by W. T. Tyler
Nick Straus had met twice with the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had begun preparing for spring hearings on arms control, the most extensive in years. A copy of his DIA daily summary had been bootlegged to a staff member, who’d circulated it to a handful of senators as suspicious as Nick Straus about the administration’s intentions regarding arms talks with Moscow. Several were even more vehement than Nick in maintaining that the Pentagon’s insistence on acquiring a first-strike weapon under a smoke screen of phony arms control was dangerously undermining deterrence and greatly increasing the probability of catastrophe. He’d met privately with two senators and they’d talked for almost three hours. He was told his revelations had been useful for those already dubious of the administration’s intentions.
He was asked to prepare for the Senate committee three papers for the May hearings, whose purpose would be to draft a resolution to be sent to the Senate, expressing both Senate and public concern about the urgency of arms control talks with the Soviet Union and greater flexibility by the administration.
It was during these conversations that he was asked to join the Foreign Relations Committee staff. He declined, regretfully, explaining that he’d just accepted the directorship of the Center.
With the preparation of the three papers, Nick Straus began the reorientation of the Center, which had too long been administered for the benefit of its own technicians. It was to be a kind of public forum, an ombudsman, intended to clarify the crucial issues of the day. Public issues were too often obscured by executive secrecy, privilege, and cant. The government erred in claiming that the issues were so complex that only the experts could determine the relevancy of a given policy. It was the government itself, Nick insisted, that was the poorest guide possible through the secretive, relativistic maze of fact, conjecture, and fallacy that lay behind a given policy choice, like the MX missile. The public may not have been experts in these technical details, but neither were they intimidated by them. On the larger issues, they knew whether a given policy was wrong or right, and this was their strength. The Center would help make that strength public.
Angus McVey gave him his enthusiastic support. So did Haven Wilson, who’d made his final recommendations and retired from involvement with the Center. Putting aside for the time being his plans for opening a law practice in rural Virginia near the old farm he and Betsy had bought, he joined a small Washington law firm. He was now a commuter again, with a large, airy office overlooking K Street, his own private parking space, and a dozen associates, many of them former government lawyers.
It was in the third week at his law office that he read one morning of a decision by a Tennessee federal district court that brought to mind Birdie Jackson and prompted telephone calls to Foreman and Bernie Klempner. The three of them met for lunch several days later. They talked for two hours and Klempner promised to consult his records. The information Klempner discovered there and a subsequent visit to the Justice Department’s civil rights division were what convinced Haven Wilson that he should talk to Birdie Jackson when she visited Washington.
Birdie Jackson had had recent chest pains and was under medication when she’d visited Washington. Her doctor had advised against the trip but she’d come anyway, arrived by overnight bus with members of two Baptist church congregations from South Carolina. Buster Foreman met her the evening of the first day in the lounge of the Beltway Motor Lodge, where she was staying. She was relieved to learn that Smooter Davis was safe and sound in Oakland, California, but was puzzled that she hadn’t heard from him during all those years. Buster didn’t tell her that Davis had refused to return Haven Wilson’s telephone calls or acknowledge receipt of his registered letter.
She told Buster that she’d received a letter and a mysterious package from Cora Pepper, sent to her in care of the Mount Zion Church. It had been mailed from Newport News, Virginia. She and Tom Pepper were on their way to Washington, but their truck had broken down outside Newport News. Cora was working in a motel, Tom Pepper as a short-order cook. The package she’d sent contained a wad of yellowing newspaper clippings with marginal comments by Tom Pepper, auto delivery receipts from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi used-car retailers, carbon copies of typewritten notices of meetings at Bob Combs’s hunting camp, and two faded Polaroid photographs taken during one of those meetings. In one, Buster could make out the porcine face of Shy Wooster, standing next to a beer-bellied man wearing a barbecue apron, holding a barbecue fork in one hand and an automatic shotgun in the other. He was identified by the handwriting on the back as a Klan official from Foley, Alabama.
Cora had explained in the accompanying letter that she’d collected the papers from Tom Pepper’s old bankruptcy files—they had been given up not willingly but grudgingly: her husband had planned to use them to interest Bob Combs and Shy Wooster in investing in his fast-food franchise. The memorabilia concerned those years Tom Pepper had worked at the Combs car emporium in South Carolina, when he had been privy to the conspiratorial goings and comings of those difficult times.
Haven Wilson looked at the envelope’s contents after Buster Foreman brought them to him the same night. The meaning wasn’t entirely clear for each document, but the pattern was. The dates were what interested him most.
Wilson met with Birdie Jackson in his K Street office the following morning. She was smaller and more frail than he’d expected. Her voice was weak and slightly hoarse. As Buster helped her from the portable wheelchair to the leather armchair, Wilson had misgivings about subjecting her to a long and arduous public trial.
She listened silently as he described her case against those who’d burned her house and those who, knowingly or unknowingly, had aided and abetted them. He told her what Bernie Klempner had confirmed a week earlier—that he’d been warned by Smooter Davis that a few Klan sympathizers from the next-door car lot had been planning arson the week her cottage had burned. The target had been the Mount Zion Church, which had recently sponsored a private excursion to join an NAACP sit-in in Selma, Alabama. The warning had been passed to the FBI in Washington, to the civil rights division at Justice, to the FBI field offices in South Carolina, and to local law officials. None had acted on the information. Her case would be difficult, but he thought he had enough evidence to prove a violation of federal law and a conspiracy to deprive her of her rights for reasons of race. The suit would be brought against the U.S. government.
She was surprised and disappointed. “The gov’ment, the U.S. gov’ment?” she asked weakly. “Wash’n’ton?”
“It’s the government’s responsibility,” he said. “The government knew about a conspiracy next door and did nothing.”
“It wasn’t Washington. It was Mr. Bob Combs and Mr. Shyrock Wooster. They done it.”
“This would come out in the suit,” Buster said. “Combs and Wooster both.”
“Then it’s them two I’ll take to court,” she insisted.
Wilson explained why that would be impossible. Both men would be protected under the law. The essential issue was the failure of the U.S. government to protect her rights when it had knowledge that a conspiracy was taking place.
She sat gazing at him in disappointment.
“Remember when Smooter Davis once told you that Bob Combs’s day in court was coming?” Buster Foreman said quietly. “Combs, Wooster, all of them? This would be that day.”
“The U.S. government?” she asked plaintively. “It’s the government that’s given me what I got. How’m I gonna walk up to the courthouse and ask the judge to put the U.S. government in jail? How’m I gonna do that? Lordy, I don’t want to spend the rest of my days fighting the U.S. government. I couldn’t never rest, couldn’t sleep at night. Someone always slip-pin’ ’round my house. My daddy’d turn over in his grave. ‘What you done, chile,’ he’d say. It’d be me lockin’ myself up—not Mr. Shyrock Wooster; not Bob Combs, either. It’s between me and them, and goin’ to the courthouse against the U.S. government won’t make it
right.”
They couldn’t convince her. The most she would promise was to think about it, to talk to her minister at the Mount Zion Church, and to a deacon, as old as she, whose judgment she trusted.
Only as she was leaving did she seem to remember something and turn back from her wheelchair to look at Haven Wilson.
“I don’t know you,” she said, “but I want you to promise me something. Don’t go talking about this, don’t go sending me letters, something my cousin could read, don’t go putting ideas into her head. Don’t you go making bad worse with that girl. I don’t want no one knowing about this, not till I think about it.”
Haven Wilson wasn’t sure what she meant, but Buster seemed to understand. “He won’t say a word, I promise,” Buster assured her.
It was a sunny but chilly day. Buster and his wife took her to lunch and afterward drove her up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Senate office building for the visiting group’s meeting with Senator Bob Combs—a ten-minute photo session followed by a ten-minute speech by the senator on the state of the Union.
Buster and Birdie waited at the top of the steps for the Mount Zion delegation, whose bus hadn’t appeared. She preferred to rest outside in the weak winter sun, sitting in her wheelchair, silently following the faces of those climbing the steps, curious as to who they were and what their business was.
“He really thinks I can do that?” she asked Buster, “Take the government to court?”
“He sure does.”
“It’s a whole lotta business I don’t know nothing about,” she admitted. “All these folks here.”
Buster’s wife circled the block a third time and drove on, searching for a parking place. The two were still waiting when a pair of men left a cab at the curb and came up the steps.
Buster recognized Shy Wooster a minute before she did. With him was one of Combs’s staff aides, arriving for the three o’clock meeting.
Wooster paused at the top of the steps, handkerchief at his mouth to wipe away the last traces of a long prime-ribs-and-Burgundy lunch. He glanced at Buster and then at the small figure in the wheelchair, who sat watching him silently. Something in her regard troubled him and he looked back as he held the door open for his companion. He may have remembered then, meeting her calm, unflinching eyes, because he nodded affably, but she didn’t return the nod, and his gaze shrank away, retreating from further contact as he looked out over the street and the few irregular clouds marching above the rooftops, perplexed, as if he’d lost something there. Then he turned and went inside. Unchallenged now, her eyes moved on—beyond the door, Buster Foreman, the figures on the steps, and the busy street, moved out beyond the sun-splashed buildings and the surrounding streets and river, the sloping hills and the towns and cities beyond, as if in sovereign possession of them all, no longer conscious of her small black hands, the handkerchief she clutched, the awkward wheelchair that had become a cruel appendage to her tired body, the youth and middle age that had vanished, the children that had never come.
But the moment passed and she felt the pain return. Her head inclined forward and her hand moved to her heart. Powerless to do otherwise, she had lived so long with her faith that her body seemed a prison to her.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Buster asked.
She nodded, wiping her eyes. “I was thinking of my daddy,” she whispered, turning her head away from two security guards on the steps. Frightened and alone, she had fled backward for an instant, yielding the present to the past, like Ed Donlon under the clock at the Biltmore, young Lieutenant Gawpin crossing the Remagen bridge in his new Pershing, or even Bob Combs and Shy Wooster, bringing their pastoral boyhood in South Carolina to a waiting nation. “I was thinking how he used to take me an’ Mama fishing with my cousins down on the Savannah River,” she said, watching the irregular clouds march over the rooftops.
The bus arrived. The visiting delegation from Mount Zion was dignified and elderly, all dressed in Sunday finery, the women wearing corsages. Two of the men wore American Legion hats.
“Looks like they’re coming to a funeral, don’t it?” Birdie said as they mounted the steps. “Mercy, lookit that.”
They were met at the door by one of Bob Combs’s staff aides and led down the long intimidating corridor to a formal reception room where Bob Combs was waiting, standing just inside the door. Shyrock Wooster was at his side, plucking at his French cuffs, elbows held out like a tin soldier’s as he introduced each of the guests to the senator, so expertly reading out their names from the forgotten nameplates on their coats that it seemed to the embarrassed visitors he’d known them all his life.
Birdie Jackson was the last to enter, her wheelchair still pushed by Buster Foreman. A photographer was taking pictures as the guests passed through the receiving line, and Buster’s concentration was momentarily shattered by the glare of a flashbulb as he eased Birdie Jackson across the threshold.
“Well, I declare,” he heard Shy Wooster say. “Lookit who it is, come all the way from Frogtown. I expect you don’t remember me, do you, Miz Birdie?”
“’Deed I do,” he heard her say, surprised at the strength that had seeped back into her voice, which rang as clear as a bell. But even that didn’t prepare him for the transformation brought by the flesh-and-blood presence of Bob Combs and Shy Wooster after all those years.
“Well, what do you think of that, Senator? I didn’t think you’d remember, Miz Birdie, I sure didn’t.”
“How’m I ever gonna forget? It was you an’ Bob Combs burned down my house. If I’d been home that Sunday evenin’, you an’ them yellow shoes’d never got past my screen door.”
There was a moment of utter silence as her accusing voice traveled the length of the room.
“A-men,” a soft voice called out far to the rear.
Buster Foreman would remember Bob Combs’s shocked pink face, searching the dark countenances gathered behind him, Shy Wooster’s efforts to move the South Carolina journalists and the photographer back from the wheelchair, and then the flare of another flashbulb that sent magnesium ghosts dancing through his head.
“Just home folks here today, boys,” Wooster drawled. “You press stringers come to the wrong place. A little misunderstanding, that’s all. Give the little old lady a little breathing room—”
“Misunderstandin’? What you talkin ’bout?”
“When’d it happen, Miz Jackson?”
“Ain’t no misunderstandin’ about it. It was a blowtorch offa Mr. Bob Combs’s garage bench that fired up my kitchen wall that Sunday night, an’ it was Mr. Shyrock Wooster a-holdin’ it, same as he was holdin’ that bag of skunk medicine when it blowed up in Mr. Tyrone Collier’s Cadillac automobile.”
“Praise the Lord.”
“When was this, Miz Jackson?”
“Y’all move on out now, just home folks here today, no press allowed—”
“When was your house burned down?”
Buster Foreman still had a grip on Birdie Jackson’s wheelchair, standing just inside the door, and it was Buster who decided that the time had come for Birdie to make her departure.
“There was a lotta folks knew about it. Cora Pepper was one. Smooter Davis another. It just may be that we’d ask the federal judge down there in the U.S. courthouse to prove it.”
“Is that why you’re in Washington, Miz Jackson?”
“Time to go,” Buster whispered over her shoulder, and with that, he moved the wheelchair back out the door and down the long corridor, the two South Carolina newspaper stringers still in pursuit.
“Mercy, I didn’t mean to say all that,” Birdie said from the back seat as Mrs. Foreman drove away. “I just don’t know what took holt of me.”
“I think I do,” Buster said.
“How long did Mr. Wilson say it’d take to get him a case together?”
“Three or four months?”
She gave a deep sigh and sat back again. “You tell him I’ll just have to go ahead an’ do it, then. I wouldn�
��t want all those folks back there thinking I was saying what I didn’t believe.” She looked out the window. “I sure do hope I git my strength back.”
4.
Arriving those Saturday mornings at the remote Virginia farmhouse, the station wagon loaded with tools, bags of mortar, and groceries for another weekend of brush clearing and renovation, Betsy and Haven Wilson were greeted sometimes by deer browsing in the front meadow, by an occasional chimney swift or titmouse trapped in the downstairs rooms, by signs that raccoons or possums had come to scavenge. The foxes had been there too, resentfully prowling the evidence of their husbandry from the previous weekend. Their spoor wasn’t indiscriminate, like that of the chipmunks or the field mice or the blacksnakes that lived in the old stone foundation or the nearby maple trees, but was deposited accusingly on the ashes of the previous Saturday and Sunday campfire, on a heap of plaster rubble torn from the kitchen walls, or brush cleared from the rear slope.
As they lay exhausted and stiff on their mattress in one of the empty upstairs bedrooms, they heard the raucous high-pitched barks from deep in the rear woods, but misinterpreted them. Betsy thought they were screech owls. But one moonlit night in February they were awakened after midnight by the familiar cry just outside the window, and through the pane discovered the fox standing in the moonlight near the dying embers of the fire they’d built that evening, as visible in the frosty light as the deer that morning in the front meadow.
Betsy had hired an architect and they worked from his plans. A local brick mason relined the old chimneys, a rural plasterer restored the deteriorating walls. Restoration was Betsy’s object, not rebuilding. She stripped the hide of old paint from the pine woodwork by hand. When friends from McLean dropped by one Sunday afternoon and suggested the addition of a rear redwood deck, she looked at Haven in silent astonishment, as if her intentions were so clear by now that only the willfully blind could misunderstand. She resisted weekend visitors because they intruded upon their privacy and complicated their work schedule, as they also disturbed her concentration. She dressed as she pleased when the two of them were alone—tennis shoes, loose shirts, paint-splattered jeans or denim skirts—bathed in a washtub in the kitchen at night, only the moon watching, and then would race upstairs, flushed and still damp, her flesh tingling, to take refuge under the covers with him in the cold room. In the morning he would go downstairs while she waited for him to bring her clothes. The energies each found in the other during those solitary weekends seemed to astonish both of them.
