Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel Page 7

  Then the antlike act, the drama of burdens.

  If there are several schooners lying at the wharves, or if some collier is anxious to be under way, the ants may crawl under their loads for twelve or fifteen hours at a stretch, and take their pay and go home to sleep the clock around and return to hang around again waiting for the boss to swing the gates and pick another crew.

  There are those who try, by bribes or good fellowship, or by tapping clerks and agents whom they know, to get advance information on sailings and dockings so as to be johnny-on-the-spot when the call comes. It generally happens that these wiseacres can never go anywhere, even under the dock to relieve themselves, without someone hopeful or suspicious at their heels.

  Along this whole waterfront there is a suspicion and jealousy as restless as the lipping of water against the pilings. Every man’s hand is against every other man. This is the way the bosses want it. If those who are passed over do not hate those who are picked, something has slipped in the system. A healthy competition for work is the best insurance against labor troubles.

  But there are some, less eager, who will not shove and scramble and buy drinks and kick back out of their wages. They are not going to run up and slobber all over some petty Caesar like the dock boss. They do not stand up and take a look every time a ship’s smoke shows beyond the breakwater or a switch engine backs a string of boxcars onto the dock. They go on pitching pennies, or arguing, or playing cards in the shade of a warehouse, until someone among the eager reports real action at one pier or the other. Then they walk over, maintaining the dignity of the American workingman. They do not need work bad enough to kiss anybody’s foot for it. And some day they will strike this harbor and tie it up tight and get some decent conditions and decent wages and an eight-hour day on the longshore. When they get strong enough. Not yet.

  These are the ones who will talk back to a slave driver, refuse to lift things too heavy for a man, holler for more handtrucks, more dollies, more manpower on a job. They read books and radical papers and attend meetings, and they make a sharp and contemptuous distinction between themselves and the scissorbills. The lumber companies and the stevedoring company keep a careful check on their numbers and activities, even when the waterfront is quiet. Now, with the trainmen striking, these are the ones who are out in sympathy, throwing a picket line across the foot of each dock. When a carload of scabs is backed through the line, protected by mounted police, the pickets give way reluctantly, beckoning and yelling. So far there has been no trouble, only words.

  In ordinary times itinerant radical intellectuals and organizers hit the Pedro waterfront as if on a Lyceum circuit—ex-professors and ex-preachers, rebellious college boys, union delegates, professional revolutionaries preaching socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, bimetallism, the single tax. With faces like saints or madmen or prize fighters or farmers or clerks, but always with the eyes of believers, they come and go, leaving a little deposit of their eloquence and fervor and belief among the men who will listen. Now with the waterfront struck they come in greater numbers, and back from the picket lines in the temporary headquarters, and in the shade of sheds and warehouses, little meetings go on. Prominent among the men in the audiences are those with the red button of the Wobblies in their shirts.

  One of them is the slim Swede with the scarred jaw. He can take a piece of chalk and draw a picture on a wall so anybody could recognize it. He is the one who wrote the song about Casey Jones the union scab. The other morning there was a Wobbly sticker on the dock boss’s window: “Join the One Big Union.” The Swede is supposed to have put it there. Not that he ever admitted he did. He hangs around with the boys, and when he talks they pay attention to him, but he doesn’t talk much. A kind of a clam. And a strange smile, sometimes, almost as if there were nobody home.

  The street that paralleled the tracks along the waterfront was a canal of fine gray dust that climbed the spokes of dray-wagon wheels and hung in the air for minutes, as if it had no weight at all. Anyone crossing the street stamped his feet hard on the loading platforms to shake off the clinging powder, but at noon not many were crossing the street. The picket line at the Hammond dock was down to a handful; the rest were over at the headquarters or sitting in the shade eating. There was a smell of hot planks, tar, fish. Anything metal in the sun was too hot to touch, but in the shade of the warehouse where Joe sat alone there was a cooling smelly breath wavering up from the water along with the wavering reflection of light. Nothing was coming in or out; the cops were out of sight in the dock boss’s office.

  In the nearly complete quiet hardly a gull cried. The tide was down, leaving the barnacled piles exposed like scabby legs. The water lipped around them oilily with a tiny wet sucking noise.

  He was remembering the islands, and a time he had looked down into the lagoon through a glass-bottomed bucket and seen how the fishes hung among the watery coral gardens, and how at the shadow of a shark they all streamed off together across the sand, and how they came winnowing back when the danger was past. All the little fishes, rushing in one direction or another because of food or fear. And all the big fishes, some poisonous, some with stings, some with teeth.

  With a sandwich half eaten in his hand he sat in the heat-stunned noon and thought about them, and as he sat he saw a rat come creeping in quick bursts of movement along a timber under the dock. It moved as if danger lay at every crossbeam; it tried the air with its nose, saw everything with bright bead eyes. Joe knew it saw and estimated him, though he had not moved the slightest muscle for two minutes. A big rat, big and smart and careful, it came in creeping bursts of movement that were somehow indicative of a curious boldness mixed with an overpowering caution.

  For a moment it disappeared, then it was in sight again. When it chose to move fast its creep became a hop almost like a rabbit’s. On the loading platform someone stamped his feet hard, and as the sound and vibration shook along the planks the rat froze, its whiskers twitching, its nose trying the air. After a pause it moved again, arrived at an angle in the beams, twisted and with one smooth movement was up on top in the sun.

  Joe broke a piece off the sandwich and tossed it out onto the planks. For a long time the rat sat perfectly still, not even its whiskers moving: a big rat, big and smart, not to be baited into danger. Even at forty feet its protruding perfectly round eyes shone with an intense concentration of life.

  Now, belly to the planks, its motion less like an animal’s than like a snake’s footless slide, it came toward him until it was within ten feet of the piece of bread. Joe sat very still, and when he heard footsteps coming along the platform he willed angrily that they go back. Some flatfoot would have to come along just at this minute.

  The rat heard the steps too; it was still again, a gray hump on the planks. Joe cheeped softly with his lips, and without more hesitation the rat crossed the last few feet and took the bread between its paws and began to eat. The thing made Joe smile; he had been holding his breath.

  Not so fast, Grandpa, he said. Look a little closer before you take things people offer you. There’s always arsenic in the cheese and strychnine in the bread. Remember who you are. They wouldn’t put it out there if it wasn’t poisoned, would they? Why would anybody do you a favor?

  The rat had finished the bread. Joe tossed out another piece, and the rat scuttled away, stopped, returned and fell on it. The dragging tail crept after it across the wood.

  If you didn’t have such a naked tail, Joe told it. If you just looked pretty, and learned to sit up and beg politely. If you didn’t swarm in dump-grounds and sewers. Why don’t you grow fur on your tail and learn to do tricks and quit hanging around wharves and living like an outcast?

  When he threw a third piece of sandwich toward the rat there was no running away. That’s the way it goes, Joe said. The minute anybody tosses out some food, you practically stand on your head. The biggest, toughest, smartest rat under the wharf, and all it takes to tame you is a scrap of sandwich. If you really got wise you
could take over the town of San Pedro, did you know that? Just by going after what you really want and not being satisfied with a chunk of bread.

  Steps came around the warehouse, close, and in one motion as smooth as water the rat was over the edge and gone. For a moment its snaky tail lay there, and then as if it had a life of its own it crawled out of sight. Joe looked up into the cocky, square face of Herb Davis.

  Davis pulled down his mouth. “I guess I queered it.”

  “Queered what?”

  “Weren’t you trying to get him?”

  “I was feeding him.”

  Davis stared, his tough red face contracted. Even on so hot a day he wore a snap-bow tie. His sleeves were puffed out above metal elastic armbands. “What the hell for?”

  “Anything wrong with it?”

  “Nothing except the city probably spends a hundred thousand a year exterminating ’em.”

  “That’s why I was feeding him,” Joe said. “What’s new?”

  “I come down to spread the word. Tom Barnabas is here.”

  “He is?” Joe stood up.

  “Flying trip,” Herb said. “He’ll be around all afternoon and talk at a street meeting tonight. Also he wants to talk to you.”

  “Me?”

  “I been telling him about you,” Herb said. “What you get for being famous.”

  Since Sunday he had felt it—a kind of expectancy, and he believed implicitly that there would be a day like this when the waiting immobility of his life would be broken and something big would happen. Destined and dedicated, a man on a big errand, he had yet hung on the brink, uncertain, committed but not wholly involved; and his unprecipitated, uncorroborated myth of himself hung with him. There would have to be a moment or an event that would be crucial. He felt it coming now.

  Dusting off the seat of his corduroy pants, he said carefully, “He at the hall?”

  “Was when I left. You coming back now?”

  “I want to stop off at the shack for a minute first. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

  “He particularly wants to see you,” Herb said. He went off along the platform, a hurrying man, an aggressive, thrusting-aside, doing man, and Joe started for the shack.

  Barnabas was a member of the General Executive Board of the IWW, an intellectual and an orator, almost as big a figure as Trautman or St. John or Haywood, and he represented something Joe wanted to see and know: a man high in the union, a leader and an organizer, Barnabas also wanted to see him. To be known and sought out—there was a satisfaction in that that pulled his mouth upward in a smile. But he still felt what he had felt when Davis told him—a little uncertainty, a little fear. He was going to the shack to change his clothes and see if John Alberg was around to go down with him.

  The moment he came in the shack he gave up the second notion. John had got himself tanked last night as usual. The quilt and the shucked-off clothes were all over the floor. In underwear and socks, John sat on the brass bed rubbing the back of his neck, bleary-eyed and whiskery and with the corners of his mouth brown from snus. Anger flew in Joe’s face like a bird caught in the room. Without a word he yanked the chest out from under his bunk and got out the blue suit, the shirt and collar, the yellow shoes.

  John scrubbed at his swollen face, yawned, sank his head and cautiously rolled it on his neck. “Holy yee!” he said vaguely but with feeling. His toes curled in the holey socks, he watched Joe change.

  “Going somev’ere?”

  “Tom Barnabas is in town.”

  For two or three minutes more John said nothing, but watched stupidly. Then astonishment visibly broke the surface of his mind. He said, “You dressing up to see him?”

  Tying the string tie, Joe saw the image of his cousin in the broken mirror, temples clutched between the heels of his hands, dog-eyes bent upward.

  “Maybe I should go around looking the way you look,” Joe said.

  “You couldn’t look as bad as I feel,” John said. He rose, groaning “Oh, holy smoke!” and shuffled to the stand and with one hand poured a dipperful of water over his head. Dripping, with water catching in his stubbled cheeks, he turned and groped among his clothes on the floor, finally coming up with a pint bottle about half full. Muttering to himself, his big foolish face stunned and swollen, his big head wagging, he worked the cork out with his thumb and finger while Joe watched.

  “Are you going to start right in again?”

  “Vell, holy yee,” John said.

  As if he carried a fifty-pound weight on his head he cautiously tipped the bottle, moving his head and the bottle together. Joe let the anger lick out again, realizing how much was there only when he let it go. He said, “When every man in the union ought to be down on the line or over at the hall hearing what Barnabas has got to say, you sit around here in your drawers starting another drunk.”

  The bottle came cautiously down. “Dis is har of dog.”

  “A souse!” Joe said. “A lousy dehorn!”

  He slammed the door on the sight of John’s opening, astonished face. Along the path he walked carefully, walking on grass instead of in the path, so as to avoid getting dust on his shoes. Without precisely admitting it to himself, he knew why he had jumped on John, why he had felt it necessary to dress up. He could even, in the layer of his mind which knew things without admitting them, discover an almost voluptuous appreciation of his own cunning.

  Barnabas was for labor but not born in it. He was not a working stiff, but a college graduate, a leader. And to him now, ready to listen with attention but not in any way acknowledging any superiority in brains or value in the other, came Joe Hillstrom in good dressy clothes; also a leader, also a man who showed above the rest.

  But he wished with a last flash of anger that John had been sober enough to come along. A man alone showed up more.

  6 San Pedro, July, 1910

  He came into the hall under the poster of the worker stripped to the waist, with the red letters IWW rising behind him like a red dawn, and saw Barnabas in the midst of a group—Davis and Manderich and some others, and a girl Joe did not know. The whole group turned as he came in, so that he entered alone and spotlighted. “Here he is now,” Herb Davis said.

  So he was expected, he had been named. Crossing the room was like an actor’s entrance. Though he shook hands with Barnabas almost indifferently, he felt at once the man’s magnetism. Something emanated from him, a glow of conviction and assurance that shriveled Joe’s confidence instantly. Barnabas gave his undivided, friendly attention when he shook hands, his eyes were brown and warm, and his eyes and his hand and his voice all said the same thing. Glad to know you. Really glad.

  “You wrote Casey Jones,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a great song. It really puts the finger on something.”

  Joe said nothing. His embarrassment and his pride made him look into Barnabas’ open handsome face almost jeeringly. The brown eyes were warm and compelling on him. He knew that his unadmitted notion of being equal to this man was a pipedream. His challenge was defeated before it ever got made.

  “Herb tells me you’re working on some more.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. He felt in the group around him, in Herb especially, the unspoken urge: Go on, tell him about it, show your stuff, impress the visitor so the local boys can take pride. But something stiff and clumsy in his insides would not bend, his tongue was awkward in his mouth. To his own ears his voice sounded surly and resentful. On the broad freckled face of the girl in the circle he thought he saw amazement, and he leveled a glance of hatred at her.

  Barnabas was pressing him, his warmth unchanged. “You’re making a book of them, is that right?”

  “I had a notion.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “It isn’t done.”

  “How many songs?”

  “Only three really finished.”

  “That’s all right. Where are they?”

  “Over at the mission.”

  He felt his
neck redden at how the words sounded and the things they implied, and added, “I write them there because there’s a piano.”

  Barnabas was looking at his watch with one eye still on Joe. “I was just going over to the hotel. Can you bring them there? Regent Hotel, room seventeen?”

  “How soon?”

  “Right away.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good!” Barnabas said. His voice boomed, a big commanding sound, and his actions got at once brisker, as if something now was settled and other things remained to be attacked. He put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Sooner or later we’ve got to quit organizing to ‘Halleluiah I’m a Bum.’ I want to see your songs for a very particular reason.”

  Several of them went through the door together, and in the street Barnabas turned, apologizing. “You didn’t meet Betty. This is Betty Spahn.”

  He looked at her sharply now, focusing on her for the first time. The hand she gave him was broad as a man’s, her eyes were flecked with yellow, her mouth was flexible, wide, amused. So Barnabas traveled with a klootch. And this klootch! “Boxcar Betty?” he said.

  She was known wherever migrants gathered, in boardinghouses and jungles and camps all up and down the West. Her father was an itinerant populist agitator, her mother the daughter of a country parson who had lived with a half-dozen workers in the labor movement. Mother Spahn’s house in Aberdeen was still headquarters for harvest stiffs; in the yards at Aberdeen the girl had grown up with boxcars for playhouses. She had hit the road at sixteen, been for a while the girl of Dutch Weiss until he was killed in a battle with the Kansas City cops, and she had scratched her name on the walls of half a dozen jails where she had been thrown for her work in free-speech fights and walkouts. Once she had ridden from Seattle to the IWW convention in Chicago with the Overall Brigade of Jack Walsh, hopping freights with the rest, jungling up with them, working at meetings and asking no favors, one girl among twenty-five men, as red a Wobbly as ever grew.