Joe Hill Read Free Page A

chilly. For a long time Joe sat back in the dark by the window. Once he leaned to put his face against the pane and saw the kid at the table, still writing.
    The tantalizing sea-smell that the freighter had trailed past was still in his nostrils. The past was in it, and pictures blew like smoke across his mind, the hills and the bay and the rivermouth and the ships, the schoolyard with the lush summer grass, the YMCA reading room where sailors had come, the smoke of boats coming down from the copper mines at Falum. He could have drawn every street and building in that seaport town, and yet when he tried to bring it closer, to put himself back in the cottage, to come in on some winter evening with the red muffler three times around his neck, and image his mother in the kitchen amid the warmth and the smell of food, something in him turned away and held it off. By an effort of will he could summon the house he had grown up in, but he couldn’t hold it. It ran out of his mind like water from a leaky pail, and left him only an irritable, empty sense of loss.
    Names wouldn’t do it, either. He tried, softly and to himself, the singing Swedish sounds, naming every street of Gefle, stores and shops he remembered, people he knew. None of them meant what he kept trying to make them mean, and he felt himself watching and testing himself for the effect he wanted. He tried naming his mother’s name, Berta Hillstrom, and waited for the emotion that had ground like hobnails through his childhood and youth. But his mother’s wrongs and her skimped dejected life stirred in him only a vague unhappiness now. It was 1910 now; she was twelve years dead.
    He walked around to the door and looked into the cabin. The kid hunched over the table, still writing. Behind him, against the wall, was the long bench jumbled with glass bottles, jars, beakers, racks of test tubes, that Bottles amused himself with when he was sober. There were chemical stains on bench and floor, a faint chemical stink in the air. One of the bare studs and part of the wall had been charred by fire.
    “Got any more paper?” Joe said.
    “Sure.” The kid tore out three or four leaves of his tablet, and pawed among the mess on the table until he found a stub pencil. The point was broken, and he got out his knife to sharpen it. His forehead was pimpled, but he looked clean, curly-headed, healthy, not like the usual road punk. His hands were full of an eagerness to be helpful, and he smiled when he looked up from the sharpening and handed the pencil across.
    Back in his chair in the stern Joe shifted to get light on the paper. On the top sheet he drew a quick cartoon of a lumber camp–stumps and drooping firs and a tall topped tree with a top-faller clinging in it, and down on the ground a donkey engine contorted and bucking, with a peavy handle sticking out of its insides and a lot of smoke and agitation and gear wheels going up in radiating explosive lines. Beside the donkey engine he drew a beefy man in a stag shirt facing a smaller, curly-headed figure. The curly-headed one was thumbing his nose. Below the drawing Joe printed neatly, “This is how I kissed my last boss goodbye.”
    When it was finished he took it inside and handed it to the kid. “Here,” he said. “Put this in for your sister.”
    The kid looked at the picture and then up at Joe. The innocent awe in his face was pleasant to see. “Kee-rist, where’d you learn to draw like that?”
    “Send it on,” Joe said. “Give her my love.”
    Back in his chair again he sat and doodled aimlessly, producing a string of meticulous three-dimensional boxes, a string of sailing ships leaning in a wind. He spelled his own name, Joseph Hillstrom, in elaborate Old English lettering he had learned to make as a schoolboy from Salvation Army tracts. He turned the page over and drew a tophat with a shiny highlight up its length, and under the tophat he drew a pot-bellied man with a big watch chain. Across the page below