Joe Hill (30 page)

At noon he ate in a workingmen’s eatery on Second South, and came out afterward to pick his teeth and lean against the wall, watching people pass. A bum panhandled him for a cup of coffee, and Joe gave him a nickel. Another bum struck him for a match, but Joe didn’t have any. He learned comfortably against the wall, watching faces.

Along the sidewalk came a dapper young man with a mustache, his legs encased in peg-topped riding breeches, his calves booted in glistening British boots. In his hand he carried a crop with which he tapped the side of his leg as he walked. His heels were crisp and confident on the sidewalk.

Looking at him come, Joe was moved by ribald amusement. He was astonished that such a dude would have the nerve to appear on the street. With the corner of his mouth he chirped twice, sharply, as if to a horse.

The dude looked sideways, startled, his crisp walking uninterrupted but his hand forgetting to tap the crop against his boot. He had large soft brown eyes and his mustache was brown and luxuriant. As his eyes met Joe’s they went angry and hard, and his mouth stiffened. Joe gave him a still, intent look, one the poor prune couldn’t misunderstand.

“Giddap!” he said, and removed the toothpick from his mouth.

For a hopeful instant he thought the dude was going to take the challenge, and he shoved his shoulders away from the wall eagerly. But the dude’s face, a face like a girl’s with an artificial mustache pasted on it, turned ahead again, reddening, and the crisp bootheels clicked on. Two men standing across the doorway looked at Joe and shook their heads and laughed.

Joe let himself back against the wall, taking advantage of the narrow ledge of shade. As he leaned, his eye caught a glimpse of a man who passed and hesitated, turning; a man with loose shoulders and loosely hanging arms, and a face that took on a hanging, sheeplike grin.

Otto Applequist.

As they shook hands he felt Otto’s eyes all over him, like the slapping hands of a cop, slapping the corduroy pants, the worn shoes, the shirt that he had washed himself at Mother Wynn’s. Otto himself looked prosperous. His shoes were new and shiny, he wore a collar and tie and a straw skimmer.

“Well, well, well, well, well!” Otto said. He pumped Joe’s hand and studied Joe with a secret smile. What he saw seemed to tickle him. His smile broadened. “I heard you was in jail.”

“It’s a fright what stories get around,” Joe said.

“How’d you get out?”

“You can’t get out unless you’re in.”

Otto’s smile widened until his eyes almost closed. “Same old Joe. Still keeping the mouth shut.”

“Same old Otto, still trying to get something on somebody.”

That brought a burst of coughing laughter from Otto. For a moment, still laughing, he watched two girls go by. Turning back, he said, “How’s old Manderich?”

“He’s dead.”

“Dead!”

“You hear all the stories,” Joe said. “You should have heard that one. They killed him at Oatfield.”

“Well I’ll be damned.” Otto’s loose shoulders moved. “That old gorilla,” he said. “He was all right, I guess, but he sure took his politics hard.”

Joe said nothing. Otto, working his genial white eyebrows, looked him over again. “You been in Zion long?”

“Just got in.”

“Damnedest place you ever saw,” Otto said. “Town’s full of Swedes. The Mormon missionaries must’ve cleaned out the old country. I’m forgetting how to talk English.”

They moved back into the shade against the wall of a drugstore, putting their hands behind them on the wall. Joe was glad enough to see Otto. He was a petty-larceny thief, and he liked to snoop
out every scrap of information about anything, but if he had no hard feelings about that night in Pedro there was no reason Joe should. And he was somebody familiar; he took the edge of strangeness off this town.

“Doing anything?” Joe said.

“Murray smelter.”

“Honest working stiff, uh?”

“Want to see my letters of recommendation?”

“I’m afraid I’d recognize the handwriting.”

They laughed together, two old acquaintances gabbing in the street.

“Where you staying at?” Otto said. “Wobbly hall?”

“Mother Wynn’s. You know it?”

“I heard of it. Bughouse rest home. Whenever the cops want an agitator they look there.”

“They do?”

“What do you care?” Otto said with a laugh. “The cops aren’t nothing to you.”

Joe shrugged.

“You got quite a rep since I saw you last,” Otto said. “You’re the kind of an agitator the cops’d really be interested in. You still writing songs?”

“Not lately.”

“Sticking around long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bound anywhere special?”

“Nowhere special.”

“Jesus, you don’t know the answer to anything, do you?” Otto said.

“My father was a Pismo clam,” Joe said.

“I wouldn’t be suprised.” Otto crossed his feet and raised his hat to cool his forehead. With his hat still off he turned, as if a thought had surprised him, and said, “Say, you know who I met here?”

“Who?”

“Woman that used to know you in Sweden. Anna Olson.”

Alertness awoke in Joe. He felt in the pit of his stomach the kind of paralyzed expectancy that had come in childhood games when his hiding place was discovered, the moment of staring exposure
before the screaming race for the goal. “Sweden?” he said carefully. “That’d sure be a freak. You sure it was me?”

“Joe Hillstrom. She said you went away to be a sailor when your mother died.”

“I don’t remember any Anna Olson.”

“Well, she remembers you. She was a friend of your mother’s.”

Joe raised his shoulders vaguely. The street lay hot and sun-drowned before him, and it was suddenly as strange as a street in a dream. Beyond it, over the flat roof of a building, he saw the slopes of the mountain rising. It was a strange place, and he the strangest thing in it, with the past washing in on him. “Maybe she’s changed her name,” he said. But he remembered Anna Olson all right, in her house and his own, summer afternoons on the streets of Gefle. His mother’s friend, one of the few.

“She lives right near where I’m boarding, out in Murray,” Otto said. He shoved Joe’s shoulder. “Say, you know what you could do? There’s a kind of a potlatch of Mormon Swedes out at my place tonight. You could come on out.”

“That’d be a treat.”

“Do you good,” Otto said. “Stick around by yourself too long, you’ll begin to smell your own breath.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. He rubbed the scar at the corner of his mouth, and from under his hand said, “What kind of a potlatch?”

“Whist,” Otto said, “Coffee and cake. Just a bunch of good Mormons getting together to talk Swedish.”

“What’ll you be doing at this party?”

“Why not? I can talk Swedish.”

They laughed together again. With an appropriate and calculated carelessness Joe said, “All right, I haven’t got anything to do. I might come along. You sure it’s all right?”

“All right? You’re a Swede, that’s enough. For that matter, I can introduce you as the big
IWW
song writer.”

“I guess we can get along without that.”

“Plain Joe Hillstrom, uh?”

“That’s my name.”

“Okay,” Otto said. He took out his wallet and found a scrap of paper in it and scribbled an address. “This’ll be a new experience for you,” he said, and the sly grin spread and curled his lips. “Respectable churchgoing people to associate with.”

“I guess I can stand it,” Joe said. “What time?”

“Seven-thirty maybe.”

“Vell,” Joe said, “Ay see you dar.”

“Plenty of
Svenska flikas
,” Otto said. “All these Mormons got twelve pretty daughters.”

He crossed the street, natty in his straw hat, and Joe turned back toward Mother Wynn’s. It was hard to figure what Otto was up to, or whether he was up to anything. It could be that he had found out something about Joe from Anna Olson and thought he could use it. But what could he use it for? Plenty of people had no fathers. It made no difference who knew where Joe Hillstrom came from.

But the cold expectancy, like the sensation of cold against a decayed tooth, was still with him. This whole town was prickly with the sense of something due to happen.

In store windows he examined himself as he walked, trying to label himself, looking himself over as if he were Anna Olson seeing the son of her old friend for the first time in sixteen years. He observed what thirteen years of knocking around and three years in the labor wars had done to Joseph Hillstrom of Gefle, Sweden. With the eyes of these Mormon Swedes he gave himself the once-over: a pretty glum customer, long-haired, bag-kneed, with an intent scarred face.

The moving arms of a taffy-pulling machine in a candy store window stopped him momentarily, and watching his own image in the glass he cracked his face just to see if he could look human. Ghostly among trays of panoche and peanut brittle, a reflected stranger smiled at him.

He knew Anna Olson the moment he came in with Otto from the porch and saw her talking with other women in the hall. Plain, faded, comfortable, she meant Gefle so strongly that even though he had been anticipating the meeting he was stopped dead inside the door by the intense familiarity of her face. Quiet mouth,
plain flat hair, the hands that worked on a half-knitted gray wool sock even while she talked: they leaped out of his mother’s kitchen over the gap of years, and voices with them like voices that he knew, women’s voices talking Swedish.

When her eyes moved casually to brush his, he waited expectantly, but she looked on past him, and her nod was for Otto. She didn’t know him. If he wanted to, he could still walk out of here without speaking to her. In the other room someone was pumping a player piano. The party hadn’t begun yet. He could beat it out and drop the hatch cover on all this past.

But Otto was at his elbow, shoving him forward, and he stood with Otto’s hand pinching around his muscle and endured the questioning eyes of Anna Olson and two younger women.

“You know who this is?” Otto said, and he shook Joe slightly, holding him like something he had captured.

Anna Olson’s eyes searched his face. He felt that her eyes were soft and her brows arched with a question. “Do I know you?” she said.

“I guess not,” Joe said. “Not any more.”

“Did I once?”

“A long time ago.”

“A long time ago. In the old country?”

“Yes.”

“Gefle?”

“Yes.”

Half smiling, she searched his face again. He was conscious of his scars.

“I don’t.… How long ago?”

“I left there in ’98.”

“Before we did,” she said. Her forehead was scored by a frown. “It’s so long, I can’t.… You’re not Olaus Berger?”

“No.”

“There’s something familiar,” she said. “Your eyes, especially.”

“Come on,” Otto said. “You’re a punk guesser.”

Then suddenly her hand came out and touched Joe’s arm, and her eyes were warm with recognition and surprise. “Why of course!” she said. “Of course, I know you now. But you’ve changed. You were just a young boy the last …”

“I have to have proof,” Otto said. “Who is he?”

The look Anna Olson gave Joe was almost eloquently friendly. She ignored Otto. “You used to be such a funny solemn little boy,” she said. Her hand with the gray sock in it reached and pulled one of the younger women over, a woman Joe vaguely noticed as tall, neither quite pretty nor quite plain, with eyes of a placid temperate blue like Anna Olson’s, and with long strong white hands. “Ingrid,” Anna Olson said, “just imagine. This is Joseph Hillstrom. You two went to school together.”

Ill at ease and feeling that a dozen people were listening to the talk, Joe shook the young woman’s hand with a vague impression of quick eyes and a confused pink blush before the girl stepped back. There were other hands to shake, and a string of names: Andreen, Strand, Carlson, Erickson. It seemed to him that the parlor and hall were as noisy as a tree full of blackbirds, and he was astonished at these people that Otto had fallen among, who welcomed him just because he was a Swede and a friend of Anna Olson’s. They were already, in the way they accepted Otto, like sheep sheltering a fox. Now here they were admitting a kind of wolf, a revolutionary and rebel. By the time the first awkwardness wore off he began to be amused. He let himself be dragged into the parlor and seated at a table opposite Anna Olson, where he played clumsy whist for two hours, listening, keeping his mouth shut except to answer the questions Mrs. Olson put to him: What had he been doing, what was he doing now, was he working in Salt Lake, what brought him here, did he hear from anyone in Gefle.

This last question she asked him a second time, as if she hadn’t heard or didn’t believe his first answer, and her mild blue eyes probed him with a sort of insistence as if she expected some cryptic information that the others would not catch. He told her what he had told her before, what was true. He had not heard from a single soul in Gefle since he left, except his cousin John Alberg.

And where was John?

That one he could not quite answer straight, for the last he had heard of John, he was shacked up on the beach at Hilo, bucking sugar bags on the wharf when he had to, and indulging in a continuous
luau
between jobs. A dehorn, one of the casualties.