The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “I reckon you caught it from Tom,” I said. “You said yourself that Laura Foster was the talk of the settlement for all her goings-on with men. I reckon poor Tom paid the price for her loose ways.” I held my breath then, to keep from laughing at this bare-faced flimflam, but Ann was nodding her head like I was telling her something she already knew. It is easy enough to lead a mule in the direction it already wants to go, and Ann had the wind up something fierce over our drab little cousin Laura. She would believe that Tom might be stolen away by that little mud hen, as if that were anything worth worrying about.

  If I hated anybody in the world more than I hated everybody in general, I believe I’d wish Tom Dula on them. But Ann thought that the sun rose over his left shoulder, and it suited her to blame her troubles on Laura Foster, for she was already dead set against her.

  The next time Tom darkened the door, she lit into him like a scalded cat. He had come in smiling, probably hoping for a pleasant spell by the hearth, and a plate of corn muffins, if I had made any, for he’d wait until doomsday to get anything baked by the fair hands of Ann Melton. But he got more warmth than he bargained for that day: Ann’s wrath could have melted an anvil.

  She ran at him, same as she often did to fling herself into his embrace, but, though he stood open-armed to meet her, she pulled up short, and thrust her face up in to his, and screamed out her words as if he was still on the other side of the gate. “I am poxed, Tom Dula! Bound to die! And it is on account of you.”

  I stood off in the corner, watching this, and holding my breath so as not to laugh. But it was interesting to watch the pair of them. I spend a lot of time watching people, seeing when they smile or frown, and what they say to good news or bad tidings, and I try to remember to do the same, for if I did not make myself remember to smile or frown, all I would ever show the world is an empty stare. I was born past caring about anything.

  When Ann flew at him, Tom Dula froze, and turned ashy pale, letting her wrath break over him like a bucket of cold water. If he could have turned and run, I believe he would have. “You have killed me, Tom!” she wailed, beating her little fists against his chest, and letting loose a storm of heavy weeping.

  He held her close to him, with an empty stare upon his own face, but he stroked her hair and murmured soft words to her, the way I have seen people talk to a child that has fallen down and cut itself, or to a horse that is fixing to bolt. Finally, when the nerve storm looked to be about over, he tilted her chin up so that he could look into her face, which was blotched and streaky with her tears, but she didn’t look as unsightly as she ought to have done after such a flood of temper. If I had let loose a tantrum such as that, I’d have looked like a withered winter apple dug out of the root cellar. But not Ann. She looked like a rose in a shower of warm rain. Ann had too much of everything, which was hard lines on the rest of us, and that set me to thinking again on what I might do to change that.

  “What has sot you to wailing?” Tom asked her, with an edge to his voice, but he was smiling a little, too, for Ann’s tempers are legion, and most of the time they are of no more consequence than a summer squall.

  This time, though, she was not to be comforted with smiles and embraces, even from her beloved Tom. She glared up, cutting him with those dark eyes. “I am poxed, Tom,” she said, not screaming any longer, but in a quiet, shaky voice that was holding back a flood of tears. “You give me the soldiers’ ailment, and since you never had it when you come home from the War, I reckon I know where you came by it lately.”

  He was looking over her shoulder straight at me, but before he could say anything, Ann stamped her foot and said, “From Laura Foster! That’s where!”

  I was holding my breath then, wondering if Tom was sober enough to have worked out where he picked up the pox in the first place, before he went and passed it on to our drab cousin Laura, but I need not have worried. If Tom had sense enough to work it out, he didn’t say so. He and James Melton were alike in that respect: right or wrong, they generally let Ann have her own way about things. All she had to do was weep and storm, and shout at whoever displeased her, and the men generally stepped aside and let her have her way.

  I did, too, sometimes, but not on account of her carrying-on. I could watch her rave and scream from sun-up to midnight without batting an eye, but I thought it best not to let on that I was not afraid of her, nor that I cared so little for her contentment. I had my bed and board to think of, after all. I found the easiest way to deal with Miss Ann was to let her think she was getting her way, and if I could do that, and still go about my business on the sly, so much the better. I’ll take peace and quiet, if it comes cheap enough.

  I was watching her, though, all the time. Looking to see where that little spot of weakness lay within her. If you intend to hurt someone, it’s best to find out where hitting them will do the most good. I studied her posture, checking for a sign of tautness in her neck that would show she was fixing to set at Tom again, once she got her second wind, but she was slumped against him with her face pressed against his chest, making little kitten noises, while he stroked her hair.

  They didn’t take any more notice of me after that, so I went away to see to the chickens.

  Later on I heard that Tom had gone off to see Dr. Carter to get treatment for his ailment, same as Ann did. R.D. Hall said that Tom was in a bate about his affliction, and claiming he would “put through” whoever gave it to him. But he never did any more than just complain about it. As far as I could tell, Tom’s tempers were like summer storms: quick and hard, but gone in a flash, leaving no trace they’d ever been. Women’s anger is different. We burn long and slow, and you may never see the flames, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.

  * * *

  Wilson Foster’s place is a five-mile walk from the Melton farm, over in German’s Hill, just past the Caldwell County line. Ann swears that Tom Dula makes the journey every few nights, leastways she’s afraid he does, so I reckon all that marching in the infantry got him used to the exercise. Or maybe he’s just like a sorry old dog that will travel clear across the county to find a bitch in heat. Making that five-mile walk afforded me a deal less pleasure than it would Tom, but I set my mind on doing it every week or so anyhow, taking care to arrive in the early evening so as to be gone by the time Tom made his rounds.

  It’s a good thing that James Melton is an able shoemaker as well as a farmer, for I must have worn out half a deer hide in shoe leather, walking those muddy paths in the April mists to reach German’s Hill before full dark. The damp cold seeped all the way to my bones, and plastered my hair against my cheeks, but I was set on going, not for the joy I’d find at journey’s end, but for another kind of joy altogether.

  When I could get my chores done, I’d set out at earliest twilight, and count on reaching the Fosters’ place in time to help Cousin Laura get supper on the table, which meant, of course, that I would be asked to help them eat it. I didn’t mind peeling potatoes and frying up apples, because if I had stayed to eat with the Meltons, I would have had to do all the cooking, instead of just helping out by doing half of it. Besides, I judged that Cousin Laura was more apt to talk when she was too busy fixing supper to think overmuch about what she was saying to me. I hoped she would get to talking and all but forget that I was there, and then I would learn what secret it was she was fluffed up over, like a broody hen.

  If I put my mind to it, I can gentle people the same as I’ve seen some drovers do to horses. Soft words, no quick movements, and never a hint of judging them or being riled. People in these parts are not, by and large, trusting souls, and the War has made them even more leery of strangers. When we came of age, Laura, Ann, and I, strangers—in uniform or not—meant trouble. We saw barns burned and livestock stolen. Ordinary farmers got bushwhacked and left on the road with their throats cut, murdered by one side or the other, as if which side had done it would have counted for anything. I reckon all of us learned to give as good as we got, and to take whatever we co
uld from them that had more than we did. But the War was over now, and maybe some folks were letting themselves forget what they had learned about the danger of trusting people. Anyhow, I wasn’t a stranger to Laura Foster, for all that we didn’t grow up together. I was kin. And if you can’t trust your kinfolks, who can you trust?

  Why, nobody.

  I wouldn’t forget that lesson, and I figured I’d give her cause to remember it as well.

  So I told her how lucky she was to be so thin and pretty. Scrawny passes for pretty while you are young, and it puts people in a good mood to be warmed with praise; though you would be wasting your time to try it on me, for I can always see the truth through the whitewash.

  I let her talk by the hour, it seemed like, about how life was passing her by while she was stuck in her daddy’s house, taking care of his young’uns like a hired girl.

  I sat beside her at the table, peeling puckered winter apples, and nodding my head in agreement every time she stopped to draw breath. I remembered to pat her hand and pull a sorrowful face when her tears spilled over on to her sallow cheeks. Laura was making stew for dinner, same as she did most nights, because watery flour and potatoes is the best way to make a smidgeon of meat feed a slew of people. Two skinned rabbits lay on the table beside the flour bowl, looking to me like stillborn babies, but that was a comment I kept to myself.

  “T’ain’t fair.” Laura’s voice was shaking, and I saw tears plop in to the stew pot.

  “It is hard lines on you, Laura,” I told her, for it was plain what she wanted to hear. “You have put in enough of your youth taking your mama’s place in this house, and it’s only right that you should have a chance to make a family of your own.”

  “Well, it is,” she said, wiping her wet face with the back of her hand. “And I mean to do just that before too long. You wait and see.”

  “I’m sure Mrs. Dula would welcome another daughter about the farm, though she already has one of her own. But Tom’s sister is a grown girl now, and she’ll be out and gone before too long, I’ll warrant.”

  It had been a stab in the dark, and when Laura stopped stirring the stew and turned to stare at me, open-mouthed, I saw that I had guessed wrong, and I hastened to set it to rights before she remembered herself and stopped confiding. “Of course, I don’t know what anybody would want with Tom Dula, for all that our cousin Ann sets such a store by him. I guess you could hope to live long enough for him to inherit that land, if the taxes don’t claim it first, but if it’s up to him to run the place, it will fall to ruin about his ears one of these days.”

  She tossed her head. “I ain’t studying about Tom Dula, Pauline. He’s all right to pass the time with, ’cause Lord knows there ain’t nothin’ else to do around here, but going over to the Dulas wouldn’t hardly be a change from where I am now. Just swapping one dirt farm for another, and waiting for hard work and childbed to take me off, like it did my mama.”

  It seemed to me that she had just ruled out mankind in general with those true words, but I judged she was not bright enough to work this out for herself. It was only Tom she was set against, and not the male sex in general. Laura thought she was going somewhere, and I wanted to know where.

  I tried again. “Anyone can see how good you are at taking care of young’uns. There’s more than one widower in these parts with motherless babes to raise, and a tidy little farm in need of a helpmeet. Any of them would be glad to take you to wed.”

  Laura shook her head. “I have had enough of other people’s children. And enough of hill farming, too. I want to get clean away from here.”

  I couldn’t afford to make any more wrong guesses about what was in her mind. We were near to the secret now, and she would be like a broody hen a-guarding it. I cast my thoughts about, trying to light on some man who would be able take care of her without having a farm to rely on. The local gentry did not figure in my calculations. There were rich men enough, even in Wilkes County, but Laura’s soiled reputation had spread in whispers about the settlement, and I knew that no doctor or landowner would bother with a penniless girl who was damaged goods. Even if she had been beautiful, they’d not have troubled to marry her, and beautiful she was not. But I doubt she had ever been five miles from home, so there was no use thinking of anybody farther afield than the settlement.

  I don’t know what made me light on an answer just then, unless it was thinking about fallen women, and remembering how folks had said that Ann had gone and lain with the drovers for a yard of cloth or a sack full of beans.

  The drovers run cattle from over the mountains in Tennessee right through here on their way to the bigger Carolina cities farther east. If a girl wanted to get shut of her home county, that would be the way out, for they were only passing through. Like as not, Laura would have met them the same way Ann did, by bartering what she had beneath her skirts for whatever they would give her for a few minutes of pleasuring behind a tree somewhere. The wonder of it was that any of them would want more of her than that. I couldn’t see why.

  “You found you a drover,” I said, soft as I could, for I knew she’d be in mortal fear of being overheard.

  Laura got big-eyed and put one skinny finger to her lips, and shook her head.

  I thought surely I had got to the truth at last, but I could tell by the way her cheeks turned red that there was more to it than that. “Well, whoever he may be, I am happy for you, Cousin,” I said, pushing my mouth into a smile. “And you have my word that I will not breathe a word to your father.” Which was true, as I had other plans for the news.

  She nodded. “I know I can trust you, Pauline. You know how unhappy I am, and you know what it’s like to be a servant. So does he.”

  I nodded, and squeezed her hand to give her encouragement, and I was careful not to show how she had riled me with those easy words. No, I did not know what it was like to be a servant, really. I never felt like those that took me in and paid me wages were my betters. I was getting room and board for my doctor visits, and working when I had to, so that I could keep the Meltons’ roof over my head, but I never felt tied to anything or anybody.

  What did either one of the Meltons have to make them better than me? A few acres of scrub land on a hill in the middle of nowhere? Why, they neither one of them could read or write any more than I could, and there wasn’t one dish in that house that wasn’t made of tin. And, as for being clever, I’d show them who outranked who before all was said and done. Whenever I took a notion, I could walk out on Cousin Ann, and, when I did, I’d pay her back for all the ordering I took from her, and all the times I worked while she laid around, queening it over me, because she had married a man with land. One of these days I would show the whole sorry bunch who was master here, and when I had done calling the tune, they would be a deal worse off than they ever thought I was.

  Now, though, I was lacking in stones for my sling, so I had to take care to sweet-talk Cousin Laura so that she would confide in me. She had poured me a tin mug of chicory coffee, and I took a sip of it, wishing I had a dollop of honey to cover up the bitter taste, or, even better, a big slug of whiskey. Still, drinking it kept me warm, while I tried to think what women wanted to hear when they reckoned themselves in love.

  “So he’s not a drover, then? But a drover is a fine figure of a man. Strong, too.”

  Laura wasn’t paying any mind to my prattle, which was just as well, for I had no idea how to praise nasty, smelly cow men, who hardly saw the indoors from one season to the next, and who looked to the rain for their bathing. I had been with drovers a time or two up home, and it was all I could do to hold my breath until they were done with me.

  “He is no drover by trade, but he sure is a fine figure of a man.” Laura leaned close and whispered to me, and her tears had stopped. “I’ve known him all my life, but of course we didn’t see each other any more once we stopped being little children. We just lost track of each other, I reckon, for our paths would never cross in the ordinary way of things.”

/>   I was toting up all she said, trying to work out what she was getting at. “Surely you’d see him at church, Laura.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no. If he went to church, he would go with his own people.”

  I had it now, but I was so thunderstruck by the news that I could not even speak to interrupt her.

  She got all moony-eyed, remembering meeting up with him again. “I had gone to see Cousin Ann, and he was out on the road, chasing a brindled calf that had got loose from the pen, and it near took my breath away to look at him. I didn’t even recognize him at first. His black hair was spilling out from underneath his hat, and his skin was the color of a buckeye nut, and, though it was September, I reckoned he had a touch of the sun.”

  “It sounds like you did,” I said, but I remembered to smile to take the sting out of the words, and I went on without thinking, “Sounds like he’s at least a half breed.”

  She nodded. “He says his granddaddy was a Shawnee. But of course, the coloreds mostly do say that around here. They seem to think it is shameful to be kin to the people that owned them, though I can’t see why. It’s no fault of theirs.”

  “And who were the people that owned him?”

  She leaned even closer, barely whispering it to me, as well she might. “His people were slaves of Wash Anderson’s family over on the Stony Fork Road. Johnny is free now, of course, but he still lives with the Andersons, and works on that farm of theirs, between the Meltons and the old Bates Place. But he says he’s wanting to go west, where life is easier for such as him.”

  I sifted through this piece of news. A freed slave. Even if it were true, him claiming to be Indian would hardly have mattered alongside of that. It did make one thing clear, though: how it was that a handsome young man could want Laura Foster. I reckoned that no man but a colored one would think her worth having, for if my mud hen cousin outranked anybody in this world, it would be the likes of him.