The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  In my younger days, when anybody did me a good turn, I would lie awake nights trying to figure a way to repay his kindness. Later, though, after I had married a member of the Burke County gentry, and became accustomed to the customs of civilization, I learned that obligations are the currency of polite society. You want people to be forever indebted to you for some favor or other, in case you should ever need their power or their influence to advance yourself. This system of influence peddling took some getting used to, but I got the hang of it soon enough. I had been studying rich people most of my life, and if I never got exactly to feeling like one, I reckon I could pass muster amongst them, but the proud independence of my fellow mountaineers still warmed my heart.

  “You mustn’t feel beholden to me,” I assured the shaggy young man. “The money is not an issue. I am obliged for the chance to defend you. The government won’t let me run for political office yet, you know, so I must fall back on lawyering to earn my living, but, between the War and my time in Congress, I am years out of practice. So you are my test case, and I hope that you will also prove to be an advertisement of my skill as a defense attorney.”

  He shrugged. “It’ll be uphill work then. They were dead set on hanging me afore they even knew for sure they had a corpse.”

  I nodded. I knew as much from the briefing I had been given on the case by Captain Allison. “Feeling does seem to be running high against you. We will try to get the case tried in another county, where you may get a more impartial jury. And where I may get one as well. You know, Wilkes County was strong for the Union during the War. Twelve jurors from here might enjoy the chance to give the former Confederate governor one in the eye by convicting you.”

  “So you want to move me?”

  I nodded. “The legal term is a change of venue. I propose to get the case tried just over the line in Iredell County. I lived there after the fall of Raleigh, and I flatter myself that I am well known and liked in Statesville.”

  “But you ain’t on trial, sir.”

  I smiled. “Sometimes to a lawyer it can feel that way. Juries can be contrary. You can argue yourself blue in the face, and then see your man convicted because those fools in the box didn’t like the look of him. But never mind the politics of it. Let us begin with the facts. It would be best if you told me in your own words how you came to be in this jail, charged with this terrible crime.”

  The cold blue eyes looked into mine, and he looked no more than a boy in his bewilderment. “On account of the women, I reckon,” he said at last. “The Bible says that Eve brought death into the world when she ate that apple, and I reckon females have been the death of us ever since.”

  “And yet, it is a young woman who is the victim in this case, and it is you who are charged with being the serpent bringing death to her.”

  * * *

  He tried to make a gesture, but the shackles clanked, and he let his hand fall again to his side. “Laura Foster,” he said. “She didn’t count for much. Anybody will tell you that.”

  I felt a chill when he said that. Did we in our war teach this mere boy that people’s lives were of no account? “That sentiment does you no credit,” I told him. “And it will not endear you to a jury. Also, it is not how the prosecution will argue it. Whatever this young woman was in life, death will have translated her into an angel of purity and radiance. Even people who knew her will begin to believe it.”

  He scowled up at me, and the shackles clanked again. “That won’t make it true.”

  “People believing it will make it true. That’s as close to truth as we get this side of heaven, son.”

  I let him turn that over in his mind for a moment or two, and then I said, “Now I know that when the whispering started about you being responsible for this killing, you took off and went over into Tennessee, and that they caught you there and hauled you back. You do see, don’t you, that your flight across the state line will make people assume you are guilty?”

  A smile flickered across his face. “Well, Governor, don’t you believe that, and I reckon it won’t be true.”

  * * *

  So it seems I have undertaken the defense of a boy soldier, who has no money and who cannot even be bothered to make protestations of innocence. I must be as stubborn as my opponents accuse me of being even to think of pursuing this. And yet I am bound to do it … though I cannot say what impels me. Is it a case of “There but for the grace of God go I?” I was once a poor mountain boy, with no powerful friends, and too proud to ask favors of anyone. But I don’t think I was so very like Thomas Dula, after all. The Lord Almighty may have smiled upon me, but it seems to me that He stood back and let me do most of the scut work of self-improvement all by myself.

  I was born in 1832 in the mountains of Madison County, North Carolina, on a little mountain farm in Reems Creek, a few miles north of Asheville. The President then was Andrew Jackson, a dour backcountry fellow who had once practiced law one mountain and a state line over from there, in Jonesborough, Tennessee. I venture to say that my family’s hopes for me ran equally high, for I came of good stock, for all that we were hemmed in by mountains and far removed from the corridors of power.

  David Vance, my father’s father, had fought with Washington at Brandywine, and froze with him at Valley Forge, before finishing up the War in his native South, alongside Colonel Sevier at the Battle of King’s Mountain. I reckon he enjoyed that skirmish more than he did the big battles up in Pennsylvania. I would have.

  At King’s Mountain those volunteer soldiers, mountain farmers who marched from Tennessee and the hills of Carolina to face down the Redcoats on the South Carolina border, were a sight more successful than General Washington’s Continental Army up north. They beat the British in an hour, and walked back home to finish the harvest. So my people were mountain farmers, but they also had education and friends in high places, and they had seen more of the world than the other side of Reems Creek. After the War, my grandfather served in North Carolina’s General Assembly, so perhaps the disease of politicking was a hereditary one in my case, but the love of learning was instilled in me at my mother’s knee. When my grandfather died, he left a library of five hundred volumes, and my mother put it to good use in the evenings, gathering us children around the hearth, and reading to us, from Shakespeare, the Bible, the commentary of Julius Caesar. These nightly sessions with the classics taught me grammar and oratory, providing me with a wellspring of fine words that I could draw from in later life in my speeches in the courtroom or on the hustings.

  When I was six, they sent me and my brother Robert over to Flat Creek, seven miles from home, to board with “Uncle Miah,” Nehemiah Blackstock, who was a friend of my grandfather, and, like him, a surveyor. He was also a stern Presbyterian, same as the Vances were, and he brooked no disobedience. Like the recording angel, he kept a list of our failings in his black book, which he would consult when deciding what punishment should be meted out to the young sinners in his care. Many’s the time I had been judged and found wanting by Uncle Miah, and he made sure I grew up to be a good and learned man, or else a careful one. But it was thanks to him and the other determined adults who had charge of me in my youth that I got an education and made a lawyer, instead of sitting in a cell like poor Dula.

  After my tutelage at Uncle Miah’s, I was sent over to Tennessee to Washington College, which was little more than a grammar school, but it was a beacon of culture on the frontier, I suppose, and it smoothed away the rough edges of my primitive state, so that my penchant for arguing became a talent for debate, and my natural loquacity passed for oratory.

  My father died when I was eleven, which dampened the family’s prosperity, and ended my formal schooling, but by then I had got the gist of education well enough to keep at it on my own, and by then I also had the determination to make myself a successful and prosperous man.

  Later in life I learned that the daughters of the well-to-do are sent off to finishing school so that they may learn the proper way to
move in polite society: which fork to use, how to make polite conversation, and those arcane passwords of speech and deportment by which the gentry are able to recognize one another as being “the right sort.” Without knowing anything of that custom, I set myself on that course at sixteen, when I took a job as a desk clerk at the Warm Springs Hotel, a resort and spa, built to take advantage of the natural mineral springs there in Madison County. The Warm Springs Hotel catered to the Eastern Seaboard gentry, who fled the fevers and miasmas of a southern summer in favor of the cool and bracing mountain air of the Carolina mountains. The guests barely noticed me, of course, for they thought that the denizens of the mountains were ill-bred and savage folk, and to them I was no more than a servant. But to me those rich folks from the flatland were exhibits in my private zoo, and I studied them with the care of a naturalist.

  By the time I had finished my sojourn as an employee of the Warm Springs Hotel, I could tell Charleston from Richmond, planter’s wife from lawyer’s daughter with a glance at their apparel. In that school for society, I learned to speak and dress in a way that would make the gentry accept me as one of their own. I never felt myself to be one of them, though, for there was always an unreconstructed part of my soul that sided with the common man, and understood the pleasures of the jug and fiddle more than that of the decanter and the opera.

  Not many of the well-bred Charlotte lawyers of my acquaintance would have taken the case of a penniless illiterate from the hill country, but fighting for the underdog came as naturally to me as breathing. I just hoped for both our sakes that this Dula fellow was innocent, for after the War and the Governor’s Mansion I was rusty at the practice of law.

  PAULINE FOSTER

  Late April 1866

  Listening to Miz Ann Melton blackening the name of her cousin Laura would have made a cat laugh, but, since I had my bed and board to think of, I just kept quiet and let her rave.

  “Why, Laura Foster has got no more morals than a mare in heat!” she declared, as if such a thing would disgrace our fine family of Fosters. I had to turn away then, and bite my lip to keep from laughing in her face. Here was Ann with a lover still coming to her bed a couple of nights a week, while her husband slept nearby, and her own mother Lotty, having lost count of the fathers of her young’uns. Then there was me, with a battalion of lovers and a war wound beneath my skirts to prove it. We were fine ones to talk about the sins of little Laura Foster. She couldn’t hold a candle to the rest of the family sinners, but you would never catch me saying so to Mistress Ann, to whom I was beholden for my keep. Nor would I be sharing with her the news that drab little Laura claimed to have unearthed another sweetheart besides Ann’s beloved Tom. I don’t reckon Ann would have believed me anyhow on that score, for nothing would ever convince her that Tom Dula was not the finest, handsomest fellow in all creation.

  One man is the same as another to me, except some of them stink more than others, but from the way other women act around this man or that, I can see that they have preferences in the matter of coupling, and, for Ann, the sun rose and set upon Thomas Dula, though I cannot say why this should be so. To my mind, he was no better looking than her husband, and he was a deal less steady and dependable. If you looked at the two of them the way you’d study a horse you were planning to buy, then only a fool would pick Tom.

  I used to wonder what she saw when she looked at him. Not what the rest of us saw, which was a lazy, no-account boy with an easy smile and an inclination to go through life like a raft on a river, taking the easiest course as it flowed. If I was to tell Cousin Ann that Laura found some man she liked better than Tom, like as not she would call me a bare-faced liar. Well, I am a liar, but people seldom catch me at it, and, though I had no intention of sharing the news with Ann, I did believe that Laura’s affections lay elsewhere.

  There are a deal of things a woman might want more than a sunny smile and a strong back in bed: land, money, dependability, honor, the respect of the neighbors. James Melton had all of that. Tom had none of it, and never would. Picking some other man in place of Melton struck me as a foolish choice, whether Ann believed it or not. I resolved to take a close look at the men hereabouts to see if I could tell which one had taken my cousin Laura’s fancy. But I would not tell Ann. Let her jealousy simmer a while longer, while I watched the pot boil, and when the time was right, I would let it scald the lot of them.

  * * *

  Spring’s cold rains brought the first green shoots of grass, and then deep in the bare woods the redbud trees swelled up like sores that crowned a rosy pink, and then went away, same as mine had. A week or so after the redbud bloomed and withered, Ann was washing herself and found some rosy sores of her own. They were between her legs, where it didn’t show, so she was as beautiful as ever, but the affliction took its toll on her temper, which was ragged at the best of times.

  She slammed the tin washbowl on to the table, and thrust her face up close into mine, so I could feel the heat of her breath and smell her body, still unwashed, for she had come upon the sores and quit. “I am sick!” she screamed in my face. “And I reckon it is your fault!”

  I have one gift from fortune. It is not grace, or beauty, or a fine singing voice, or breeding, but it is a blessing nonetheless. I cannot be moved. Being shouted at does not make me tremble, and neither panic nor insult can tempt me into a display of temper. Inside my head, I am as cold as a creek of snow-melt. Sometimes I wonder what other people feel when they weep or storm, for whatever it is I am not touched by it. While she sobbed and swore, I stood there looking at her, thinking as clearly as if she were humming hymn tunes, and I felt nothing at all.

  “Why, Ann, I am sorry you have taken poorly, but it can’t have nothing to do with my sickness, can it? I reckon all the world knows how you catch the pox—from laying in sin with them that has it. But whatever else we ever did, you and I, we never did that, Cousin.”

  She stared at me for a moment, letting my words sink in, and perhaps she was too frightened to reason it out, as I had been here a good while before she even took sick. I had no doubt that Ann was poxed, because, though she had not lain with me, I had been tupped by Tom, and so had she, which amounted to the same thing. I was sure of that. I had taken a roundabout way to share my affliction with her, but I had managed it in the end, and it was all I could do not to gloat over my victory. But I generally take the wiser course, and that called for me to force tears into my eyes, and clasp her hand, and say, “Oh, it cannot be my condition that ails you, Cousin! Perhaps you are just liverish.”

  She shook her head. “I felt the sore just now, when I was washing myself.”

  “All manner of things can cause a lump upon the body. Mayhap it will go away of its own accord.” I tried to sound as if I believed that, for it would do no good for her to know what ailed her. It was enough that I knew.

  I reckon that if you are born beautiful, then the outside of your head is so important that you don’t have to worry overmuch about what there is on the inside. Leastways, I never could see any sign that Ann ever wasted any time trying to think out anything. While she was brushing her black hair into a glossy sheen, or when she rubbed lampblack on her eyelids to make her dark eyes big and calf-like, those eyes would go soft and vacant, like two puddles of spilled ink, and she rarely spoke when she was tending to her rites of beauty. Those things ought not to take up so much space in your head as to crowd out other thoughts altogether, but she never seemed bored, though she did little enough of anything. Whereas, me—why, it seems like I cannot stop myself from thinking, even when I want to. Even when I am bone-weary and trying to drift off to sleep, notions keep buzzing around behind my eyes until I wish I could swat them away like gnats. Sometimes in the back of my imaginings there is that shadow of my bodily sickness and an ugly picture of what the end will be like for me, but mostly I am able to keep away from that abyss by playing a never-ending game of draughts with everybody who crosses my path.

  Do I need to repay anybody for some
slight or injury, and, if so, how can I safely do them a bad turn? — Is there someone standing in the way of something I want, and, if so, what lie can I tell to push them aside? — Who is vexing me by being too rich, or too smug, or too happy? How can I put a damper on that?

  I never ran out of scores to settle, and little seedlings of mischief to tend to. But Ann and Tom just seemed to roll along through life on a cart of new-mown hay and cabbage roses—never worrying about slights or rivals, never trying to come out ahead or fearing being left behind. They just … lived. Why, calves walk into the butchering shed with as much forethought as those two had about where life would lead them.—It must be restful to be able to live like that, floating, instead of fighting back against the current, but I take no pleasure in idleness.

  I am always trying to win a game that no one else knows we are playing.

  I figured that Ann’s habit of not bothering to think was the reason she had not worked out what was ailing her and how she had come to catch it. She knew full well that I had lain with Tom Dula, same as she had, and surely by now she knew that I had the pox. It stands to reason that I’d give it to him, and he would pass it right along to whoever he took a notion to bed down with. Funny that she didn’t see it coming, that she didn’t even recognize it when it caught up with her, while I had laid awake nights planning for just such a calamity to overtake her. Maybe for an instant or two it irked me that she could not see my cleverness behind the trap that had sprung on her, but then I remembered that I needed the Meltons’ bed and board, so I held my peace, and went back to acting like a concerned and devoted cousin.