Joe Hill (21 page)

They looked at each other, shrugged, pulled down their identical mouths. They were gangling, red-necked; in the heat their thin freckled skins looked as wet and red and chafed as an infant’s. They looked exactly alike but it was always Russ who did the talking. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a dozen. There just ain’t many in this place that’ve ever …”

“All right,” Joe said. “A dozen’ll do. You better start right now to round them up. Get in toward the inside of the crowd and work by two’s. Art and Enno and I will take care of the preacher, and we’ll get Fuzzy up on the soapbox. It’s up to you to keep anybody from pulling him off again.”

The crowd had swelled so that it spread almost out to where they were. The preacher’s words were indistinguishable over the noise people made talking and asking questions. Women moved through the dust and sun with babies on their hips, and stood on tiptoe to locate friends in the crowd. Under the peppers people were packed in close, seeking shade.

Between the tents now Manderich and Virtanen came hurrying with Fuzzy between them. They had their hands on his arms, and helped him along, and he came with a step and a hitch and a half-jump, his hat pulled far down over his ears to hide his cotton-top. His face seemed full of a white eagerness; his teeth showed like a squirrel’s.

Joe watched him as he came, and he was reassured by the eagerness and by Fuzzy’s instant comprehension of what would have to be done. Maybe he was all right. He’d better be.

They huddled only for two or three minutes before the Kirkhams hurried away. At the last moment Virtanen was sent with them. They needed more assured protection in the crowd. Joe and Art alone would have to handle the preacher.

Even while they talked fast, laying it out, Fuzzy Llewellyn’s eyes roamed over the fringes of the crowd, which by now Joe thought must number many hundreds. His tongue touched his split lip, and he said softly, “Oh by Jesus, it’s made to order, it’s made to order!”

Smiling, Art Manderich looked at Joe, a significant, humorous, allusive look, and his thumb touched the head of the hatpin in
his suspender. Until then Joe had not been conscious of the automatic under his own arm. He had worn it so long that it was like part of his clothes. But now as they started fighting their way into the press toward the increasing bellow of the preacher’s voice he felt the gun every time he pressed against anyone. The dust was gritty on his lips. He went ahead, edging, touching people, moving them aside, saying “Excuse us, how about getting through here.” So far as he could see, few were paying any attention to the preacher. They looked, and waited, and said things to those beside them, and shushed their children, and watched the faces of their neighbors as if for enlightenment, but they stayed. The shadows of the pepper trees, at the edge of the fierce sun, dappled them with blotches and freckles of light and dark.

Ahead of him, not very far now, the preacher was loud, and Joe listened consciously for the first time as he slid and wormed and worked his way forward, making a path for the others.

“… If you haven’t known Jesus! Oh, brothers and sisters, I can’t possibly tell you the joy I felt in my heart when I first knew Jesus was my friend! I been carrying a millstone around my neck all my days and never knew it. I was weighted down with sin, oh I confess it, brothers and sisters, I confess it gladly, I’ve had my soul washed clean and that old burden of sin don’t bother me any more. But I carried it around till I was bowlegged with it, I carried a pack of sin like a peddler’s, brothers and sisters, and all because I didn’t know Jesus was my friend, all because I didn’t know where to go to get my burden lightened. Now I’ve laid it down, and I tell you one and all, I’m a new man. You’ll never know what living can be until you come to Jesus and have those sins forgiven. You’ve all got ’em, brothers and sisters, everybody’s got ’em. Just make up your mind to come in and lay that burden down …”

The three were near the heart of the crowd, where a little breathing space had been left around the preacher’s backless chair on which he stood and shouted. Joe looked around. There were too many women; in close the crowd was two-thirds women, yet even they did not seem to be taking in what the preacher said. Some were Mexican women he was sure did not understand one word in ten.

Once more he looked carefully around, tiptoeing to see better,
but he spotted no finks whose faces he knew. The heat of the crowd packed him in; he wanted to break away and fight himself free and into the open. The red-faced preacher roared on, streaming sweat. “
Jesus
, my friends. Keep that name in mind. When He first visited this sinful world, coming from the city of jasper and pearl and pure gold, He stepped down out of that glory just to save sufferin’ humanity, just out of the pity of His great heart, and I want to say to you, brothers and sisters, He’s still ready to save, He’s still got His hand stretched out to the poor and needy …”

The eyes of the three met. In two smooth steps Joe and Manderich were beside the preacher’s chair. Joe took hold of the preacher’s pocket and yanked, tearing the seam so that the white lining showed; instantly the preacher’s hand shot down to grab his wrist, the preacher’s hot face turned down on him, glaring. Then Manderich reached, and together they yanked so that he had to hop off backward to keep from toppling. His hoarse roar of anger was chopped off short as he leaped, but he was threshing his arms free as soon as his feet hit the ground. Manderich’s heavy clutch pinioned one arm, but he broke the other free from Joe’s lighter weight, and as he did so Joe grabbed a handful of the man’s wet shirt with his left hand. His right dove halfway under his own coat, and held it there on the gun butt, his eyes inches from the preacher’s furious face, until the man’s eyes chilled and understood and the furious threshing of his arms quieted. With a final cautious half-meant twist he freed himself and stood still. Joe slipped around behind him, next to Manderich, his eyes swooping in one comprehensive glance across the faces near at hand. They looked merely astonished. A couple of the women had begun to edge away. But no trouble, not a peep. Ahead of him the preacher stood, breathing hard, his blue shirt wet and dark. Sweat ran as Joe watched down the pink scalp under the thinning fringe of hair, a crooked drop crookedly running until it came to the roundly shaven neck, and then it skidded and disappeared under the wet collar. Art Manderich, breathing formally through his nose, his face set like the face of a hussar at inspection or an usher in a church, stood with his arms folded.

Up on the chair Fuzzy Llewellyn was shouting in the preacher’s place—a sharper, more cutting voice, saw-edged and nasal and penetrating. “We’re takin’ over this meeting right now! Why are
we talon’ it over? I’ll tell you. Because we all got more important things to meet about than the size of somebody’s private pack of sin. We got a lot of grievances in this camp, and a lot of conditions have to be improved. How do you get a drink of water in this stinkhole? You’ve tried it down at the field. You’ve hit up the stew-wagon guy. What’d it get you? And how long did you stand in line by one of those backhouses this mornin’? There was a line of twenty-six people waitin’ when I came down. Just put your mind for a minute on what you was linin’ up for. Waitin’ in line to use a thing like that. I don’t know how yours was, but mine would’ve made a hyena throw his lunch. That’s what we’re takin’ over this meeting for. To see if anybody here agrees with us something ought to be done about it.”

The preacher’s sweat was as strong as a horse’s. He looked straight ahead and said nothing, but his breathing hissed and gurgled, and his neck was beet-red, shining wet.

“I want to ask you somep’m else,” Fuzzy shouted. He turned his body, shouting for the far edges of the crowd. “I want to ask you is anybody sick around you. Everybody near you healthy?”

He waited. A mutter of sound, a growl, came from here and there in the crowd. Joe was not satisfied with it. It seemed too small, maybe only the noise made by the Kirkhams and their squads. He searched the faces near him, and saw that their attention was split between Fuzzy and himself; they listened to Fuzzy but they watched him and Manderich and the captive preacher. It was hard to tell whether they understood anything or not, whether Fuzzy could touch them at all with a catalogue of their wrongs. To quiet his own fear that they were a bunch of meek cattle, he whispered to Manderich, “Did you say two hundred? We got half the camp.”

Manderich grunted unintelligibly. The preacher looked over his shoulder, and Joe seized his arm in warning. Under the man’s fat he felt the bone and muscle of power, and in the cold blue eyes that swung on him he saw hatred and watchfulness but no fear. For a moment he let his eyes lock with the pale eyes. The pupils were mere dark pinheads in the glassy, marbled irises, and it was a long time before the eyes would let themselves be beaten down. It would not do to give this preacher any rope.

Listening past Fuzzy’s shouting, his ears alert for sounds of
trouble in the crowd, he thought once he heard the beginnings of uproar, but Fuzzy let out his voice another notch, and by the time he took breath the sound was not there. A baby began to squawl. Again Fuzzy raised his voice, whipping and goading their apathy.

“… unless we do it together! You can see my face, some of you can anyway. If you’re close you can see my back.” He yanked his shirt out and whipped half around to display his back crisscrossed with dark bruises, welted and scabbed from blows. “All right!” he shouted, whipping around again. “All right, you want to know how I got it? I’ll tell you. Two days ago three other guys and I got sick of the filth in this camp and we squawked. We went over to the super and we raised some hell. You know what happens after that? Just by accident we all have callers that night. They take us out on the south road and beat hell out of us and make us run the gauntlet while a dozen of them whale away at us with barrel staves. Just a great big Hallowe’en party. Then they point us down the road and invite us not to come back.”

He paused, his squirrel teeth exposed by the back-drawn lips. For a moment it was so quiet Joe heard his breath hiss, and heard the sound of a motor starting on the other side of the sheds. He looked for anger in the sheep faces of the crowd and saw none, only the alert, half-expectant listening look.

“But I come back!” Fuzzy shouted. “By God I doubled around and I limped back in that same night, and I been here ever since. You want to know why I came back? I’ll tell you. I came back because I knew if enough of us squawked it wouldn’t be possible to take care of us with barrel staves. Let just a hundred of us out of this whole mob get together and stand together, and they ain’t goonin’ us off the ranch. They ain’t doin’ nothin’ then. They’re listenin’, because they’ll have to listen.”

The last faint lingering suspicion that Joe had had of Fuzzy was gone now. Fuzzy was going good. He was militant and he had guts and he could pour it on from up on the box. And no matter how his eyes and ears searched the crowd, he could catch no premonition of trouble, no shouldering stir of deputies coming in, no sound of heckling, no fighting. Nothing but this waiting.

“I want us to sing a little,” Fuzzy was shouting. “Anybody that’s going to work together can start by singing together. I want us to sing a song about a scissorbill that didn’t know which side his
bread was buttered on. This is a song by Joe Hill, and it goes to the tune of ‘It Looks to Me Like a Big Time Tonight.’ I’m going to say over the words and when you get the idea how she goes, we’ll sing her all together.”

For a second Joe felt a twitch in his solar plexus, a spasm of jealous protest. Joe Hill himself should be up there bringing them on, forming them from a mob into a single weapon of power. But the preacher moved restively and Joe tightened his grip on the fat arm. Fuzzy was the soapboxer, he was the one who could do it best. He listened intently to the words as Fuzzy bellowed them out, halfway between speaking and singing.

“Any day now,” Fuzzy’s can-opener voice confided to the crowd, “any day now I’ll own this ranch.” He stuck out his face. “Anybody got any doubts?”

That brought the first real response, a riffle of laughter that was lost as Fuzzy lifted his arms and started the singing. Joe sang, and old Art, tuneless as a sea Hon, growled at his ear, but there was only a scattering of support through the crowd, a thin unconfident singing, a few voices singing loud and trying to sound like many, saying

Joe thought it would die out altogether, but the few of them carried it to the end of the chorus, and then Fuzzy was shouting out the second verse, about Mr. Block and the job shark, and then waving his hands wide again, inviting the big chorus.

This time it came fuller, louder, wider-spread. Joe could see people near him trying to pick up the words as they sang. He bellowed at the uncompromising red neck of the preacher.

It grew with every verse. Mr. Block tried the great
A.F.
of
L.
and got stung; he tried the ballot box and elected a Socialist mayor and got rapped on the block by a big Socialist cop; he grew angry at Spain and joined the army and lost a leg in Cuba and went around afterward on his peg shouting “Remember the Maine! Hurrah, to hell with Spain!”; and at length he died and met St. Pete and expressed a wish: He’d like to meet the Astorbilts and John D. Rockefell.