The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  She was too caught up to see the sneer on my face, and I took care to wipe it away quick, before she did spy it. “He’s a-wanting to go west real soon, and he says he’ll take me with him.”

  “How do you come to be with him?” I said quickly, to stop myself from asking why any man bent on heading west would want to be saddled with my drab and penniless little cousin.

  “Well, when I met him a-chasing that calf in the road, I stood in front of the beast and flapped my apron to make it run back toward him. He put the rope around its neck, and stopped to thank me for my help. Then I took a more careful look at him, and I remembered who he was, so I smiled back. He asked me how I was, and said he was sorry to hear that my mama had died. I walked on back to the Andersons’ barn with him while he put the calf back in its pen, and we talked about how we all used to play together as young’uns. I remember that he was always good to me in those days. He’d skin up a tree to bring me an apple, or pick berries for me, even in the briars, and when we all took cane poles down to the river to fish, he’d put the slimy old worm on the hook for me. Then we got to talking about how everything has changed since we were young, on account of the War and all.”

  I didn’t suppose he was sorry that the War had changed things, for it had given him his freedom. I wondered what they found to talk about beyond that. They ought to have been worried about somebody seeing them passing the time of day together. Plenty of folks around would take exception to that, and if they had a mind to teach him a lesson, he’d be lucky to escape with his life. But Laura was too far gone to be reached with common sense. “After that, I started walking that way most every week on purpose, and we got to be friends again. His name is John, and he treats me better than Tom Dula ever thought about.”

  Well, he would, I thought, for one harsh word or a slap from him, and his fine white lady-love could let out a squawk that would get him strung up from the nearest tree. “So he is called John. What’s his other name?”

  She shrugged. “Still calling himself Anderson. As light as he is, I guess he may have more right to the family name than most slaves do.”

  “And the other—you know—his neighbors? Do they know?”

  “There aren’t many colored folks in Reedy Branch, and if there were, they wouldn’t care what Johnny and me do together. We lost so many young men in the War that a woman is lucky to find any kind of man at all. It’s him or a fat old widower, I reckon, for Tom Dula ain’t the marrying kind. The freed slaves mind their own business, same as we do. And maybe they think it serves the white folks right for him to take up with one. Like winning a little battle for all of them. But we don’t care about that. We’re the same as we were as children—just … kind to each other.”

  I thought John Anderson was playing conkers with the devil to be risking his neck for the likes of Laura, but that was his lookout. I just wished he had picked Ann, is all. I wonder how that would have set with Tom Dula. And I wondered if James Melton could be bothered to care if his wife took up with him instead of Tom.

  I looked at Laura, trying to figure out what she was planning to do. “So you have sworn off Tom now?”

  She shrugged. “He comes by now and again, and I don’t say no. No point in it, is there? Locking the barn door on Tom after he’s already had it? I can’t undo that.”

  She would get no argument from me, because I never could see the sense of what folks call “faithfulness,” nor why they would want it. The chicken don’t care if you eat her egg or another hen’s for your breakfast, and I didn’t see that there was much more to it than that, but I do know that, for some reason, most people do mind about such things.

  “And, anyway, people in the settlement know about me and Tom. It keeps them from looking for anybody else taking up with me.”

  The stew would have boiled away if I had not got up to stir it, for Laura was sitting at the table, twisting a plait of her rabbitty brown hair, and looking calf-eyed into the fire. “I do miss Johnny something fierce, but we can’t meet too often, for fear we’ll be seen together. Once people got to talking, there’d be no shutting them up, so I keep having to do with Tom, and seeing Johnny only now and then. I feel like a bear in a cage. There ain’t nothing else to do around here, except chores. If I didn’t have something to do besides washing and cooking, I’d take leave of my senses. Tom is as good as anything else. Us being together is nothing to either one of us, but just a way to pass the time that don’t feel like working.”

  It always felt like work to me, but I nodded like I understood her nonsense. “So your heart is set on your nut brown boy—if he keeps his word about taking you away with him?”

  She slapped the table with her open hand, and the stirring spoon clattered off on to the floor. “Not if! When! He swore it. Johnny says he plans to light out of here when the weather gets warm—near the end of May. I’ve made up my mind that when he comes through here, I’m packing up my clothes, and going with him.”

  I laughed. “Well, you’d best not let word get around that you are fixing to run off with a freed slave, Cousin. Else he won’t get any farther than the end of a rope.”

  She so far forgot herself as to shout at me. “Don’t you think I know that? I ain’t told nobody but you, Pauline. I’m counting on you not to give us away.” Right away, she clapped her hand over her mouth, and looked around, fearful that somebody had come in and overheard her, but nobody was there except the baby, asleep in its pallet on the floor. It stirred and moaned at the sound of its big sister raising her voice, but Laura cast a fearful look at the baby and quieted down at once. It tossed a time or two, and rolled over so its back lay to the fire, and went on sleeping.

  “Oh, please, Pauline,” she said, whispering again, and grabbing at my sleeve with her fingers. “You have to keep my secret. Don’t let on to nobody that I told you. It’s only for a couple more weeks, and then I’ll be shut of here for good.”

  I shrugged. “It’s nothing to me, Laura. I just hope your man realizes the chance he is taking. If he gets killed for messing around with you, it’ll be on your head, not mine.”

  “But you promise you won’t give me away?”

  “I will not tell anybody that you have any lover other than Tom Dula. I swear.” It makes me smile when I can tell someone the absolute truth, and still be planning their destruction. None of them could see more than a yard in front of their noses. But I could. I had everything I needed now to bait my trap, and so long as it ensnared Ann Melton, I did not care a damn who else got hurt. That was their lookout.

  ZEBULON VANCE

  How did I come to be mixed up in the trial of Tom Dula in the first place?

  He was a stranger to me, and his part of the Carolina mountains lay a hundred miles from the part in which I grew up. In my explanation I will attempt to be truthful, but I am sure there are those among my opponents who will deem my honesty arrogance. Honesty has very little to recommend it. Mostly, it gets you into trouble, even faster than liquor; and, though I have no personal weakness for the latter, I do find the former well-nigh irresistible.

  “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” people say. Well, I’m not entirely sure that it would. I think Old Scratch might positively delight in watching us engineer our own downfall by practicing a trait universally acclaimed to be a virtue.

  So let me tempt fate with the truth: I needed the work, and those Wilkes County lawyers who asked the judge to appoint me to spearhead the defense wanted to be spared the local notoriety of having championed an unpopular defendant. It is required that lawyers accept a certain number of cases pro bono in order to keep their license to practice, and since I had been politicking for most of the previous decade, I had some catching up to do with my legal obligations. A paying case would have been an even greater kindness, but I cannot pretend that I did not need the pro bono credit even more. I also needed a much-talked-about trial to bring my name before the public—favorably I hoped. At least in Charlotte, where I had set up shop with Clement Dowd, pub
lic sentiment would not run so high against my client as in Wilkes County.

  That’s why the two local attorneys, Allison and Armfield, were willing to let me lead the defense. They were both able men, with more trial experience that I had, but Wilkes is a sparsely populated place, and practically everybody there was kin to either the accused killers or the victim. There can’t be any joy for a local lawyer in bearing the brunt of the strong feelings such a case was bound to stir up. But since I lived far away, in Charlotte, they reasoned that I could represent an unpopular defendant and come out unscathed, because nobody where I’m from knew or cared about the particulars in this little backcountry case. I don’t suppose anybody even much cared if I won or lost it, so long as the letter of the law had been carried out to the satisfaction of the court. And I needed the practice in front of a jury—how better to accomplish that than by taking an obscure case among strangers?

  I don’t suppose anybody gave much thought to the poor accused man when they were making these plans for their own convenience and for my professional advancement.

  Hard lines on him.

  * * *

  Those fine upstanding gentlemen who had undertaken the defense of Thomas P. Dula were conscientious attorneys, and they made every effort to be cordial to me, but I do not think they were overly concerned about the outcome of the trial, which they seemed to think was a foregone conclusion anyhow, as they believed him to be guilty. The accused man could not afford to pay them to think otherwise, so their thoughts turned on observing the rituals of justice, rather than on justice itself. They kept meticulous records, with particular attention to their own expense forms, and they passed the time at trial courteously amongst their fellows in the law, and for both sides the defendant was simply a “situation,” the reason for the ritual they all observed, but otherwise not a part of it. Such a procedural charade is easier to bear if the wretch is guilty. You tell yourself that a loss in court may be the means by which true justice will be served, and, if you should happen to win, why then it sweetens the victory to know that the credit is all yours and not owing to any virtue or merit on the part of the defendant.

  I did not take capital cases in my youth, in the little stint in the circuit court up around Asheville. Always for me, the law was a means to an end, an apprenticeship through which I must pass in order to reach public office. It worked, too: Congressman, Governor … I had gone far in three short decades of life, but I was honest enough not to risk some poor devil’s life while I was putting in my time as a practicing attorney. Let me get some horse thief acquitted or take sides in a land squabble—that was momentous enough for my blood.

  Times had changed for me though. I had applied for parole from the United States government, for my part in the lately defeated Confederate government. They ought to have taken into consideration how long and hard I argued to dissuade my home state from seceding in the first place, but of course that carried no weight with them.

  * * *

  One of the attorneys assigned ( just as well) to sit second chair to me for the trial was Captain Richard M. Allison, who was a cavalry officer in the War before he was invalided out in ’64, and then, like the rest of us, he had gone back to the tamer business of fighting battles with fine words and stacks of paper. I suppose that Allison will be called “captain” for the rest of his life, even if he lives half a century past that four-year madness of a war, but I aim to leave off the courtesy title of “governor,” just as soon as I am allowed to get myself elected to some new office again—“senator” would be favorite.

  When the good captain told me of the incident in Wilkes County, my first thought was how improvident it had been of this Dula fellow to indulge in an act of private violence in such perilous times as these. Surely we had troubles enough in the land, with bushwhackers marauding the country roads, carpetbaggers infesting the new state government, and all manner of profiteering and petty scoundrels at work picking at the carcass of the Old North State for the spoils of war, without some callow young veteran adding a senseless murder to the burden of the populace.

  The young woman’s death occurred in May of 1866—we were then only a year past that war that had brought enough carnage to the states comprising the Confederacy to put one in mind of the End of Days. And the accused is a veteran of the 42nd infantry—not one of mine, thank heaven, though I have heard it said that I spent little time with my regiment while I had it, so that I might not even recognize a staff officer, much less a humble private. Still, everywhere I go I am beset by men who claim to have served with me in the War, and I hear them out, smiling and clasping their hands, but mostly I am thinking that if all those who claimed to have fought with the 26th North Carolina had really done so, we could have beaten the Yankees and Napoleon besides.

  Captain Allison interviewed the two prisoners when they were first brought in to custody, and so when I arrived in Wilkes County to take nominal charge of the case, I sat down with him on that fine October afternoon, savoring the sunshine and a basket of mountain apples that some well-wisher had bestowed upon me outside the courthouse. Another comrade in arms, no doubt.

  I had seen the prisoner for a short while that day, just to introduce myself and to assure him that I would do what I could for him. Do what I could for him. How often that phrase has come to my lips these past five years! When I was Governor, every day’s post brought a heartrending letter from some poor wife or mother, pleading with the all-powerful Governor of North Carolina to release her only son from his regiment, or to let him come home to be tended until his wounds healed. I sent them back what sympathy I could, but the truth was that even governors cannot tell the army what to do, and they would have paid no attention to me had I tried.

  Usually the appeals on behalf of soldiers came from poor people in the mountain counties, because they are proud to claim me as one of their own. I know what swallowing of pride it took for these stoic and self-reliant people to ask for help from a powerful stranger, and I shared in their shame—theirs for asking and mine for being powerless to help them. Save a poor enlisted man with no influential family connections? Why, that’s exactly who does die in a war, and everybody knows it—except, I suppose, the friends and family of the poor boy trapped in the thick of it. I doubt that even an emperor could change that fact of life—much less a governor.

  That feeling of helplessness in the face of a poor young soldier came back to me as I stood there in the jail in Wilkesboro, echoing that threadbare phrase for the thousandth time. I wonder how many of the grieving wives and mothers actually believed that I could perform a miracle on their behalf. Judging by the polite but wary look on the face of the prisoner, he had no such illusions about my ability to cheat death. I felt sorry for him. Illusions make life bearable.

  He was polite to me, a little in awe perhaps of having the former governor come to see him, but he seemed to take no comfort from my empty phrases. Perhaps that would make it easier for both of us when the inevitable verdict came in.

  “Why did he do it then?” I asked Captain Allison. I was paring the apple with my little silver knife, but I was no less attentive for that. If I cannot pace, then I think better when I focus on some small task at hand. I could tell by the expression on that careful lawyer face of his what reply was forthcoming, and I held up my hand to forestall it.

  “Yes, Allison, I know. Dula is presumed innocent until those twelve scoundrels that comprise the jury say otherwise. We’ll take that as read. But we are not in court now, and there is no one in earshot of this porch to make mischief with our conversation, so just tell me why he is thought to have done it—if that phrasing suits you better.”

  I do believe the captain blushed, either at my plain speaking or in contemplation of the answer he would be forced to give to my question. He hemmed and hawed for a bit, looked away, and finally mumbled, “It is woman trouble, Governor.”

  I sighed. “We have a new governor in Raleigh now. It might be best to leave off calling me that before
the Federals take a notion to haul me back to Capitol Prison for presumptuousness.” I wouldn’t put it past them. “Woman trouble, is it?”

  He nodded unhappily. “The accused has a sordid reputation for being unchaste.”

  I was glad that my mustache hid the smile I could not quite suppress. “Well, he was a soldier, Allison.”

  “So were we all, Gov—er, Mr. Vance. I hope that military service did not cause us to lose the honorable principles we were taught in church and in childhood.”

  “Perhaps our client did not acquire those same principles, and surely the women he associated with were not the gentle ladies we are accustomed to.”

  Allison shuddered. “I should say they are not. Some of the details of this case … we shall have to clear the court of all female spectators—though why they would wish to attend in the first place, I cannot imagine.”

  Well, I could. But I let that pass. “Now what exactly do you mean by woman troubles?”

  Captain Allison leaned forward, hand cupped above his lips, and hissed at me, “He has the pox, sir!”

  I have the honor to be married to a preacher’s daughter, who was raised in the genteel society of the Morganton planter class, so perhaps he thought I would be as easily shocked as my Harriette by such news, but I grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of the Carolina backcountry, and, after my father died, my family ran a way station for the cattle drovers who passed through Madison County. Between my association with these colorful specimens of humanity, my early career as a country lawyer, and my later years in Congress, I was quite inured to the specter of human iniquity in all its many forms.

  I cannot say that I understood the impulse, though.

  You might think otherwise, for, as I said, I grew up in the mountains that form Carolina’s border with Tennessee, and many of the frontier folk up there had little use for the social conventions, and I do confess that for a year or two I enjoyed the drinking and the dancing of rough-and-ready Asheville, and I’ll even admit to brawling a time or two, before I came down with the fever of ambition and went to bettering myself through education and mingling in polite society. In those days I lived up to the light I had, but it wouldn’t have been bright enough to read by.