The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “’Tis pox.”

  Well, I was sorry indeed, but I was no more surprised than she was, staring up at her over my belly. “I judged that it was. Can you cure it?”

  She locked eyes with me for a long moment, and then she spat on the floor. “I reckon I can tell you how you came by it. You was bit by a trouser snake.”

  She saw my puzzled look and cackled. “I say you have been a-laying with all and sundry. And I reckon that you have been paid for your wickedness with the wages of sin. Going with just the one man will make a girl fall pregnant, like as not, and that can be attended to if need be, but spreading your favors amongst the drovers and trappers and soldiers like you done will get you poxed sooner or later, and so it has done for you. And that is a graver matter than a swollen belly.”

  I met her eyes with a stare as bold as brass, for if she was looking for me to hang my head and weep for my waywardness, she’d be a long time waiting to see it. She was as old and dried up as broom straw, and I reckon she had forgotten what it was like to be young, and, anyhow, when she was in my time of life, there weren’t no war on, and that makes a world of difference to the course of a life.

  I was sixteen when the War commenced. It didn’t reach us right away, tucked up in the mountain fastness like we are. There is not much up here worth fighting over, and not enough flat ground or spare provender to accommodate a big army, anyhow, but within a year or so, we began to hear about battles flickering just beyond our boundaries, and we knew that at any moment the war might flare up and engulf us in its flames.

  Before the War ever came to us, the young men went away to it. Mostly they didn’t want to, though, except for the fools who thought they were heading off to a grand adventure. The rest were caught in the net of a law called Conscription, that said unless you could pay your way out of the army, or else managed a big plantation or a hospital or suchlike, then you had to go and serve in the Confederate army, on account of North Carolina having left the Union. But they never asked our opinion about secession, and most folks up here said it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

  When the bureaucrats enforcing Conscription started hauling our young men out of the mountains, I had just turned eighteen, and I was hoping for a spell of dancing and courting to sweeten my salad days, before I settled down to a lifetime of farm work and childbirth, and all the cares of growing old. But I was done out of that youthful dalliance by the War.

  Before I could have any fun, all the likely young men went off to the flatlands where the fighting was, and the young girls all wept to see them go, knowing they might not ever come back. So they said good-bye as hard as they could. Being young and knowing you might not live to grow old makes a nonsense of all those silly rules about virtue and chastity—anyhow, that’s how it struck me, and the soldiers were happy enough to take memories of a sweetheart away to war. Some of them came back now and again, sent home to recuperate from war wounds, or maybe they just walked away from an encampment one night and hightailed it home, and they weren’t shy boys anymore, after what they’d seen and done, and I welcomed them home as well. It wasn’t a love match, really, or if it was, it was them being in love with the whole idea of soldiering and danger and sorrow—not just taking a shine to one young woman. When you see a baby-faced young fellow eying you like a starving dog, and you know that he may not live to see another spring, he wants you to give him all the springtimes he’s ever going to miss in one gulp. He doesn’t mind parting with his money for the consolation, neither, and mostly I lived on that.

  Then, of course, in ’64, the War finally found us here in the hills, and suddenly food was scarce, and soldiers were burning farms and making our lives a misery, and then it became a practical matter to give a man what he wanted for a slab of meat or a warm blanket. Whatever you have to do to survive shouldn’t count as a sin. It don’t seem fair to me that soldiers get forgiven their trespasses after the peace treaty is signed, but that the rest of us are condemned to eternal guilt by the long memories of our neighbors.

  I figured it was my war wound, that touch of pox that I got along with the meat scraps and the blankets the soldiers give me. I wish I had some warm memories of love and joy to salve the affliction and make me think it was a fair exchange, but I never had that. I took what the soldiers had, and they did likewise, and, if they cheated me in the bargain, they are mostly dead and buried by now at Antietam or the Wilderness or Chickamauga, past being revenged upon. Dead or alive, I reckon they have all forgot me now, and I never cared now what happened to any of them.

  I am alone.

  I wasn’t about to fall to weeping in front of a judgmental biddy like this granny woman, but her words froze my belly to my backbone nonetheless, for I had seen men afflicted with pox, and that they had died raving was not the worst of it. Before it came to that, the skin of the sufferer would curdle and crust with fearsome sores, bubbling and running like salt pork in a hot iron skillet, so that not even the bravest Christian could stand to go near them.

  I was not afraid of what would come to me, but I was angry that I could not see my way out of this trap. And I was only twenty-two. Too young to be looking at such a fate. I reckon most girls would be scared enough to fall to praying, only I didn’t believe there was anybody out there to hear me, and, if there was, He had let this happen, so I didn’t see no use in begging favors of Him now. Didn’t nobody in this world give a tinker’s dam for me, and I didn’t hold out much hope for mercy in the next one, either. I had to shift for myself, same as always, and let the rest of the world beware.

  “Mayhap, salts of mercury will help you some,” the old woman said. “A doctor could give you that.” She laughed and recited that old jest I’d heard a time or two from the soldiers: “One night with Venus, and a lifetime with Mercury.”

  I scowled at her as I hitched down my skirts and clambered off the table. Then and there I made up my mind that I would go elsewhere to find a doctor, for I would get neither cure nor sympathy from the root doctor biddies up there. I had no qualms about leaving Watauga County. I’d be no more alone anywhere else than I was there. But freedom costs money, and I had none.

  “I reckon there’s a doctor down the mountain in Wilkes County,” I said. “I have people down there, and I believe I will go to them.”

  The fire blazed up just then as a new bit of dry wood caught alight atop the logs. The old woman’s eyes lit up as well, and she fixed me with a narrow gaze. “If you up and go to Wilkes County, nothing will come of it but sorrow.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t see how it could be any worse down there than where I’m at right now.”

  She shook her head. “There’s no hope for you anywhere. Better if you was to die here, without troubling anybody. It’s you that carries the sorrow within you, and if you venture down into Wilkes County, you will take death and dishonor right along with you, and you’ll spread them like the pox that brands you.”

  “On other people, you mean?” I laughed. “Why, that ain’t nothing to me. I’d see the whole world pole-axed in one blow if it would make me well and happy. Or even if it wouldn’t.”

  “Nothing will make you well. The death you will bring to others may gladden your heart, though. That is a greater sickness than the pox, and it, too, is beyond my power to cure.”

  “Oh, I don’t want cured of that,” I told her as I wrapped up in my shawls and made for the cabin door. “If my body has to hurt, I think it is a blessing that my heart never will. It don’t even the score, but it helps.”

  * * *

  For the next day or two, whenever I had occasion to speak with anyone, I led the conversation around to doctors, hoping for one that I could get to without much travel or money, and I asked in particular about Wilkes County. By and by somebody mentioned that there was indeed a good one by the name of Carter down the mountain in Wilkes. As soon as I heard that, I made up my mind to choose that doctor, on account of the kinfolk I had there, not that I thought they’d be overmuch glad to
see me. My father came from Wilkes, and he had left a brother and cousins back there when he moved the forty miles west up to the ridgetops near Blowing Rock, but he had never married my mother, so they took no notice of me, those Fosters, for all that I called myself one.

  The Fosters are not a close family, nor a clan that can be counted upon to rush to one another’s aid in time of trouble, any more than I’d have bestirred myself to help them. I would not be welcomed with open arms by my Wilkes County cousins. But I reckoned if I made it worth their while, and added a dollop of guilt into the brew, then one of them would be bound to take me in. Best not to tell them I was coming, though, or they’d put me off for certain.

  * * *

  When the end of February came and the wind let up a little, I packed my clothes in a canvas poke, and, come sun-up, without so much as a good-bye to anybody, I set off along the trace that led east and down the mountain.

  It takes most of a week to get over to Wilkes County, following the old buffalo trace, first along Lewis Fork Creek, and then down into flatter country along the Elk Creek Road that leads to Wilkes County, where my people had come from before the War. Walking from Watauga County to Wilkes is a long, bitter journey to make in the tail end of winter, but miserable ain’t the same as important, so there’s no use making a tale of my six-day walk back to the family seat. The war years brought so much suffering to the folks in these mountains that for me to complain about any hardships on my journey would be like spitting in a well. I’ve known worse. Everybody around here has.

  Back in a cold winter of the War, when times were hard and food was scarce, my daddy took sick of the fever and inside of a week, he was dead. Didn’t none of his people come up for the funeral. Maybe the message never reached them, and with bushwhackers prowling the roads, such a perilous journey wasn’t to be thought of anyhow, but I don’t believe they would have come even in the best of times. They don’t exactly consider us kin. We didn’t grieve for him ourselves, and maybe his Wilkes relatives mourned him even less. The Fosters keep to themselves, but just because we didn’t live in one another’s pockets didn’t mean I couldn’t find them when I needed them. They all lived in some proximity to Dr. George Carter, and that was all they were good for.

  But I had to go somewhere. My daddy was dead, and Mama had no use for me. Times was hard, and I was past eighteen and on my own. But for the War, I might have had a husband and two young’uns by now, but the Confederacy turned most of our young men into worm food, and I didn’t care to make a match of it with the old men and the maimed veterans who were left.

  My grandfather’s niece, Lotty Foster, had herself a cabin and some scrub land alongside of a creek called Reedy Branch, maybe a mile before it empties into the Yadkin River. I reckon she might have taken me in: any woman that has borne five bastards hasn’t had much practice saying no to anybody, but the family all said that Lotty was bad to drink, and, despite having that grown-up daughter Ann, the family beauty, out and gone, she had four other young’uns still at home. No use putting myself there, I thought. I would end up tending children as well as doing all the chores and, like as not, spending my evenings being expected to nursemaid the old sot herself. I wasn’t feeling well enough for such a burden as that, and I was by no means sure her little cabin would have room for me nohow. Best seek an easier place to begin with, and leave Lotty’s cabin for a last resort.

  I didn’t have far to go to seek other lodging. Across the road from Lotty’s cabin was a steep hill with a little house and some outbuilding on the top of it: James Melton’s land. My handsome cousin Ann had married him before the War, and the chores there were likely to be fewer, though not because Ann was doing a hand’s turn of work, for it was gospel in the family that she never had and never would. We were near to the same age, but I had not set eyes on her since we were children, and she was pretty enough then, but proud and bossy with it, too. I did not expect to find her much improved.

  They call that part of Wilkes County “Happy Valley,” though I couldn’t see that the folks there were any better off than the rest of us. There were fine houses scattered here and there, same as anywhere else, but between the showplaces were ramshackle cabins and ordinary houses—again, same as anywhere else.

  The one thing I did notice when I got there on the first day of March: it was warmer down there than it was up on the mountain. Though the hillside forests were still bare, new leaves with a yellow tint to the green were budding on the valley oaks and chestnuts, so I judged that Wilkes County was a week closer to spring than where I had just left. The road was muddier, though, and the wind was still sharp. I’d be glad to get shut of the foul weather, and sit down by somebody’s fireside, for my cheeks felt like snowballs.

  I asked the way a time or two of the farm folk who gave me shelter in the course of my journey, not wanting to spend any more time in the wind than I had to, mindful that I was sick, but since the road followed the Elk Creek, it was simple enough to find my way to the Stony Fork Road. By late afternoon I was standing on the dirt track, looking up that long hill toward the farmhouse where my cousin Ann lived now. I had heard tell that there were fine plantations down in the bottom land around the Yadkin, and that may be so, but I had not fetched up on the doorstep of one of them. The Elkville community could boast of no river mansions with colored servants to wait on you hand and foot, though I heard tell there were such places in Wilkes, owned by the likes of the Isbells and the Carters. Not my Foster kin, though, and not the Meltons, either, from the look of this place. Ann’s husband’s property was a shabby hill farm that would be hard-pressed to feed the owner’s family, much less anybody else around the place. I was used to such as that, though. Thanks to the War, we were all schooled in doing without.

  The wood frame house had no upstairs, no fancy pillars or porches, and its steps were two flat stones set in the dirt. It could have used a lick of paint, too. It was a toad of a house, squatting on its hilltop under bare trees in a yard of scraggly brown grass. A thin wisp of smoke drifting out of the stone chimney told me it was no warmer inside the house than out. Still, Cousin Lotty’s place was no more grand or kept-up than this, and hers was child-infested to boot, so I reckoned I had better make the best of things here, if they’d have me, which I reckoned they would.

  I did not have the charm of Cousin Ann, but I have a knack of knowing what folk want, and for being that, as long as it suits me.

  I wasn’t used to much in the way of comfort up home, either. Beggars cannot be choosers, and beggar I was, so I picked up my bundle of clothes, and waded uphill through the dry grass to the door.

  By the time I got there, a couple of scrawny hounds had crawled out from under a shed, and were yapping and baying at my heels, but I gave the littlest one a hard kick with my boot, and they thought better of trying to light into me. Them dogs didn’t worry me none. They’d have to have the teeth of a handsaw to get through two petticoats, a wool skirt and my old leather boots, and when they saw no fear in me, they gave up, and slunk back under the porch. But I was hungry and shivering from my journey, and I could have done with less noise. Nobody came to see what all the commotion was about, so I rapped hard on the door with bare knuckles numb from cold, hoping they wouldn’t keep me standing out there in the sharp wind for too much longer.

  By and by the door opened a crack, and a tall, gaunt man peered out at me, neither angry nor welcoming, but looking as if he had only opened the door to stop the knocking. He didn’t say a word—just stared out at me, waiting, I guess, to be told what I had come about.

  “I’m Pauline Foster,” I said, investing in a smile. “If you be Mr. James Melton, I am blood kin to your wife. I come to see her.” Without giving him time to answer back, I picked up my sack of clothes, and shouldered my way past him into the house, calling out for Ann. He stood aside and let me pass without a word. I reckoned James Melton was the kind of man that nobody paid any mind to, so maybe he was used to it.

  I saw then that there were
n’t no use to be hollering, for Ann could not help but hear me. The inside of the house was one great room with a fireplace at one end, and a pine table and a bench seat set back a few feet from the hearth. At the other end of the room two narrow beds stood side by side on a rag rug. At the foot of one bed was a wooden trunk, its lid open, and clothes were spilling out of it and onto the floor, so that told me where Ann slept. The walls of the cabin were wide chestnut logs, chinked with clay to keep out the wind, and there was one little square window set in the far wall, but in the dusk of a gray winter day, it didn’t let in enough light to do much good. That was just as well. Brighter light would have showed the dirt and untidiness of the place, which was bad enough as it was.

  Ann was sitting on a stool near the fire, and the flames made shadows on her face ’til I didn’t hardly recognize her, but once I got up close I could see that the kinfolk’s tales were true. She had grown up to be a rare beauty, right enough. She had big dark eyes, set in a heart-shaped face, and her black hair was drawn back in a bun so that you could see the sharp line of her jaw and the cheekbone ridges that made her a wonder to look at. Her mouth was thin, and gave her a peevish look of discontent. When she got old it would wrinkle like a draw-string purse, but for now she was just past twenty, and not even an uncertain temper could mar those looks. I wondered why she had settled for James Melton, who was tolerable to look at but still unprosperous, when her perfect face surely would have taken her higher than that. I made up my mind to ask her about her choice of a husband, but not just yet; not until I had settled in as one of the household.

  She sat there on her stool, looking up at me with an expression of mild curiosity, like she didn’t know who I was and didn’t care overmuch, either. I didn’t think Ann ever had much use for other women, nor they for her. But speaking my mind would not get me bed and board, so I knelt down, all smiles, and threw my arms around her, as if she were my dearest friend in the world.