Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Read online

  His fingers were still working over the tune of “Casey Jones.” Words began to fit themselves to it, an ironic parody that made him go without a word to Lund’s desk and grab up a piece of paper. He wrote the song almost as if from dictation, with very little crossing out and thinking, and when he stopped to read them over cold he had two verses and two choruses.

  The Workers on the S.P. line to strike sent out a call;

  But Casey Jones, the engineer, he wouldn’t strike at all;

  His boiler it was leaking, and its drivers on the bum,

  And his engine and its bearings, they were all out of plumb.

  Casey Jone skept his junkpile running;

  Casey Jones was working double time;

  Casey Jones got a wooden medal,

  For being good and faithful on the S.P. line.

  The Workers said to Casey: “Won’t you help us win this strike?”

  But Casey said: “Let me alone, you’d better take a hike.”

  Then someone put a bunch of railroad ties across the track,

  And Casey hit the river with an awful crack.

  Casey Jones hit the river bottom;

  Casey Jones broke his blooming spine;

  Casey Jones was an Angeleno,

  He took a trip to heaven on the S.P. line

  A line at a time he coaxed it along, juggling St. Peter, the Pearly Gates, harps, wings, angels, until they fell into place, erasing and changing until he had another verse:

  When Casey got to heaven to the Pearly Gate,

  He said: “I’m Casey Jones, the guy that pulled the S.P. freight.”

  “You’re just the man,” said Peter; “our musicians went on strike;

  You can get a job a-scabbing any time you like.”

  Now Lund was looking over his shoulder. “Inspiration?”

  Rotating on the stool, Joe passed him the sheet. “Communication to the Brotherhood of Railway Engineers.” He swung gently, indifferently, but he kept Lund’s face in the periphery of his vision, and the way Lund’s smile widened as he read was a thing of importance. He waited for the laugh, and it came.

  “Wonderful!” Lund said. “You’ve really got it coming. But why make poor St. Peter into the image of Collis P. Huntington?”

  “Not Huntington,” Joe said. “St. Pete isn’t that big a bug. He’s just a labor shark in heaven. He runs the hiring hall.”

  Still laughing, Lund beckoned to a man reading at one of the tables. The man came over, a short wiry man with an enormous Adam’s apple. “This is something you’d like, Mac,” the missionary said. “Sing it for him, Joe. This is Frank McGibbeney, he’s a trainman himself.”

  McGibbeney shook hands, impassive, and listened with an expressionless face as Joe played and sang the first verse and chorus half under his breath. But by the fourth line he was grinning. At the end of the chorus his face was reddening and his eyes were half closed with a suspended guffaw and his mouth was hanging as he listened. When Joe finished the railroader was almost hopping up and down.

  “Say!” he said. “Say, that’s a daisy, Jack. That’s really a peacherino.”

  Lund had put on his bartender scowl. “Are you going to leave that scab in heaven? Isn’t there any solidarity among the angels?”

  “All right,” Joe said. “Let’s get him out of there.” Their eyes were on him as he leaned on his elbows and thought. His mind worked like a watch, little wheels turning, gears meshing, a controlled and triumphant mechanism. After no more than two or three minutes he spread the paper against the music rack and wrote:

  The angels got together and they said it wasn’t fair

  For Casey Jones to go around a-scabbing everywhere.

  The Angels’ Union No. 23 they sure were there,

  And they promptly fired Casey down the Golden Stair.

  The abrupt laughter at his back inspired him, and he tossed off another chorus as fast as he could write.

  Casey Jones went to Hell a-flying.

  “Casey Jones,” the Devil said, “Oh fine;

  Casey Jones, get busy shoveling sulphur;

  That’s what you get for scabbing on the S.P. line.”

  McGibbeney was almost lyrical with admiration. “Oh, that’s a pip,” he kept saying. “Boy, that’s really first class.” For a marveling second he looked at Joe, but he spoke to Lund, as if one didn’t quite talk to a man who could write such songs. “The boys over at the hall would like to hear that, they sure would.”

  “Take it along,” Joe said, and thrust the paper at him.

  “There’s a meeting tonight,” McGibbeney said. “You wouldn’t feel like coming over and singing it, would you?”

  His wandering, rather furtive eye held Joe’s a second and then slipped away. A skinny little man with an exaggeratedly fierce face, he looked almost in embarrassment toward the front door.

  “I can’t sing,” Joe said.

  “It’d sure be appreciated,” McGibbeney said.

  Pulling his mouth down, Joe looked at Lund and said, “Gus here would have a right to be mad if I played and sang for a union right after I turned down a chance to play for Jesus.”

  But Lund only shrugged and smiled, refusing to bite. McGibbeney’s urging voice said, “We can use all the help we can get.”

  Someone had opened the front door and was standing in it. Joe glanced up and saw who was there, and his cousin John’s roar of welcome made people jump and turn around the whole length of the shuffling, repressed room. “By Yudas, har he is!” John said. “Yoe! By golly, Yoe!”

  Big as a tree, square-hewn, a Terrible Swede, he came down the room waving his arms, and after him came Otto Applequist, sheep-faced, smiling his silly-looking, surprised smile. Still feeling good, feeling excitement and the anticipation of something good to come, Joe stood up and made a grinning pretense of getting ready to knock his cousin’s block off. To McGibbeney he said, “Here’s the man you want. He’s a guitar player, and he can sing.”

  Then he was overpowered by John’s welcome.

  3 San Pedro, June, 1910

  On a summer Saturday afternoon the Forecastle saloon is cool and dusky. There are no lights on yet, the Saturday night rumble has not yet begun out in the street. It is cool and the light is gray and the smoke of stogies and pipes rises and hangs under the high ceiling.

  This is a quiet hour, an interim period. In a few minutes Tinetti will remove the greasy, crumbed-up empty plates from the free lunch counter and replace them with full ones. The crowd is thin now, and men who occasionally come through the swinging door stand a moment with an almost resigned air, as if looking for someone or something they know they will not see, before they turn to find a place at a table or the bar. Everything hangs in suspension like the smoke, everything waits, everything is a little tired and slack muscled, and the talk is quiet, unargumentative, relaxed.

  “… in Ohio,” their talk goes. “His old man was stationmaster. Sure, I know him, known him since we were kids. What’s ever become …”

  “… snowed three feet that one storm,” they are saying. “I started to go out next morning and the door was snowed clean over. Finally I went out the second-story window and tunneled in to the door so’s we could open it. That drift was fifteen feet high if it was an inch. Stayed there till after …”

  “… dead pigeon,” their sad voices say. “Some’m just busted in his gut. We was setting in the kitchen and he looked kind of green and said he had this belly ache, and all of a sudden he grabs the basin off the washstand and bends over and blurp, he fills her with blood. It come out of his mouth in a stream big as a ball bat, and black …”

  They coddle their beer, their broken shoes indifferent among the other feet on the rail, their elbows proprietary on the bar, their hands circling the glasses in wet rings on the wood, their eyes watchful for when Tinetti will renew the free lunch. They raised their elbows and pull their chest away from the bar as Emil the bartender swabs with his wet rag, and then belly back to the dark old walnut before
the twilight mirrors.

  “… cold this summer,” Emil says. “Logs of fog.” His face is square and serious, with a pale curl stuck flat on his anxious forehead. His hands are clean and unhealthily white, like something pickled.

  It is a lovely and restful thing to stand in a saloon in the late afternoon taking your time with a nickel glass of steam beer and hearing the quietness of the talk, nobody argumentative yet, nobody drunk and wanting a fight, everybody relaxed and waiting for the free lunch, the light gray across the tables and the mirrors shadowy and the bar shining with pale soft reflections. It is a good thing to cross your feet, leaning; or to put one foot on the rail and hunch over the bar’s friendly solidity, just resting and taking it easy after a day’s work or a day’s hanging around or a day’s walking on the picket line.

  Across the bar, before the dusky mirrors, there are bright-colored punch boards painted all over with gold coins, and with shoulders comfortably touching the shoulders of the men on right and left you can study the things the boards will give you for nothing, for a nickel, if the luck happens to come your way: 90, 190, 290, 390, 490, 590, 690, 790, 890, and 990 all win a box of delicious assorted chocolates. The boxes are there in a stack, solid proof of the board’s honesty. There are also the things the even hundreds will get you—a jackknife, a razor, a fishing reel, a varnished fish basket with a strap, a shaving mug. There is the grand prize for number 1000, a .12-gauge Marlin repeating shotgun worth twenty dollars. It slants there in the corner of the mirror, a satiny shine up its blue barrel, its stock seductive and smooth and curved.

  You can get it for a nickel. Everybody’s got a chance. If you miss the shotgun, you’ve still got a chance at the reel, or the fish basket, or the shaving mug, and if you miss those you can probably win some chocolates.

  In the squares of little paper-covered cells where luck hides, some of the holes are punched out and black. Someone has played a system and punched out the corner cells of each square; one whole square in the lower left hand corner is punched out.

  “… Anybody won anything on that board, Emil?”

  “Just one knife and a box of chocolates. That’s getting ripe.”

  He lays the board on the bar, and you say, “If it wasn’t for suckers like me, sharks like you would have to work as hard as I do.” But there are all those chances. You can pick off a twenty-dollar prize for a nickel. Everybody’s got the same chance.

  You push at random with the little punch. “What the hell,” you say, “I’m shooting the wad.” You unroll the little worm of paper, 596, and Emil slides your nickel off his edge and drops it in the till.

  The crowd is thickening at the bar, and you move down, making room for more shoulders. “How about another beer, Emil?” Then there is a difference in the room, as if a corner has been turned, and here is Tinetti with the tray of mounded plates, the loaves of thin-sliced rye, the pickles knobby as an alligator’s back and sweating cool brine, the sliced bologna and the salami with globules of fat among the rich dark meat, the slices lying spiraled and overlapping like the ripe coins painted on the punchboard.

  As the plates slide out there is a perceptible drift, a gradual slow surge, dignified but irresistible, toward the free lunch end. The men who are closest say something to Tinetti, something friendly and casual, and for a suitable interval Tinetti stands there dangling the empty tray, talking. It is two or three minutes before one of the beer drinkers, almost absentmindedly, reaches out and picks up a slice of bologna. Still talking to Tinetti, he peels the gut off and chews slowly. They are talking about the relative chances of Detroit and Philadelphia in the American League race. A man on the left, listening politely, covers a slice of rye with a slice of ham, and as if by afterthought with a pickle. The first man moves away, getting a slice of salami and a piece of bread as he goes, and the crowd edges past a little at a time. There is a smell of garlic in the air, and Emil refills many beers. Tinetti, moving away from the free-lunch counter, lights the lamps back of the bar, and now another phase has come, the warm phase.

  After a second beer and a bologna sandwich and the lights, the Forecastle is a place of warmth and comradeship and life. Now everything is rich and gilded, the colors shine fatly, the pearl handle of the prize jackknife is fabulous, the razor is a princely instrument, the shotgun a weapon for King George in a Scottish shooting box.

  There is more talk now, louder, more vehement.

  “… I matching you or you matching me?” the voices say.

  “… Ketchel?” they say. “He couldn’t lick his weight in duck feathers. Over in Goldfield once he hired out as a fink, and one night a friend of mine laid him cold as a wedge with a ketchup bottle. You want to talk fighters, I’ll talk to you, but not Ketchel. Not that dirty stool …”

  “… so when she’d been gone three or four days they finally find her in this hotel with the Greek, and I guess her old man was wild. He busted in the room, and her and the Greek was in bed, and the old man just grabbed the covers and yanked. Neither of them had a god damn thing on. Bert said she had hair on her like a man. How’d you like that, boy? Jesus, I’d like to have been there when they busted in that room. I guess the old man was really mad …”

  “… split you ten punches, Jack,” says the man on the left.

  You punch five apiece, and then another five, and win a box of chocolates and then match the man for them and lose. The expensive Marlin shines, blue-satin barrel and polished stock, against the mirror, and the pearl-handled jackknife and the razor and the reel and the mug and basket stay where they were. They shine there, a comfortable reassurance and a promise, and multiply themselves in the fecund deceptive glass.

  There is usually music about this time of the evening, a big Swede who sings and plays the guitar with fingers so thick it is a miracle he manages to hit only one string at a time. Not a j or a w to his name. It’s a riot to hear him when he gets a little stewed and starts off on “Yoost a song at tvilight.” Maybe on Saturday nights he starts later.

  But here he is now—Lord, what a moose!—between a couple of other men, a slim dressed-up fellow with a tight mouth, and a funny-paper Swede with a face like an old ewe. They crowd up behind the men at the bar, and the big Swede says, “Vot you got for soft drinks, Emil?”

  The way Emil stops and stares, puckering his troubled forehead under the flat curl, gets a laugh.

  The big Swede keeps insisting, laughing. “Sure, vot you got?”

  “Lemon pop,” Emil says, and they both look at the slim man in the blue serge. He smiles as if it hurt him. After the big Swede’s, his voice is quiet and low. “Lemon pop’ll do fine,” he says.

  They get the pop and a pint of whiskey and mix back into the crowd looking for a table. Every now and again the big Swede’s laugh vibrates the glassware, but it seems that he is not going to sing. Maybe he will later.

  After a while he does. The guitar starts to plink and hum, and men at the bar or around the room half cock their heads to listen. The Swede has pushed back his chair and slung the guitar around his neck and is picking aimlessly at the strings, saying something and laughing. Now there is a little hook-nosed man, McGibbeney, a railroader, sitting at the table between the man in the blue suit and the ewe-faced Swede.

  The men who are listening grin a little and nod a little when the big Swede, Alberg is his name, starts off. “Halleluiah I’m a Bum.” That’s the one. The Swede has a voice like coal pouring down a tin chute, but his thick fingers are surprisingly nimble on the neck of the guitar. Voices join in from along the wall, among the tables:

  Oh why don’t you work like the other men do?

  How the hell can I work when there’s no work to do?

  Halleluiah I’m a bum,

  Hallelluiah bum again,

  Halleluiah give us a handout

  To revive us again.

  Oh why don’t you save all the money you earn?

  Well if I didn’t eat I’d have money to burn.…

  The Swede’s voice leads
them and drowns them out and leads them again, The tune goes like a man who swings his elbows as he walks.

  I went to a house and I asked for some bread,

  And the lady said, “Bum bum, the baker is dead,”

  Halleluiah I’m a bum,

  Halleluiah bum again …

  Warmth flows into the room from the lamps, the rich reflections along the bar, the glint and shine of glasses, the sound of singing. John Alberg’s cousin and McGibbeney sit watching the singer, their lips turning up in the curl of a smile. He is a man that everybody likes, John Alberg, a big worthless good-natured man like a shaggy dog that wags its tail at everybody and hangs out its tongue and laughs. This is his theme song, the thing they expect of him, a kind of national anthem of the IWW. You can tell the Wobs around the saloon: they are the ones who sing. Quite a lot of them, by their clothes, are also railroaders. The Wobblies have been organizing a lot among the trainmen, especially among the boomers.

  Smoke rises toward the gaslights slowly, is sucked into the draft and streams upward above the jets. John Alberg hits the guitar a final lick and rolls out his big laugh. With that laugh on tap, he should play Santa Claus in department stores.

  “… it’s the back muscles,” a high argumentative voice says at the bar. “Hell, what’re you givin’ us? That’s where you get your punch. Look at Bob Fitzsimmons, he had back muscles big as oranges. You can’t hit just with your arm. Look at John L. …”

  McGibbeney is leaning forward, saying something with his sharp fierce face thrust toward Alberg. Alberg pulls a paper from his pocket and spreads it on the table. He looks at the guitar, hunts some chords, taps with meaty fingertips on the soundbox.

  “Dis is new song,” he says confidentially to those nearest. “My cousin Yoe yust wrote it. You listen, dis is damn gude song. ‘Casey Yones the Union Scab.’ ”