Joe Hill (58 page)

For them, at least, there were no complications, no querying of the demands of vengeance, and justice, and love.

It was perhaps a minute after the pinch of white dust had blown upward and dissipated itself among the leaves before any sound came from the crowd. Then a single voice, hoarse and untuneful, insistent, full of a bawling ardor, started to sing. The song was “There Is Power in a Union”—one of Joe Hill’s.

Other voices joined in instantly. The song spread like a grassfire, so that within seconds the whole great crowd was singing.

No one proposed it, no one had had the idea before, but now all had it together. In an orderly column, six or eight abreast, holding up their red One Big Union pennants like the banners of an army, they fell in line by the hundreds until they were massed in a column half a mile long, and singing as they went, they marched out of the cemetery and down the streets of Seattle. When they came to the King County jail they spread out all around it, still singing.

Police appeared; during lulls in the singing we could hear the sirens as reinforcements came hurrying. But the crowd gave the police no cause to disperse it. Orderly, quiet, confident, almost carefree, they stayed massed outside the jail for two hours, singing to the
IWW
prisoners inside. Late in the afternoon, when they had sung themselves hoarse, they passed the hat and took up a collection for Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, awaiting trial in San Francisco on a charge of bombing the Preparedness Day parade.

The song they sang last, the one that groups of them were
still singing as the crowd broke up into groups and couples, was the one they had begun with:

W
ALLACE
S
TEGNER

Joe Hill

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) was the author of, among other novels,
Remembering Laughter
, 1937;
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
, 1943;
Joe Hill
, 1950;
All the Little Live Things
, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal);
A Shooting Star
, 1961;
Angle of Repose
, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize 1972);
The Spectator Bird
, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977);
Recapitulation
, 1979; and
Crossing to Safety
, 1987. His nonfiction includes
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
, 1954;
Wolf Willow
, 1963;
The Sound of Mountain Water
(essays), 1969;
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto
, 1974; and
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West
(1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the
Los Angeles Times
for his lifetime literary achievements. His
Collected Stories
was published in 1990.