be entirely sincere. His lips firmed until the outline of his teeth was molded under them, and he said, “When I first came into this burg I had a cold hunch, and I kept having it. Something was due to happen to me in this place. I could feel it.”