Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online Page A

moving away from the free-lunch counter, lights the lamps back of the bar, and now another phase has come, the warm phase.
    After a second beer and a bologna sandwich and the lights, the Forecastle is a place of warmth and comradeship and life. Noweverything is rich and gilded, the colors shine fatly, the pearl handle of the prize jackknife is fabulous, the razor is a princely instrument, the shotgun a weapon for King George in a Scottish shooting box.
    There is more talk now, louder, more vehement.
    “… I matching you or you matching me?” the voices say.
    “… Ketchel?” they say. “He couldn’t lick his weight in duck feathers. Over in Goldfield once he hired out as a fink, and one night a friend of mine laid him cold as a wedge with a ketchup bottle. You want to talk fighters, I’ll talk to you, but not Ketchel. Not that dirty stool …”
    “… so when she’d been gone three or four days they finally find her in this hotel with the Greek, and I guess her old man was wild. He busted in the room, and her and the Greek was in bed, and the old man just grabbed the covers and yanked. Neither of them had a god damn thing on. Bert said she had hair on her like a man. How’d you like that, boy? Jesus, I’d like to have been there when they busted in that room. I guess the old man was really mad …”
    “… split you ten punches, Jack,” says the man on the left.
    You punch five apiece, and then another five, and win a box of chocolates and then match the man for them and lose. The expensive Marlin shines, blue-satin barrel and polished stock, against the mirror, and the pearl-handled jackknife and the razor and the reel and the mug and basket stay where they were. They shine there, a comfortable reassurance and a promise, and multiply themselves in the fecund deceptive glass.
    There is usually music about this time of the evening, a big Swede who sings and plays the guitar with fingers so thick it is a miracle he manages to hit only one string at a time. Not a
j
or a
w
to his name. It’s a riot to hear him when he gets a little stewed and starts off on “Yoost a song at tvilight.” Maybe on Saturday nights he starts later.
    But here he is now—Lord, what a moose!—between a couple of other men, a slim dressed-up fellow with a tight mouth, and a funny-paper Swede with a face like an old ewe. They crowd up behind the men at the bar, and the big Swede says, “Vot you got for soft drinks, Emil?”
    The way Emil stops and stares, puckering his troubled forehead under the flat curl, gets a laugh.
    The big Swede keeps insisting, laughing. “Sure, vot you got?”
    “Lemon pop,” Emil says, and they both look at the slim man in the blue serge. He smiles as if it hurt him. After the big Swede’s, his voice is quiet and low. “Lemon pop’ll do fine,” he says.
    They get the pop and a pint of whiskey and mix back into the crowd looking for a table. Every now and again the big Swede’s laugh vibrates the glassware, but it seems that he is not going to sing. Maybe he will later.
    After a while he does. The guitar starts to plink and hum, and men at the bar or around the room half cock their heads to listen. The Swede has pushed back his chair and slung the guitar around his neck and is picking aimlessly at the strings, saying something and laughing. Now there is a little hook-nosed man, McGibbeney, a railroader, sitting at the table between the man in the blue suit and the ewe-faced Swede.
    The men who are listening grin a little and nod a little when the big Swede, Alberg is his name, starts off. “Halleluiah I’m a Bum.” That’s the one. The Swede has a voice like coal pouring down a tin chute, but his thick fingers are surprisingly nimble on the neck of the guitar. Voices join in from along the wall, among the tables:
    Oh why don’t you work like the other men do?
    How the hell can I work when there’s no work to do?
    Halleluiah I’m a bum,
    Hallelluiah bum again,
    Halleluiah give us a