Despite my youthful escapades, the one snare that I never got caught in was a dalliance with unsuitable women. I never let my youth and high spirits blind me to that extent to the road that lay ahead. I was intent on bettering myself, and the road to privilege is best traveled alone until you are almost there.
As pretty and winsome as a frontier girl might be at seventeen, she would have proven a millstone around my neck if I had tried to marry her and drag her, unlettered and unrefined, up to the seats of the mighty, where I was bound and determined to go. I knew better than to risk my future for the momentary pleasure of a youthful romance. I waited until I was accepted to read law with the Woodfin brothers, two prominent attorneys in Asheville, and then I began in earnest the hunt for a suitable bride.
Do not misunderstand me. I was no fortune hunter in search of an heiress, nor did I marry one. Birth and breeding were what mattered to me. My Harriette was the orphaned daughter of a Presbyterian preacher—but she was raised by a gilt-edged family of the plantation aristocracy in Morganton. It was not money that I was after. I needed a well-born young woman, cultured and socially acceptable to the frontier Brahmin. She would see my potential to make something of myself, and I would honor her for her gentility, and aspire to live up to her standards. She would be my guide and my mentor among those “quality folks,” whose ranks I had been determined to join since my days as a clerk at the resort hotel in Warm Springs.
I came from a good family myself—it was only the poverty caused by father’s early death that put me at a disadvantage. But my mother meant for her seven children to succeed in life, and so when I was nearly twenty, she sold our drovers’ inn in Lapland, and moved us to a modest frame house in Asheville. The town of Asheville had been built upon land purchased from Mother’s family, the Bairds, and from my paternal grandfather David Vance, who had fought in the Revolution. In Asheville, if nowhere else on earth, I could count myself a prince.
I think John Woodfin took me on as a pupil to read law on account of that pedigree. I do not know what else he could have seen in a raw-boned youth from the hills. In addition to the Bairds and Grandfather Vance, the war hero, I was kin to the Erwins of Morganton through my mother’s mother Hannah Erwin. Woodfin set a store by that, because he and his brother Nicholas had married two McDowell sisters from Morganton, and kinship with the Erwins and the McDowells connected you to everybody who was anybody west of Raleigh. I knew that my association with the Woodfin family would give me an entrée into that frontier aristocracy, and it was there that I proposed to seek a wife. Morganton is forty miles east of Asheville and outside the mountains. Like water, money and power seem to flow downhill, so the closer one gets to the flatlands, the more of it there is.
Presentable young men with prospects are at a premium in the Carolina backcountry, and so a few months after I began my association with the Woodfins, I was invited to a formal party at Quaker Meadows, the McDowells’ elegant home in Morganton. It was there that my fellow law student Augustus Merrimon introduced me to the McDowells’ ward, Miss Harriette Espy, orphaned in infancy, and raised by the McDowells, so that, while she was not an heiress, her social connections were like threads of spun gold. The tiny young lady standing by the punch bowl, silver ladle in hand, was auburn-haired with earnest gray eyes and a kind face.
“You are reading the law?” she said, after the introductions had been effected. “Oh, what a noble calling!”
“Well, that doesn’t relieve the tedium too awful much,” I said, trying to balance a plate in one hand and a cup of punch in the other. I felt like a mule in a choir loft.
She ignored the jest. “I do so admire a learned man, sir. My own dear, departed father studied at the Princeton Theological Seminary. I shall pray for your success, Mr. Vance.”
I had recently decided to leave the Woodfins’ tutelage and attend the University of North Carolina, and so I played on the heartstrings of this pious young lady, telling her that I should soon be far from home and friendless, and assuring her that entering into a correspondence with my unworthy self would be an act of Christian charity.
The courtship wasn’t all smooth sailing, for Miss Espy ran a tight ship when it came to piety, decorum, and, most especially, absolute fidelity. Why, before we had exchanged no more than a handshake and a sheaf of letters, I nearly lost her, when that infernal stick-insect Merrimon told her that I had been paying addresses to another young lady—an incident that occurred months before I even met Miss Espy, mind you, but she wrote me a letter that would have frozen a bonfire, telling me that our association was at an end, but that she would pray for me. Well, I deserved a law degree just for being able to talk my way out of that one, for it was the hardest case for the defense I ever had. (At least until the matter of Thomas Dula.) But in the end I carried the day with Miss Harriette, and on August 2, 1853, in the Presbyterian Church in Morganton, Miss Espy became Mrs. Zebulon Baird Vance, before God and a host of frontier gentry, whose approval at last I had won.
Forever after, folks said that Harriette was the apple of my eye, and so she was, for like that apple in the Garden of Eden that imparted wisdom to our first parents, so my Harriette bestowed the wisdom of civilization upon me—the gift of powerful friends and the wit to use our connections to advance my career. Indeed I treasured her—but to return to the metaphor of Eden, I am mindful that any apple from that fabled tree would have conferred those self-same gifts.
* * *
So I sat there on a porch in Wilkesboro, peeling an unmetaphorical apple, and listening to Captain Allison stammer through an explanation of the behavior of our client. I was not shocked, though I would have never repeated a word of our conversation to my sainted wife. She would have been horrified beyond the power of speech. She’d have expected me to give up the case on the spot, I suppose, and since I was not being paid a red cent to conduct the defense, it would be hard to argue to the contrary. But, after all, somebody had to defend the poor boy.
I put down the apple. “So you are telling me that this Dula fellow had seduced the victim, Laura Foster, and promised to marry her, but that he was also in an adulterous relationship with his codefendant, Mrs. Ann Melton? And the state’s witness, the servant girl, Pauline Foster … she also claims that the accused has had—”
Allison nodded unhappily. “Carnal knowledge. Yes. So she alleges.”
I let out my breath in a long whistle. “I see what you mean about requiring that all ladies be barred from the court when all this testimony goes into the record.”
I was thinking what a waste his life had been, if he had chosen only to spend it on idle pleasures that led nowhere. Life is a gold coin—but you can only spend it once. How sad that a likely-looking fellow should throw away his one chance for so little of lasting value. I hoped he enjoyed himself, though. How sad if it had all been for nothing.
“I spoke with him briefly, you know,” I told Captain Allison. “He did not strike me as a dissolute fellow.”
My colleague ventured a tight smile. “Well, sir, they keep him sober in the jail, you know.”
“Even so…” I shook my head. “He is quite young.… I perceive weakness … laziness covered by a facile charm, perhaps.… He struck me as the sort of amiable fellow who would go along with anything a comrade suggested, provided the task was not too onerous, or if agreeing was less troublesome than saying no.”
“That may be, sir, but it won’t save him.”
“No. I hadn’t got to the point of thinking about ways to get him off, Allison. I was just indulging in a bit of speculation. I always want to know why people do things.”
He shook his head. “You know, Mr. Vance, I’ll bet you that sometimes they wish they knew.”
After a moment of companionable silence, I said, “Well, you know, I also met the other defendant today.”
Perhaps it was a trick of the sunlight, but I could swear that Captain Allison was blushing again. “Oh—er—did you?”
My mind was still on biblical
metaphors. I remembered an apocryphal story that—as the husband of a rock-ribbed Presbyterian—I was not encouraged to believe in: the tale of Lilith, Adam’s “other woman.” They say she wasn’t human—a demon, perhaps, or one of the fairy folk they talk of in the old country. Dula’s codefendant Ann Melton brought that old story to mind.
When I asked to see her at the jail, I was mindful of doing my bounden duty as her attorney, but I dreaded the encounter, for I imagined some poor weeping wretch, too frightened to speak, clinging to my coat sleeve and begging to be saved from the gallows.
But when the jailer brought her into the interview room, I found that I had done Mrs. Melton the grave injustice of underestimating her. My first impression—which I was careful not to show—was sheer admiration of her beauty, which affected me as I might stand back and appreciate a waterfall or a sunset, without having any desire to possess it. She was beautiful—not in the robust country way of an ordinary farm girl, for that is merely the bloom of youth and animal spirits, and it fades as fast as summer lightning. Ann Melton’s face had the sculpted perfection of Pygmalion’s marble goddess made mortal. Her alabaster skin was offset by smoldering dark eyes and a cloud of black hair that fell in waves about her shoulders. And she carried herself like a duchess, who had, by some error, fallen among ignorant rustics who had rudely imprisoned her. How extraordinary that such a rare creature should have come from an illiterate and shiftless family living in a primitive backwoods cabin in the middle of nowhere. Had she been more fortunate in her circumstances, she could have married a prince, I should think. All those thoughts passed through my mind in the time it took her to enter the room and sit in the chair opposite me across the little pine table in the interview room. No doubt she had been studying me, too, for her glance at me was one of cool appraisal. Here was no weeping wretch, in fear of her life, but rather a cool and disdainful beauty, who took men’s admiration in stride, and who took it for granted that her perfection would spare her the indignities visited upon lesser beings.
“I am sure this is most bewildering to you,” I said, attempting to put her at her ease.
She rolled her eyes and permitted herself a small mocking smile. “I understand it all right. People have been talking all summer, and they figure one of us killed Laura Foster.”
“Or that you did it together.”
“Well, we didn’t.”
“Do you know how Miss Foster met her death?”
She shrugged and looked away. “It’s nothing to do with me—or Tom.”
“Well, there’s no percentage in trying the two of you together, in any case. I intend to request severance in this case. That means that you will each have your own trial.”
She nodded. “Different juries?”
“Yes.”
“And in his trial, you’ll say I did it, and in my trial you’ll say he did it, and we’ll both walk free.”
I blinked. I had expected her to demand that I discover the real killer. “Well, I hope that we may see both of you acquitted of this terrible deed, but I would be remiss in my duty as your lawyer if I did not warn you that if you are convicted, you would be hanged.”
She gave me a pitying smile. “They’ll never put a rope around this pretty neck.”
PAULINE FOSTER
May 1866
Ever since I found out that I had got the pox, I had been keeping still and listening whenever folks talked about it. They said it takes people in different ways, some faster than others, so I could not know what is in store for me. They said, though, that sometimes the disease poisons the mind, driving the sufferer to madness, and causing him to thrash and rave in a world of delirium until he finally rots from the inside, and dies. That may be a mercy, to be deprived of thinking so that you don’t realize what has become of you. But the future never troubles me overmuch. What I got to wondering about more and more was whether the madness of the pox had anything to equal the lunacy afflicting them that called themselves “in love.”
By the beginning of May, Ann Melton was pacing the floor like a penned-up bull downwind of heifers, and imagining Tom at Laura Foster’s place at any given hour of the day. It was tempting to think that the pox had got to her quick and gone to her head, and I can’t say I would have minded much if it had, but she seemed the same as ever on any subject except Tom. I tried to reason with her a time or two, more to get some peace than to give her any, but she would not be comforted with common sense, so I gave it up, and let her rave.
It didn’t sweeten my day any, though, to have to listen to her carping while I did the chores, sweeping around her feet like as not, and stepping over her to pick up an old bed quilt that had fallen on to the floor, while Ann wept and cursed Tom Dula for the faithless hound that he was.
“I don’t see that he’s changed,” I said once, to shut her up. “He is the same rotter now that he was at fourteen, bedding a married woman, and anybody else who would let him. I don’t see why it’s bothering you now. You’ve had most of your life to get used to the way of him. And you ain’t tied to him, so if he makes you as miserable as all that, you need never see him again. Just stick to your husband, who never gave you a minute of grief, and forget about Tom Dula.”
Ann laughed. “That won’t happen.”
“Likely not. Well, then, if you’re just fuming about his latest dalliance, why, you said yourself that such carryings-on don’t signify nothing to Tom.” Here I paused and pretended to be busy with my sweeping, but all the while watching her out of the corner of my eye. “Unless you think Cousin Laura means more to him than the rest.”
She threw me a look. “’Course not!” she said, as if I had suggested that chickens could talk. “Tom ain’t never loved nobody but me, and he never will. I know that as well as I know my own name. As if he could prefer a scrawny milksop like her over me! He’s just trifling with Laura to pass the time, and to spite me for not dropping everything in my life for him. I reckon he thought I’d go off with him when he came back from the War, and I was so thankful to see him, I might have done it, but if I had, we’d have both starved. I have told him so often enough, but he won’t see sense about that, and it hurt him that I refused to go. I think he minds about it still. That’s how I know that ’tis more spite than devotion that takes Tom over to German’s Hill.”
I shrugged. “Bid him not to go then. If he is as set on you as you claim, he’ll do what you tell him to, won’t he?”
She laughed merrily at that. “What? Tom? Harken to me over a dalliance, when I up and married James Melton without a by-your-leave to him? Why it would just give him that much more joy in doing it, knowing he was paying me back as well.”
I stopped straightening out the tangle of quilts on her bed, and turned to look at her. “Well, if it don’t mean any more than that to him, then why do you care about it?”
She got all quiet then and put her face in her hands. Then she said, so softly that I barely heard her, “Because it wounds me to think about him being with her.”
“You mean like you being with James Melton?”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“I had to live, didn’t I? Had to get shut of my mama before I ended up like her, with a passel of fatherless young’uns, and nothing to look forward to but the next bottle.”
I shook my head. “Even so, it’s funny to hear you harping on faithfulness, while you are still living with that husband of yours.”
Ann shrugged and turned away. “It’s different. Tom knows.”
* * *
Spring had finally come to the valley, and I was glad of the warm weather, for I was mortally tired of wearing the same dirty, sweaty clothes all the time, and not getting a chance to wash them. The Melton cabin stank of sweat and chimney smoke and unwashed chamber pots, but now that the days were fine I could go out in the yard and boil the clothes in the kettle, and on warm afternoons, we could leave the doors open and air out the room for a while. I didn’t feel much like giving the place
the scrubbing it needed, and if Ann didn’t insist upon it, why, I wouldn’t, but I figured out how to get rid of most of the stench, just to make it livable in there.
I gloried in the sunshine, not even minding the chores so much as long as I could be outside, and I was feeling stronger with every passing day. I thought maybe Dr. George Carter’s treatments had worked and made me well, but when I asked him about it, he said not. He thought it was only the mild spring weather that made me feel better, and that I still needed more treatments of bluestone and mercury. I hoped he was wrong about my sickness, but I did see how the sunshine could make me feel well, even if I wasn’t. The farm work was still hard and never ending, but at least I didn’t have to do it in bitter cold. There was less wood to tote, and soon we’d all be eating better as the gardens began to come up, and the game became more plentiful in the woods. There ain’t much meat on a baby rabbit, but it’s easy to kill, because it ain’t got the sense to run from the hunter. And full-grown courting rabbits aren’t much harder to pick off, because they seem to lose their minds come mating time, and forget to be careful.
My dim cousin Laura put me in mind of a courting rabbit herself these days, for she was so snake-charmed over that dark lover of hers that she’d walk into any snare you cared to lay in her path, so little did she notice anything going on outside her own head. All I had to do was nod and smile, and sit still and listen while she rattled on—and she’d have kept it up by the hour, if I could have stood it, but nothing she ever said interested me in the least, except that when I wasn’t thinking about six other things, then I was sifting through all the babble, listening for something I could use. She wanted me to brush that long scraggly hair of hers until my arm ached, and all the while she’d be daydreaming out loud about that golden day when she’d get shut of her old life forever, and ride off into the west with her man. She hardly remembered I was there, for she was barely there herself. She had moved clear into the future, and she’d be sleepwalking until she caught up to it.
The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel Page 13
