Joe Hill (32 page)

On the narrow porch hidden behind the vines it was utterly black. A bird rustled, alarmed, in the curtain of creeper. From some stooping place Anna fumbled up the key and found the lock with it.

“Shall we sit out?” Ingrid said. “It’s so nice outside.”

“Find Joseph a chair there,” her mother said. “I’ll go get the coffee on.”

Bumping around finding chairs, Joe could smell the girl, like Castile soap. Then a lamp flickered and steadied through the window and he saw three chairs, the hanging surfaces of leaves, the almost-buried porch rail.

“Shall I bring the light out?” Anna said from inside.

“We don’t need it. It would just draw bugs.”

Joe eased himself into one of the chairs. Inside there was the sound of a stove being shaken down and kindling being broken. “I ought to beat it,” he said. “She’s having to build up the fire.”

“Don’t go,” Ingrid said. “She gets lonesome for home since Dad died. She loves having you.”

She spoke in English, as she had spoken from the beginning to him. It was as if she wanted to emphasize a difference between herself and her mother. Her voice was low, a little husky. Probably she sang alto in the church choir. But she seemed a pleasant enough girl. With the lamplight striking it obliquely, her face was cleanly outlined; he noticed that her eyes were rather deeply set, and that there was a long shadowy curve at her throat like a drawing that only suggested neck and shoulders by a hint of line and a touch of shadow. He could see none of the self-consciousness that he had observed earlier. At least if she blushed over every word now it was too dark for him to see her.

“What was that first piece you played tonight?” he said.

“Sinding’s ‘Rustle of Spring.’ ”

Having asked and having been answered, he found himself with no ready thing to say. She sat with her hands in her lap and watched him.

“How long did you have to take piano lessons before you could play a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. A long time, I guess. I started when I was seven.”

“And you’re twenty-eight or nine now.”

He was surprised at how easily and naturally she laughed. “That’s something we don’t say out loud.”

“Twenty years, say,” he said, and stared at her speculatively in the diffused lamplight. Twenty years while somebody else paid the bills. That was the difference. Without much more than dutifulness,
probably, with no more than average talents, she spent twenty years learning to play pieces that would impress a lot of churchgoing Swedes at a whist party. He thought of himself and how he had followed organ grinders and street singers with violins and accordions, and of the hunger that had driven him to hang around fairs and festivals as a boy. As palpable as a wind came the memory of the
YMCA
piano and the Scotch sailor who had taught him his first chords and his awe at his own accomplishments when he first chorded out one of Luther’s hymns by ear. There had once been an itinerant merry-go-round with a calliope and little painted horses, all of it run by the leg-power of town boys, and he had spent whole afternoons behind the screen working like a galley slave and listening happily to the wheeze and whine of the music and taking his pay in free rides on lions and giraffes and spotted ponies. He remembered himself in one powerful multiple rush of collection as he had been at ten, eleven, twelve, and the duskiness of the porch moved and flowed around him as the duskiness of his cottage bedroom had flowed around him in boyhood. He felt like knives the innocence and futility of the dreams he had dreamed. The bastard son of a sickly seamstress, to He in his bed and imagine splendors and triumphs.

Suddenly he wanted very much that this girl should know the man who sat beside her as Joe Hill, the maker of cartoons and writer of songs. He wanted to say, “Go into the lumber woods or any construction camp or any Wobbly hall up and down the coast and ask if they know Joe Hill. Start up one of the songs and see if they know it. Maybe it isn’t highbrow stuff like your Chopin and Sinding, but it helps bring on the worker’s world. Once, let me tell you, I saw men sing a song I wrote and come right on into the deputies’ guns …”

As if she read his mind she said, “I wish you’d played.”

“I told you the truth,” he said. “I can’t play. I’m good enough to pound a piano in some saloon, that’s about how good I am. I never had the books. Nobody ever taught me.”

“But Mr. What’s-His-Name, Applequist, said you’d written a lot of songs.”

“Labor songs,” Joe said. “Most of them set to Salvation Army tunes.”

“Didn’t you ever try to write music yourself?”

“Once or twice. I never got anywhere. I don’t know enough.”

There was a momentary hesitation. “I should think you could,” she said.

Her face was turned out of the light so that he could not see her expression. “Why?” he said. “What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know. You look as if you’d thought a lot. You look like a sensitive person.”

Interested, he sat back in the chair. “Yee!” he said. “That’s a new one. How do you figure out I’m a sensitive person?”

“I was watching you tonight.”

A late scrap of moon had climbed over the mountain wall and its light came through the leaves in flits and flashes. Anna Olson came and leaned in the door.

“You must have had a lot of exciting times,” she said. “Where have you been to, you sailor?”

“Just about everywhere,” Joe said. “I started out on a passenger steamer between Stockholm and Hull. After that freighters, mostly—tramps. Around the Cape of Good Hope one voyage, and out through the Indian Ocean and Australia, and back to the States. Across the Pacific three or four times, down through the canal. Just around, generally.”

“Imagine!” she said, without any real interest. Then she added, “I’m sorry the coffee is slow. The fire was clear out.”

“You shouldn’t have bothered.”

“It’s no trouble. Just a minute now.”

After a minute she went back in, and Joe said to Ingrid, “Most people that look at my face get the idea I’m some kind of hard guy. I’m supposed to have a poker face.”

“You’ve got a poker face all right,” she said seriously. “But it’s not like some poker faces. Some people just don’t have any expression because they’re dull people, but some freeze their faces so they won’t show anything. That’s the kind you are.”

He was staring at her hard, surprised at her. Propping his knees on his elbows, he leaned forward, rubbing his hands together with a dry calloused rustle. “If I’m such a frozen-face, how can you read my character like a fortune teller? What did my sensitive face give away?”

Ingrid stood up as if she had thought of something. “You can’t
freeze your eyes,” she said accusingly. “You were seeing everything that went on tonight, all around that whole room!”

She went inside and brought out a little table, and in a minute her mother came bringing coffee and cake. There was no chance to pursue the interesting conversation with Ingrid. He praised the cake and then they were back in Gefle, recalling the dancing and fiddling contests on Midsummer Eve, and Pastor Eklund’s unlucky series of wives, and the fish peddler who sometimes got drunk and destructive and kicked his cart apart in the street and scattered herrings over half a block.

The moon had climbed a long way, clear above the high eaves of the porch, when Joe stood up. “How late do the streetcars run?”

“Oh my goodness!” Anna said, and clapped her hands together. “I forgot you have to go into town.” She hurried in to look at the clock. “It’s after one,” she said, returning. “The owl car will be gone. I just got so interested I didn’t think.”

“How far is it in to North Temple?”

“Oh, you couldn’t walk. It’s seven miles. Maybe we could …”

“What about Mrs. Erickson?” Ingrid said. “She’s got a spare room for rent. He might get that for tonight.”

“She wouldn’t be up,” Joe said.

“The boys would be. They never go to bed, or Mr. Applequist either.”

“All right,” Joe said. “I’ll try there.”

“I feel responsible,” Anna Olson said. “I’ll go over with you.”

“No,” he said. “I can make out. If I have to walk in, it won’t kill me.”

“If you took that room,” Ingrid said, “you’d get a lot of chances to play the piano for them.”

She was laughing; after a moment he laughed too. “I’d be right handy for music lessons, at least.”

“Why sure,” she said. “Any time.”

“You mean that?”

“Of course.”

“Could you teach me about harmony?”

“What are you talking about, you two?” Anna said. “Teach you music?”

“Sure,” Ingrid said.

“If I brought over a song sometime, could you try out the arrangement and maybe take the kinks out?”

“I should think so.”

“You got a new pupil,” he said. “When’s the best time?”

“I don’t have any pupils after five any day.”

“Expect me sometime after five.”

For a step or two she followed him along the path. “Any particular day?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I have to write the song first.”

Their goodnights and their invitations to come again went with him through the overgrown gate. He walked two blocks back to the Erickson house and found Otto and the two Erickson boys drinking beer on the high front porch. When he asked about a room Otto was all over him, urging him to move out for good.

“Listen,” Otto said. “You’re right next to the smelter, practically. We could maybe get you on the bullgang, at least. You better move out. You know the kind of grub Ma Erickson spreads? Herrings, the only place in Salt Lake, and coffee cake and fruit soup. You live out here a week you’ll start putting some meat on your bones. You could stick round all winter and organize the smelter. We’ll all join the One Big Union and wear buttons and damn the boss.”

“It wouldn’t do you any harm,” Joe said.

Karl Erickson said, “You an organizer?”

“Listen!” Otto said, and put his arm around Joe’s shoulders. “I’ve known this guy a long time. He’d never tell you who he was. He gave you that deaf-and-dumb act about the piano, but you know who he is? You ever hear of Joe Hill?” He mauled Joe around. “These guys are no scissorbills, they know the score.”

The Erickson brothers peered at him. There was respect in the way they leaned in the shadows. “Joe Hill?” they said. “My God, are you Joe Hill? You better stay.”

That was something, at least, after the beating he had taken from Chopin. He let them lead him upstairs, and in the end he let Otto talk him into sharing his room. In the morning he could decide whether or not he would stay.

He awoke sharply and alertly, instantly aware of the strange room, instantly taking it in and understanding it. He saw the white-enameled iron bed, the washbowl and pitcher and slop jar, the Boston rocker, the dresser. He saw his own and Otto’s clothes on floor and chairback. His recognition of them was like a renewed recognition of himself: the vague expectancy that had haunted him ever since his arrival in Salt Lake did not make of these things the sources or keys of future events. They existed for themselves, and so did he.

Otto was sleeping heavily with his face to the wall, taking advantage of Sunday morning. Lightly Joe got out of the bed; bending and stooping and exercising himself for a moment, he felt as limber and tough as a whip. There was no doubt in his mind that he would stay here. It was clean, it had none of the notoriety of Mother Wynn’s. And there was a piano a couple blocks away, and Ingrid Olson for a schoolteacher. He had not written a song for a long time.

In the kitchen he found Mrs. Erickson slapping around in old felt slippers. With her teeth out and her hair tied up in a dustcap she gave him flapjacks and coffee, and before ten o’clock he caught a streetcar up the long straight reach of State Street toward the scaffolded dome of the capitol. A half-hour later he was at the Wobbly hall.

This too was a strange place of the utmost familiarity. There was a class in socialism going on. When it broke up he eased into the conversation—an old song, both words and music—about the proper conduct of a union hall.

–Yes, but that’s just the point. A union hall isn’t a flophouse, even if you do organize migrants. The minute you make it a flophouse you start getting in bums that join up just for the free flop and the mulligan.

–What harm does that do? You got a house committee, the
place can be kept clean. Go on in there now, it’s clean. What harm does it do to let stiffs roll a blanket on the floor and maybe boil up a pot of java?

–I told you. It brings in the wrong kind of members.

–Since when did we get so choosy? I thought we wanted everybody in.

–Maybe we do, but not to flop in the hall.

–Like me? I flop in the hall.

–No, not like you. What the hell! But I’ve seen some guys come through here and spend a week that I’d sure hate to count on as union men. And I know plenty of home guards that stay away from here just because it’s always full of hoboes with their socks and undershirts hung out to dry.

–That’s too damn bad about the home guards. They got wives to wash their socks. Let me tell you, if it wasn’t for the hall sometimes …