The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  It was a dingy white frame house that didn’t look big enough to house six people, but I suppose that the little ones all slept piled together somewhere like puppies. It looked like a house that nobody cared about—not Wilson Foster, because he was too shiftless to own it, and not his landlord, because he probably figured that a ramshackle place with a leaky roof was good enough for a tenant farmer’s family.

  I didn’t feel sorry for them, though. They had a roof over their heads, and a woods full of game to put meat on the table, and they had lived through the War. There’s many that had to make do with less than that. Besides, the Fosters were not what you would call a close family. We didn’t think we owed anything to one another, and we didn’t flock together like guinea fowl, preferring our own company to the outside world. Look at Cousin Ann. She didn’t take me in out of the kindness of her heart. She let me stay so that she could have a servant for next to nothing. If that is family feeling, you can have my share of it.

  * * *

  I sat looking at the house for a minute, before I approached the door. Before I could hello the house, one of the boys came around from the side of the house, and stood a few feet away from me, staring. I made sure he didn’t have a rock in his hand, and then I bade him a good evening, but he just glanced at me wall-eyed, and gave me the barest nod to acknowledge my greeting. Shy around strangers, I thought, and I left him be, and walked on up to the house, wearing a plaster smile, and ready to be the long-lost cousin from the mountains, if that’s who they needed me to be.

  At first nobody answered my knock, but inside I could hear a child hollering, “Somebody’s come a-calling.”

  I waited, because there’s no use in rapping again if they know you are there. By and by, the door opened enough for a small head to peek up at me, and a big-eyed boy stared at me for a moment or two, before he said, “What?”

  I gave him a careful smile. “It is all right,” I said. “I am kin to you. Which Foster boy are you? James?”

  He shook his head. “Naw. I’m John. It was Elbert what brung you up to the door.” That got him talking, which is why I pretended to think he was James, who is seventeen. This sorry little pup couldn’t have been twelve yet. I knew that the best way to get some folks to talk is to let them correct you. After that, he forgot to be bashful, and I edged past him and headed straight for the fireplace, for it had been a cold walk from the Meltons’ place to German’s Hill. While I warmed my hands, I glanced around, seeing exactly what I had expected to see: a few sticks of homemade pine furniture, a rag rug on the floor, and some pans and a cast-iron skillet hanging from hooks in the ceiling.

  Nobody ever got rich being a tenant farmer, and Wilson Foster was proof of it. After a minute or two my eyes got adjusted to the dim light, and I spied my cousin Laura over next to a cradle, holding a lap-baby in her arms. This must be the youngest of the brood, the one that their mother had probably died giving birth to. That, too, was a commonplace, among poor folk. The women just keep spitting out babies, and wearing themselves out with tending to the brood and doing all the farm chores, until finally one day they birth one baby too many, and die trying. Most men managed to get through at least two wives in a lifetime. The wonder of it was that any woman was ever fool enough to walk into that trap, but most all of them did, sooner or later. I supposed that my cousin Laura would, too, if she ever got the chance, though one baby seemed the same as another to me, and since she had one to tend to as it was, why would she go off to saddle herself with another one?

  She was a little thing, Laura was. The top of her head wasn’t much higher than a broom handle, and I’ve seen gourds bigger around than her waist. She had mousy brown hair, and good cheekbones in a heart-shaped face, but she wasn’t a patch on Ann, for looks or brains.

  When my feet and hands stopped tingling, I left the hearth and went over to the cradle, where Laura was. She had got the baby to sleep now, and she set it down in its old rag quilt, laying a bony finger to her lips to warn me not to wake it with any loud talking. I needed no cautions on that score. The last thing I wanted was to have my visit marred by the bawling of a smelly young’un.

  I nodded to Laura to show her that I understood the warning, and pointed for her to come back over to the hearth. We dragged a couple of pine stools up close to the fire, and put our heads together to talk in low voices. I didn’t see Wilson Foster anywhere about, and I reckoned he had not come in from the fields yet, which was fine with me, for I had not come all that way to suffer through idle chit-chat.

  “I don’t know if you know who I am,” I said to Laura.

  She nodded. “Yes. You have the look of the Fosters, I reckon, but I had already heard tell you was working over to the Meltons’ place, so I’d a-knowed you anyhow. Not too many strangers about. Leastways, not females.”

  She didn’t seem put out to see me, and I wondered if she had heard the gossip about me and Tom, and whether she cared about it or not. Best not to speak of it right away. “I envy you your home and family, Cousin, for I have none.”

  She shrugged. “The house is rented, and as for family, I’d as lief give you some of ours, for they are no end of trouble to tend to, night and day. Trying to take care of it all killed my mama.”

  “I thought I’d heard that the baby there was the cause of her passing.”

  Laura glanced over at the cradle, where the small assassin slept in peace. “She was worn out, anyhow, and birthing that last child took more strength than she had. I doubt not she was glad to go, in the end.”

  I mustered the smile I use when I have worked out the right thing to say. “I’m sure it eased her passing to know that her brood was left in your loving sisterly hands.” I didn’t believe any such thing, but I thought it might please her to hear it said.

  “Well, I hope I do my best.” Laura looked away and scowled as one of the younger boys ventured into the room. “What is it, John? Get along to bed now! I’ve no mind to fool with you this evening.”

  “I’m still hungry, Sister,” he said, in a treble voice, on the verge of tears.

  Laura sighed and shook her head. “There’s cold biscuits in the tin plate in the pie safe. Get you one, and mind you don’t make a mess with the crumbs in your bed, for I’ll not change it.”

  The boy snatched his biscuit, and crept away past us. When he had gone, I turned back to my scrawny cousin, beaming in pinchbeck admiration. “Why, all this responsibility for home and children will serve you well when you have a husband and a home of your own.”

  Laura took up the poker and stirred the fire. “I reckon it will.” She didn’t seem none too cheered by the sentiment. “But for the War, I’d have been wed long ago, but now there’s scarcely enough men to go around, though my spinsterhood is not for want of trying. I reckon I could have set my cap for a fat old widower, but that wouldn’t be no different from staying here.”

  “It can’t be as hopeless as that,” I said. “After all, you are only just past twenty now, and the War is over, so it may not be long before somebody makes you a bride. I hear tell you have a sweetheart.”

  She turned on me, still holding the poker, likely forgetting she had it in her hand, but she looked like she’d spied a snake. “What have you heard?”

  I laughed. “Oh, not a word about a fat old widower, Cousin. I hear tell that a handsome young soldier is paying court to you.”

  She sat back down on the stool, and the firelight made shadows on her ashen face, but there was no trace of the pleasure a girl usually shows when you tease her about a beau. She sighed. “Oh, I reckon you’re talking about Tom Dula. When Daddy caught us together, I knowed it would get about. Well, Tom is fine to look at, and he is one for sport, right enough, but what would he do with a wife?”

  “Why, take her home to the Dula farm, of course. His mother still lives there, but what of that? The rest of the Dula young’uns will be out and gone before too long, and old Miz Dula won’t last forever.”

  “No. But our cousin Ann will. At leas
t it will seem like it to me.”

  “Ann Melton? Why would she come into it? She has a husband already.”

  “Some say she has two, and she seems likely to keep them both.” Her lip curled, and she twisted a hank of her broom-straw hair. “Don’t you wish you were beautiful, Pauline?”

  It hurt to be reminded so matter-of-factly that I was not, but I never flinch when I have been stung. “Well, Cousin, if beauty would give me a golden palace to live in, meat and whiskey every day, and servants to do my bidding, I would welcome it, but I cannot see that beauty has given our lovely cousin any more than the lot of an ordinary plain woman: a dull husband and a middling farmstead. Where is the wonder in that?”

  Laura shrugged. “More than I ever got, or you either. But it may yet come right for me. There’s somebody else who is sweet on me. Folks around here wouldn’t think him even as good as that no-account Tom, but leastways he would be proud to have me.”

  That was the first interesting thing that drab little cousin Laura had said. “Well, who is your suitor then, missy? A bald old farmer or a cripple home from the War?”

  She shook her head. “I mustn’t say. We cannot have it known. But what about you then, Pauline? Do you have a sweetheart waiting for you back up the mountain?”

  “Yes, and his name is legion. I have come down here to get cured of my love sickness. Pox. The wages of sin, folk tell me.” I had Cousin Laura’s measure by now. She kept to herself, not that she had much choice living so far out from the settlement, and she wasn’t the type to tell tales. She was sitting on her own secret like a broody hen, and so I entrusted her with mine—not that I cared anymore who got to know of it. The damage was done, I reckoned.

  “I’m very sorry for your trouble,” Laura said primly, in a voice so soft I could hardly hear her.

  I reckon she was shocked by what I’d said, because her eyes got big, and she leaned a little away from me, like she was a-skeered she might catch it from me. I did not bother to tell her that, like as not, she already had.

  ZEBULON VANCE

  I made notes about the case at the time, not because I ever intended to make the details public, but simply because a lawyer must keep track of his cases, and this one stretched out for so many months, while I went on about my life in Charlotte, that I had need of documentation to keep it in my mind. Perhaps I had some thought of turning it into a memoir, for a good deal of my own history intrudes into the story. When all is said and done, more people will be interested in me than in him, poor fellow. I might have kept my own story and thrown out his, if I’d ever had the leisure to pen my autobiography.

  I do not know that these jottings do me much credit, but I saw no reason to alter them for posterity. I have told the truth about worse things, so let the story stand as I recorded it at the time.

  October 1866

  I have just returned from a visit to my client, Thomas P. Dula. Tom Dooley (to employ the local vernacular) is a likely-looking lad, a fellow Confederate veteran, and a poor mountaineer born in a Carolina log cabin. I was all those things myself once. But there, I assure you, the resemblance ends. Dula is a more handsome man than I ever was, and I doubt he will ever have the opportunity to run to fat as I fear I am beginning to, but, aside from that, all the advantages lie with me.

  I was appointed by the presiding judge to defend the prisoner, but since it is a capital case, the poor fellow’s fate does not rest in my hands alone. North Carolina in her wisdom requires that defendants on trial for their lives must be represented by two members of counsel. Mr. Dula had three: myself, Captain Richard Allison, and Robert Armfield. I wondered if the logic behind the multiple-attorney rule was akin to the tradition used in firing squads, of loading one gun with dummy bullets, so that each man may believe that he had no hand in the killing of the prisoner. With three of us attending to Thomas Dula during the trial, the guilt of the loss is shared amongst us. Thus I hope to use some legal maneuvering to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

  Captain Allison is an able fellow, and I’m sure he could have handled this case without having an out-of-work ex-governor underfoot, but he was gracious in receiving me, and kind enough to brief me in the facts of the case, before I went off to interview the client, to determine the situation for myself.

  The prisoner has spent some three months in the Wilkes County jail, a solid two-story red brick building, sparse of windows, as befits a place that detains murderers. It sits behind the white-columned brick courthouse, like a ruddy calf in the lee of its stalwart mother, but it is a pleasant prospect for a prison, with shade trees softening the aspect of the structures, and a distant line of hills framing the valley now in autumn tints of gold and scarlet.

  I was raised in just such a village, in the towering blue mountains that lie between Asheville and the border of Tennessee, and I missed those sheltering hills in my life these days, for I had left their peaceful majesty when I was barely twenty, for the opportunities afforded me by the more prosperous flatlands. First I went to study law at the university in Chapel Hill, and, after a stint in the court system back home in Buncombe County, I set out for Washington to serve in Congress. Though I argued mightily against secession, I was forced to leave the U.S. government when North Carolina did, and, unable to prevent the War, I took my place among the fighting as colonel of the 26th North Carolina, a homegrown regiment. I had no particular military prowess, you understand. In those days, when the continent was trying to mount two armies from the remnants of one, anybody who could get five hundred men to sign up and serve under him was automatically made a colonel, for it was assumed that such a man could afford to buy his own horse and sword.

  But the best fighting is politicking. I left the conflict in midstream to take up residence in the Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh, and from there, when the Confederacy fell, I found myself back in Washington, this time in a Union prison, along with the rest of the Confederate governors, as the victors seemed intent on collecting the whole set.

  A year ago last July, they set me free again, and I took the train back to North Carolina, forbidden to hold political office yet awhile, for, in remaining loyal to my home state, I had rendered myself a traitor to the greater Union. Thus barred from politicking, I was forced to fall back on my original profession—the practice of law, although I had done none of it in a decade, and I doubted that I had either the experience or the inclination to make much headway with it. Still, a man must live, and it was tolerably honest work—well, as much so as being a Congressman is, I reckon.

  The Wilkes County jail, that squat brick building set behind the courthouse, is rather dark inside, and, after the corridors of the Governor’s Mansion, it might have struck me as a bit low and cramped, but for my recent stay in similar accommodations in what was again our nation’s capital.

  “We have much in common,” I told the prisoner.

  He sat before me, gaunt, shaggy-haired, and scowling, rubbing at the iron shackles on his wrists, for they had chafed his skin. He gave me an appraising stare with those cold blue eyes, and I wondered if I was looking into the soul of a killer, but I had taken him on as a client, and so, unless he admitted it himself, I must believe him innocent. I wonder, though. When the War came, we took beardless boys out of the cabins, and sent them into the depths of hell, in places like Antietam and the Wilderness, and some of them came back changed. Once a dog has killed a chicken, you might as well shoot him, for you can never trust him again.

  I was against the War from the beginning, and only incidentally because North Carolina’s secession would cost me my seat in Congress. When the Tarheels left the Union, I was on the stump, in my hometown of Mars Hill, orating mightily in favor of staying out of the Confederacy. I had just raised my hand to heaven to emphasize my point when a little towheaded boy came running out of the telegraph office, calling out that Fort Sumter in South Carolina had been fired upon, and that President Lincoln was calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the insurrection: that
is, to invade our sister state, which North Carolinians would never do. Slowly, I let my hand fall.

  So those who were hell-bent on the War had got it, and as if we had not suffered destruction enough in the four years it lasted, I thought we might now be getting another kind of retribution. In a generation of young men, we sowed the seeds of violence, and violence we shall reap.

  * * *

  “I thank you for coming to see me,” said the prisoner, “but you know I warn’t in your regiment, Governor.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  He reddened a little, and nodded, thinking I meant that I would be ashamed to claim him as a comrade because of his current difficulty.

  “It isn’t that,” I assured him. “I have heard that you were taken prisoner near Kinston at the end of the War, but I was long gone from there by then, so your troubles in ’65 cannot be charged to my scroll.”

  “No. You was the Governor by then.”

  “And I went to jail as well, you know. About the time the Union let you go, they started rounding up all the Southern governors, and so I did three months in a Washington prison, in the congenial company of Governor Letcher of Virginia.” I looked around at the bare room with its whitewashed walls and the rough-hewn pine table that separated me from the prisoner. “How does this prison measure up to your Yankee prison camp? It certainly puts me in mind of the one I was in up in Washington.”

  He shrugged. “It is tolerable, sir. At least here I sleep inside out of the weather, and they do feed me. I miss the taste of whiskey, but that’s about all, I ain’t used to much in the way of finery, nohow. My mother is a widow woman, and our ridge land don’t amount to much. I reckon you know there’s no money to pay a lawyer.”

  “I didn’t suppose that there was.”

  “Yet you come all the way up here from Charlotte, anyhow?”

  I smiled, hearing in his question another point of similarity between him and me. Mountain people do not like to feel themselves in anyone’s debt. Apparently, judging from my client’s troubled eyes, not even if his life depended on it. He had been at pains to make it clear to me that he had not served under me in the War, thus relieving me of a sense of obligation, and now he underscored the point that he could not pay my fee, so if I proceeded to act on his behalf, it was my own decision, and not for duty or for gain. I confess I liked him the better for his forthrightness.