Joe Hill (37 page)

“You can go pull it by yourself then.”

“It’s easier with two. One can keep him quiet while the other goes through him.” Stooping until his rump stuck far out behind and his chin was on his stacked hands, he watched Joe steadily as a dog waiting for something to drop from a table. He looked ridiculous in that position, like the rear end of one of the masquerade donkeys in a political parade. “I always thought you’d be a good one to hook up with,” he said. “You never fooled me, not for a minute. But you got a talent for keeping your mouth shut.”

In front of Joe the player roll was punched with dots and dashes and staggered lines of holes like some intricate code. He felt as if he leaned back against some strong pressure from behind. The last thing he wanted was to get mixed up with Otto. If he took what the world owed him as a workingman, he would take it alone.

But he sat silent, and Otto said, “This guy’s somebody I’ve had my eye on for a couple weeks. He don’t vary by ten minutes from one night to the next. He walks those two blocks like he was walking a beat.”

Joe rotated gently on the stool, pushing himself clear around until he was back facing Otto’s mottled intent eyes. “How do you know all this?”

“I keep my eyes open,” Otto said.

Joe’s foot had started him around again. “What time does he close his joint?”

“Nine-thirty.”

He felt as if a pump were blowing his insides full of cold air. Light and empty, he swung around again to face Otto.

“What time is it now?”

Before Otto could answer, the clock in the dining room began to strike, and they sat facing each other, silently counting, until it stopped at eight.

The first thing Lund did when he got off the train in Salt Lake City was to call the county jail. An asthmatic voice told him, between coughing spells, that visiting hours were three to four Tuesday and Friday. Today was Tuesday. He was lucky. But court would be in session until three-thirty. There was only the half-hour opportunity, and unless he wanted to go to the courtroom first he had more than six hours to kill. He told himself that he did not want to go to court knowing as little as he did. Maybe he didn’t want to go to court at all.

Eight years of uninterrupted work in the mission had made a provincial of him. The baggage carts and the redcaps and the newsstand girl and the big waiting-room mural that showed the driving of the golden spike were strangenesses, almost dangers, to his senses. He felt clumsy in the cool vault of the station, and when he stepped outside he got stranded on the sidewalk under a blast of white sun.

The newspaper item that had pulled him off the train was torn out and folded into his breast pocket. He had to know more, but where would he go for information? Not the sheriff’s office, where there would probably be nothing but official indifference. Not the
IWW
hall, which would be dispensing partisan hysteria. A helplessness weighed upon him; when he put down his bag to think a moment, a bellhop captured it and led him to a big yellow hotel bus.

His room at the hotel held him only ten minutes. In another ten he was standing before the semicircular desk in the public library. A librarian came up and looked at him.

“Do you keep back files of the Salt Lake papers?”

“How far back?”

He consulted the scrap of newspaper in his pocket. “Beginning January 9, this year.”

“The whole file from then to now?”

“If it’s not too much trouble, please.”

“It may be at the bindery,” she said. “If you’ll wait a minute I’ll see. This month’s are all on the rack over there.”

Against the wall where she pointed, the papers hung in their wooden holders. But he didn’t want to get the story backwards; he wanted to follow it as it had unfolded. It was important to him to know, and to know straight.

In five minutes the girl was back, sliding two ponderous volumes in new red binding across the desk. “Just came back,” she said pertly, smiling. She shoved a card at him, and he signed, took the volumes in his arms, found an unoccupied table, sat down. The new binding opened stiffly; he pressed it down, turning the pages until he found the date he wanted: January 9, 1914.

The front page showed him nothing that he was looking for, and he had hunted through two more pages before he realized that January 9 was the night it had happened. It wouldn’t have been reported until the next day.

In the January 10 paper there was no need to hunt. It was there in black headlines, a two-column story clear down the page, and more over on page 4. He read it through carefully, and on to the next day, and so on, hunting up every item. At noon he was still reading. When the reading room emptied he went obediently too, found a lunchroom on the corner, spent fifteen minutes there, and came back to read again. It was nearly one o’clock when he finished.

For a considerable still time he sat thinking. Around him was a dry rustle as readers turned pages. He saw, out of his abstraction, the faces of strangers, strange windows in a strange room, strange light through the windows from a strange city outside. In this foreign place he sat like a parent brought to hear accusations against his son, and though he willed disbelief he was forced to admit that there were puzzles, ambiguities, qualities of Joe Hillstrom’s character and fragments of Joe Hillstrom’s history, that lent some credibility to the charges. Even the story Joe told about
the woman: anyone who knew Joe Hillstrom would instantly doubt it. Yet it was his only defense.

Things he did not want to remember came to the surface of his mind like corks that could not be held under. Except for stretches of longshoring, he did not know of a job that Joe had held in three years. In spite of his apparent idleness, there were those forty dollars in crumpled bills that he had thrust on Lund in the kitchen of the mission. There was the gun he had thrown him for hiding at the same time. There was that earlier time when he had come in with his face cut and the gun in his pocket. There was the long schooling in violence, the whiplash temper, the fights that had marked his face and jaw.

He thought of the way Joe could look sometimes when he was interested and animated, chasing down an idea, how his eyes could widen in the innocent stare while his lips twisted with irony. With that image sharp in his mind he turned again to the picture of Joe in the clipping he had torn from the paper on the train. Before he looked at it again he had repudiated the implications of that face.

Joe’s cheeks were emaciated, blackened with a week’s beard. The lips were drawn back wolfishly. Out of hollow sockets the eyes smoldered half-lidded and contemptuous. Joe must have known when the picture was taken that he had a face to scare babies, yet he had turned it straight into the camera in bitterness and contempt. It was the face of a desperado—or of an El Greco martyr before suffering or art or both had refined the passion and defiance out of the eyes and mouth. He tried to read it, to see behind it, but he could not for his life have said whether it was the face of a guilty man showing his teeth or that of an innocent one bitter at injustice. If it had not had a caption under it he would never have known it for the face of Joe Hillstrom.

There was more to be learned—there had to be—but not here. He closed the volumes and carried them back to the desk, where the librarian stood up to receive them, an anonymous young woman in a green eyeshade and glasses. She looked at him and smiled an indistinguishable smile. “Did you find what you wanted?”

“Yes. Yes, thanks.” Looking at the notes in his hand, he said, “I wonder if you can direct me to a couple of places? Is the county jail somewhere near here?”

The girl’s glasses flashed up. “The jail?”

“Yes.”

“That’s down on Second East, between Fourth and Fifth South. You’d go four blocks down and one left.”

“Good. Now how would I get to Eighth South and West Temple?”

She drew him a little map on the back of the sign-out card. Eight blocks south, two west. “But the blocks here are long,” she said. “You’d better catch a streetcar down on the next corner and ride as far as Eighth South. Either a 6 car or a 12.”

She was a pleasant and helpful young woman, and he thanked her. It occurred to him that Joe had probably, during his stay in Salt Lake, used the library. He was tempted to describe him, or show his picture, and ask the librarian if she had ever noticed him around, but that seemed a fruitless sort of investigation, and he thanked her again and left, to emerge from the strange reading room into the strangely brassy and unmisted sun. A sprinkler was going on the library’s lawn, badly gone to plantain weeds. Somewhere chimes rang the half-hour. He had still two hours before he could see Joe in the jail. Down the steep sidewalk, under the freckled shade of trees, he walked to the corner and waited for a car.

Eighth South was wide and dusty. In vacant lots the weeds were head high, with a strong pulpy smell. Big cottonwoods grew along the parking strip, shading the whole street. Their leaves were an intense, varnished green; June cotton blew from their opening pods and drifted the street like snow. Sprinklers going on the lawns made erratic pools of cool air that he walked through.

Crossing Main Street, he passed three boys hunting sparrows with slingshots. Ahead he could see that the street dwindled off after a couple of blocks, and across the end he saw the smoke of a switch engine. The telephone wires were beaded with blackbirds that suddenly darted up in a cloud and left the looped wires swinging.

It was a calm, quiet, neighborly street. West Temple, when he came to it and stopped to fix it in his mind, was another of the same. But he saw the butcher shop and grocery on the corner. Cowan’s Market, Morrison’s Grocery, two neighborhood shops side by side under the same roof, and he walked up West Temple
on the opposite side, trying to visualize how this block and these stores might have looked on the night of January 9. The newspaper reports had been detailed. He knew a good deal about the outward events of that night, and they built up for him now like something played on a stage:

The night was mild for winter, with the temperature on the edge between thaw and freeze. The streets were muddy, the slush at the sidewalk-edges just crusting the slightest bit. Except in the shelter of bushes and houses the snow was all melted off. Overhead the sky was opaque, without moon or stars, low and shut in by smoke. The winter smoke cloud was an acrid bite in the nostrils, a taste in the mouth like a railroad tunnel.

Up this street, coming from the west under tight poplars that even leafless would throw solid pillars of shadows, walkers would have come out of the winter murk like characters out of a story by Poe. First the footsteps, hard to locate; then the shadows, darker than the dark and smoke, more fluid than the poplars, emerging and taking shape. They came toward the corner, a tall man and a shorter one, and near the intersection, within the glow of the arc light, they met a couple returning from a show. Neither man made a move to step aside. They came straight on, crowding the woman off into the slush. As she swung indignantly she saw the taller one for a moment plain: a thin face and a sharp nose, a soft felt hat, no overcoat, a red bandanna tied loosely around the throat.

Lund walked in the tracks of the two men to the corner, turned with them up West Temple toward the store. When he stopped before the entrance he saw that the store had been closed for some time. Putting his nose against the window he shaded his eyes and looked in upon two dusty counters, empty vegetable bins, bare shelves, the cash register with its drawer hanging open, the icebox with its door ajar. His imagination peopled the stage as the news reports and the testimony of witnesses directed: front left, Morrison trundling a sack of potatoes toward the bins. Back, left, his seventeen-year-old son Arlin sweeping the floor in front of the icebox. Back, right, the younger son, Merlin, at the entrance to the stock room.

Experimentally he put his thumb on the latch and depressed it, feeling how it might have been for the burglar the moment before the act, this moment with the cold latch under the left
hand, the right hand pulling the handkerchief up over his face and then going under the coat for the gun.

He felt how it might have been to enter the store swiftly, gun in hand, breath hot under the handkerchief, and to shout the words that young Merlin Morrison heard: “We’re got you this time!” How Morrison would have started up from his stooping position, his hands still around the ears of the potato sack; how Arlin and his brother would freeze at their cleaning-up jobs at the rear of the store.

He felt it as vividly as something remembered, but at that point of confrontation his imagination balked. The story that Merlin Morrison had told in court didn’t contain enough of the essential details. A terrified boy of thirteen, he had dilated some points and totally missed others. And even if he had seen everything that happened, there was nothing in what he would have seen to tell Lund or anyone else
why
the two men had come to this dusty little store at nine forty-five on a winter night with guns in their hands and bandanna masks over their faces. To Lund, at least, that
why
was everything.