The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  But in 1880 I married again.

  Mrs. Florence Steele Martin was a prosperous widow from Kentucky, well past the bloom of youth, just as I was. There would be no second family of young Vances from this union—and the grown sons I already had were scrupulously polite to her, but they plainly thought the family would be better off without her. In their calculations, though, they reckoned without the War.

  When I was hauled away to prison on my birthday, three weeks after Appomattox, Federal soldiers swarmed through our little house in Statesville and took all our belongings. We never got them back. After that, I earned little enough as a lawyer, because in those days of Reconstruction, no one had much money to spend on litigation. And the pay of a Senator is modest, because it is supposed that those who hold the office come from rich and powerful families, which, by and large, they do. But I did not. I was looking at the declining years of my life with precious little fortune to shore up the cares and vicissitudes of old age. Florence Martin was wealthy, and I was democracy’s answer to an earl: a United States Senator. It was a sensible and satisfactory alliance, and we were neither the poorer for it.

  We summered in the mountains near Asheville in our stately mansion Gombroon—named for the Persian pottery of that name, for I was a cultured man of the world by that time, still close to Asheville in my heart, but in other ways very far from it indeed, and my last home was proof of my success. Gombroon was the most modern style of estate, three stories high, with a turret and sprawling porches, and all the accoutrements of a fiefdom: an orchard, a vineyard, a dairy, and formal gardens. I felt that I had earned such prosperity, but it was the wealth of Florence Martin that made it happen, and I was grateful for that.

  But would I have died for her? Assuredly not. I never felt such reckless passion for any human being, and it was the thought of that devotion that brought Tom Dula and Ann Melton to my mind, even after so much time had passed. I tell myself that they were still caught up in the madness of youth—just past twenty, both of them, though war and hardship had made them old beyond their years. Whatever they felt for one another, that lust that made everything else in the world fade to insignificance: I never felt that. Never did. And I could never quite figure out whether I envied them their transports of sentiment or whether I pitied them, as one would a madman whose delusions blind him to the realities of life.

  But they died young, and I lived on for decades, ending up revered and prosperous in a mountain mansion, safe from the riptides of emotion that sweep lesser men away to their deaths.

  PAULINE FOSTER

  June 26, 1866

  The next day, J.W. Winkler and a host of his neighbors went out combing the woods again. They all spread out, one right next to the other, and walked forward in a straight line, same as people say the Redcoats used to do when they marched in to battle during the Revolution. Spread out like that, the searchers were sure not to miss a single foot of ground as they went along. They kept up that battle formation, walking in circles outward from the Bates’ place. Sure enough, when they got to a clearing just north of the abandoned farmstead, one of the searches noticed a broken bit of flax rope tied to a dogwood. They reckoned it matched the broken lead rein on the halter of Wilson Foster’s wayward mare.

  That discovery fixed their attention on the clearing, and they all fanned out now within that small area, practically bumping into one another in their eagerness to examine every inch of ground. I wasn’t there, but afterward they would tell anybody who would listen about what happened out in that clearing. Before too long, one of the searchers, who had his eyes fixed upon the ground, spied a patch of red on the bare earth about a hundred yards from where the rope was found, and they reckoned it was a bloodstain, and that the killing had been done there.

  When I heard about that a day or so later, I caught my breath, and scarcely dared to let it out again, for I thought that surely after finding blood and rope, they’d keep combing over the underbrush in that clearing until they discovered the burial. But I need not have worried about it, for I was wrong about Laura’s resting place. After the excitement of their discoveries had worn off, they all went back to the general store to boast of their adventures, and I suppose they might have had a few drinks to celebrate their success.

  After that it would have been getting on toward suppertime, and the search party began to come apart. Before long they had all gone their separate ways, and with all the farm chores that needed doing this time of year, none of them could spare the time to come back another day to continue the hunt for more signs of Laura Foster. I was disgusted with them for quitting the hunt when I reckoned they were close enough to spit on the grave, but of course I had to keep quiet about it, and just as well that I did, for I had guessed wrong. When they didn’t stumble upon the grave, I resolved to find out the truth of the matter.

  It was the end of June by then, and they had no real proof that Laura was dead, but the rope and the bloodstain gave folks in the settlement plenty to talk about, and, in the evenings and on Sundays after preaching, they yammered loud and long over what they reckoned the rights of the case to be. By now nobody really doubted that Wilson Foster’s daughter was dead. The horse had found its way home, and its rider could not have got far without it, not without being seen, anyhow, for all of Wilkes County and Watauga County besides were looking out for her.

  The lack of a corpse did not stop the settlement from declaring that murder was done, and generating a lot of hot air trying to get to the bottom of it. Most of the speculating centered on Tom Dula, because he was known to be carrying on with her, and most people thought she had been intending to elope with him. You wouldn’t catch me disputing their conclusions. Tom Dula was not the marrying kind; he did not care a fig for Laura Foster; and he had no reason to elope with her if he did want to marry her—but if the citizens of Elkville were too slow to work that out for themselves, they’d get no help from me. I just wish they had pitched on Ann as the culprit.

  She heard all the scandal mongering, though, and it gave her fits. She wept and stormed and told anybody who would listen that Tom was innocent—which was true enough, but not a soul believed her. When he came to the house now, they huddled in corners and talked in whispers. I contrived to listen, when I could.

  Finally, when the whispers grew louder than a swarm of bees, Tom made up his mind, and all Ann’s tears could not deter him.

  * * *

  It was the last Monday in June, two days after Winkler and his searchers had found the flaxen rope and the bloodstain in the clearing, that Tom called on the Hendricks family, trying to convince them to stop telling all and sundry that he was guilty. He got no joy from that meeting, though.

  “We won’t quit till we’ve found her and hanged her killer,” they told him. “The farmers may have to quit searching and go back to tending their fields, but Colonel Isbell vows that he won’t stop searching until he finds that poor girl, and a prosperous gentleman like him has all the time in the world.”

  Tom laughed at that. “Colonel Isbell! Why he wasn’t nothing but a captain in the 22nd North Carolina. I reckon these days a colonel is just a captain with money.”

  Since Colonel Isbell is about the richest man there is in Happy Valley, that remark of Tom’s probably shocked the Hendrickses about as much as the thought of murder. Anyhow, Tom said he could see it was no use trying to talk sense into them, so at last he came away, and that evening he showed up at the Meltons’, as downcast as I’ve ever seen anybody.

  Even before that Ann must have known that the situation was grim. That afternoon while James was out in the field, and I was supposed to be weeding the garden, I went inside to rest awhile with a cup of water, and I found Ann kneeling on her bed, and tearing a piece of clapboard off the log wall behind it, so that the logs and mud chinking showed through. Then she took a long nail and poked a hole through the chinking between the logs, and she was trying to pass a piece of string through the hole.

  I had seldom seen her so
industrious, and I stood there in the doorway for a minute or two watching her go at it. Finally I wearied of seeing her wrangling that string, and I spoke up. “What are you doing now, Ann?”

  The nail clattered to the floor, and she turned on me with stricken eyes. “Don’t you never sneak up on me like that, Pauline!”

  I shrugged. “Wasn’t trying to catch you at anything. It’s hot outside. I just came in for water.”

  She sneered, “Any excuse not to work!”—which was rich coming from someone who never did anything herself.

  She eased down off the bed and picked up a knife that had been lying in the folds of the quilt. I caught my breath, thinking she might mean to make a run at me with it, but she simply turned away and pushed the knife between the head of the bed and the wall. I said nothing about it, and neither did she.

  I got my water, and sat down on a stool, sipping it, while she went back to coaxing the string through the hole. When at last it went all the way through, she gave a little cry of satisfaction, picked up the nail and one of James’s shoe-making mallets from his workbench, and she swept past me and out into the yard. I didn’t follow her, but presently I heard a tapping on the wall outside, so I went out to see what she was doing, taking care not to let her catch sight of me again, for she was agitated. I saw that she had found the bit of string that she’d poked through the hole in the cabin wall, and now she was tying the end of it around the nail she had just driven into the outside wall.

  Now that is meant for a signaling device, I thought to myself, and there could be but one person that she would want to summon her in such a way. I reckoned she planned to tie the other end of the string around her wrist when she went to bed. She means to slip out tonight and talk in private. This was a strange twist of events, because they had never resorted to sneaking around before. Tom always came in, bold as brass, and saw her at any hour he pleased. So why were they fixing up a signal string now? I resolved to keep off the whiskey tonight, so that I could stay awake and see what transpired.

  I slipped away around the back of the house before she could catch sight of me, and I went back to weeding the garden. We never said a word to each other for the rest of the afternoon. Ann paced the yard like a caged bear, and I think I could have shouted at her and she’d not have heard me.

  It was gathering dark when Tom Dula finally showed up, but, although James was sound asleep in his bed, Ann was yet awake, and I reckoned that all her trouble over the nail and string had been for naught, for Tom opened the cabin door and came in without a word to either of us. He sat down on a stool next to the empty hearth and stared into its blackness as if there were flames there that only he could see. Ann touched his arm a time or two, and he looked up at her, and tried to smile, but it weren’t no use, and an instant later he would fall back to gazing at nothing again.

  “You must be tired,” I said to him. “You want me to fix you a bed?”

  He barely glanced at me. “I can’t stay,” he said, talking more to Ann than to me. “I’m off home directly.”

  Ann started to say something, but he had turned away again, so she got out her wooden comb and began to brush her black hair down over her shoulders. I couldn’t see any sense in holding off on my drinking now, for there would be no secret meetings between them tonight, so I reached under Ann’s bed for the jug she kept there, and took a long pull of whiskey to make me drowsy. Ann looked like she wanted to talk, but she could see that Tom was in no mood even to hear chatter, much less try to join in.

  After a few more minutes of silence, broken only by the peaceful snores of James Melton, Tom got up and stumbled past us to the bed. He threw himself across it, like he was going to sleep, and he buried his face in the covers, but after a moment or two, I heard him bawling like a new-weaned calf.

  I looked over at Ann, and she looked more scared than sorry, but she didn’t go near Tom. She blew out the candle, and we sat there for a minute or so in darkness, listening to Tom’s sobbing.

  We had made a pallet of quilts on the floor in case Tom wanted to stay, and Ann crawled into it, and lay down like she meant to go to sleep, and as it was cold and dark now in the cabin, I crawled in after her, figuring I might as well sleep, too. I was hoping that the likker I’d drunk would ease me into oblivion, despite the snores and the weeping, but as I stretched out there, waiting for the darkness to drag me under, the pallet started to shake, and I realized that Ann was crying, too.

  I figured something was bound to happen soon, for there was no use in the two of them laying there three feet apart in their separate miseries. I was glad neither of them expected me to comfort them, for I never could understand what made people cry. I know that some people weep when they cut a finger or get a bellyache, but pain never takes me that way. It just makes me angry that I cannot stop the hurt. Grief and regret are things people talk about, but I do not see the point in dwelling on things that are over and done with and cannot be changed. I wondered why Tom and Ann were weeping, and all I could figure was that they were afraid of what was going to happen to them. If they had turned to me for consolation, I would have told them what fools they were to waste time on tears. If they were afraid of what was coming, they’d be better off planning to fight back with clear heads, instead of bewailing their fate. But they didn’t ask me for anything, so I lay there trying to muffle the noise so I could sleep.

  Presently, Ann’s shoulders stopped heaving, and she turned back the covers, and slid out, making straight for the door and slipping outside without a word to me or Tom. He heard her leave, though, for a moment later he had got up and followed her out. They were gone for a couple of minutes, and then Tom came back in alone and in the light from the open doorway, I could see him go straight past me and over to the head of Ann’s bedstead. He slid his hand underneath it and pulled out that knife I’d seen her hide there. He stuck it into his belt, and I saw that he meant to take it away with him.

  * * *

  “I’m bound for Tennessee, then,” he told her.

  She shook her head, too stricken to speak, and after a moment she reached up and stroked his cheek with her hand.

  It was a mild summer evening, and, after Ann had stolen out of the house, Tom caught up with her under the trees in the side yard. I knew she didn’t want her husband overhearing too much of their talk, for they reckoned that he knew nothing of what had happened to Laura, but also because they had private things to say to each other as lovers. I wondered why they bothered to be so secretive. I never saw any sign at all that James Melton cared one way or the other what they did.

  I had a jug of whiskey I’d got from Wash Anderson two days before, and since I’d finished Ann’s, I took it out of the shed where I’d hid it, and I went around to the front of the house where some weed cedars grew close to the house, and I crawled up underneath one of them with my whiskey, close enough to hear most of what Tom and Ann were saying, and to get a glimpse of them through the cedar branches, but I reckon I could have stood right out in the open and waved my arms and they’d not have seen me, so intent were they on each other.

  That is just what is wrong with them, I thought. They never see anything but each other. If James Melton was made a prisoner in his own house by his wife’s indifference; if Laura Foster became a plaything for one of them to make the other one jealous; and if Wilson Foster lost his daughter and half the community wasted many days in planting season hunting for her corpse—why, none of that made a bit of difference to Ann or Tom. Just as long as they had each other, the rest of the world could go hang.

  But they wouldn’t have each other for long. I sat still under the cedar branches, and listened to the lovers’ farewell.

  “I can’t lose you,” said Ann, and I think she’d have screamed it to the sky if she hadn’t been afraid of being overheard.

  Tom held her for a while and then he pulled away, and said, “I’ll come back for you. Let me get away to Tennessee and get myself situated there, and along about Christmastime, I’ll sl
ip back over the line and come back to fetch you. You can wait that long. And then I reckon we’ll be together for good.”

  His voice broke as he said those last words, and then they didn’t say anything for a long while, but they just clung together like little children, crying like their hearts were breaking. Tom Dula crying. I never thought I’d see the day. He had lived through that god-awful war and seen all the horrors of a Yankee prison, and here he was sobbing like a child at the thought of leaving my vain and empty-headed cousin. I listened to her pleading with him not to leave her, and there in the darkness I was grinning like a possum, for if she had really wanted to spare him that journey, she could have. A dozen words to any upstanding man in the community would have seen Tom out of trouble—but of course such an act would have put Ann herself in peril, and whatever she thought she felt, I knew that she would not risk her own precious neck for anybody. Not she!

  Even if Ann loved Tom more than she ever loved anybody else, she still wouldn’t bestir herself to keep him from harm. Or perhaps she thought that they were safe enough if they did nothing to provoke any more suspicion. I don’t suppose Tom would have let her sacrifice herself for him, anyhow. They wanted to be together, which required that both of them be free.

  I took a silent pull on my jug of whiskey, and wished they’d have done with their touching farewells, for I was tired of listening to them.

  After a moment, she put her hand on his arm and said, “You don’t have to go, Tom. They’ll not prove anything against you. It’s only talk, is all.”

  “They’ve hanged men for less. I’d be better off away from here. Once I’m gone, it will all blow over. Let them think I did it, as long as they don’t come after me. I’ve been a prisoner once, thanks to the Yankees. I don’t ever mean to let it happen again.”