Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 6

  They yelled and shoved Moe forward into McGibbeney, who stood still with folded arms and shouldered him contemptuously away. Pushed at by half a dozen hands, Moe looked up under his eyebrows with little twinkling eyes, and then he put out his hand.

  “Fellow worker,” he said, “I am a man of peace. What about you?”

  There was something so hilariously humble about him that they collapsed again, and laughing brought back the memory of McGibbeney dangling by the heels. John thumped Joe on the back, his arm falling with helpless weight. His eyes were red and full of tears. “Yesus God!” he gasped. “Oh, holy smoke! Did you see t’ings fall out of him? Pennies, and vatches, and store teet’, oh Yudas Priest!”

  Joe gave him a hard elbow in the solar plexus and he bent over, too weak to be resentful, and fell to the ground and rolled there. McGibbeney stood with dignity while the joy declined and eventually died, and he eyed John Alberg with disgust.

  “Until you guys started your god damn Roman holiday, I had something I wanted to do over here,” he said. He looked at Joe. “I came over here to get you.”

  “What for?”

  “Got some’m to show you. You and Herb, especially.”

  “Why Herb and me?”

  “Come on and you’ll see.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “What I want to show you happens at five sharp.”

  “I should have been over at the hall a long time ago,” Davis said. “Will this take long?”

  “On’y a few minutes.”

  Finally they let McGibbeney herd them out across the flat, along the waterfront, across the web of tracks, and up to Beacon Street. He was triumphantly secretive until he stopped them in front of the Argosy Theater.

  “What the hell is this?” Davis asked. “I haven’t got time for a show, Mac, that’s a fact. I got to get in and work for the trainmen even if you won’t.”

  “You got time for this,” McGibbeney said, and bought three tickets.

  The entrance smells hotly of popcorn and butter. As the outside door sighs behind them they are pushed into the warm stink of bodies. The air seems as thick as glycerin, and they stand at the head of the aisle in a gloom of half-seen heads and shoulders until the seats grow slowly into vision. “Here,” McGibbeney whispers. “Here’s three.”

  On the lighted stage, strange and far away as something seen down a long tunnel, three acrobats slide and tumble down, bow, spring muscularly offstage to a spatter of clapping. But just as the last one, a girl, is disappearing, a hobo with big flapping shoes darts out of the wings and trips her with his cane. He ducks her indignant swing, saunters out onstage to meet a man in a derby who comes in from the other side.

  At the moment of the encounter the one with the cane points upward and cringes, turning up his coat collar. “Duck!” he yells. Derby glances upward. “Duck hell, that’s a gull.” “Well b’y or gull, you better duck!” yells the hobo at the top of his voice, and grabs his knees and guffaws. Derby swings a mighty kick at the hobo’s tempting backside, which twitches away just in time so that the kicker misses. His foot flies an incredible distance into the air and he crashes to the stage. From the audience comes a sharp, explosive bark of laughter.

  The two come together again, rubbernecking the gallery, still talking in bellows. A white rope of light falls from the ceiling and nooses them there.

  “You know,” Derby bellows, “I had a terrible fright the other night. I was sitting out at the water tank waiting for a freight and a tarantula ran up my pants leg.”

  “That’s nothing!” Hobo bellows back. “Yesterday I went to see my friend Cohen at his tailor shop and a sewing machine ran up the seam of my shirt.”

  He ducks a roundhouse swing with the indifference of a shooting-gallery duck and breaks into a big-footed, loose-soled tapdance. His baggy pants flop and fly around his legs, he cocks his smashed tophat over one eye and skates backward without moving from one spot, he holds up one leg and jumps over it, alighting with a splat of leather. One foot gets going in a continuous roll of taps and sticks there, so that he stands for a full minute with one uncontrollable leg flapping, his face contorted in anxiety and surprise. At last the leg locks stiffly. Pulling fails to budge it. He bends over and seizes it with both hands. Nothing happens. With all his weight he hauls backward; without warning the foot comes loose and he does a complete flip to light flat on his stomach. Somebody in the orchestra pit hits the bass drum as he lands, and the giggling murmur of laughter rises to a shout. Rising very slowly, a betrayed man, Hobo sees his friend Derby. He chases him furiously offstage, and the clapping begins.

  “For the love of mike,” Davis says, leaning across Joe. “Is this what you brought us over here to see?”

  “Wait.”

  Now Hobo is back on the stage, pacing back and forth, and on his shoulder is a sign, UNFAIR. (Davis nudges Joe with a little grunting appreciative chuckle.) From the opposite wings comes Derby, now a railroader in a hogger’s cap, carrying a big oil can. They confer in pantomime; Engineer keeps shaking his head, and goes around touching imaginary machinery with the spout of his oil can. They wave their arms at each other. Picket is insistent, Engineer angry. Finally he drives Picket away, climbs up into an imaginary cab, leans out an imaginary window, hoots long and mournful with his mouth, lets off steam with a sounding hiss. With nothing but his mouth and the shuffle of his feet he sounds amazingly like a locomotive starting to roll. Picket, defeated, sulks and thinks.

  Then he is struck so hard by an idea that he is almost knocked down. He rushes offstage, and in a few moments appears at the other side lugging a railroad tie, which he lays in Engineer’s path and tiptoes away. The shuffle and hiss and chug of the engine is coming along fast now; the Engineer is debonair in his cab window, waving at the audience as he pours by. Abruptly his neck stretches, he stares, he leaps for the brakes. There is an indescribable rush of sound with help from the cymbals in the pit as he falls twice his length and crashes. A moment of silence, then a weak hiss of escaping steam, then silence again.

  Someone in the audience yips like a dog, McGibbeney punches Joe’s shoulder and his eyes shine, Davis is laughing. On stage the actors are now standing arm in arm, looking with an expectant simper up into the floodlights. In the pit the pianist has started a rolling introduction to “Casey Jones.”

  Joe sits as still as if a quick move would bring the building down. To hide the tremor that is growing in his hands, he has folded his arms across his chest, but the palms of his hands are moist, and for an instant he is scared to death. He makes a curt shrugging acknowledgment of something Davis is saying. The theater is too quiet. The applause has been for the pantomime; the song, he knows, will fall flat. Then his ears pop as if from altitude, and he hears the vaudeville team, already on the third line:

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

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

  But now Joe is jerked out of the embarrassment that has held him stiffly, for like a chorus that has been rehearsed, a dozen people in the audience come in.

  CASEY JONES kept his junkpile running,

  CASEY JONES was working double time …

  “See?” McGibbeney says in Joe’s ear. “By God, I knew it the minute I heard it first!”

  Davis roars out the second chorus. The whole theater is coming in, even Joe Hillstrom, having the song dragged out of him by the exuberant will of the people in the dark around him and the waving arms of the two vaudevillians.

  But Joe is sweating, and almost before the last chorus he is standing, sidling his way to the aisle. Davis and McGibbeney are behind him, and out in the glare of the afternoon street they look at him curiously. “We should’ve stuck,” McGibbeney says. “They encored those guys twice last night.”

  “How’d they get it?” Joe says.

  But the railroader lifts his hands. “I guess they just picked it out of the air. These vaudeville boys are sympathizers, but they just
been in town four days.”

  “Damnedest thing I ever heard of,” Davis says. “You only wrote it a week ago.” He looks at Joe quickly. “I s’pose you could sue, if you wanted.”

  But McGibbeney looks at Joe with a wrinkled forehead. “Jesus, then they’d stop singin’ it. You don’t want them to do that.”

  In the popcorn-smelling entrance, his back against the posters advertising the Three Alegrettis, he stands apart from his own presence and his own laughter and his own companions, and through slightly narrowed eyes looks at something else. Something had been stirring in him ever since last Sunday, when they whistled and gave him a hand at the trainmen’s meeting. He knows perfectly what it is that he feels: pride, and a sense of power. There are things he can do and things he can be. He is already out in some current, and he can feel his bows swinging, his engines coming to life.

  Davis has said something. Joe looks at him and McGibbeney, opening his eyes wide, and what he says surprises him with the way it rings. “I didn’t write it for money,” he says. “I wrote it for the good of the working class.”

  Davis has hold of his hand, shaking it. “All right!” he says belligerently. “All right now, by God! I been laying off of you, but I’m not laying off any more. It’s just a bunch of god damn baloney that you ain’t wearing a button and carrying a card. How about it?”

  “I told you, I don’t like jails well enough to join the Wobblies.”

  “Horseshit,” Davis says. “You don’t have to work in any free-speech fights. There’s plenty of us that can’t do nothing else. You can do more good staying home and writing songs.”

  “Look what this one’s done in a week,” McGibbeney says.

  Davis is still shaking his hand. “The Wobblies are a singing outfit. You can stir up a hell of a lot of solidarity just with a good song, one with real militancy in it.”

  Joe is pretending to consider, but the current is already shoving him along. “Well, I’ve got no big objection,” he says, and instantly they have hold of him, steering him. It is pleasant to him to see how they gloat over landing him; he is a prize, a triumph for them, somebody. The sense of being on the verge of something remarkable, and of being made for what is now to happen, is as palpable as the heat beating up from the sidewalk, but almost before he recognizes it for what it is he is hiding it, not to show it to the others. He walks quietly, smiling, and when Davis offers him the makings he makes a little foolish rhyme. He says,

  Smoke and snus I never use,

  I live on straight tobacco yuice,

  and is rewarded by their soft snorts that pretend to indicate disgust but actually indicate their recognition of his superior powers, their unenvious admiration. They take him on to the Wobbly hall, something special.

  It was late when he left the hall, and though he could have had a choice of companions he went alone. He did not go immediately back to the shack, but under the push of a vague restless desire to stretch his legs drifted off Beacon and into a side street that led up the hill. The night was dry, swept clean by a gusty wind, and the stars were like stars at sea, but there was none of the loneliness of the sea here. All around him as he walked under the steady night-sound of trees there was the sense of human crowding. It was a pleasure to him to walk quietly in the dark, past lighted houses and dark, and feel the people inside and know that he was utterly strange to all of them. Nevertheless, here he walked, with strength and speed and brains in him that they never suspected, and fingers that could play a piano or a violin, and a mind that could set words to rhyme and an eye and a hand that could make pictures. He felt like a lion that walks disdainfully through a sleeping camp of hunters.

  At an intersection he paused, seeing the chip of moon through the leaves of a tall eucalyptus. It looked inexpressibly far-off, vanishing, and he was reminded of a time in his boyhood when he had carelessly left a skiff untied after he stepped out of it, and the tide had run it out, bobbing and dancing and hopelessly out of reach, into the bay.

  What are you after, a fellow like you? he asked himself, and smiled to himself like an actor. He discussed himself with the wind, sitting on a gravel hill and looking down over the lights of the harbor. You are no usual Swede immigrant, no ordinary workingman, the night assured him. If you were, you’d be down at the Forecastle with John, or shooting pool in some joint, or sponging a bed and a cup of coffee down at the mission. People see something in you. What are you after, a fellow like you? Moe Dreyfuss asks. What have you got talents for? the missionary says, scolding you. You’re one we really wanted, Davis says, pinning a button on you and making you out a card. That one song is better than the whole damn picket line, says McGibbeney.

  The wind comes across the Pedro Hills and whines in the thin grass, and out over the harbor the channel lights and the starlike line along the breakwater are splintered by the wind.

  It is a fine warm dream, this dream of the self. It moves as freely as the wind from triumph to triumph. There are shouts in it, and the respectful faces of workers and bosses and politicians. There is a kind of march in this dream, a slow purposeful surge, and an anger that like a fire loose in a city spreads over everything in its path.

  And faces: the stiff-lipped Bible-reading captain of the first ship he ever worked on, between Stockholm and Hull; the suspicious, snoopy, County-Galway phiz of Joyce, the proprietor of the Bowery saloon where he first landed work in America; the furious twisted face—the face of a man with an unbearable pain inside him, or a fury that he cannot satisfy—of the third engineer on the Sarah Cleghorn. Others too: the worried, beet-red face of a Norske farmer in Dakota, a man who kept glancing at the fading daylight and loped like a clumsy bear, trying to get in another fifteen minutes, another fifty bundles, another ten sacks. Faceless figures of men in cutaway coats and big watch chains—they swim and swarm in his mind while the wind tugs at him and the lights of the harbor splinter and re-form and shine with diamond brilliance in the wind-split night. He feels his lean strength like a cat stretching; when he stands erect above the wind-tormented grass he is as tall as Moses lifting his hand over the Red Sea and crying for the waters to divide.

  More than an hour later he came in the faint moon-and-star light along the path through the salt grass and up to the door of the shack. Somebody was home; he saw a shadow stoop and move against the light of the window. When he opened the door he found Otto at the table rolling something in a newspaper. For an instant he had the impression that Otto crouched, ready to fight or run, before the slight tension relaxed and Otto’s face pulled up in the sleepy smile.

  “Hello,” he said. “What was Macs big secret?”

  “Eniting,” Joe said. “Nothing special.”

  Otto’s smile widened while he rolled the newspaper package and twisted one end. He had his hat and coat on as if ready to go out. “You’re sure a talker,” he said.

  “I talk enough,” Joe said, surprised.

  “Never too much, eh?”

  When they locked eyes, Otto’s eyes did not fall. They wrinkled at the corners as if he were enjoying some private joke.

  “Maybe I haven’t got much to talk about,” Joe said.

  “Not as much as me, is that what you mean?”

  “Maybe.”

  Into Otto’s smile now had come something definitely knowing and amused. He picked up the package and rolled it gently between his palms. At last he said softly, “Who’re you trying to fool?”

  Puzzled by the concentrations and the air of knowingness in Otto’s look, Joe felt the backs of his knees tensing as if before a fight. But he only said, “Not you, I guess.”

  “I got eyes,” Otto said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.” Holding Joe’s eyes, he tipped the package and jiggled it until a pair of wire cutters and a thin-bladed hacksaw slid out on the table. “I been watching you,” he said. “I like the way you keep your mouth shut.”

  “I kind of like it too,” Joe said.

  Otto was loosely built, shorter than Joe, nondescript except for th
e sheep face and the silly-looking smile. Everything about him seemed limp and loose, hair and smile and clothes, even the way his arms hung from his shoulders. But his eyes had the unwavering reflecting brightness of a rat’s. “How’d you like a build up your stake a little tonight?” he said.

  But now Joe began to smile. He shook his head. “Don’t tell me anything about it, Otto.”

  “You can’t live forever without work,” Otto said. “Even if they break this strike, you’re back on the dock bosses and the mates.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Shrugging, Otto shook the hacksaw and wire cutters back into the package and retwisted the end. “You like to work alone, is that it?”

  “Maybe I’m particular what I work at,” Joe said. He returned Otto’s mocking grin, and as Otto turned to the door he wagged his finger at Otto’s coat lapel. “You wearing that button out tonight?”

  Otto’s eyes lighted on the button in Joe’s own coat. He laughed aloud, shaking his head almost in admiration, and slipped the button from his lapel and into his pocket. “You’re all right,” he said. “We’ll get along.”

  5 San Pedro, July, 1910

  On ordinary days the waterfront is a blocks-long stage crisscrossed with railroad tracks, cluttered with stacks of poles, lumber, neatly layered ties, pyramids of coal. The two long wharves stretch out into the bay toward Dead Man’s Island, each with its own pattern of tracks, stalled freight- and flatcars, piles of merchandise going or coming. Around the ends of the wharves small craft cluster like fruit flies around something sweet and sticky; along the other end lounge the longshoremen waiting for the dock boss’s call.

  This is a stage on which are enacted the tedious scenes of arrival and departure, of fetch and carry, more erratic than the tides but just as repetitive. Out along the docks the stagehands prepare the sets, warp in freighters and lumber schooners and colliers and coastwise passenger ships and an occasional old three- or four-master. Their work is complex with lines and bawled orders, but it comes quickly to a neatness, a readiness, and a waiting. At a certain point the dock gates are unlocked and at the window of his little office the stage manager selects his actors from the loungers on the proscenium. He selects them for various reasons: because they are personal friends, because they have bought him drinks, because they have kicked back a folded bill out of their wages, because he is tired of seeing their faces around looking hopeful, because he needs every man he can lay hands on, sometimes even because he knows them for good workers and strong backs.