The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  The room’s silence was broken only by the fiery rumble from the coal stove. Many were asleep.

  “’Course now, some folks come out o’ hard times pretty good,” Dorsey Combs continued mildly. “Sure they do. Some of us get toted up to the steeple, get carried up there high and mighty, up there at the top of the spire, where the sweet music plays. But there ain’t much room up there, you notice that? You ever notice how small it is, up there high and mighty, ridin’ on everyone’s shoulders up above the pigeons even, where the sweet music an’ chimes play all day long? But you fellas out there, you ain’t lucky at all. You’re hid out in the cellar, spread out on the walks, pounded into sand by every Tom, Dick, and Harry on his way to Sunday school, his big fancy automobile parked at the curb, feet and tires trampin’ on you all day long, you see what I mean? And another thing if you’re lower down, which is what I been trying to tell you since I stood up here, is that being that far down, it’s not just the Tom, Dick, and Harrys, either, because even the pigeons are gonna shit on you, that’s how bad it’s got. That’s the difference between high and low style, boys, and that’s what I’m here a-telling you. Until you boys get yourself organized, you folks are low down, no count, low style, ornery mean, like I’m a-talking, and the pigeons have shit on you good—”

  Someone laughed. Dorsey Combs ignored him.

  “So you know what I mean, don’t you? Now you’re beginning to get woke up. So lemme tell you something else. It’s not just the pigeons I’m talking about—”

  The sound of the rear door being opened stirred those in the front row with the expectation of bean soup being brought from the kitchen behind the alley, but it was Mrs. Tolliver, her face stung by the cold, returning to fetch the prayerbook she’d forgotten on top of the piano.

  Dorsey Combs’s expression changed immediately. “Take your beginning from Ezekiel,” he sang out, his voice lifted to its revival tent register. “‘Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion! Put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem! I give my back to the smiters and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair! Who is he that shall condemn me? Lo, they shall all wax old as a garment! The moth shall eat them up!’”

  Mrs. Tolliver smiled, but then her eyes dropped to the spittoon at the foot of the lectern. Dorsey Combs smiled too, a sad, weak smile. ‘“Come and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon,’” he continued, but the cold cheeks turned away, to disappear through the curtain. After they heard the rear door close, Combs dropped the quid of tobacco into the spittoon and nudged it back under the base of the lectern. Foreman watched him bring a small medicine bottle from his inside pocket, twist off the cap, and take a long pull. “‘How much less man, that is a worm, and the son of man, which is a worm,’” he muttered huskily, his eyes shining as he replaced the bottle.

  Someone guffawed. “That ain’t no bean soup,” another called out. The audience was awake now, aroused by Mrs. Tolliver’s intrusion, and disappointed that the soup hadn’t appeared. They had also seen Dorsey Combs’s bottle.

  “How about passing it around?” a younger man yelled.

  “Don’t be a-laughing now,” Combs protested, but it was too late. His grip had slipped; sedition was in the air.

  “Where’s the bean soup at, preacher man?” a hoarse voice asked contemptuously.

  “Boys, if you’re gonna whip old Satan, you gotta play Satan’s game,” Combs said, but the laughter only grew louder. “It’s not old Satan we’re messing with, anyways. He’s gone out the back door to get him a job over on the Savannah River. Don’t go depending on the Good Book. Step away from it, step up to yourself for a change, get organized, get yourself a union—”

  A tall, gaunt man in the middle row stood up. “You got yours,” he called out. “Gimme some o’ ours!”

  Combs yielded. “All right, it’s a-coming,” he promised haplessly. “Just hold down the ruckus. I need me a head count first. You fellas that are first-timers, step up to the front. I need me three to serve an’ three to wash up. I don’t want any wash-up gang sneaking out the back door like they did last night.”

  The crowd grew quiet again and Dorsey Combs counted hands. “You boys done pounded me into sand,” he said as he left the platform. Buster Foreman saw a small, weak man, eyes flushed with humiliation.

  The wash-up crew disappeared, as Dorsey Combs had feared, and Foreman stayed behind to help Combs and the cook wash the dishes.

  “I figured you for a federal man soon as I laid eyes on you in the back room,” Dorsey Combs confessed, wiping his eyes after a long swallow of whiskey from the coffee cup. He sat with Buster at an all-night truck stop on a highway east of Knoxville. It was called Colonel Tom Pepper’s. During the drive out from the city in Buster’s rented car, Combs had described the proprietor as an old friend from his South Carolina days. “Saw it right off. How come you looked me up? I got those charges dismissed, but you can’t tell sometimes. Maybe you heard about them.”

  “Which charges are you talking about?”

  “Federal charges,” said Combs, leaning forward with a sigh as he returned his handkerchief to his hip pocket. He had a small potbelly, an encumbrance that forced him to give breath when he bent, stooped, or stirred himself too energetically. “Transportin’ a minor across state lines. You try to keep foolishness like that hushed up, whether it’s one lie or a pack o’ lies.” His gaze was elusive, a little shy, the sad gray eyes no longer so secretive. His hand trembled as he reached for the cup. Two coffee cups were on the table in front of him, one filled with coffee, the other half-filled from the medicine bottle of blended whiskey he kept in his pocket.

  “I heard something about that,” Buster said. At the storefront church he’d heard the public orator, but at the wash sink and in the car driving out he’d had a sense of another Dorsey Combs, this one the small-town fabulist, the barbershop and courthouse-steps raconteur. It was difficult to tell where the life ended and the stories began.

  “It was all on account of that trouble over in South Carolina,” Combs said, “where we were organizin’ that textile plant I was telling you about. I was living in a boardinghouse, and the company union went and bought off the woman that runs it. Said I’d run off with her daughter. Lemme tell you sumpin’ about that daughter, too. It wasn’t carnal knowledge that got that girl’s clothes tore up. A pure case o’ self-defense. She wasn’t any minor, either, like her mama was claiming. She was twenty-five if she was a day, that girl was, but her mama dressed her up like that, dressed her up like she was a china doll, fourteen years old. You ever run into a widow lady like that? Keeps herself and her daughter dressed up like they was still both virgins, thinks no one’ll know?”

  “I don’t think so,” Buster said. Only two truckdrivers sat in the midnight silence of the truck stop and one of them turned to look at Combs. The air was tart with griddle fat and boiled coffee. A CB radio crackled from the shelf behind the cash register, carrying truckers’ warnings of radar traps, icy ramps, and one-lane traffic on the interstates into North and South Carolina. “Who brought the charges?”

  “Her mama done it. The daughter knew I was coming to Knoxville to visit Colonel Tom over there and ast could she ride along to see her uncle. When we got here, turned out there wasn’t any uncle. I gave her bus fare to get back home an’ took her right on the gravel out in front there to catch her a Greyhound. That’s where we had the argument. Got her clothes tore an’ so did I.” He lifted his arm to show Buster a gaping hole where the sleeve had been ripped. Then he stood up and peeled off his coat. The right sleeve of his white shirt was missing. He wore only a starched cuff. “Tore the sleeve right off, coat and shirt both. Woulda jerked my arm right out the socket. I got the coat sewed back on. Can’t hardly tell, can you?” He put on the coat again, pulled the cuff down on his wrist, and resumed his seat. “What happened was, on the bus going back she tore her clothes up some more, and after she got home made up the damndest pack o’ lies you ever heard. Her mama swore out a warrant. I wouldn�
�t o’ touched that girl, wouldn’t have harmed a hair on her head—not with that face. Ugly? Lordy. You oughta see it. You think you know ugly?”

  “Some ugly, maybe,” Buster said warily.

  “The worst ugly, what’s that?”

  “That’s hard to say.”

  “Toad soup,” Combs suggested smartly.

  “Yeah, that’s ugly,” Buster conceded.

  “Ugly as toad soup, that’s what she called herself.” Combs reached for the coffee cup. “Just as mean, too. Two days after that, I tore up my machine in an accident out on the highway there. Been here ever since, high and dry. My car’s out back. No place to go, nothing to get there with, only shank’s mares. The Church of the Open Door’s got a rest home for folks like that.” He smiled dimly, looking at Buster Foreman from beneath the bushy eyebrows, as if he recognized a kindred spirit. “They dry ’em out, Miz Tolliver does. Hang ’em up and dry ’em out, sunshine clean, like country wash, only it’s the psalm-singing and prayin’ does the scrubbing, sure as lye soap. She’s done a right smart bit of praying in her time, Miz Tolliver has—had to, married into that family like she did. She’s done some praying for me, too, along the way. First knew her in Bible class down in Georgia and I was the Bible Answer Man, like she said. Used to call me up at the station. I could do voices then—livestock reports, produce market, even did a baseball game once. She was a pretty young girl then. Went down to see her one weekend. We kept in touch over the years. Did too many voices to suit her, that’s the trouble.” His voice trailed away and he drank again from the cup. He smelled of whiskey and tobacco, the aroma so powerful that Foreman knew it wouldn’t have escaped Mrs. Tolliver that night or anyone else sitting in the first two rows at the storefront tabernacle. “Should have stayed in radio,” Combs said sorrowfully.

  The tractor-trailers came whining down the grade out front, bound for the interstate. Combs seemed to listen, his head turned away. The two truckdrivers paid their bill and left.

  “How come you looked me up?” he began again, after a minute. “You said you wanted to have you a little talk. What in particular you got on your mind?”

  “Nothing in particular; just find out a little more about the Combs family,” Buster said. “You told me you were a union organizer. When did that begin?”

  “A long time ago, longer’n I wanna remember.”

  “So you’ve given it up now.”

  “I’m wore out. I been through it all an’ I’m wore out. I’ve turned myself in, you could say, come to the end of the line and turned myself in to the Church of the Open Door. There was a time I could do it, but not anymore. They broke me down, this country did. Wore me out. Look at that.”

  He held out his hand, palm down, stubby fingers spread, but this time it wasn’t the alcoholic’s tremors Buster Foreman noticed. The fingers were scarred and bent.

  “Where’d it happen?”

  “Happened everywhere,” Combs said. “Look at it. They busted my fingers and they broke my head. I’ve been beat up, scalded, pistol whipped, and stomped on. I got my ear half-chewed off once by a bus driver and had a bucket of cold horse piss poured on me once down in Laurel, Mississippi. They did it every way but legal, but they done it. No, I’m wore out. You saw me down at that church tonight. Time was I could take a bunch of folks like that, worse off than I was, and get ’em all fired up, ready to go, like in the old days, but you saw what happened. What you heard tonight was my old Ozark, Alabama, speech, ’cause that’s where I made it, down in Ozark, twenty-one years ago. What’d you think of it?”

  “I was a little confused,” Buster said.

  “Steeples an’ spires,” Combs said, as if he hadn’t heard. “It was in a Methodist church outside of town and we were gonna march, but we couldn’t get that colored congregation to join in. So I heard about it—I was the champeen talker of that particular group we had down there—an’ I went over that Sunday night and had me a few words with ’em. I talked to those folks a long, long time. I told them about organizing, standing together. I told them about the steeple and the spire, how small it was, how the sweet music plays all day long but just for a blessed few, and how even the pigeons got a better roost than they did. It wasn’t easy. When you stand up an’ say ‘shit’ to a Sunday night Methodist congregation like they was, you’d better either have quick feet or a quicker head, ’cause they’ll come after you like a bunch o’ bees, run you right out of your britches if you don’t watch. But I had the word in those days. I had something to say and they’d listen, something that carried me along. Even now, I can feel a little of it coming back, the way it was in the old days, but they’re all gone now, the movement’s all broke up, all scattered. Oh, Lordy …”

  He faltered, his voice heavy with emotion, and Buster Foreman watched the brightness gather in his eyes as he leaned forward once again to take the handkerchief from his hip. “But I’d do it all over again, I sure would,” Combs continued huskily, “do it all over again tomorrow.” The chair creaked as he touched his wet cheeks with the folded handkerchief. “They broke me down quick tonight, didn’t they? Got to me fast. Wouldn’t have done that in the old days. I get upset, thinking about it. They’re all gone now, all of ’em, just like the feelin’s gone. When we lost the feelin’, the movement broke up, and the wind carried it away, just like that dust bowl they had out in Oklahoma back in the thirties.…”

  “The civil rights trail,” Buster said, no longer puzzled. He and Fuzzy had been wrong. The long record of arrests and convictions hadn’t been for lying out in ambush in the high weeds with his ax handle or knuckle duster. He’d been one of the marchers.

  “Those were the best years I gave to anyone, the best years of my life,” Combs was saying. “I couldn’t tell you how far I walked, how many places I went. The first time was from Selma to Montgomery, walked all the way, and got my head busted open outside the Jefferson Davis Motel, I think it was. There was some kind of honky-tonk next door and some trash standing out there alongside the road, a-hooting an’ hollering. Closer we got to town, the worse it was, and so we had to close up a little. I was walking on the outside, right along the edge of the highway. Next to me was a Catholic priest, next to him a Congregationalist lady from somewhere up in Massachusetts. All of a sudden, I heard someone call out my name, call out just clear as a bell. ‘Hey, Dorsey Combs, what are you doing with them niggers, carpetbagger?’ this fella yells at me. It was a used-car salesman I knew from up in South Carolina and I couldn’t figure out what he was doing with that trash standing up alongside the road. So I tell the folks around me to keep moving, but I go over to him real quiet like, on account of those were the rules we laid out before we left Selma—no talking, no laughing, no heckling back—but once I step off the pavement I’m back with my own folks again, I can talk their talk, they can talk mine. So I say to this car salesman, ‘Who you callin’ carptetbagger, you redneck peckerwood sonofabitch.’ I never saw who it was cold-cocked me first, whether it was him or someone else, but when I woke up, I was in jail, me and that Congregationalist lady both. First time she’d ever been in jail.”

  “But not the first for you,” Buster Foreman said.

  “Could be; I don’t remember now.” He studied Foreman curiously. “How come you know all this? You used to be government, son. If you’re not now, you used to be. I seen too many of ’em not to know. What is it you wanna find out about?”

  “What Bob Combs was doing all those years.”

  “Go ask him. Haven’t spoken to him in twenty-two years; not him, not the rest of that family. He’s a half-brother—not real kin where I come from. Me, I’m my daddy’s side. He worked in a textile mill, same as I started out.”

  “When did you get into the movement?”

  “I went up to the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, training to help organize the textile mills and the coal tipples. There was some folks from the NAACP up there at the same time and that’s where I met up with them. Rosa Parks. You remember Rosa P
arks?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “December 1955. She started up the Montgomery boycott. Wouldn’t sit in the back of the bus and got fined fourteen dollars. Just fourteen dollars to get it all started up. Find something you can get started up with fourteen dollars these days. Couldn’t even get a hotel dinner in Nashville.” Combs waited for Buster Foreman to answer, but he had nothing to say. “What do you do—work for a newspaper, digging up dirt?”

  “No, not a newspaper; just curious.”

  “So you’re looking for dirt,” Combs replied. “Lemme tell you something before you get started. You go butting into Bob Combs’s business, you’re buying yourself a whole lotta trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Dorsey Combs picked up the whiskey cup. “The kind of trouble that don’t need asking. Bob Combs is like that textile mill over in South Carolina that run me out of town—big business.” The CB crackled from behind the counter, a trucker’s voice warning of a disabled truck on an exit ramp, but there was no one there to hear.