Joe Hill (33 page)

–What it seems to me, the hall is the surest way of maintaining solidarity. If a worker knows that wherever he goes he can find friends and fellow workers and a place to put up in for a few days while he hunts a job, he’s going to think a lot more about the union, because it
does
something for him.

–I agree, I agree! But he doesn’t have to sleep in it and hang out his socks in it. There are plenty of workers right here in town that would bring their wives to meetings—and that’s something we want too, isn’t it? But they won’t bring them because they’re never sure what kind of guys they’ll find around.

–So the only thing to do is what I’ve always said. Have two halls, one for business and social meetings and one for a union-run boardinghouse.

They worried the argument back and forth in a desultory, Sunday-morning way while Joe listened. Through an open door he saw a massive man with a head like a block of granite come into the next room and sit down at a desk. That ought to be Jud Ricket, the secretary. Joe rose and went in.

The secretary looked at him across the littered rolltop desk with eyes of a startling, polished black. He bulged with life; a look from him was as intense as a stab. Joe knew him a little, by reputation. A manager, a comer. He put out his hand.

“Ricket?”

“Yes.”

“Joe Hill.”

Without taking his eyes from Joe’s, Ricket reached out a big blucher-cut shoe and hooked a chair within reach. While Joe sat down Ricket studied him with curiosity, a jerky tic like a smile moving one corner of his mouth.

“Nobody told me you were corning,” he said.

“Nobody knew.”

“On your way somewhere?”

“I thought I might eventually get over to Colorado.”

“Look in on Mr. Rockfeller, uh?” Ricket said. “Don’t let anybody fool you, that can get bad.”

“Lately I’ve spent a lot of my time raising money for the Oatfield defense committee,” Joe said. “You doing anything about that?”

“Usual thing. Collection, street meeting. We’ve sent in a couple of contributions. But I don’t know, I just can’t get excited about that case.”

“You can’t? Why not?”

The fleeting wide smile touched Ricket’s lips, held for a moment, and snapped off. “Fuzzy Llewellyn was a member in bad standing, for one thing. He’d been blacklisted out of the Stockton local.”

“Art Manderich was in good standing.”

“I know,” Ricket said. “I ought to be in there pitching, but I just can’t get my heart in that one the way I can in some others.”

“An injury to one is an injury to all,” Joe said.

“That’s a fact,” Ricket said solemnly. “That’s a fact, sure enough. But some injuries just advertise better than others. Who’s this Hale? Just some little punk rancher. If those boys had been used up by the lumber trust, or the copper trust, or John D., then the case would advertise better.”

“Maybe they didn’t go in there and get killed for the advertising.”

They were looking hard into each other’s eyes. The twitch moved Ricket’s mouth again and he flapped his hand on the desk. “Well,” he said, and shrugged. “We’ve sent what we could. It’s a little far away from us here. We’re sort of in a backwater.”

“Anything doing at all?”

“Mainly on-the-job organizing. We’ve got to lay a foundation in this state before we can get anywhere. Haywood tried Bingham
last year. You know how far he got. They busted his strike with Mexican scabs. But he left a lot of buttons behind. We’re trying to spread it in the smelters and up in Park City and down in the coal camps. Next time we pull a big strike we want support.”

There was a question in his black eyes, but Joe shook his head. “I don’t want to waste my time working on some smelter bullgang when I could be doing something important. Do you know how many dollars it takes to keep a crew of lawyers working? How much does it cost to save a man from the chair?”

“Yeah,” Ricket said, not as an answer but as an acknowledgment of the force of the argument. He rubbed his hands circularly one upon the other and then reached for a big brass-ended advertising pencil and twirled it between his palms. “This is a bad town for raising money in,” he said.

“No town’s much different.”

“I don’t know,” Ricket said, “maybe these Mormons tithe away all they got. I should think for the Oatfield boys you might do better down on the coast.”

“I just came from the coast,” Joe said. He knew what was the matter with Ricket. Ricket liked the organizing and he liked a fight, but he didn’t like dispersing himself in a dozen directions helping defend every organizer that got thrown in jail.

“I had a hunch when I came into this town,” Joe said. “I can do something here, but not at any penny-ante organizing in some smelter.”

Ricket tossed and caught the pencil. “That was a suggestion, that’s all.”

Looking restlessly around the jamb of the door, Joe nodded at the old flatbed press in the main room. “I see you’ve got a press.”

Ricket nodded.

“A song printed on cards will double or triple your take at a street meeting,” Joe said. “A really good song can make you fifteen or twenty dollars.”

Ricket nodded again. “Now I see where you come in. You got a song?”

“I can write one.”

“Then you’d be a sucker to go to work organizing in a smelter,” Ricket said, and hitched himself forward to hump over the desk.
He gave Joe a glance of almost winsome friendliness. “I got a single-track mind, I try to drag everybody I see into what I’m interested in at any special time. I want you to know we’re glad to have you in town. You got a place to live?”

“I’m at a boardinghouse down in Murray.”

“There’s a cot up at my place.”

“Thanks, I’m fixed.”

“About food,” Ricket said, and smiled his phantasmal smile. “If you go broke, there’s a Chink on First South will give you credit any time on the strength of your card.”

Joe stood up, and the swivel chair shot backward against the wall as Ricket struggled to his feet.

“Any time you get a song ready,” Ricket said. He shook hands with Joe and watched him go out—Ricket, a great black bear of a man with an odd manner, and a smile that came and went like the play of muscles when a man grits his teeth. Maybe he was getting everything that the traffic would bear out of Salt Lake and maybe he wasn’t. They would see what a Joe Hill song would do. Maybe it would wake this burg up a little.

One song. One more song. Joe went out into the morning heat with his mind already beginning to churn out scraps of rhyme, sort among the old familiar tunes. One song, we will sing one song … and there was the tune. The words came thronging to pair with it, and he went up a strange street wrapped in his inner swathings of contemplation, working at the verses. My Old Kentucky home sold for taxes, gobbled by the landlord, raided by the cops, taken over by the bank, sold by the sheriff at public sale. There was plenty you could do with the idea. He walked a street in Salt Lake City, in the bright stare and clarity, the barren brilliant light of a September morning, with words moving in his head, and he inquired the way to the public library and turned left out of the sun.

As he turned, he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Inside a pawnshop window, ringed by harmonicas and banjos and watches with thick chains, was an automatic in a worn holster. Pressing his arm against his ribs, he felt the emptiness where the Luger had used to ride, and he thought of how once in their talk Jud Ricket’s shiny black eyes had dropped to the place where a hidden gun would be. In that flick of Ricket’s
glance he had seen a reflection of his own legend: Joe Hill, an ice-eyed stiff with a rod under his arm, a maker of songs and a hunter of trouble, an uncompromising enemy of the master class but maybe dangerous, maybe hard to handle.

With hardly a break in his stride he turned into the pawnshop, and five minutes later he came out with the gun in a package in his pocket. Now he went full stature again, veritably Joe Hill, wearing the things that completed and uttered him: an empty purse, a gun, the forming words of a song.

By the time he reached the stone library below the spread wings of the Eagle Gate he had arranged the easily alternated counters of his belief into a stanza.

Other stanzas were clamoring at the gate, half seen. One song of the politician, one song of the children in the mills, one song of the girl below the line, one song of the poor and ragged tramp, one song

At the circulation desk he waited impatiently for the girl to come from sorting cards at a file. “I’d like to borrow a pencil for a few minutes,” he said.

The girl’s eyes behind round windows of glass jumped to meet his. He saw her mouth pop open. Two words came out: “We don’t …” Her tongue touched her lip quickly, something moved in her throat. Without a word and without taking her eyes from his face she reached sideways and groped up a long sharply pointed pencil and laid it in his hand.

“I guess I don’t quite understand what it is you do,” she said.

It was the third time he had been to the Olson house. On the music rack of the piano sat the scribbled and erased music notebook they had been working on: a song he had begun long ago, in San Pedro, and had never been able to finish. Between the lines of music Joe had copied out the first verse, to see how the words matched with the notation.

“I’m an organizer,” he said.

He heard Anna Olson at the dishes in the kitchen. Through the open window he saw a man and two little girls setting up a ladder under an apple tree red with fruit. The dirt street lay lulled and quiet in the evening. There was a smell of mown alfalfa. Eastward the Wasatch showed between poplar trees, its slopes bronze and pink with the late sun and the first beginnings of autumn. He had momentary perception of how peaceful it was, and he thought of a little shanty somewhere in the hills.

“You don’t work in any particular place,” Ingrid said.

He let himself look at her serious, interested face, into her eyes that held his a moment and then dropped. She had nice skin and a faint clean smell, and sitting next to her was still an unfamiliar and faintly disturbing experience. He remembered having been bumped by her arm as she leaned to pencil something into the music notebook.

“Haven’t you heard about the
IWW
?” he said. “I go someplace and stay long enough to plant a few sticks of dynamite, and then I clear out and go blow something up somewhere else.”

“No, seriously. Do you make speeches?”

“I’ve made a few. I’m no good at it.”

“How do you organize, then?”

“Talking to the men. Generally there’s dissatisfaction, maybe some trouble. I get them to pull together, form a committee. At meetings, I’m generally the guy that thumps the piano. Sometimes I draw cartoons just to get people laughing, you know, promote solidarity. People fight a lot better when they can sing, or when they’ve got something to laugh at.”

“Who tells you what to do? Do you get paid by the locals where you go, or by a national office, or what?”

He stiffened a little at that, delicately touched in his pride. “I never took a dollar from the union.”

Her face went pink with the easy blush, and he saw that she felt rebuked. Watching her reach up self-consciously to smooth the pages of the music notebook, he thought of how much he could tell her that would shock her pious ignorance, and felt magnanimous for keeping still. “I guess I don’t quite understand what it is you do.” I guess not. The struggle of labor against the bosses was more than she ever would understand.

“You have to live
somehow
, though,” she said.

He laughed. “A man can live quite a while on what he can mooch from free-lunch counters in saloons.”

That brought her eyes up, testing him to see if he were joking. In a careful voice she said, “I see. Where do you sleep?”

“Under bridges, out in the jungles, on park benches. Or I can always unroll a blanket on the floor of the local hall.”

Just when he expected her to smile she gave him her direct, serious look. “It’s your whole life, isn’t it?”

Somehow he felt the question as an accusation, and he stood up, tired of this conversation. He had taken a lot of satisfaction in doing for the past week what he had been doing, but he did not want to sit and justify himself and his life to Ingrid Olson.

“Let’s go down and take in a show,” he said.

A little smile of malice curled her mouth. “Can you get tickets at a free-lunch counter?”

Joe shrugged. “You gave me my supper. Why should you kick at buying me tickets to a show?”