Joe Hill (5 page)

“Why not try organizing the scabs?” Lund said. “Every Wobbly I ever talked to wanted to beat every scab’s brains out. Scabs are workers too. Why not get together?”

“Why not talk sense?” Joe said in disgust. “A scab is a scab just because he
won’t
organize. And a scab isn’t a worker, either. He’s a worker from the neck down. From the neck up he’s a capitalist.”

They were nose to nose, and their voices had risen. Lund looked around quickly, made a disgusted sound under his mustache, shoved Joe’s shoulder to take the unfriendliness out of anything he had said, and stepped up on the platform by the piano.

Joe found a magazine and sat down against the wall. He did not listen to Lund’s short reading from the Bible, and when the others, lonesome sailors and derelicts, stood up dutifully to sing for their coffee and doughnuts, Joe remained in his chair, tilted back against the wall. But he laid aside his magazine and listened to Lund’s closing remarks, because he saw that Lund was speaking directly at him.

“… what it is that we are after in this life,” the missionary said. “We carry around all our lives a load of bitterness and discontent, pretending that it’s something else than what it is. We hate the rich, or hate the capitalistic system, or hate women, or hate politicians, or hate God. But I’ll tell you what we really hate. We hate ourselves.”

Heavy, his chest and shoulders bulky in his too-small coat, his face shining a little in the warmth of the close room, he leaned on the back of a chair and spoke at Joe, watching him steadily and crinkling the corners of his eyes slightly and speaking with an unpretentious dignity so that Joe was compelled to watch him and listen. “We hate ourselves,” he said. “We hate our own failures and our own weaknesses. We hate ourselves because we cannot help comparing what we are with what we might be. Our discontent is the voice of God in us, prodding us to live up to ourselves. Until we recognize and admit this we will always turn savagely outward, destroying other things because ourselves are at fault.”

His mustache twitched and his eyes crinkled more deeply. For a second he seemed to smile with some inward knowledge; his square teeth showed briefly. “Live up to the best that’s in you and
you’ll stand all right with God and man,” he said almost lamely, and picked up his Bible and stepped down.

The self-regulating life of the mission went on, ignoring Joe Hillstrom where he sat. Two men drifted outside. Two others came to Lund for paper and pencil and sat down to write letters. A checker game, interrupted by the services, started up again. The dead afternoon slid toward evening. Finally Joe stood up, wandered over to the piano, put out a finger and touched a key. The single pure note hung in the air, and he felt that everything in the room momentarily stopped. He half wished he had played the piano for Lund. What difference would it have made?

But he felt sullen and irritable now, and he did not turn toward Lund. For a little while there had been here the welcome he had hungered for—which was a sour thought when you pondered it, that you had no place to go except a mission or a
YMCA
. But he didn’t belong here, really, he didn’t want a lot of greasy preaching thrown at his head, he didn’t want his soul saved. Lund was not his land. The room was full of his kind, sailors and workingmen on the drift, but when he looked at them from the platform he saw no face that he knew and no one to whom he had anything to say. If he had been a user of tobacco he might have borrowed a match or a pinch of
snus
. If he had been a drinking man he might have said to one of them, “Let’s go get a can of beer someplace.” Out of the casual opiates of his kind he might have manufactured some bond, at least a temporary one, between himself and these others. But he didn’t even have beer and tobacco in common with them.

He laid his hand again on the piano, tried a whole handful of keys, a jangling discord. Then he hooked the stool with his toe and pulled it over and sat down, swinging on the rotating seat until he faced the keyboard.

For a while he fooled around, building up chords and listening to the way they mounted. There was a pleasure in the sounds like the pleasure of being clean and in good clothes. He limbered his stiff fingers on scales, and from scales he wandered off into little hesitating tunes, feeling out the combinations with hands and ears. Across the piano’s corner he could see Lund’s big solid back, and he let his fingers work out on the keys the orderly pattern of Lund’s beliefs. Live a Christian life and work hard and develop
your talents and stay away from bad companions and turn the other cheek and organize in some good sound
AFL
union and make well-bred demands and thank the bosses when they raise your wages ten cents a day, or forgive them when they lay you off or cut your pay envelope. Above all, take your licking philosophically when they break your strikes with Pinkertons and gunmen. Be polite and the plutocrats might toss you a bone. Maybe there’ll be a job scabbing on someone less polite. You might get to be Casey Jones the Union Scab, and blow a whistle on the
S.P.
line.

The tune came to his fingers and he played it through. Casey Jones the Union Scab. All the engineers and firemen who wouldn’t come out in support of the trainmen. All the boomers who jumped up to form scab crews and beat the trainmen before their strike got a start. All the scissorbills who were good and faithful to the bosses, and got their reward in heaven, or in the neck. He could prophesy the course of this strike from the earful he had got from pickets in the San Jose yards.

His fingers were still working over the tune of “Casey Jones.” Words began to fit themselves to it, an ironic parody that made him go without a word to Lund’s desk and grab up a piece of paper. He wrote the song almost as if from dictation, with very little crossing out and thinking, and when he stopped to read them over cold he had two verses and two choruses.

A line at a time he coaxed it along, juggling St. Peter, the Pearly Gates, harps, wings, angels, until they fell into place, erasing and changing until he had another verse:

Now Lund was looking over his shoulder. “Inspiration?”

Rotating on the stool, Joe passed him the sheet. “Communication to the Brotherhood of Railway Engineers.” He swung gently, indifferently, but he kept Lund’s face in the periphery of his vision, and the way Lund’s smile widened as he read was a thing of importance. He waited for the laugh, and it came.

“Wonderful!” Lund said. “You’ve really got it coming. But why make poor St. Peter into the image of Collis P. Huntington?”

“Not Huntington,” Joe said. “St. Pete isn’t that big a bug. He’s just a labor shark in heaven. He runs the hiring hall.”

Still laughing, Lund beckoned to a man reading at one of the tables. The man came over, a short wiry man with an enormous Adam’s apple. “This is something you’d like, Mac,” the missionary said. “Sing it for him, Joe. This is Frank McGibbeney, he’s a trainman himself.”

McGibbeney shook hands, impassive, and listened with an expressionless face as Joe played and sang the first verse and chorus half under his breath. But by the fourth line he was grinning. At the end of the chorus his face was reddening and his eyes were half closed with a suspended guffaw and his mouth was hanging as he listened. When Joe finished the railroader was almost hopping up and down.

“Say!” he said. “Say, that’s a daisy, Jack. That’s really a peacherino.”

Lund had put on his bartender scowl. “Are you going to leave that scab in heaven? Isn’t there any solidarity among the angels?”

“All right,” Joe said. “Let’s get him out of there.” Their eyes were on him as he leaned on his elbows and thought. His mind worked like a watch, little wheels turning, gears meshing, a controlled and triumphant mechanism. After no more than two or three minutes he spread the paper against the music rack and wrote:

The abrupt laughter at his back inspired him, and he tossed off another chorus as fast as he could write.

McGibbeney was almost lyrical with admiration. “Oh, that’s a pip,” he kept saying. “Boy, that’s really first class.” For a marveling second he looked at Joe, but he spoke to Lund, as if one didn’t quite talk to a man who could write such songs. “The boys over at the hall would like to hear that, they sure would.”

“Take it along,” Joe said, and thrust the paper at him.

“There’s a meeting tonight,” McGibbeney said. “You wouldn’t feel like coming over and singing it, would you?”

His wandering, rather furtive eye held Joe’s a second and then slipped away. A skinny little man with an exaggeratedly fierce face, he looked almost in embarrassment toward the front door.

“I can’t sing,” Joe said.

“It’d sure be appreciated,” McGibbeney said.

Pulling his mouth down, Joe looked at Lund and said, “Gus here would have a right to be mad if I played and sang for a union right after I turned down a chance to play for Jesus.”

But Lund only shrugged and smiled, refusing to bite. McGibbeney’s urging voice said, “We can use all the help we can get.”

Someone had opened the front door and was standing in it. Joe glanced up and saw who was there, and his cousin John’s roar of welcome made people jump and turn around the whole length of the shuffling, repressed room. “By Yudas, har he is!” John said. “Yoe! By golly, Yoe!”

Big as a tree, square-hewn, a Terrible Swede, he came down the room waving his arms, and after him came Otto Applequist, sheep-faced, smiling his silly-looking, surprised smile. Still feeling good, feeling excitement and the anticipation of something good
to come, Joe stood up and made a grinning pretense of getting ready to knock his cousin’s block off. To McGibbeney he said, “Here’s the man you want. He’s a guitar player, and he can sing.”

Then he was overpowered by John’s welcome.

On a summer Saturday afternoon the Forecastle saloon is cool and dusky. There are no lights on yet, the Saturday night rumble has not yet begun out in the street. It is cool and the light is gray and the smoke of stogies and pipes rises and hangs under the high ceiling.

This is a quiet hour, an interim period. In a few minutes Tinetti will remove the greasy, crumbed-up empty plates from the free lunch counter and replace them with full ones. The crowd is thin now, and men who occasionally come through the swinging door stand a moment with an almost resigned air, as if looking for someone or something they know they will not see, before they turn to find a place at a table or the bar. Everything hangs in suspension like the smoke, everything waits, everything is a little tired and slack muscled, and the talk is quiet, unargumentative, relaxed.

“… in Ohio,” their talk goes. “His old man was stationmaster. Sure, I know him, known him since we were kids. What’s ever become …”

“… snowed three feet that one storm,” they are saying. “I started to go out next morning and the door was snowed clean over. Finally I went out the second-story window and tunneled in to the door so’s we could open it. That drift was fifteen feet high if it was an inch. Stayed there till after …”

“… dead pigeon,” their sad voices say. “Some’m just busted in his gut. We was setting in the kitchen and he looked kind of green and said he had this belly ache, and all of a sudden he grabs the basin off the washstand and bends over and
blurp
, he fills her with blood. It come out of his mouth in a stream big as a ball bat, and
black
 …”