Joe Hill (29 page)

Like the dressing room and the showers, the room was empty. It smelled faintly rotten, and its walls were clammy as a cave, with great drops congealed on them. For a moment he was afraid the place was out of order, or closed because of the hot weather, but then he saw the big valve on the wall, and turned it.

There was a hissing, an internal bubbling and rumbling; a few drops of water trembled from the vent and were overtaken by a white gush of steam. As he stepped back he felt pleasure in merely watching how it came, a jet as big as his wrist rolling in clouds to the ceiling and spreading, moving, filling the corners and eddying lower, reaching out tendrils, sinking and billowing and driving the cold air downward and mixing with it until the whole room was murky, so thick with steam that the door swam and vanished. The smell of the steam was strong, a living, meaty, half-foetid, rotten-egg smell that was like many bad smells, offensive until it had been breathed awhile, and then almost pleasant. Like the smells of his own body, this steam seemed a part of him.

He was in the midst of a deep hot cloud, and as the steam hissed steadily into the room the heat grew. The goose-pimples that the damp had raised on his legs and arms were smoothed away; his scalp began to prickle with the first sweat. At a certain stage of heat he took off the bathing suit and threw it on the bench; stooping, he rubbed gently at his ankles, black with travel. Under his fingers the warm moist skin gave up its dirt, the black rubbed off and the skin was white. Without haste he rubbed himself all over, and finally he stretched out on the bench with his head on his arms. For a time the bench was cool against his skin, but before long even that sensation melted away and he became one with the enduring lubricative warmth. He stretched his arms, as supple as rubber.

The prickling of scalp and skin had passed. Every pore in his body was open and breathing. The drops that rolled down his body were sweat or steam or both, the inward and outward waters merging, impurities gently washing out of him, warmth washing in. His mind was stunned. In a long time, his only movement was to pull himself up from the bench, which was growing hard against his belly and hipbones, and draw himself up with his arms clasped around his shins, his forehead on his knees. There, watching with half-open eyes how the vapor changed and rolled, he felt his lungs softened and moistened and warmed until it seemed that he breathed with gills like a fish. The angular corners of the room were gone. As flexible as rubber, he sat folded together, and the steamy room enclosed him like a sheath.

He all but slept. Lulled, protected, sluiced in and out with moisture and warmth, his lungs working evenly like gills, his heavy head drooping against his knees, he drifted for an indefinite time without a conscious sensation, a thought, or a memory.

A bang and clatter and outcry shocked him awake. The door slammed open, a draught of cold air rushed across him bringing tension and resistance and anger. He sat as he had been, but stiffly now, and willed the intruders to go away, while his mind yearned backward and downward toward the comfort and safety from which he had been aroused. But the makers of the racket stayed in the door, shouting for someone else to come. They came in coughing and choking and one bumped against Joe and startled himself into an exclamation. Joe twisted away from the touch, hating the way they coughed and laughed and spatted each other with wet hands.

The sheath was ripped, the hammock broken, the light let in, the cold admitted, the spell gone. After a minute of rebellion, Joe took his suit and went out of the steam room to stand under the hard insistence of a cold shower. The shower drove the dream deeper and washed away the anger. He was feeling good, clean, awake, when he passed again through the corridor and threw his towel in the hamper and slid suit and key across the metal counter top toward the attendant.

Now he stood purged and clean on the outskirts of the city, most of which was cut off from his view by trees and by the benchland on which the capitol stood. There was something hidden and contained
about the city that pricked his curiosity; he wanted to get up on some high place and get a good look at this pious Mormon burg he had alighted in. Also, the steam and the cold shower had sharpened and multiplied his perceptions. He felt like a person with second sight. Something hovered ahead of him in the tree-shrouded city, and he saw himself as a small, clean, shriven figure approaching the city under the hot dome of afternoon. Something about this town made him move alertly. He sniffed, searching for familiar smells, and when he met people on the slanting street going up toward the capitol he glanced sharply into their faces, half expecting to recognize them.

The bench brought him out above a wide panorama of the valley. Below him he recognized the turtle-backed tabernacle and the six gray spires of the Mormon temple, a view almost exactly like one he had seen on a stereopticon slide. Back of him the capitol, massive and dome-topped, spoke to him of the power and strut of the law as the temple spoke of the power of the church. And far across the valley, beyond all the streets and past the last straggle of trees and miles across the arid flats south-westward, the stacks of smelters fumed slowly at the foot of the next range. Power again, the Copper Trust, the silver magnates.

The homes of Salt Lake City were humble, buried in trees, only the occasional glint of their roofs showing how they lined the trenches of the streets. But the homes of power were tall. Banks and business buildings leaped up tall at the foot of the hill, the temple spired upward to its gilded angel, the tall stacks of the mining bosses smoked across the valley. Above them all, lordly on its eminence, was the home of the law.

Sitting in the shade of a spindling new tree, he remembered a story a carpenter had told him in San Pedro. The carpenter and two other men had been working in the new office of the governor on a Saturday afternoon, fitting baseboard and trim. Taking advantage of the quiet, the carpenter brought a pint back with him from lunch. They had all taken a pull at it and corked it up when the governor came in to show his quarters to friends. The carpenter hastily shoved the pint in against a stud and went on working. But the governor’s party stayed so long that he eventually had to case the bottle in. It was there yet in the wall back of the governor’s desk.

For a moment Joe told himself that it was a good and laughable thing that the secret whiskey was there. It was a flaw in the imposing perfection, an expression of a workingman’s right to be himself. But he couldn’t stay amused. For one thing, the worker had lost his bottle, and that was the way it always went. For another, he shouldn’t have been the slave of the bottle in the first place. The system made a drinker out of him and then beat him out of his drinks. The secret pint in the wall didn’t mean anything after all. He wished it were a bomb.

But the feeling that something impended, that soon now he would remember what errand had brought him here to the heart of the sticks, remained with him. He was on the run, yes. It seemed that he was always on the run from something. But he was coming toward something, too. This town felt ominous with meaning, as if there had been a forgotten reason and a destined meeting. Yet the only things he could see from the hill that might have relevance to his life were the arrogant triple symbols of the system’s power.

In his room that night, in the boardinghouse run by Mother Wynn on North Temple Street under the shadow of the gilded angel, he sat and wondered if he should not go out and hunt up the hall. But after the close call in San Pedro he felt the need of caution. It wouldn’t hurt to smell around Salt Lake a little before making himself known. Besides, he felt languid, drained by the heat, and though he heard voices down on the porch where it was cooler, he did not move. Tomorrow he might find friends among them, good union men, or workers who might be talked into taking out a card, but he would not exert himself to know them now.

Idly he reached over and picked up the Gideon Bible that lay on the washstand. Inside he read the little message from the Gideon Society, and on the flyleaf the neat inscription: “Mother Wynn—Please accept as a token of gratitude this little book I just dashed off—with. Jesus H. O’Dwyer.”

Turning the page, he read from the beginning of Genesis, and he had got as far as the generations of Adam when he looked up to see that the window was no longer giving him enough light, and that he was straining his eyes in the dusk reading a thing in which he no longer had even the interest of contempt. But when
he started to toss the book back on the stand he hesitated and held it more to the light to read a little further. There was a terrible, uncompromising sadness about the monotonous verses of begats:

And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness … and called his name Seth.… And the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.… And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan … and Cainan lived seventy years, and begat Mahalaleel.… And Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.… And all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years, and he died
 …

Like grains of sand pouring between his fingers the generations came and passed, and centuries after they had passed the dry husks of their names made a forlorn sound in the world in which they and all their works were as grass.

This was the stuff millions of good Christians read for gospel. This was the way they built up patience in themselves to accept what they were given and bear the yoke they bore. And one generation of workers worked and got nothing and bore children and died, and another generation labored and was cheated and begot children and died, and all the days of every generation were sixty or seventy years of sweat and sickness and wage slavery, and they died.

He threw the Bible on the floor and looked out the window. Across a narrow court was the brick back of a shop, with two windows shedding light across the littered court. What went on behind the windows was so apt to his mood that it might have been staged for his benefit alone.

A baker in a white hat and short-sleeved underwear worked at a big table. His motions were jerky and precise, reduced to an inflexible routine. From a tub he reached a pillow of dough, slashed once with his knife, slapped the dough on the table, kneaded and flopped and kneaded and stretched and flopped, and tucked the wad in one of a string of pans. Another slice, and again the slap knead flop stretch flop. A row of filled pans grew along the table, magically moving ahead of the magical mechanical motions of the baker.

Watching him, Joe was reminded of the sign above the Peerless Pool Parlor in San Pedro. Both baker and sign had the mechanical
perfection, the rigid regularity, of a string of begats. This was the way life was arranged. They sliced you off and slapped you in a pan and smeared you with lard and shoved you into the ovens, and after a while out you came, one more loaf of bread. Or maybe they had you scheduled for something fancy. Maybe you were due to be coffee cake, and then they ran you through a different mill and sprinkled raisins and chopped nuts around on you and baked you a little less or a little more.

What good does it do to fight it? a treacherous little voice said in his mind. You’re on a treadmill, you just waste your strength. But he put the voice down, and he assured himself that even though Marx said the domination of the proletariat was inevitable, and that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself, yet there had to be agents and workers and fighters to bring the destruction about, and maybe hurry it.

But it was really unfair the way they mixed life up for a man. They carelessly dropped nuts and raisins around in ordinary dough and produced something like himself, neither bread nor coffee cake. The whole futile cloud of his ambitions rose up before his eyes and offended his sight. A poet. An artist. A musician. Akh!

He stayed at the window a long time, watching the jerky unalterable motions of the baker, until the baker pitched three tubs one inside the other and slid them down the table and the light clicked off to leave only a vague interior glow in which shadows of movement went on, incomprehensible for all his peering and staring and straining to penetrate the smeared light-struck glass.

The morning newspaper told him that the cornerstone had been laid at a new Mormon ward house, and showed him the faces of the men and women who had participated in the ceremonies. It informed him of a controversy between a Better Government committee and the sheriff about conditions at the county jail, and of the death of a tramp who had been found along the Western
Pacific tracks between Salt Lake and Black Rock, and of a family stabbing in Bingham. It gave him the information that ore shipments from the Silver King, Daly-Judge, and Apex mines were up thirteen per cent above the same period of the preceding year, and that the Second International was meeting in Switzerland and denouncing nationalism and war. But it told him nothing about what was happening in Sacramento, and he looked carefully among strange names and strange faces up and down the columns of the whole paper without finding any clue to the expectancy he felt. It was as if he had come here to meet someone and could not remember who.