Joe Hill (24 page)

The crew was not yet in. Stripped to the waist, Joe washed in the plank trough that smelled of old soap and wet redwood. He took his time letting the cool water run over hands and wrists and arms, splashing it over face and chest, bending to let the tap run on the back of his neck and over his hair. He was almost through when the crew came in; the late tired afternoon
was full of their laughter. Saturday afternoon. Payday. A week ago he and Art had been walking through the hop camp, getting the lay of the land. He recalled that he had been angry at the pickers for the way they could laugh and pick a guitar even in a stinkhole like that one. That was it, that was always it—the way people could stand anything and take a little fun out of their slavery. Until dinner he went in and lay out on the bunk, not thinking of anything, just letting pictures flow through his mind, drift on a current of slow unfocused anger. The tin roof popped once or twice, contracting after the day’s heat.

Immediately after supper he packed his bindle, but it was still more than two hours until he could pick up the train. In the cool of evening, brushed by the soft wind that came down from the hills toward the sea, he sat alone in the bunkhouse door with his pay in his pocket. Four days, four dollars. Not enough to pay for one of McHugh’s shirts. Nevertheless McHugh thought of himself as generous to his help. Four dollars in his pocket, a loner by temperament and a rebel by dedication, a man on his way from something and to something, Joe sat in the evening’s coolness in the fragrance of unknown flowers blooming along the bunkhouse wall, and as he sat there Gonzales, a big-mustached Mexican, one of the foreman’s many cousins, came out of the bunkhouse carrying a violin case. He sighed very loud, a long relaxing sound, as he settled back against the wall, and opening the case he took out a violin wrapped in a red silk handkerchief.

Very carefully he turned it in his brown gnarly hands, holding it to the light to see its shine, shifting it to see the changing image of his face. He rubbed the edge against his nose the way a pipe smoker will rub the warm bowl of a pipe on his skin to brighten it.

“You play it?” Joe said.

Gonzales was a man of great dignity. He smiled as if conferring a favor, and said, “It is a present for my son, who studies with the brothers in Santa Barbara. Next week he has his eighteenth birthday.”

“Let’s see it a minute,” Joe said. After a moment’s hesitation Gonzales laid the violin in his reaching hand. It was new and shiny with varnish. He picked the strings and got flat untuneful sounds.

“Give us the bow.”

Gonzales got it out of its little catch in the lid of the case.
There was a cake of resin in the green plush box. Somebody had sold him the works. Joe resined the bow and tuned the violin, looking at Gonzales over it as he fiddled with the keys and sawed in short strokes hunting the pure tone. Finally he drew the bow over all the strings, and they sang. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a young Mexican walking with his girl under the eucalyptus trees; the two stopped, ready to listen.

“Let us hear you play,” Gonzales said.

“I can’t play very well.”

“We shall judge,” Gonzales said, and lifted his shoulders and smiled.

Joe shifted his feet and body to give himself room. He felt the gun under his arm as he lifted the violin and settled his jaw over it. Out under the trees, a hundred feet away, the young Mexican said something in soft Spanish to his girl, and the sound of his voice in the cooling evening, the sight of Gonzales’ brown hands, stopped Joe with a moment’s sharp recollection of the brown hand of the picker in the dust, the dead sprawled across each other. Like a reflection one sees looking out from a lighted room just at dusk, when the near-dark outside is obscured and shadowed by the light within, he saw the faces—the dead deputy stooping over his knees, the sheriff with his black hair whitened by dust, the battered face of old Manderich.

Namelessly dead, unmarked and forgotten, carted off to the boneyard and dumped in a hole. Nameless and unregretted as a bug squashed, millions like them that he had never known, all of them nameless and forgotten, a checked seething in the earth. Joe Hillstrom too, Joe Hill, Swede, due to be knocked off sometime in some strike or riot and never missed. He hung with the violin against his collarbone and it seemed to him that nothing was worth the anguish and anger a man put into it. You were born on the flypaper, and for a while you buzzed and made a big noise, and in the end you settled down like the rest, sodden and wing-stuck and slimed with the glue.

The young Mexican and his girl laughed softly, standing expectant under the fabric of the great trees.

He searched his mind for something to play, something Spanish for Gonzales’ sake, something sad for the sake of the defeat that was upon the whole vast army of the slaves, something passively
melancholy for the sake of the plaintive wind sighing down from the cooling hills.

“La Golondrina.” He let it come with a sick feeling that he might cry, and he hated the clumsy stiffness of his hands, lame from axe and shovel handle. He played it and then he played it again, hearing it as a thin little sound of melody in the dusk, a thing that bent like smoke and drifted down toward the empty beaches.

The young Mexican and his girl clapped and laughed and walked on. The hanging leaves of the eucalyptus trees clashed softly. Over at the cookshack a screen door squeaked and a panful of water hit the ground with a sound like a slap. It was getting almost too dark to see Gonzales’ face, but when he spoke it was plain from the polite inflection of his voice that he was disappointed.

“That was very good. Have you taken lessons?”

“No,” Joe said. “I just picked it up.”

“It was very good,” Gonzales said. “I intend that my son shall take lessons.”

“I haven’t touched a violin for two or three years,” Joe said. “You get all out of practice.” Instantly he was annoyed at himself for apologizing to a fat-headed Mexican who valued a violin by the shine of its varnish. The song had moved him more than he wanted to be moved; he had heard it frail and thin and sad as waves on a lonesome shore. He needed to strike out at something to restore himself, but there was nothing to strike at, only Gonzales going on foolishly in the dark.

“Many can play the guitar, but few the violin. The violin is a finer instrument. More soul.”

“Yes,” Joe said. “More soul.” He stood up and handed the violin back, went in for his bindle, and came out to stand again in the doorway. Down at the shacks where several married hands lived there were already sounds of a party starting, though McHugh would not be around with the payroll until later. Joe had heard the men say that he always paid late on Saturday night, so late that a man could not get in to Santa Barbara, and must go instead on Sunday, when it became a thing to be confessed to the priest. No stars were visible anywhere in the whole sky. A creeping layer of cloud had come over, and it was already coalbin-dark. He would have to grope his way down to the siding like a blind man.

“Well,
adios
,” he said to Gonzales.

“Leaving?” the old man said in surprise.

When Joe did not reply, Gonzales said, “The road will be very dark.”

Joe had his bindle across his shoulder. Caution admonished him, and he said, “I was supposed to meet my brother in San Luis two days ago.”

“It’s no pleasure walking this late,” Gonzales said. “Maybe you can catch a ride with someone hauling.”

“I’ve got a blanket,” Joe said.

He attended the sound of his own soft footsteps in the dust, listening as if they were the footsteps of another, and he were Gonzales sitting against the wall hearing Joe Hill depart. There was a long lane of eucalyptus, close to a quarter of a mile, before the road swung to meet the driveway from the big house and the two fused to go out together to the King’s Highway.

At the Y of the roads, on his way toward circling back the way he had come in, Joe paused. It was almost impenetrably dark, with only the shine of the big house lights through the trees and shrubs that enclosed it, and an assassin’s desire seized him. He wanted to look in on them, watch them moving about unaware, sit in some safe covert and feed his hatred with their casual unguarded lives.

The clashing of palm fronds on the circular drive was loud, and he looked up, realizing that the wind had switched and was coming straight down the coast. In the dark and the noise of threshing branches it would be easy to go unseen and unheard. His ears sharp, he left the drive and slipped around to the back of the house, wondering if in his four days on the ranch he could have missed a dog at the big house. But he heard nothing, only the sigh and rasp and dry clash of wind in the trees.

From beyond the hedge he looked in avidly and saw a Mexican girl working in the kitchen, but he saw no one else, so he drifted on around the angle of the hedge, hugging the dense shadows of the palms. All along the side of the house the blinds were drawn, but far back, on the back wing, a light fell over the white blooms of an oleander bush and reached in slices and streaks almost to the hedge where Joe stooped and peered.

What he saw stiffened him to iron attention. Things that had
been suspended, even unsuspected, in his mind came down like an earthslide in the rains. With hardly a second’s hesitation, with hardly a thought, he put his hands on the pickets embedded in the hedge and vaulted over. Creeping among bushes, he came up in the midst of another oleander, his body screened by leaves. Through the blur of the mosquito bar on the window he saw the Coleman lamp’s white glare across the desk where McHugh sat doing something. Behind McHugh the office door was half open, and to the left, almost obscured by McHugh’s body so that Joe had to bend and peer to make sure, the terraced door of the office safe stood ajar.

He made three swift moves in preparation, as swift and sure as if they had been planned. He carried his bindle to the corner of the wing where he could find it instantly in the dark, he flipped the bandanna out of his pocket and tied it across his face, and he pulled the automatic, its metal warmer than his hand, from the shoulder holster.

His movements were so noiseless that he found himself standing in the short hall leading to the office and looking at McHugh’s unsuspecting back. The outside door he eased shut behind him. One step, then another, then another brought him almost to the inner door, but he held back against the wall because he did not want to expose himself to the window. Like a child in a game he found himself counting, one, two, three, and then he scraped his foot on the floor.

McHugh jerked around. For one flickering instant he looked straight into the gun before his eyes met Joe’s. He did not move; only his florid face changed, mottling and hardening slowly like cooling glass.

“Pull the blind,” Joe said.

The rancher’s eyes did not leave Joe’s as he reached and groped and pulled the shade. It took only the twitch of the muzzle to make him go back and pull it clear down, closing the two-inch slit he had tried to leave the first time. Still standing in the half shadow of the hall, Joe said, with a motion at the safe, “Unload it on the desk.”

Never turning even sideward to the gun, McHugh stooped and brought up papers with rubber bands around them, three wooden
drawers, a metal strong box. This he opened at Joe’s gesture. Inside was a canvas sack.

“Turn around and face the wall,” Joe said.

He stepped inside and opened the sack. Mostly silver, a small package of bills. He took only the bills. Patting the rancher’s rump, he felt the wallet and pulled it out. There were some bills in it too, which he wadded into his pocket with the others, throwing the gutted wallet on the desk. For a moment he stood thinking.

The ticking of the alarm clock on top of the safe filled the whole room; he saw that the hands pointed to five minutes past ten. In twenty minutes or so the passenger would pull off on the siding. It would be touch and go: he had been a fool to leap into this without thinking ahead. He saw too that the color had come back to McHugh’s face and neck. Standing with his back to Joe, his forehead against the wall, his hands half raised, he did not look frightened any more. There was a tension about his body that said he might try to make a fight. His neck was thick, his hair had thinned over a double crown, he was a boss and he drove a red Locomobile in to Santa Barbara, stirring up a mile of white dust on the King’s Highway, and he housed his married pickers in a string of derailed boxcars and the unmarried ones in a buggy bunkhouse. He took pride in the fact that he had put in a water faucet and a plank trough for washing.

He was a boss like Hale, an owner of human farm animals. His vest hung open, and from behind Joe saw how the heavy watch sagged the right lower pocket. Standing very still, he saw McHugh begin to fidget and sweat, he saw the fear come back, and he prolonged the moment now when the tables were turned and the boss was just a little man up against a power he couldn’t buck. This was a situation he remembered; he seemed to have lived it a hundred times, and the sharpest thing he remembered was the fat watch, the heavy sagging chain.

Deliberately and without heat he swung the clubbed gun and brought it down on McHugh’s thinning hair. The blow made a dull meaty sound, like a pick in soft dirt, and as McHugh pitched sideways Joe caught him and eased him to the floor. With a swift stretch he reached the Coleman lamp and turned the valve. For the moment before the light began to fade he stood waiting
above the rancher’s body. The gold watch, he saw, had slid out of his pocket as McHugh fell, and lay face up on the floor, a Swiss watch, thick and heavy, that told the second, the minute, the hour, the day and month and year. Fat and rich, a prize worth a hundred dollars, it lay at Joe’s feet.

As the lamp flared, dimmed, flared again yellowly, and dimmed to the reddening outline of the mantle, Joe set his heel on the face of the watch and ground down with all his weight on splintering crystal and metal. The instant the light flapped out he was through the outside door, reconnoitering, gathering up his bindle at the corner, and running.