Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Read online

  There was a bucket of water on the back of the stove. He peeled off his flannel shirt and honed his razor on John’s strap and lathered up and shaved and washed himself to the waist. In the high collar and yellow shoes and blue suit he looked unfamiliar to himself, a gaudy stranger. Counting his stake on John’s bed, he found that he had twenty-six dollars and some small change. The change he dumped back into the snap purse, the bills he buttoned down into his hip pocket. Then he pulled the door shut behind him and cut across the flats toward where the town curved on its higher ground against the hills.

  San Pedro was the same as ever, Beacon Street was the same as ever, the fog blowing like gray rags over the Pedro Hills was the same as ever. The air was soft and cool, delusively like air before a rain. Down the gray streets boxed in by stores, warehouses, saloons, eateries, hotels, he got glimpses of the two long docks angling out into the harbor toward Dead Man’s Island, and of the breakwater far out, almost on the horizon. The sky flowed restlessly landward, gray as the sea.

  There were a good many people on the streets. Drays rumbled on the cobbles, an automobile went barking off up Harbor Boulevard like a distracted dog, workmen stood outside cafes and picked their teeth and talked. They watched Joe pass, but he did not know one of them. The Harbor Cafe, where Joe had a sandwich and a cup of coffee, was crowded, and though Pete Dimitrios, in the kitchen, spotted Joe through his little window and shook a hairy arm at him, Pete was obviously too busy to talk, and so Joe went on.

  At the next doorway he was almost run down by a young man with red hair who fell out of a saloon, rubber-legged, feeling with his feet for steps and dangers and manholes, a long way from his feet but still conscious of them, and with an air of deadly seriousness and concentration wobbled off into a side street. A block further down a little man in a cap and a leather snap-bow tie stood under a corner lamppost staring up into the moving clouds, talking quietly and with a kind of ecstasy to himself.

  The same as ever. Half the people you saw either cracked or stewed. Pedro hadn’t changed. It was still no different from the Bowery or West Madison in Chicago or the Seattle Skid Road or Third Street in Frisco or Burnside Street in Portland. Some of the gray of the day seeped into his spirits like a bilge that weighed him down. Turning down toward the wharves he felt again what he had felt on Bottles’ floathouse in Seattle: the kind of despair a man feels when he is alone at the edge of water or among blank buildings, the little lost feeling that makes him want to scratch his name on a wall or the piling of a dock.

  Along the Hammond Lumber Company dock two lumber schooners lay with hatches open, both riding high and light. Their cargoes were stacked in clean white piles on the dock. At the foot of the dock a handful of men were loafing. Nothing seemed to be going on. Gulls cried in the air, and sat on the ends of pilings, and two or three old men fished off the wharf in the oily water. Joe went past, and on past the Admiral Line dock further on, and did not see a soul he knew until a voice hailed him from behind and he turned to see Harry Piper, a longshoreman he had known in Frisco. He was so glad to see a known face that he had to harden his own face to keep from showing his pleasure.

  “The old stranger himself,” Piper said. “Ain’t seen you for years. Where you been keepin’ yourself?”

  “Oh, around.”

  “Looks like you’d been good to yourself,” Piper said, and his eyes touched the blue serge, the yellow shoes.

  “Can’t kick,” Joe said. “How’s it been with you?”

  Piper spit on the planking. “Same old crap, work a day, sit on your ass a week.” He jerked his head out along the dock. “S.P. strike’s tied up things so we can’t even move stuff that’s right out here.”

  “Seen John?”

  “He’s around. Did you look out at the shack?”

  “He wasn’t there.”

  “I don’t know,” Piper said. “He’s been playin’ the guitar up at Tinetti’s saloon nights. You might find him up there.”

  Joe drifted on, vaguely dissatisfied. Harry Piper didn’t mean anything to him. He doubted if John did. It wasn’t people he was looking for, but something else, some house to go to or some family he thought of as his. Maybe John, after all. John was at least his cousin.

  The bartender at the Forecastle saloon had not seen John that day. Joe went out and got a haircut and came back. Still no John. He went out again and spent an hour in the hot suspension of a Turkish bath, sitting still and feeling the slow ooze and tickle of his own sweat, the cleansing immersion in the dense, drifting, drowsy, liquid room. But after his purification he came out into the cool street and returned to the Forecastle to find that John had still not come. Still alone, with the sluggish lost feeling stronger in him, he looked in disgust up and down Beacon Street and wondered what he might do. It was only then that he thought of Lund.

  The door said antiquely, in ornate letters, “Scandinavian Seamen’s Mission.” The inside of the show windows flanking the door was painted gray, and the backed glass gave him back his own slim dandified figure and the glitter of his shoes. As his face moved in the glass, his hand reaching for the door handle, he saw his clean haircut, his tight mouth.

  He opened the door on the smell of coffee and the sight of eight or ten men reading or playing checkers, all with thick white cups at their elbows. Like everything else in San Pedro, the room was unchanged. Above the piano the American flag hung limp as it had hung two years ago. The Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian flags on their staffs at the corner of the platform had not lifted to any stir of wind. You went in circles that took in the whole world from Hull to Durban, but you always came back to some dingy room like this.

  While he stood there Gus Lund came in from the kitchen at the back, carrying a big granite coffeepot with a towel around the handle. Halfway up the room he paused, squinting toward the door, his face thrust forward and his pale mustaches drooping. His hand went sideways to set the pot on a stack of papers, and he came forward scowling, looking more like an irritated bartender than the director of a mission.

  “What do you want here?”

  “Gude dag,” Joe said. “Ay yust like little cup coffee for Svedish sailor man.”

  Lund’s scowl blackened. “No Swedes allowed in here.”

  “Val, holy Yee!” Joe said. “Ay tenk sign saying for Scandinavians.”

  The scowl dissolved in Lund’s beautiful wide welcoming smile; Lund’s hand grabbed for Joe’s. “Joe, you scoundrel, where’ve you been? What’ve you been doing?”

  “Val, Ay yust coom from voods,” Joe droned. “Last year, Ay ban vorking on ship, taking gude look at Pacific Ocean.”

  “Come on back,” Lund said, and led him back to the desk by the kitchen door. “Here, have a doughnut.” Broad-headed, big-mustached, he sat and watched Joe with a face made for smiling, a big Dutch-uncle face. Warmth radiated from him; he was the friendliest man in San Pedro, so friendly that Joe looked at him and had to laugh.

  “You look more like William Howard Taft every day.”

  “You look like Bill McAdoo,” Lund retorted. “You could chop wood with your face. What’ve you been doing, starving?”

  “Vorking,” Joe said, and showed his yellow-calloused hands.

  “Got a place to sleep?”

  “Out at the shack.”

  Lund grunted disgustedly, but before he could say anything the door opened and two bewildered-looking young men came in. “I’ll be back in a second,” Lund said. Joe had another doughnut while he listened to the gargled and slurred sound of their talking. They spoke in Danish. When Lund returned, Joe said, “A Dane talks just like oatmeal cooking. He kind of bubbles.”

  “Bubble like a Dane or sing like a Swede, they’re all squareheads,” Lund said. “With a chance to sleep in a decent bed they’d rather hole up in a tideflat shack.”

  Joe grinned. “No preachers out there, only goats.”

  “Plus John and Applequist.”

  “What’s wrong with John and Applequist?”

  Com
fortably Joe reached for a fourth doughnut. He felt more relaxed and at ease than he had felt in a long time, ready for an argument on anything. But Lund batted the air with his hand and laughed. “You invariably lead me into a moral scolding.”

  “Lead you!”

  The wide mustaches parted in Lund’s wide warm smile. “All right, exasperate me into it. You ought to be spending your time reading books and studying music instead of wasting it with a drunk like John and a piece of jail meat like Otto. What have you got talents for?”

  “I often wonder,” Joe said. He snorted, watching the missionary fill his pipe from a little tin barrel of tobacco. The warm humorous eyes met his; the smile widened.

  “I see you’ve been in some more fights and improved your looks.”

  Touching his chin where the engineer’s ring had ripped the skin, Joe said, “Got my jaw broke.”

  Lund waited. Joe touched the slick scar again, remembering that trip and that furious Scotchman and the heat of the stokehold. “Third engineer had a habit of knocking somebody down to start each watch. He knocked me down the fifth day out, broke my jaw. I had it set in Honolulu.”

  The smile had half died on Lund’s face, but his eyes were still crinkled at the corners. His cheeks were ruddy knobs as he drew on his pipe. “You took this, I imagine. You turned the other jaw.”

  “Not exactly,” Joe said. “When I got up I paralyzed him with a slice bar. He was in the hospital longer than I was.”

  The sound that Lund made did not commit him either to disapproval or amusement. He looked at his watch. “Just about time for the service. How about playing a couple of hymns for us?”

  “I haven’t touched a piano for six months.”

  “We’re not particular.”

  But Joe was stiffening and hardening, resenting the way Lund tried to use him. “I am,” he said shortly. He turned away because he did not want to look at Lund’s Christian solicitude or Christian forgiveness. Talking about the engineer of the Sarah Cleghorn had made him mad. The sense of moral pressure behind Lund’s friendliness made him mad. The feeling that he was being judged and good-naturedly forgiven made him mad. He flipped through a stack of papers on the desk—Swedish-language papers from Minneapolis and Chicago, frayed copies of Midweek Pictorial and National Geographic, stacks of Lutheran tracts. Buried in the pile was a red pamphlet, and when he turned it over he saw that it was entitled Industrial Unionism and that it was written by Joseph Ettor. It was so out of place on Lund’s desk that Joe flapped it at him. “You organizing for the Wobblies now?”

  Lund growled, threshing into his coat. “I forgot to throw that thing out. Somebody left it here.”

  “They’ve got the right idea.”

  Lund said, “If you think you can bait me into an argument you’re mistaken. I’m a better union man than you are. I’m all for industrial unionism, for that matter. But the IWW isn’t a union. It’s a revolution. Read the Preamble.”

  “I have.”

  “ ‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,’ ” Lund said. “ ‘Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class,’ and so on and so on, and abolish the wage system.”

  “You’ve been studying up,” Joe said.

  “And I haven’t much cared for the lesson!” Lund shot back, and reached for the Bible in a desk pigeonhole.

  Joe could not quite prevent the sneer. “That’s the Christian in you.”

  “Yes,” Lund said seriously. “It’s the Christian in me.”

  “The Christian that turns the other cheek.”

  “Maybe the Christian that won’t resort to evil even for his own good.”

  Joe stared at him, stammering with the rush of words that came out of his mouth. “Oh my goodnessl Oh, holy smoke! Did you ever fork wheat off a bundle wagon for some Dakota rube that drove you till two hours after dark and fed you spoiled pork for your supper? Did you ever get knocked around a stokehold by some moron engineer? Did you ever watch the bulls go to work on a picket line?”

  “You can resist. You can organize.”

  “That’s what the Wobblies are doing.”

  “A union can win its battles without sabotage and dynamite.”

  “Oh sure,” Joe said. “How many of ’em are winning? They’re all getting just what they want, is that so? Sure they’re getting it—right in the neck. All the craft unions are good for is to scab on each other. Look at this S.P. strike.”

  “Why not try organizing the scabs?” Lund said. “Every Wobbly I ever talked to wanted to beat every scab’s brains out. Scabs are workers too. Why not get together?”

  “Why not talk sense?” Joe said in disgust. “A scab is a scab just because he won’t organize. And a scab isn’t a worker, either. He’s a worker from the neck down. From the neck up he’s a capitalist.”

  They were nose to nose, and their voices had risen. Lund looked around quickly, made a disgusted sound under his mustache, shoved Joe’s shoulder to take the unfriendliness out of anything he had said, and stepped up on the platform by the piano.

  Joe found a magazine and sat down against the wall. He did not listen to Lund’s short reading from the Bible, and when the others, lonesome sailors and derelicts, stood up dutifully to sing for their coffee and doughnuts, Joe remained in his chair, tilted back against the wall. But he laid aside his magazine and listened to Lund’s closing remarks, because he saw that Lund was speaking directly at him.

  “… what it is that we are after in this life,” the missionary said. “We carry around all our lives a load of bitterness and discontent, pretending that it’s something else than what it is. We hate the rich, or hate the capitalistic system, or hate women, or hate politicians, or hate God. But I’ll tell you what we really hate. We hate ourselves.”

  Heavy, his chest and shoulders bulky in his too-small coat, his face shining a little in the warmth of the close room, he leaned on the back of a chair and spoke at Joe, watching him steadily and crinkling the corners of his eyes slightly and speaking with an unpretentious dignity so that Joe was compelled to watch him and listen. “We hate ourselves,” he said. “We hate our own failures and our own weaknesses. We hate ourselves because we cannot help comparing what we are with what we might be. Our discontent is the voice of God in us, prodding us to live up to ourselves. Until we recognize and admit this we will always turn savagely outward, destroying other things because ourselves are at fault.”

  His mustache twitched and his eyes crinkled more deeply. For a second he seemed to smile with some inward knowledge; his square teeth showed briefly. “Live up to the best that’s in you and you’ll stand all right with God and man,” he said almost lamely, and picked up his Bible and stepped down.

  The self-regulating life of the mission went on, ignoring Joe Hillstrom where he sat. Two men drifted outside. Two others came to Lund for paper and pencil and sat down to write letters. A checker game, interrupted by the services, started up again. The dead afternoon slid toward evening. Finally Joe stood up, wandered over to the piano, put out a finger and touched a key. The single pure note hung in the air, and he felt that everything in the room momentarily stopped. He half wished he had played the piano for Lund. What difference would it have made?

  But he felt sullen and irritable now, and he did not turn toward Lund. For a little while there had been here the welcome he had hungered for—which was a sour thought when you pondered it, that you had no place to go except a mission or a YMCA. But he didn’t belong here, really, he didn’t want a lot of greasy preaching thrown at his head, he didn’t want his soul saved. Lund was not his land. The room was full of his kind, sailors and workingmen on the drift, but when he looked at them from the platform he saw no face that he knew and no one to whom he had anything to say. If he had been a user of tobacco he might have borrowed a match or a pinch of snus. If he had been a drinking man he might have said to one of them, “Let’s go get a can of beer someplace.” Out of the casual
opiates of his kind he might have manufactured some bond, at least a temporary one, between himself and these others. But he didn’t even have beer and tobacco in common with them.

  He laid his hand again on the piano, tried a whole handful of keys, a jangling discord. Then he hooked the stool with his toe and pulled it over and sat down, swinging on the rotating seat until he faced the keyboard.

  For a while he fooled around, building up chords and listening to the way they mounted. There was a pleasure in the sounds like the pleasure of being clean and in good clothes. He limbered his stiff fingers on scales, and from scales he wandered off into little hesitating tunes, feeling out the combinations with hands and ears. Across the piano’s corner he could see Lund’s big solid back, and he let his fingers work out on the keys the orderly pattern of Lund’s beliefs. Live a Christian life and work hard and develop your talents and stay away from bad companions and turn the other cheek and organize in some good sound AFL union and make well-bred demands and thank the bosses when they raise your wages ten cents a day, or forgive them when they lay you off or cut your pay envelope. Above all, take your licking philosophically when they break your strikes with Pinkertons and gunmen. Be polite and the plutocrats might toss you a bone. Maybe there’ll be a job scabbing on someone less polite. You might get to be Casey Jones the Union Scab, and blow a whistle on the S.P. line.

  The tune came to his fingers and he played it through. Casey Jones the Union Scab. All the engineers and firemen who wouldn’t come out in support of the trainmen. All the boomers who jumped up to form scab crews and beat the trainmen before their strike got a start. All the scissorbills who were good and faithful to the bosses, and got their reward in heaven, or in the neck. He could prophesy the course of this strike from the earful he had got from pickets in the San Jose yards.