The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  * * *

  Tom Dula left that night, taking one of the westward trails up the mountain, through Watauga County, the same direction I’d come from, and his leaving was the very thing that Ann had tried so hard to prevent. Her despair was no secret to anybody, for she never could conceal her thoughts, such as they were, nor her feelings. She moped about the cabin, giving way to floods of tears, and she ate so little that it was a shame to waste the food by putting it on her plate. Since she could not read or sew, and she would not seek solace in the society of her neighbors nor in prayer, she honed her misery on her husband and me, nagging about the least little thing, or shouting, or giving way to another storm of weeping, as the spirit moved her. I mostly ignored her sallies, but every now and again, when my patience wore thin, I would flare back.

  James Melton never did, though. He bore her grief and her tempers with the same calm forbearance with which he had endured everything else. I wondered how he stood it, for as beautiful as she was, one can get used to beauty the same as anything else, and what was left wasn’t worth a tinker’s dam, as far as I could see. So once when James and me had the place to ourselves, Ann having gone down the hill and across the road to mope at her mama’s house, I put the question to him. “How do you stand it?” I said. “If she were my wife, I believe I’d beat her like a drum.”

  He allowed himself a faint smile. “I watched her grow up, there over the road. She was like a flower back then … so perfect. But so skinny and shabby, too. They didn’t have anything. I couldn’t even be sure she got enough to eat. And one day I made her a pair of shoes, for it saddened me to see her go barefoot so far into the fall of the year. She looked at me then like I had given her a golden crown, and she smiled up at me, looking so shy and grateful. Well, I would have given her the world right then. All I wanted then was to protect her, to keep her from ending up like that no-account mother of hers.” He sighed and turned away for a moment, but not before I saw the glistening in his eyes. “I reckon all the shoes and fresh meat in the world can’t make an angel out of a sow’s spawn. Though I did try. Maybe if the War had not come. She was still so young, then. Sixteen, when I went away in ’61. And when I came back, I found a cold-eyed woman with no more generosity of spirit than a barn cat. I knew then that I had made a bad bargain, but we had our babies by then, and I was honor bound to stay and do what I could. I’d not leave them to her.”

  “But you know then … about her and Tom?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Sometimes I think he is the only thing that ever touched her heart. They were together when they were little more than children. I would blame him for that, except that I know how willful she is. And she’s older than Tom, so like as not, it was her idea. I can’t fault him for being so taken with her. I wish I could feel that way, even now.”

  I didn’t know what to say, for all that was in my mind was the thought that he was a graven fool, and I knew better than to say that.

  “She married me for a home and enough to eat, I reckon. And maybe she’d have been glad if the War had taken me and set her free. The War made so many widows—what would one more have mattered? Lord knows, I tried hard enough to die. I carried the colors of the 26th at Gettysburg, and I thought, surely, with men dying by the hundred there, stacked on the field like cordwood … surely, one man armed only with a flag would never live through it. But I did. I took bullets in an arm and a leg, and I was a year recuperating from those wounds, but I lived to go back to the army. They shot me again at Hatcher’s Run in ’65, and I ended up in the prison camp.”

  “I know. I heard what it was like up there at Point Lookout. Seems to me it would have been easy for you to die then. There’s plenty that did.”

  He nodded. “But, you see, Tom was there. And men were dying like mayflies, so I thought, ‘Well, the both of us will never make it out of here, so let the survivor go home and take care of Ann.’ It is a jest of Providence that we should both be spared, while better men, less willing to die, were taken.”

  I nodded. “It was Ann’s luck, not yours. She never loses anything, as far as I can tell.”

  “Now I can only hope that she will run away with Tom Dula, if that will make her happy. It would make me happy to get shut of her without costing me my honor.”

  “What would you do then?” I asked him.

  He thought for a moment. “My young’uns need a mother. I believe I’d find me a plain-faced, good-hearted, hardworking woman, and I’d count myself mighty lucky to have her. Ann was like a shooting star in my life, so beautiful it takes your breath away, but I reckon what you really need to find your way in the dark is just a good steady lantern. I am cured of hankering after beauty.”

  I noticed that he wasn’t so cured of chasing beauty as to show any interest in me, but I let that pass, and we got on with the business at hand. I had nothing against James Melton, and no particular yen for him, either. I thought he might soon get his chance to be rid of Ann, and I wished him joy of it.

  * * *

  “He’ll be back come Christmas,” Ann would declare, saying it over and over the way granny women speak a charm to stop a nosebleed or take out fire from a burn.

  I never answered back, but I thought to myself that Tom Dula would be a fool if he did come back for her. If once he got himself safely over the mountains, he had best stay gone if he wanted to outrun the rope.

  He might have had sense enough to see that if he’d had months to think on it, but he didn’t. The very fact that Tom had lit out for the hills just fanned the flames of suspicion in the settlement. On the Thursday after Tom left, Wilson Foster went to the Elkville Justice of the Peace, and told him that his daughter Laura was missing, and that he reckoned she had been done to death by “certain persons under suspicion.” Then the old man reeled off the names of the folk that he suspected, and he got Mr. Carter to draw up a warrant, ordering the county sheriff to round them up for a hearing the next day at Cowle’s store.

  Tom Dula topped the list, of course, and then came Ann, but after that he listed Tom’s first cousins Granville and Ann Pauline Dula. I don’t know what they had to do with anything, for we didn’t have much truck with them, but I wondered if the fact that Miss Dula is named “Ann Pauline” had something to do with it, as that is Ann’s given name, too. Well, it is also my name, if it comes to that. There are a few too many “Ann Paulines” for a place as small as this, if you ask me.

  Well, I’ll bet Granville Dula and his sister were mighty surprised to find themselves in custody and bound over for a hearing on a charge of murder. They were close in age to Tom, and their daddy was Tom’s uncle Bennett, on his father’s side. They had more land and social standing than Tom and his widowed mother, and they were probably mortified to be dragged into the troubles of their no-account cousin Tom.

  The next day, Friday the 29th of June, the lawmen and the local busybodies commenced a hearing at Cowle’s store, and Mr. Pickens Carter heard evidence in the matter of Laura’s disappearance. It didn’t take him long to realize that Granville and Ann Dula had been scooped up by mistake, on account of their names, and he turned them loose in short order. They hurried out of there without a backward glance, looking both scared and horrified, as if they thought we all had cholera.

  Next off, the justice of the peace let Ann Melton go, perhaps because she is small and beautiful, and men seem to think that women who look like angels act like them as well. They are usually wrong about that, but it never seems to teach them anything.

  It looked bad for Tom Dula that he was the only accused person not present at the hearing. Mr. Pickens Carter asked a constable where he was, and, with a good bit of throat clearing and foot shuffling, the lawman allowed as how Tom could not be found, and that he was believed to have lit out for Tennessee.

  The justice of the peace was uncommonly annoyed by that information, and he remarked that things certainly did look black for Tom, given the facts of the matter. With a look of sour displeasure on his face, Mr. Carter made out
a warrant for Tom’s arrest on suspicion of murder. He ordered copies of that warrant to be sent to the towns up the mountain, even over into Tennessee, where everybody figured Tom had gone.

  The quickest way to leave Wilkes County from Reedy Branch is to follow the old buffalo trace that goes alongside of Elk Creek westward and up the mountain into Watauga County. If Tom followed the trail until it met up with the wagon road to Zionville, he could cross over the Tennessee line without delay. There were a lot of murmurs of place-names and speculation about where he might have run off to, and who he might know in Watauga County that he could hole up with.

  The meeting was adjourned then, and everybody who didn’t know any better went away thinking that Tom Dula had murdered Laura Foster; the trial would be delayed until they caught him, but the verdict was already in. Nobody seemed interested in trying to figure out why he would have bothered to do such a thing. As far as they were concerned, his absence was proof of his guilt. I wasn’t about to tell them any different, neither.

  “It won’t do no good to send warrants after him,” said Ann, when we got away from there. “He’ll be in Arkansas before long, or at least out west in Kentucky.”

  He wasn’t, though. If he had any sense he would have been, but I think he was bound to Ann by some invisible thread—his heart strings, maybe—and he could not get far from her to save his life.

  PAULINE FOSTER

  Mid-July 1866

  If it hadn’t been for Grayson, I’d a been in Tennessee.

  Tom’s disappearance was a nine days’ wonder in Happy Valley. People hardly talked about anything else, and it pretty much settled the matter of his guilt as far as the settlement was concerned. Ann was wretched, listening to the talk about Tom, and worrying over what had become of him. I thought that if she ate any less she would waste away to a shadow long before Christmas, whether he came back for her or not, and if it would put an end to her moping and complaining, I’d be glad to see it happen.

  As it was, though, he didn’t stay gone until Christmas. Just past mid-July, he was brought back hog-tied by two local lawmen. We were able to piece together where he went and what he did from the tales told by Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson, the two busybody deputies that Pickens Carter sent to search for Tom and bring him back to Wilkes County. Once they had fetched him back, and seen him safely locked in the stout brick jail in Wilkesboro, the two of them high-tailed it back to Elkville to regale folks with the story of the capture of that dangerous fugitive, Tom Dula. Oh, they were full of themselves about their exploits, but the truth is that Tom’s capture had nothing to do with them. They just went and collected him as if he had been a parcel.

  I heard the tale the day after Adkins and Ferguson got back. They were ensconced on the porch of Cowle’s store, surrounded by curiosity seekers, eager to hear about their apprehending the bloodthirsty criminal. It was as if the neighbors had that soon forgotten that Tom Dula was a lazy, amiable young man they’d known all his life. Now suddenly they would believe he was a monster. I slipped in amongst the onlookers, to hear the story.

  “He went right where we figured he’d go,” Jack Adkins said, pointing westward toward the blue haze of mountains. “He took that Elk Creek Road to Zionville, and we reckon he laid out somewhere in Watauga County for a couple of days.”

  “Where’d he stay?” somebody in the crowd called out.

  Ben Ferguson shook his head. “We never did find that out, and he wouldn’t say. We’re only going by when he showed up over the line in Tennessee.”

  “That was about two weeks ago,” said Jack Adkins, taking up the tale again. “He turned up, near as dammit to barefoot, and calling himself by the name of Hall, on the farm of Colonel James Grayson in the community of Trade.”

  I put my hand over my mouth to cover my smile, for I was remembering what Tom had said about a colonel being a captain with money. When I thought to listen again, Ben Ferguson was telling how this Colonel Grayson had hired Tom as a field hand, and said he’d worked long enough to buy himself some new boots with his wages.

  “We reckoned he’d go up the mountain to Watauga, and over the line into Tennessee, so we just rode up through Deep Gap, and started asking around up there if anybody had seen the fugitive.”

  Jack Adkins took up the tale. “It took us a couple of days to work our way up to Trade, but when we finally did, we talked to Colonel Grayson, who told us right off that he had engaged a new farmhand that sounded like the man we were looking for.”

  “He must have seen us coming,” said Ben. “For when the colonel went to look for him, he was gone. So he set off with us, tracking Tom Dula along the road that leads to Johnson City. He didn’t get that far, though. We ran him to earth in Pandora. He was on foot, so we were able to overtake him without too much trouble. We caught him soaking his feet in a creek there, and before he could get up, Colonel Grayson hefted a rock and ordered him to surrender.”

  “What did he do then?” asked one of the onlookers in an awestruck whisper.

  “Well, he give up,” said Jack, shrugging. “He wasn’t armed, y’see, but the colonel had a big old .32 Deermore on his hip, so I reckon it was not so much the rock as the pistol that made him decide to surrender. Besides it was three of us against one of him, so he let us take him, and he came along peaceable. I’ll give him that.”

  “He came along peaceable right then,” said Jack. “But not the whole way back he didn’t.”

  “Well, no,” Ben allowed. “We took him straight on back to Grayson’s farm, and they barricaded him in the corncrib for the night, with all of us taking turns standing guard outside. When we started back to Wilkes County the next morning, we put Tom up behind Colonel Grayson on his horse, and we tied Tom’s feet underneath the horse’s belly, so’s he couldn’t jump off and run away.”

  “He tried, though,” said Jack. “Every now and again, we’d stop to give the horses a rest, and one time, Tom managed to loosen the ropes some. If the colonel hadn’t noticed it, I reckon he’d have been off in to the woods before we knew what hit us.”

  “We watched him like a hawk after that, but he didn’t give us no more trouble. We delivered him to Sheriff Hix yesterday evening, and they’ve got him locked upstairs in the Wilkesboro jail. They’d better keep a good watch on him, though, ’cause if they give him half a chance, he’ll run.”

  “Did you ask him what he done with Laura Foster?” somebody called out.

  Ben and Jack looked at each other and hesitated. Finally Jack said, “We didn’t like to ask him anything about that. Our orders were just to bring him back on a fugitive warrant. I reckon it’s up to the lawyers and judges to decide what happens next.”

  They all started talking at once then, but I stopped listening. If Tom was in jail and in fear of his life, there’s no telling what he might say to whoever questioned him. I reckon he’d try to pin Laura’s murder on anybody he could think of. Except, of course, his precious Ann. That’s what I would do, if it was me in jail. Muddy the waters all I could. There was no love lost between me and Tom, so I figured it might not be long before he started trying to make people believe that I had something to do with it.

  I decided it was high time I left Wilkes County.

  * * *

  Remember that.

  I left Wilkes County. All I cared about then was keeping myself out of harm’s way.

  That night I stuffed my three faded dresses, some cold biscuits left over from supper, and what little else I had in to an old blanket, and stashed them under my bed. Then I lay down and closed my eyes, waiting for morning. I didn’t bother to tell the Meltons I was leaving. They might have tried to argue about it, and there was no point in us having words over it, for nothing they could say would change my mind. Or else they might not even care at all that I was going, and if that was how it was, there would be no point in bothering to let them know. Anyhow, it’s not like they owned me or that I owed them anything. I could come and go as I pleased.

  The next mor
ning before sun-up, I got up same as I always did, and I eased my tied-up blanket of belongings out from under the bed and slipped outside. James would think I had gone to the privy, and Ann wouldn’t bother to wake up for hours. By the time they missed me, I’d have a good head start.

  As I stepped outside in to the chill of the morning mist, I took a last look around the valley, as places seemed to float in and out of clouds moving across the ground. I looked over at Aunt Lotty’s little place, straight down the hill and across the road, then below the north ridge at the Reedy Branch Road that led to the Dulas’ land, and over at the Bates’ place, deserted again now, since the searchers had given up and gone back to the business of farming. Wherever Laura was, she was resting in peace.

  My gaze came last to rest on the Anderson farm, situated in the low ground between us and the Bates’ place. I wondered if Laura’s nut brown boy was astir there yet, but I didn’t catch sight of him. I thought about warning him to keep his mouth shut about what he knew, but then I thought better of it. John Anderson had said nothing so far, and I think he knew well enough that it would mean the rope for him if he did speak up. All was quiet in the gray morning. Nobody saw me go.

  I headed south down the Stony Fork Road until I reached the trace that runs along by Elk Creek. I was taking the same westward path to Watauga County that Tom took when he went to outrun the law. The self-same one that brought me here back at the first of March.

  After the morning chill burned off, it was a tolerable walk—better than it had been in the bitter cold of late winter. It would be cooler once I got up on the mountain, but in high summer, that is a blessed thing, and I was looking forward to feeling the cool air on the mountaintop, instead of the blazing sun of a Wilkes County cornfield.