The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Everything looked just the same as it always had. The Bates’ place was as desolate as ever, though I didn’t suppose anybody ever gave it a second thought anymore, if they had to look at it every day. Laura was dead and buried, and Tom and Ann were away in jail, so life went on. But there was one person that I thought would still remember, and it was him I had come to talk to.

  I found him in the barn, milking the Andersons’ one old cow. I was surprised that he had stayed around after what happened, but then the government had set all the slaves free four years back, and he hadn’t gone off then, so maybe he was the staying kind. As soon as I thought that, though, it came to me that John Anderson had been wanting to run off with Laura Foster, and maybe he still wanted to get away—more than ever now that she was dead. But he had seen that when Tom Dula tried to run off, it just made everybody think he was guilty of killing Laura. John Anderson couldn’t afford to have people wondering things like that about him. Somebody might have seen something while they were keeping company together, and if folks put two and two together, he’d hang for sure.

  He glanced up when he saw me, and I saw him startle for an instant. All he could see was a shadow against the bright light outside, and Laura and I were like enough in form and height—both of us little and scrawny—though many would say she was more fair of face. I didn’t care, though. Look where it got her. After a couple of heartbeats, he worked out who I was, but he had to finish the milking, so he just nodded how-do, and went back to what he was doing. I stood there just inside the barn until my eyes got accustomed to the light, and I watched him squirting jets of milk into the pail. I could smell it, the hot sweet smell mingling with the odor of fresh-cut hay and cow piles glistening with flies.

  He was leaner than the last time I had seen him, and he seemed a little darker, maybe from working in the summer fields—or else the dim light in the cow byre made him seem so. He had a fine chiseled face, though, that put me in mind of a mountain back where I come from that they called The Grandfather. He was handsome enough, but I don’t reckon most people bothered to look at him. All they’d see was somebody’s slave, good for doing the farm work, and that’s all. It’s a wonder Laura ever saw more than that, but I reckon she did. He’d not find a woman like her again—and maybe he’d live longer for the fact of that.

  When he finished the milking, he stood up and hoisted the pail out of reach of the cow’s hoof. He set it down near the door, and turned to look at me. “How do, Miss Foster,” he said, quiet and careful, in his white-folks voice.

  I smiled. “You don’t have to bow and scrape to me, John Anderson. I know you of old.”

  His face stayed as blank as the cow’s. “Was there something I could do for you, ma’am?”

  “I kept your secret all this past year, John. Come sit a spell with me, and tell me how you are.”

  “I can’t see how that concerns you, Miss Pauline.”

  I settled myself on top of a pile of clean straw, and the cow wandered back outside, so after a minute of standing there with his fists clenched, he sat down an arm’s length away from me, eying me like I was part rattlesnake.

  “You went away,” he said.

  “I did. I have people up the mountain, and I went back to stay with them. I thought it might be perilous to stop on here for a while. I’ll bet you’d have left if you could have.”

  He nodded. “I used to dream about it. Only in my dream, it would be me and Laura astraddle her daddy’s mare, heading up that mountain that looks like it rises up out of the woods behind the back pasture. Reckon I’ll never see those mountains up close now.”

  I took a blade of straw and twirled it between my fingers. “People forget, John. A year has come and gone. Give it another one or two, and nobody will even mark your absence. You are a free man, ain’t you? Go as you please.”

  He leaned back and pointed out the barn door and up at the sky, where a full golden moon was just coming up over the ridge. “See how big the moon looks when it rises? Looks like it’s almost touching the ground. When I was little, I used to think that if you climbed to the top of the mountain, you could touch it. But one night I climbed all the way up the ridge, and when I got there, the moon was as far away as ever. Now, I reckon freedom is like that. You think that if you just go someplace else you could touch it, but when you get there, it will still be a million miles away.”

  “You and Laura might have made it, if you went far enough out west to where they don’t care about such things. Indian Territory, maybe.”

  “Well, that is past praying for. Laura is dead and gone. And I am thinking that once the harvest is over and done with, I will get away from here. At least then I won’t have to look at that ridge where they found her buried. Maybe I could sleep better then.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “The Andersons have property over the county line, at German’s Hill. I thought I might do some sharecropping on my own over there, if Mr. Washington is willing to let me try. I think he will. It’s only Caldwell County—not over the mountain, not Indian Territory, but maybe I can start living again there. Find me another woman.”

  I smiled at his foolishness. “Another gal like my cousin Laura?”

  “No!” He hit the straw with his fist. “As little like her as ever was. I have done with that. I’ll find me a good steady woman of color, who can help me tend a farm, and make a life over there, where we don’t have to sneak around in fear of our lives.”

  It was like listening to James Melton all over again. The Foster women seem to have the power to bewitch a man, like the fairy queen in the old ballads, but sooner or later, he wakes up on a cold hillside, with a handful of dust and ashes, and after that all he wants for the rest of his life is a plain ordinary woman who will share his burdens, instead of a moonshine maiden who gives you dreams and leaves you with nothing.

  The moon had climbed higher than the ridge now, and it was so dark in the barn that we both looked like shadows. I leaned back in the straw, feeling drowsy and peaceful. Neither one of us said anything for a while. Then I heard John sigh, a heavy, weary sound like a tired old horse.

  “What?”

  He sighed again. “It’s just that you put me in mind of Laura, sitting there in the hay like that, all in shadow. You favor her.”

  “Laura and me were blood cousins, so we ought to.”

  “I’ll miss her until the day I die.”

  I thought the day he died might have come sooner if she still walked the earth. I didn’t say that, though, because I was mindful of what I had come about. So I leaned close to him in the soft darkness of that summer evening, and I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned close. “She was mighty lucky that she had you to make her happy, John. I never had anybody.” I made my voice quaver, and it was too dark for him to see that I shed no tears. Before he knew what was happening, I was in his arms, and then I just let nature take its course. He called me “Laura,” and I never said a word, just went on kissing him and running my hands over his body. Never saw a man yet that didn’t take to rutting given half a chance. He wasn’t but twenty-two or so, and Laura had been dead a year and more. By the time he remembered himself, it was too late to matter.

  He turned his back to me when he was done, and I thought I heard him crying softly in the dark. I left him be for a minute or two, while I righted my skirt, and picked straw out of my hair. Finally, I said, “Tom Dula is getting a new trial around harvest time. And then Ann will have her day in court. And I reckon you know more than anybody about what really went on that day.”

  “I know Laura wasn’t running off with Tom Dula. It was me she came to meet. I never told anybody, though.”

  “See that you don’t. I reckon you know what would happen to you if people knew about you and Laura.”

  “I know. But they already sentenced Tom Dula to hang in that one trial. If the next court does the same thing, they’re going to kill him. And he’s an innocent man. He had no call to kill my Laura. None at all. I
keep thinking I should tell somebody that.”

  I leaned in close again, but there was no softness about me this time. “You won’t tell anybody anything, John Anderson, for if you do, it’s you that will hang.”

  He tried to pull away, and I could hear the bewilderment in his voice. “But—but—I never harmed Laura.”

  “No. But I can’t have you trying to save Tom. I want him to hang.”

  “But why? Are you aiming to save your cousin—Miz James Melton?”

  “Well, no, John. I want them both to hang. And if you try to stop it, I’ll see that they lynch you, no matter what. I’ll tell them you raped me.”

  I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I heard him draw breath, and he shuddered like he’d touched a snake. “Somebody should have killed you,” he said.

  I laughed. “Why, I’m just a servant girl here. People hardly notice me at all.”

  * * *

  When the fall term of 1867 rolled around, wouldn’t you know it, this time it was the prosecution that wasn’t ready. They claimed that some of their witnesses had not turned up. That there Colonel Grayson from Tennessee was one of the missing witnesses, and I wasn’t surprised. A whole year had passed, and by now he must have thought he had better things to do than to travel all the way to Statesville to watch a bunch of North Carolina attorneys waste everybody’s time with their legal shenanigans. I hear they fined him eighty dollars, though, for not attending. I wonder if they ever collected it.

  They finally had that second trial on January 21, 1868, and mostly the same witnesses went all the way to Statesville to say their piece again. But there were a few changes. In the corridor outside the courtroom I saw Eliza Anderson, Wash Anderson’s younger sister, decked out in her Sunday best.

  “What did they call you for?” I asked her.

  She doesn’t care for me overmuch, and I reckon that’s because her brother has been tale-bearing, but she answered me civil enough, “Nothing very important, I’m sure. But we live next to the Bates’ place, and I suppose the prosecution called me on account of that.”

  I thought it was odd, because her brother was already down as a witness, and could have answered any questions about that, but I didn’t think too much about it, for my mind was occupied with my own testimony, which was a deal more important than hers.

  She went into the courtroom while I was still waiting in the hall, wondering if the court was planning to give us lunch. Presently Miss Eliza came storming out of the courtroom, looking like a wet hen.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Where is my brother?”

  “Outside having a smoke. I said I’d fetch him if it was his time to go in. What’s the matter?”

  There was a pink spot on each one of her cheeks, and her lips twitched. “That awful man who is defending Tom Dula asked me … actually, in public … asked me if I was kin to—as he put it—‘a man of color’ named John Anderson.”

  I sat very still on the bench. “Strange question for a lawyer to ask. What does that have to do with Tom?”

  “I haven’t the least idea. I did not respond, and in fact before I could, the other lawyers objected, and the judge told me I need not answer.”

  “Well, as light as John is, I should think there might be a blood tie there somewhere.”

  Eliza Anderson gave me a cold stare. “Well, it’s nothing to do with me!” And she stalked off to complain to Wash about that godless lawyer from Charlotte.

  I wondered what prompted Tom’s lawyers to ask that. Had he figured out the truth of Laura’s disappearance and tipped them off? Well, it didn’t matter. John Anderson could not tell what he knew, and I had no intention of telling it, either.

  I don’t think Tom ever worked it out. I reckon when Ann finally found him on the Friday that Laura went missing, she had said to him something like, “Well, you’ll not be running away with Laura Foster now, Tom Dula, for I have killed her.”

  And poor easygoing Tom must have stared back at her, and said, “What are you talking about?”

  But it was too late then, for by that time, Laura was lying dead in the weeds at the Bates’ place with a knife wound in her heart.

  And what could he do then? Let her hang for a crime she committed for love of him? He loved her too much for that. So he buried that body, and then he was as guilty as she was.

  They found Tom guilty in the second trial, same as the first, and although his lawyers succeeded in getting the execution postponed from February until May, they could not delay it forever.

  By then I knew that Ann would likely go free whenever she came to trial, but that didn’t matter. However long she walked the earth thereafter, the truth is that she would die the day they hanged Tom Dula.

  I don’t know why, though. I never did understand what it was that made people prefer one man over another.

  I went back to Watauga between the trials, and found me an old man to marry, but that was a matter of business: getting a roof over my head and enough to eat. Besides, I had a baby on the way by then, and I needed to marry before it arrived. I reckon I come as close to caring about that baby as I ever have to loving anybody. Not because of its father—he is the least of it—but because the child is a part of me, and for that reason alone, I value it. But if it is born poxed, I will stifle it.

  So I shall get away from Wilkes County for good, and I will take care to steer clear of tragedies, so no one will ever think to ask what became of me. The people who live happily ever after—they don’t appear in the history books. They just fade away. I reckon that’s what happiness is.

  ZEBULON VANCE

  Doctors, as a rule, do not attend their patients’ funerals, and it is for similar reasons that lawyers absent themselves from public executions: it is daunting to have to face one’s professional failure squarely in the cold light of day. In addition to that, I could argue that I was by no means out of the financial mire that the War had left me in, and I had my living to get at my law office in Charlotte, a good fifty miles from Statesville, where my erstwhile client would pay with his life for his crime—or possibly for mine: the arrogance of thinking my rusty legal skills adequate to mount a criminal defense in so serious a matter. I hoped him guilty, and I did not see what good it would do to go and try to offer comfort, when I had none to give. I got him a second chance before a jury, and, when that failed, his consolation could only come from a clergyman, in the hope of heaven.

  He had been a soldier, and I hoped he would die like one.

  In any case, my duties lay elsewhere, for I appeared before the court not only in Charlotte, but in Salisbury, Lexington, Lincolnton, Concord, Monroe, and even farther afield. I expect to be remembered for my political career, but if I am remembered for any legal case I ever took part in, I expect it will be the Johnston Will case, tried in February 1867, in Superior Court in Chowan County. It was a legal tangle involving a legacy, and no one’s life was at stake, Mr. Johnston having already gone on to meet his maker. My chief contribution to that case was an impassioned speech, somewhat off the subject of the case at hand. I’m good at that. If I can entrance a jury with a diverting yarn, or make them laugh, I can often make them like me enough to find in favor of my client. It is sentiment, rather than logic, and the opposing lawyers do not esteem me for it, but it is the best way I know to practice a trade that I was taking up again after a hiatus of a dozen years. As I said, I won that case, and I hope it will suffice to sum up my career before the bar.

  But in the Dula case, a young unmarried girl was dead. She was no angel of virtue, to be sure, but people were sorry for her, and that rather cramped my style in the way of misdirecting the jury with tall tales and humorous rhetoric.

  Though I am committing my memories to paper, this case will not make it into my memoirs, if I have anything to say about it. It was not a shining hour in my career.

  I was not there at the end, and I expected to know no more about it than what was reported in the Salisbury Watchman a week thereafter
. But some time later I chanced to run in to my former co-counsel, the Iredell County attorney Captain Richard Allison, in the courthouse in Charlotte. He was there on another matter, but, upon seeing me, he delayed his departure for home in order to spend an hour with me, so that I might hear how it all ended in the Dula case, for he had indeed been there.

  We repaired to a quiet corner, where we could sit undisturbed and talk without being overheard. After we got the initial pleasantries out of the way, Allison turned somber. “I was there, Governor,” he said. “The man died bravely. I thought it my duty to see it through.”

  I sighed. “I wish we could have saved him. Did you speak to him before the end?”

  “I did, yes. He sent for me. I never thought he would, for the jailers were saying how indifferent he was to his impending execution. He laughed and joked about the fact that he was to die the next day, and he refused the offers of ministers who would have offered him spiritual solace. His sister Eliza and her new husband made the journey from Wilkes County to Statesville with a wagon, in order to take the body back home for burial after the hanging. She brought him a note from their mother, imploring him to confess the truth of what happened, so that she could cease to be tormented by doubts and questions, but his only response to this was to ask that his sister and brother-in-law be allowed to see him.”

  “I don’t suppose the jailers agreed to that?”

  Captain Allison shook his head. “They had every reason not to trust Tom Dula. Even when he was locked in his cell, they kept him shackled to the wall on a length of chain. He did not mean to die if he could help it.”

  “One can hardly blame him for that.”

  “No, I suppose not. That night the jailer took him his supper, and he ate heartily as if he had another twenty years to live instead of only that many hours. But as the jailer got up to leave, he noticed that one of the links on the prisoner’s shackles was loose. He called at once for another guard to help him, and together they examined the chain. When they saw that the link had been filed through, they knew that the prisoner had somehow got a weapon in his cell, so they began to search.”