Joe Hill (9 page)

And faces: the stiff-lipped Bible-reading captain of the first ship he ever worked on, between Stockholm and Hull; the suspicious, snoopy, County-Galway phiz of Joyce, the proprietor of the Bowery saloon where he first landed work in America; the furious twisted face—the face of a man with an unbearable pain inside him, or a fury that he cannot satisfy—of the third engineer on the
Sarah Cleghorn
. Others too: the worried, beet-red face of a Norske farmer in Dakota, a man who kept glancing at the fading daylight and loped like a clumsy bear, trying to get in another fifteen minutes, another fifty bundles, another ten sacks. Faceless figures of men in cutaway coats and big watch chains—they swim and swarm in his mind while the wind tugs at him and the lights of the harbor splinter and re-form and shine with diamond brilliance in the wind-split night. He feels his lean strength like a cat stretching; when he stands erect above the wind-tormented grass he is as tall as Moses lifting his hand over the Red Sea and crying for the waters to divide.

More than an hour later he came in the faint moon-and-star light along the path through the salt grass and up to the door
of the shack. Somebody was home; he saw a shadow stoop and move against the light of the window. When he opened the door he found Otto at the table rolling something in a newspaper. For an instant he had the impression that Otto crouched, ready to fight or run, before the slight tension relaxed and Otto’s face pulled up in the sleepy smile.

“Hello,” he said. “What was Macs big secret?”

“Eniting,”
Joe said. “Nothing special.”

Otto’s smile widened while he rolled the newspaper package and twisted one end. He had his hat and coat on as if ready to go out. “You’re sure a talker,” he said.

“I talk enough,” Joe said, surprised.

“Never too much, eh?”

When they locked eyes, Otto’s eyes did not fall. They wrinkled at the corners as if he were enjoying some private joke.

“Maybe I haven’t got much to talk about,” Joe said.

“Not as much as me, is that what you mean?”

“Maybe.”

Into Otto’s smile now had come something definitely knowing and amused. He picked up the package and rolled it gently between his palms. At last he said softly, “Who’re you trying to fool?”

Puzzled by the concentrations and the air of knowingness in Otto’s look, Joe felt the backs of his knees tensing as if before a fight. But he only said, “Not you, I guess.”

“I got eyes,” Otto said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.” Holding Joe’s eyes, he tipped the package and jiggled it until a pair of wire cutters and a thin-bladed hacksaw slid out on the table. “I been watching you,” he said. “I like the way you keep your mouth shut.”

“I kind of like it too,” Joe said.

Otto was loosely built, shorter than Joe, nondescript except for the sheep face and the silly-looking smile. Everything about him seemed limp and loose, hair and smile and clothes, even the way his arms hung from his shoulders. But his eyes had the unwavering reflecting brightness of a rat’s. “How’d you like a build up your stake a little tonight?” he said.

But now Joe began to smile. He shook his head. “Don’t tell me anything about it, Otto.”

“You can’t live forever without work,” Otto said. “Even if
they break this strike, you’re back on the dock bosses and the mates.”

“That’s all right.”

Shrugging, Otto shook the hacksaw and wire cutters back into the package and retwisted the end. “You like to work alone, is that it?”

“Maybe I’m particular what I work at,” Joe said. He returned Otto’s mocking grin, and as Otto turned to the door he wagged his finger at Otto’s coat lapel. “You wearing that button out tonight?”

Otto’s eyes lighted on the button in Joe’s own coat. He laughed aloud, shaking his head almost in admiration, and slipped the button from his lapel and into his pocket. “You’re all right,” he said. “We’ll get along.”

On ordinary days the waterfront is a blocks-long stage crisscrossed with railroad tracks, cluttered with stacks of poles, lumber, neatly layered ties, pyramids of coal. The two long wharves stretch out into the bay toward Dead Man’s Island, each with its own pattern of tracks, stalled freight- and flatcars, piles of merchandise going or coming. Around the ends of the wharves small craft cluster like fruit flies around something sweet and sticky; along the other end lounge the longshoremen waiting for the dock boss’s call.

This is a stage on which are enacted the tedious scenes of arrival and departure, of fetch and carry, more erratic than the tides but just as repetitive. Out along the docks the stagehands prepare the sets, warp in freighters and lumber schooners and colliers and coastwise passenger ships and an occasional old three- or four-master. Their work is complex with lines and bawled orders, but it comes quickly to a neatness, a readiness, and a waiting. At a certain point the dock gates are unlocked and at the window of his little office the stage manager selects his actors from the loungers on the proscenium. He selects them for various reasons:
because they are personal friends, because they have bought him drinks, because they have kicked back a folded bill out of their wages, because he is tired of seeing their faces around looking hopeful, because he needs every man he can lay hands on, sometimes even because he knows them for good workers and strong backs.

Then the antlike act, the drama of burdens.

If there are several schooners lying at the wharves, or if some collier is anxious to be under way, the ants may crawl under their loads for twelve or fifteen hours at a stretch, and take their pay and go home to sleep the clock around and return to hang around again waiting for the boss to swing the gates and pick another crew.

There are those who try, by bribes or good fellowship, or by tapping clerks and agents whom they know, to get advance information on sailings and dockings so as to be johnny-on-the-spot when the call comes. It generally happens that these wiseacres can never go anywhere, even under the dock to relieve themselves, without someone hopeful or suspicious at their heels.

Along this whole waterfront there is a suspicion and jealousy as restless as the lipping of water against the pilings. Every man’s hand is against every other man. This is the way the bosses want it. If those who are passed over do not hate those who are picked, something has slipped in the system. A healthy competition for work is the best insurance against labor troubles.

But there are some, less eager, who will not shove and scramble and buy drinks and kick back out of their wages. They are not going to run up and slobber all over some petty Caesar like the dock boss. They do not stand up and take a look every time a ship’s smoke shows beyond the breakwater or a switch engine backs a string of boxcars onto the dock. They go on pitching pennies, or arguing, or playing cards in the shade of a warehouse, until someone among the eager reports real action at one pier or the other. Then they walk over, maintaining the dignity of the American workingman. They do not need work bad enough to kiss anybody’s foot for it. And some day they will strike this harbor and tie it up tight and get some decent conditions and decent wages and an eight-hour day on the longshore. When they get strong enough. Not yet.

These are the ones who will talk back to a slave driver, refuse to lift things too heavy for a man, holler for more handtrucks, more dollies, more manpower on a job. They read books and radical papers and attend meetings, and they make a sharp and contemptuous distinction between themselves and the scissorbills. The lumber companies and the stevedoring company keep a careful check on their numbers and activities, even when the waterfront is quiet. Now, with the trainmen striking, these are the ones who are out in sympathy, throwing a picket line across the foot of each dock. When a carload of scabs is backed through the line, protected by mounted police, the pickets give way reluctantly, beckoning and yelling. So far there has been no trouble, only words.

In ordinary times itinerant radical intellectuals and organizers hit the Pedro waterfront as if on a Lyceum circuit—ex-professors and ex-preachers, rebellious college boys, union delegates, professional revolutionaries preaching socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, bimetallism, the single tax. With faces like saints or madmen or prize fighters or farmers or clerks, but always with the eyes of believers, they come and go, leaving a little deposit of their eloquence and fervor and belief among the men who will listen. Now with the waterfront struck they come in greater numbers, and back from the picket lines in the temporary headquarters, and in the shade of sheds and warehouses, little meetings go on. Prominent among the men in the audiences are those with the red button of the Wobblies in their shirts.

One of them is the slim Swede with the scarred jaw. He can take a piece of chalk and draw a picture on a wall so anybody could recognize it. He is the one who wrote the song about Casey Jones the union scab. The other morning there was a Wobbly sticker on the dock boss’s window: “Join the One Big Union.” The Swede is supposed to have put it there. Not that he ever admitted he did. He hangs around with the boys, and when he talks they pay attention to him, but he doesn’t talk much. A kind of a clam. And a strange smile, sometimes, almost as if there were nobody home.

The street that paralleled the tracks along the waterfront was a canal of fine gray dust that climbed the spokes of dray-wagon
wheels and hung in the air for minutes, as if it had no weight at all. Anyone crossing the street stamped his feet hard on the loading platforms to shake off the clinging powder, but at noon not many were crossing the street. The picket line at the Hammond dock was down to a handful; the rest were over at the headquarters or sitting in the shade eating. There was a smell of hot planks, tar, fish. Anything metal in the sun was too hot to touch, but in the shade of the warehouse where Joe sat alone there was a cooling smelly breath wavering up from the water along with the wavering reflection of light. Nothing was coming in or out; the cops were out of sight in the dock boss’s office.

In the nearly complete quiet hardly a gull cried. The tide was down, leaving the barnacled piles exposed like scabby legs. The water lipped around them oilily with a tiny wet sucking noise.

He was remembering the islands, and a time he had looked down into the lagoon through a glass-bottomed bucket and seen how the fishes hung among the watery coral gardens, and how at the shadow of a shark they all streamed off together across the sand, and how they came winnowing back when the danger was past. All the little fishes, rushing in one direction or another because of food or fear. And all the big fishes, some poisonous, some with stings, some with teeth.

With a sandwich half eaten in his hand he sat in the heat-stunned noon and thought about them, and as he sat he saw a rat come creeping in quick bursts of movement along a timber under the dock. It moved as if danger lay at every crossbeam; it tried the air with its nose, saw everything with bright bead eyes. Joe knew it saw and estimated him, though he had not moved the slightest muscle for two minutes. A big rat, big and smart and careful, it came in creeping bursts of movement that were somehow indicative of a curious boldness mixed with an overpowering caution.

For a moment it disappeared, then it was in sight again. When it chose to move fast its creep became a hop almost like a rabbit’s. On the loading platform someone stamped his feet hard, and as the sound and vibration shook along the planks the rat froze, its whiskers twitching, its nose trying the air. After a pause it moved again, arrived at an angle in the beams, twisted and with one smooth movement was up on top in the sun.

Joe broke a piece off the sandwich and tossed it out onto the planks. For a long time the rat sat perfectly still, not even its whiskers moving: a big rat, big and smart, not to be baited into danger. Even at forty feet its protruding perfectly round eyes shone with an intense concentration of life.

Now, belly to the planks, its motion less like an animal’s than like a snake’s footless slide, it came toward him until it was within ten feet of the piece of bread. Joe sat very still, and when he heard footsteps coming along the platform he willed angrily that they go back. Some flatfoot would have to come along just at this minute.

The rat heard the steps too; it was still again, a gray hump on the planks. Joe cheeped softly with his lips, and without more hesitation the rat crossed the last few feet and took the bread between its paws and began to eat. The thing made Joe smile; he had been holding his breath.

Not so fast, Grandpa, he said. Look a little closer before you take things people offer you. There’s always arsenic in the cheese and strychnine in the bread. Remember who you are. They wouldn’t put it out there if it wasn’t poisoned, would they? Why would anybody do
you
a favor?

The rat had finished the bread. Joe tossed out another piece, and the rat scuttled away, stopped, returned and fell on it. The dragging tail crept after it across the wood.

If you didn’t have such a naked tail, Joe told it. If you just looked pretty, and learned to sit up and beg politely. If you didn’t swarm in dump-grounds and sewers. Why don’t you grow fur on your tail and learn to do tricks and quit hanging around wharves and living like an outcast?