The Shadow Cabinet (38 page)

She said she wasn't.

She watched him as he consulted a small booklet, as small and as secretive as her bank deposit book with the Farmers and Merchants Bank, smiled again, this time brazenly, and told her that her property taxes would soon be due at the county treasurer's office. He suggested she might be able to use the additional income.

She told him that she'd already laid money aside for her taxes, where it was earning interest, gave him back his card, and shut the door.

Bob Combs had that month bought the strip of property bordering Birdie on the west. He planned on relocating his used-car lot from its downtown location and adding to it in time a new suburban garage and showroom for his new-car franchise. In March the move was made. In May, Shy Wooster came to see Birdie a second time, with the same results. That summer, Combs bought the property bordering on Birdie to the east and within a month had moved his paint and body shop from downtown, installed in a pair of corrugated-metal buildings just across the fenceline. By then, construction had begun on a shopping center directly across the pike. To the west, clearing and grubbing had started on the new highway interchange.

During the following autumn, bulldozers and road graders leveled the ten acres directly across the road, filling the air with red dust; by night the floodlights of Bob Combs's used-car emporium glazed the side windows of Birdie Jackson's cottage, where the cups and saucers on her china shelf, the pots and pans under her stove, and the vials and bottles in her medicine cabinet marched back and forth until the midnight hours to the pounding and hammering of the Combs body shop just east of her parlor window.

In November, Shy Wooster came to see her a third time.

“Must get pretty noisy here at night,” he informed her through the back screen, “all that bangin' and carryin' on, all that dust an' commotion 'cross the road there.”

“I don't notice it much,” Birdie told him in her light, dry parlor-room voice. “Work all day in town an' go to bed early, like I always done.”

“Some billboards on that bank out front would shut out a lot of that noise and dust.”

“'Deed they would,” she agreed as she began to close the door. “Shut out the morning sun from my garden, too, when spring comes.”

That same month the architect's drawings for Bob Combs's new- and used-car emporium were completed. The bank was satisfied, the zoning commission was satisfied, and the regional sales manager for the Detroit automobile manufacturer was satisfied, but not Bob Combs. He had amplified his original ambition and now wanted to consolidate his real estate holdings and build an even larger car mart, incorporating Birdie Jackson's three acres.

“It sticks out like a sore thumb, that little pea patch out there an' that shantytown crapper sittin' in the middle of it. What kind of trade you gonna attract when you got roosters crowin' and nigger wash hanging on the line all day right next door?” he told Shy Wooster. “We've gotta figure some way to get her to sell out real quick.”

This wasn't what he told the regional sales manager. “Well, I tell you,” he said. “What I'd like to do is spread out even more with a high-volume trade, but I'm a little hemmed in right now. We got a lil old nigra woman livin' over there, livin' all alone, like she has all her life, an' we kinda feel responsible for her. I don't wanna go uprootin' anybody, just moving them out of house an' home like that. What I did was tell her we'd rent some billboard space out front so she could get a little money ahead an' start looking for a place out there in Frogtown, where all the colored folks from around here have moved to, but she was too proud to take it. That life she's got over there is all she knows. I kinda think it's only the good Lord himself has the right to tell her, ‘Time to move on, Miz Birdie. Progress is movin' in on you and it's time to get on down the road.'”

Bob Combs had a seductive voice. Disembodied by radio from the chin-less face, the small sanctimonious mouth, the small watchful eyes, and the muscleless flab of his waist and shoulders, it was the voice of reverence and piety, flowing from the purest wells of rural and populist sentiment. He'd discovered it almost by accident during his secretarial college days, when he was selling a variety of kitchen gimcracks and medicine cabinet nostrums to keep himself in books, clothes, and hair tonic. He wasn't quick on his feet, was incapable of spontaneity and as dull as a boardinghouse bathtub. Barbershop colloquy of any length, depth, or subtlety quickly proclaimed him for what he was—a nasty, short-tempered bigot. Sharp-eyed housewives who questioned him too shrewdly about his door-to-door product saw the same transformation—a nasty, red-faced bully stooping to collect his shabby merchandise in front of slammed doors, barking dogs, and, occasionally, abusive husbands. After a winter and spring of failure, he took to the back roads one June in a Ford coupé as an apprentice to a velvet-voiced salesman from a Nashville religious house, peddling devotional materials. By August he had a coupé of his own. He'd learned to lengthen his sentences, deepen his delivery, and to introduce himself by talking about everything under the sun but the product in his display case. He'd also learned to keep to the dingier, less sophisticated side of the tracks. By the end of the summer he'd acquired a resonant baritone that didn't so much enlighten his customers as entrap them, like flypaper, reaching its syrupy, comforting tongue into dim parlors and despondent bedrooms where the lonely, the elderly, or the infirm waited for visitors who never came.

That was the beginning. In time he moved from devotional ware to encyclopedias to Formica kitchen counters, then to automobiles, second mortgages, and finally into politics, returning to that same fundamentalist constituency whom he could now assure that the Gospel—less its devotional wares of songbooks, sheet music, telephone book covers, wall tapes-tries, birdbath statuary, and mother-of-pearl gifts for the pallbearers from the family of the deceased—was their only political hope, and Bob Combs its apostle.

The baritone had less effect upon Birdie Jackson, who had frequently been the prey of real estate developers, to say nothing of asphalt-siding and burial-insurance salesman who'd heard of her patrimony. She knew the value of her property, just as she knew it would go higher. She'd often discussed the subject with a trust officer at the Farmers and Merchants bank, whose advice followed her own instincts: if she was in no hurry to move, wait until the price was one she couldn't afford to pass up.

The day Bob Combs appeared at her back door, he was smoking a Kiwanis Club cigar. He'd just returned from the monthly luncheon downtown and was feeling particularly benign. He knocked at the screen door, stepped back, cast a tolerant eye over the eclectic clutter of the rear stoop—washtub, scrub board, chopping block, a bag of chicken feathers, plaits of drying onions hanging from a beam—studied more covetously the side and rear acres, and lifted his hat as the inside door opened.

“Howdy, Miz Birdie,” he began, with that bounteous smile that was the most prominent feature of his billboard advertising and, his admirers claimed, could charm a cat out of a shrimp bucket. “I'm Bob Combs.”

“I know who you is,” she said. “Seen your face often enough around town these days.” She didn't open the screen door as she pulled on her faded woolen mackinaw. On her feet she wore a pair of men's galoshes.

“I came to see if maybe we could talk a little business, Miz Birdie. Maybe I could come in and we could have a quiet talk about this nice place you've got here.”

She was looking at his cigar. “Ain't no smoking in my house,” she said. “Hangs in the curtains, chokes my birds half to death, gets into my bread dough. You wanna talk, you stay out in the yard an' we can talk like this. I was fixin' to go out, anyway.”

The kitchen behind her was small and neat; an iron stove stood across the floor. Two bird cages hung from the side window. A gray cat was lying on the sill. Combs rubbed the ash from his shoe in the yard, returned the cigar stub to his pocket, and followed Birdie across the path to the coal pile next to the rear shed. She filled the scuttle, her gloves on, and then carried it back to the house, still in silence. He made no offer to help. He thought she had reconsidered, now that his cigar was extinguished, and that she would invite him in. She didn't. She locked the screen door instead, carried the scuttle inside, and then returned to the door.

“If I'd sell, ain't no place my chickens could go,” she said. “No place I could carry them. What'd I do with my birds; my cats too? This is the only place they got, just like me. Money don't mean nothing to them, nothing at all. I got what I need to take care of myself.” She hesitated, looking at his bright eyes, the cherub's mouth, and the polished light-tan shoes, curious as to what metal this billboard Jehoshaphat was made of. “How much would you be a-paying?”

Combs thought she was being coy. “Five hundred dollars an acre,” he announced, generosity rich in his voice.

“Lord a-mercy.” She smiled, embarrassed. He smiled too, not unaware of what such a princely sum must mean to this little old darky woman no bigger than a twist of burley tobacco. “Lordy me,” she continued. “You do go back a long ways, don't you, Mr. Combs, you an' my daddy both. I ain't heard tell of them prices since the car line out yonder carried you all the way to town for a Roosevelt nickel.”

Then she shut the door.

Shyrock Wooster hadn't been with Combs when he'd made the offer, but he knew of Birdie Jackson's rejection. Combs had described the encounter, but with the same vagueness that marked his sales career: the subtleties and the fine print were omitted. He hadn't revealed the stinginess of his offer. He'd said instead that she wouldn't abandon her family homestead, her chickens, her cats and her canaries, and that the small cottage was her refuge against the intrusions of a rootless and changing outside world.

Shy Wooster knew of Birdie Jackson's passion for neatness, order, and propriety. He thought she was giving herself airs, an old black spinster in a broken-down shanty mimicking those Episcopalian dowagers from downtown whose cool parlors she dusted and whose silver tea services she kept polished.

“Break them chickens loose and maybe she'll go where they do,” he told a stripman from the Combs body shop one morning as they sat at the linoleum counter of the roadside coffee shop and diner on the pike. “Even better, throw a bucket of pig shit in that front parlor of hers an' I tell you you'd see one fast nigger running down the road out there back to Frog-town, where she belongs.”

The diner and coffee shop belonged to Cora Richards, the ex-wife of an army sergeant from Fort Jackson. They'd bought the diner's inventory and lease from the former owner with his mustering out pay, but he'd re-enlisted, they'd been divorced, and now Cora ran the business alone—cook, waitress, and proprietor. She was a plain woman, but not unattractive. Her hair was raven black, her figure full-bodied, her eyes quick and friendly, but not with customers like Shy Wooster. Those who sat at the counter or the four small tables inside the door had known her ex-husband, but rarely talked about the divorce. They were for the most part salesmen from the car lot or the body shop across the pike, construction workers or dozer operators from the crews working on the new shopping center next door. Shy Wooster was much younger than most of them. In his whispered counter talk and vulgar innuendos she heard the frustrated sexuality of a college freshman of the times. After her divorce, he'd become obsessed with the idea of taking her out. He'd asked her three times, not over the counter with others present or even alone with her in the diner. The invitations had come by phone late in the evening, just as she was about ready to lock up. In the sly, insinuating voice she heard the same adolescent mixture of contempt, condescension, and sexual fascination she'd seen in his eyes as he'd followed her movements at the grill.

“Come on, you wanna little of what I got to give, honey, just say so,” he'd urged during the third and final call. The voice sickened her the way an obscene telephone call would, and she would have responded vigorously this time, more than a match for Shyrock Wooster's fraternity house imagination, but the hour was late and she was tired, and she'd slammed down the phone in tears. Alone with her in the diner that evening was Tom Pepper, a tired, silent, used-car salesman from Bob Combs's lot across the pike. He'd served time in Tennessee for manslaughter after he'd returned from the war, and now lived alone in a weed-grown trailer on an isolated lot halfway to Frogtown.

“Hot stuff, aincha?” he teased her after she told him the story. “Hot stuff, gettin' all them college boys hot in the collar.”

“Ornery too,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Next time he comes in here, I'm gonna take out after him, fix him good.”

“Ornery as me,” he said as he wiped off the tables.

“Ornrier,” she said, putting her handkerchief away. “You ever two-time me, I'll tell 'em how you can tap-dance, tap-dance up a storm.”

He didn't believe her. “You ain't that ornery,” he said as he straightened up the chairs. “But don't you worry any about Mr. Rooster. I'll have me a quiet talk with that little sucker.”

Shyrock Wooster never called Cora again, and it was four months before he reappeared at the diner.

Standing at the grill that morning, Cora heard Wooster's remark about sending Birdie Jackson down to Frogtown. She bought country-fresh eggs and seasonal produce from Birdie, and the following Saturday morning, as the two women stood in Birdie's back kitchen, she asked if Bob Combs had approached her about buying her property. After she learned that Birdie had rejected his offer, she cautioned her.

“You better watch out,” she said. “You know what some of those car salesmen of his that are all the time on the road are mixed up in, don't you?”