Joe Hill (50 page)

Then there was a “pool of blood” found two or three blocks away from the Morrison store and the prosecution made a whole ocean out of it in spite of the fact that the Utah state chemist would not say that it was human blood. He said that the blood was of “mammalian origin.”

Then there is Miss Mohan, who is supposed to have heard somebody say “I’m shot.” At the preliminary hearing she was very uncertain about it. She said she thought she heard somebody say those words but she was not by any means sure about it
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Now, that’s all there is, to my knowledge, and I am positively sure that all this so-called “evidence” which is supposed to prove that the Morrison gun was discharged on the night of January 10, 1914, would not stand the acid test of a capable attorney, such as I am now in a position to get. At the time of my arrest I did not have money enough to employ an attorney. Thinking that there was nothing to my case, and always being willing to try anything once, I decided to go it alone and be my own attorney, which I did at the preliminary hearing
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A few days after that hearing an attorney by the name of McDougall came to see me at the county jail. He said he was a stranger in town and had heard about my case and would be willing to take the case for nothing. Seeing that the proposition was in perfect harmony with my bankroll, I accepted his offer. I will say for McDougall, though, that he was honest and sincere about it and would no doubt have carried the case to a successful finish if he had not got mixed up with that miserable shyster Mr. Scott. Before my trial, I pointed out the fact that the preliminary hearing records had been altered, but they said that the said record did not amount to anything anyway, and that it would do no good to make a holler about it
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Then the trial commenced. The first day went by with the usual questioning of jurors. The second day, however, something happened that did not look right to me. There was a jury of eight men entered the courtroom. They had been serving on some other case and came in to deliver their verdict, which was one of “guilty.” Then the court discharged all the jurors and they started to go home, but for some reason Judge Ritchie changed his mind and told three of them to come book and go up in the jury box and be examined for my case. I noted that these three men were very
surprised and that they did not expect to be retained for jury service. I have therefore good reason to believe that they were never sub-poenaed for the case, but just simply appointed by the court. One of these men, a very old man by the name of Kimball, was later on made “foreman” of the jury. During the course of the trial I was surprised to see that some of the witnesses were telling entirely different stories from the ones told by them at the preliminary hearing and I asked my attorneys why they did not use the records of the preliminary hearing and pin the witnesses down to their former statements. They then told me that the preliminary hearing had nothing to do with the district court hearing and that the record did not amount to anything. They did, however, use said records a little, but only for a bluff. After I had watched this ridiculous grandstand play for a while I came to the conclusion that I had to get rid of these attorneys and either conduct the case myself or else get some other attorney. I therefore stood up the first thing in the morning one day and showed them the door. Being the defendant in the case, I naturally thought I should have the right to say who I wanted to represent me, but to my surprise I discovered that the presiding judge had the power to compel me to have these attorneys in spite of all my protests. He ruled that they remain as “friends of the court” and that settled it. Mr. Scott went after one of the state witnesses in a way that convinced me he really could do good work when he wanted to. After he got through with this witness (Mrs. Seeley) he came up to me and said, “Now then, how did you like that?” I said, “That’s good, but why didn’t you do some of that before?” “Well, er …” he hesitated. “This was the first witness we had marked for cross-examination.” If that is not a dead give-away, then I don’t know anything. It will be noted that Mrs. Seeley is one of the last witnesses for the state
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I will now say something about the pistol which I had in my possession when I called at Dr. McHugh’s office to have my wound dressed. That pistol was a Luger caliber .30, a pistol of German make. I laid my pistol on the table while the doctor dressed my wound and I thought that he would be able to tell it from other pistols on account of its peculiar construction. He said he did not know, however, what kind of pistol mine was. That was an even break, and whenever I get an even break I
am not complaining. He did not, like most of the state witnesses, commit perjury, and is therefore in my opinion a gentleman. There was another doctor, however, by the name of Bird, who dropped in while Dr. McHugh was dressing my wound. He only saw the pistol as I put it in my pocket, and he said so at the preliminary hearing, but at the district court hearing he came up and deliberately swore that my pistol was exactly the same kind of pistol as the one that Morrison and his son were killed with
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As I said before, my pistol was a Luger .30. It was bought a couple of months before my arrest in a second hand store on West South Temple street, near the depot. I was brought down there in an automobile by three officers and the record of the sale was found on the books: price, date of sale, and everything just as I had stated. The books did not show what kind of a gun it was, however, and as the clerk who had sold it was in Chicago at the time a telegram was sent to him to which he sent this answer: “Remember selling Luger gun at that time. What’s the trouble?” I bought the pistol on Sept. 15, 1913, for $16.50. Anybody may go to the store and see the books
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Now anyone can readily understand that I am not in a position where I could afford to make any false statements. I have stated the facts as I know them in my own simple way. I think I shall be able to convince every fair-minded man and woman who reads these lines that I did not have a fair and impartial trial in spite of what the learned jurists may say to the contrary. If you don’t like to see perjurors and dignified crooks go unpunished, if you don’t like to see human life being sold like a commodity on the market, then give me a hand. I am going, to stick to my principles no matter what may come. I am going to have a new trial or die trying
.

Yours for Fair Play
,

J
OE
H
ILL

Under Lund’s window the street lights had come up. Across an acreage of roofs and chimneys he saw the sky die swiftly from blood-red to rust to slate gray. There were gaps in Joe’s argument, sophistries, substitutions of plausibilities for fact, a jesuitical seizing of technicalities, a profound and perhaps significant silence about the crucial circumstances of his wound, his throwing away of the
gun, his sharp whistles outside the Erickson house before Dr. Bird took him in, the suspicious flight of Otto Applequist. Yet the statement was plausible too; it had, even in its sophistries, the ring of a man who believed what he said. The gaps could easily be there because he was honorably hiding something, woman business or union business, that prevented frankness. Despite the gaps, Lund believed. Whatever Joe was hiding it was not guilt, or at least the guilt for the crime he was charged with.

One statement could clear him, if he would make it. But instead of that he would go to his death arguing technicalities and plausibilities, either because he hoped they would save him or for some enigmatic reason that was like a bad joke persisted in. Or he might be freed by the under-cover, confidential manipulation of a relationship and a connection that Joe himself would scorn to acknowledge and refuse to use.

To a simple man with a moral view, the differences between guilt and conviction, innocence and freedom, were a trouble to the mind.

The visiting room at the State Prison. In the center a rectangular steel cage, a room within a room. On three sides of the cage, inside and outside of the screen, a scarred table, and on inside and outside continuous benches. Visitors and prisoners sit on the benches, their arms on the table, and talk through the net of steel. On the fourth side the cage opens into the prison yard by a barred door. Prisoners are brought in here, visitors come through the office from the front entrance. At both entrances stand uniformed guards. The walls of the visiting room are plaster painted a robin’s-egg blue except for a wainscot strip of pebbled metal painted a poisonous and angry green.

At the entrance from the office a little group stands uneasily quiet—Ingrid Olson and her mother, Jud Ricket and Jack Carpenter of the defense committee, Gustave Lund. In a few minutes
Joe Hillstrom enters the cage from the prison yard, handcuffed between two guards, one of whom detaches himself. The other comes along and sits down beside Joe on the inside bench.

Ricket says something under his breath and Carpenter lurches on his crooked leg. The two women look uncertainly at the men, the men look back. There is only a half-hour altogether; someone must go first. And with the guard there it will be hurried, public, dismal. The prison does not leave a guard with anyone but Joe. In the cage two other prisoners are talking with visitors in a freedom that seems extravagant by comparison.

At last Ricket, with a last questioning look at the others, shrugs and starts forward. At the screen, still standing, he puts out his hand to touch Joe’s fingers in the parody of a handshake, but the guard warns him off. Beside Lund Jack Carpenter jerks with anger, muttering.

Joe looks wasted and pale from sickness and imprisonment, his scarred face is wedge-thin, but he sits erectly with the guard like an enormous manacle on his left wrist, and he smiles. Even from forty feet away Lund sees his eyes, how passionate and troubling a blue.

The group by the door cannot hear what Ricket says. He talks earnestly, his head close to the wire, and Joe listens, nods, nods again, smiles. He says something and Ricket replies.

Abruptly Ricket is on his feet. Contemptuously he raises his hand, turns it around several times before the face of the guard to show that he has nothing concealed in it, and touches the tips of his fingers to Joe’s. For a moment he is bent, concentratedly bowed toward the prisoner; then he breaks away and comes back toward them massive and grim. Jack Carpenter starts, half turns in question of the unspoken order they follow, and goes on.

Carpenter does not sit down, and his voice is loud enough to be heard. He ignores the guard; to him the man is not there. He looks through the screen, his bad leg bent, his body twisted to balance his weight, and he says, “This isn’t goodbye, Joe. I want you to know that. I’m not sayin’ goodbye. All I want to say is keep your chin up in here, keep fightin’. That’s what we’re doin’ outside, and we’ll win yet. You’ll be out of here a free man.”

He stops. His throat works. With a harsh violence he raises his hands and shakes them fiercely before his face. “Okay, boy!” he
says, and swings and comes limping back. Lund looks away, not to watch his face.

The remaining three hang, hesitating. “Next?” the guard at the door says. “Who’s next?”

Ingrid pushes her mother forward, and Lund feels a pang of fierce jealousy, thinking that next time she will try to shove him ahead, keep the final minutes for herself. Lover or friend, who has the most right? Joe has wired him to come. He glances again at Ingrid and sees unexpected lines in her face and neck; she looks strained, prudish, a vinegarish old maid, waving her mother on.

The woman comes up slowly to the wire net. Her hands start to come up and fall again quickly as she glances at the guard. With her hands like dead birds on the table she slumps to the bench and leans forward. Lund hears only her first words, “Oh, Joseph!” and then murmurs and the sound of her crying. He sees Joe’s stiff head nod, he sees the long look Mrs. Olson gives him, and then she too comes stumbling back.

Lund feels unclean, watching her face twisted with crying, and he wonders what the guards are made of, to sit impassively handcuffed to scenes like this. If the girl goes now he doesn’t want to watch. He knows her face will crumble as it crumbled at the gate when they talked the first time. It would have been better if none of them had come. They all pretend hope, they all carry in their minds the possibility that Hilton’s efforts will bring a last-minute reprieve, but they all come too with the knowledge that this may be their last look at Joe and their last word. He knows the girl will collapse.

He will not quarrel with her over precedence or time. She may go now or he will. For a moment their eyes met, Lund makes a gesture, a motion indicating that she may choose. She has her arm around the shaking shoulders of her mother, and her face is raised. A nod, and she has taken her arm away and is walking firmly toward the cage.

So far as Lund can hear or see—and he watches painfully, unable to look away—she says nothing, and neither does Joe. He cannot see Ingrid’s face, only her stiff back, but he can see Joe’s pale cheek and the almost luminous even blue stare.