Joe Hill (57 page)

Not trusting himself to speak, Lund nodded and handed the paper back. In a moment he saw that Joe’s attention was wandering again, the inward resolution wavering. Already many minutes had passed. It must be at least a quarter to seven.

Abruptly Joe swung around. “I thought something might happen,” he said in a high, tight voice. “It did before.”

“Resign yourself, Joe,” Lund said. “It’s the only way. Please, boy!”

He put his hand on Joe’s arm and saw the stretched lines from the corner of the thin mouth. “I’ve never preached at you, and I won’t now,” he said. “In the end we answer to ourselves. If you can come before yourself with a clean conscience they can’t hurt you, Joe. They can’t touch you.”

Joe’s head jerked, a strange pecking motion as if he were recovering from being pushed, and his lips parted to show the even clenched teeth. “I can answer to myself ail right!” he said shrilly. “They’ve had plenty of chances to change their minds. Thousands of people have put in a word for me. President Wilson has wired them twice. They still want to shoot a man because he’s an enemy
of their filthy capitalist system. All right, let them shoot me! I’m ready for them. What are they waiting for? Why don’t they come on?”

Lund grabbed Joe’s shaking hands and hung on to them both. He wished he hadn’t come. It was unbearable, and he did not help Joe. In the face of Joe’s cracking control he wavered, thinking of what Carpenter had panted at him by the gate. Which was better, to take the last walk resigned to your death, or to walk out still believing the miracle might free you before the firing squad took aim? He did not know, he miserably did not know.

“Joe,” he said, “listen, Joe! It isn’t final yet. The Pardon Board has been meeting all night. Somebody wired from Seattle that he could prove an alibi. There might be …”

Joe’s lips flattened across his teeth, and his breath wheezed. His eyes darted around the cell as if in search of a door. “Then there’s still a chancel” he said.

“I don’t know,” Lund said. “Don’t bank on it too much. There isn’t much time. You’ve got to be ready, you’ve got to be resigned.”

Joe pulled away. “I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. I’m ready for them.” His eyes were moving constantly around the cell, and he kicked the balled-up papers with his feet. Words came out of him in bursts, jerkily.

“Messed the place all up. Writing all night. Ought to clean the joint out.” He smiled a strained, ghastly smile. “Brought up to be neat. Sailors always neat. Ought to sweep out here.”

Before Lund knew what he was about, he was at the door, calling to the guard. “Hey, Hutton. Hutton!”

The steps came fast, almost at a run.

“I’ve only got a few minutes,” Joe said. “They’ll be here any time. I never had any last requests of anybody, but I’ve been a neat man all my life. I’d like to clean this place up before I go. Can I have a broom?”

“That’ll be all right, Joe. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Just the same, I’d like to clean it up. I haven’t got much time.”

The guard went up the corridor and came back very quickly with a broom, which he shoved handle first through the bars. Joe started sweeping, his head bent, his jaw set so hard that the scars on cheek and neck stood out like welts. Sitting on the cot, Lund pulled his feet up while Joe swept under them.
The papers were just gathered into a neat pile when they heard the slow crowded footsteps on the stairs.

Lund crossed the cell in two steps, took the broom handle from Joe’s hands and set the broom against the wall. There were no voices coming with the steps, only the sound of somehow laboring feet, and sharp and clean in Lund’s mind flashed the picture of the first funeral he had ever preached at, the funeral of a very big man in a lodge hall in Minneapolis: his mind echoed with the unpadded bare silence of that hall, and the way the pallbearers’ feet had labored under the weight of the dead, going out.

He wrung Joe’s hand, but the hand was flaccid, and he stared in anguish into Joe’s eyes, but the eyes were fixed on something far off. Joe’s nose was sharp as a pencil; the tight lines were deep from nostrils to lip. He did not turn when the steps halted outside, but the unmutilated wing of his nose fluttered, and his chest swelled. Over his shoulder Lund looked into the eyes of Sheriff Coues, and with Coues, crowding the corridor, he saw Bestor, three deputies, a smooth-faced white-haired man with a doctor’s black satchel.

“All ready, Joe?” the sheriff’s deep sad voice said.

Joe stood with his back to them. The cell lock clacked, and Lund after one last hopeless wringing of the slack hand, squeezed out the narrow door. “He all right?” the sheriff asked, and gestured with his eyebrows at the doctor, obviously asking if Joe needed a hypo.

“He’s all right,” Lund said from a choked throat, and even while he spoke he was shoved headlong into the sheriff by the guard behind him. He turned, half falling, his mind full of the incredible belief that it was a last-minute rescue, that the Wobblies had succeeded somehow in forcing their way in, that the guards, Bestor, the doctor, might be Wobblies in disguise—his mind was an explosion of thoughts even while he struggled for balance.

He turned in time to see the cell door slam shut. Joe’s stooping body leaped and bent, and the cot skidded across the cell, barricading the door, just as the sheriff and the recovering guard threw their weight against it. With a crack like a shot Joe broke the broom handle across his knee and lunged. The guard yelped like a dog, the sheriff leaped aside. Then the guard was back in the corridor holding his wrist, from which blood welled up
swiftly along a jagged tear. Deputies with guns in their hands were ranged along the front of the cell. Inside, behind the cot, Joe couched with the broken broom handle, holding them off as if with a sword.

“Go on, shoot!” he screeched. “You’re going to shoot me anyway, save your paid murderers the trouble! Why don’t you shoot me?”

Two deputies rushed the door, but the broom handle darted and drove them back. Sheriff Coues moved them aside and stood before the door. He was the only man there who was not furiously excited. “Joe,” he said, “what do you think this is going to get you?”

“Never mind. Just try coming in here after me.”

“You’re going to die, Joe,” the sheriff said, and his voice boomed in the hollow cell block sad and slow. “You’re paying a debt, and you can’t beat it. You’re just making it hard for yourself and everybody else.”

“Just try coming in!”

“I thought you’d die like a man, Joe.”

“I’ll die like a man. Come in and see.”

“You and I always got along,” Coues said. “I think we respect each other. But when I come in after you it won’t be me coming, Joe. It’ll be the law, and you can’t buck it. Now I’m coming in.”

He put his shoulder against the door and pushed, paying no attention to the threatening stick. He pushed the cot angling across the cell and squeezed past it and went up to Joe and held out his hand. After an unspeakable moment Joe laid the broom handle in it.

“Now I know I was right about you,” Coues said. He beckoned the doctor, who took his bag inside. “Roll up your sleeve, Joe,” the sheriff said. “This’ll make it easier.”

They read the warrant to him from the corridor while he stood with his arm bared to the doctor’s needle. Five minutes later Joe Hill came out of his cell with a fixed, gritted smile on his face, his shoulders back, his head up. His eyes were fixed, staring far-off, blue and milky as the stare of a cataract-blinded man, and his head was tipped slightly sidewise, as though he listened.

The sheriff handcuffed his hands in front of him, and a deputy took each arm. Bestor, the doctor, the two guards, Lund, all stepped back against the corridor bars and the deputies started forward.
Lurching, yielding to their hands, Joe walked ahead stiffly. Sheriff Coues and the third deputy fell in behind, and Lund came like a sleepwalker beside the doctor.

He walked like a blind man, as stiffly and as blindly as Joe Hillstrom walked. Like a blind man he felt the iron corridor turn into the landing above the stairs, and like a blind man he set his feet carefully one after the other on the iron treads: eleven steps, then a landing and a turn, then eleven more steps and the solider landing of the second tier; than eleven more, and another landing, and eleven more and the solid cement. Fear came up through his legs at that change: no more stairs; that much of the journey done.

Fear came in with the bitter morning air at the opened door, too, and as the cold rushed to meet them Joe Hill said loudly, as if he were truly blind and could not see those he spoke to, “You’re killing an innocent man. I could be a free man now if I’d wanted to compromise. My trial wasn’t a fair trial and I wouldn’t take anything but a complete vindication. I said I’d get a new trial or die trying. Well, I haven’t stopped yet.”

Lund saw that gray light had flooded up over the mountains. The whole prison yard lay bare and open to the little procession. He saw Joe Hill’s erect back marching slowly between the shuffling, usherlike deputies. Joe’s had remained bent slightly as if he listened for something, and he looked in a quick half-circle when they were halfway across the yard. There was not a movement from the guards in doorways and on the walls. The sound of shoes on cement was a slow dry shuffle.

Fifty feet or more of cement sidewalk—and Lund’s feet knew how Joe’s were feeling it out step by step. He felt how the terror came one swift stride closer as the feet left the cement and crunched in cinders at the beginning of an alley between buildings. Now against the outer wall, crowded between that and one of the buildings, the spectators came in sight, twenty-five or thirty men huddled under the thin vanishing steam of their breath. The fear came a step closer and took him harshly by the throat as the procession turned left around a corner into the rough alley, and there was the chair.

The sheriff turned and motioned; he had to wave twice before Lund realized that he was the one being signaled. He stumbled
out of the hypnotic procession and over to the group of witnesses. Some malady was on his eyes. He saw the little file move up the alley like a distant caravan toiling across a plain, and at the end he saw the execution frame, crude and rough as the cross of Calvary—a raw plank backstop backed with steel, and in the planks that masked the steel back a hole as big as a man’s two fists chewed out by the bullets of past executions. Bolted to the frame in front of the backstop was an ordinary office armchair.

The chair faced a stone building across the alley. Directly across, in the double doors of what looked like a machine shop, Lund saw a green curtain that moved a little in a breath of wind. Through the curtain, three at kneeling height and two at standing, jutted the barrels of five rifles.

They stopped Joe Hill in front of the chair, and Lund saw his head move as he looked toward the curtain and the screened source of his death, the hidden men whose names only the sheriff knew, who came in a closed car and left the same way, with the faint consoling possibility that the rifle they had fired might have contained the one blank cartridge of the five.

It seemed to Lund that when he looked sidelong at his death Joe jerked in the deputies’ hands. And when the sheriff moved slowly up and tied a black handkerchief across Joe’s eyes, the listening tilt of the condemned man’s head was so pronounced that Lund looked around wildly in the hope that what Joe listened for might still come. A messenger from the Pardon Board which had been meeting all night might yet make unnecessary the splintered backstop and the casual chair, the rifles and the hidden sweating executioners, the waiting chaplain and the three doctors lined up with warden and sheriff beyond the place of execution. Like a sleeper groaning in nightmare he moved, trying to struggle back out of the danger and horror he had fallen into, but when he opened his eyes wide and breathed deeply, steadying himself, the prison yard and the alley were the same.

They removed the handcuffs from Joe Hill’s wrists and put him in the armchair. Not a sound came from them. They stood as silently and watchfully as he knew the Wobblies were standing outside the prison walls.

As if he were to die himself, and had passed beyond hope
or fear, Lund felt quite suddenly calm. He looked with clear eyes at his friend who was really about to die and saw the deputies strapping his shoulders back to hold him erect in the chair. As the white-haired doctor bent forward with his stethoscope to his ears to examine the heart of Joe Hill, workman and singer and rebel, hero now in a hundred
IWW
halls, either a martyr to law’s blindness or a double murderer, Lund examined that heart in another way, and could not find the answer he searched for.

The doctor pinned a heart-shaped target on Joe Hill’s breast, and Lund’s throat tightened till the constriction was hard pain. He bent his head and said a swift prayer, but the substance of his prayer was incoherent to himself, and he might, for all he knew, have said it aloud, “God help you, God help us both, God help us all.”

“I die with a clear conscience!” Joe said suddenly, loudly. “I die fighting, not like a coward. But mark my words, the day of my vindication is coming!”

Beyond the execution platform the sheriff stepped out one step and raised his hand. His face was graven with deep, anguished lines. “Aim!” the deep preacher-voice said.

Joe struggled against the straps that held him. His fury pulled him to a strained half crouch, and he screamed toward the curtained doorway. “Yes, aim! Let her go! Fire!”

Lund turned his face, blinded with a rush of tears. He heard the deep voice of the sheriff and the hot slam of the rifles. The man next to him let out his breath in a slow, whinnying sob.

The preacher turned and stumbled across the yard toward the front gate. The sun was red over the guard towers and the tops of the inner buildings. As he crossed the yard he heard the wild, savage ululation from outside the walls, the cry as direct as the roar of an angered animal.