The Ballad of Tom Dooley

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “You have the look of a soldier,” I said, not because it was true, but because men seemed to take that as a compliment.

  He nodded. “Well, the 42nd North Carolina tried hard enough to make me one.”

  Ann had linked arms with him, and she was leaning against him now, looking as proud as if he had won the War all by himself, instead of losing it in company with a hundred thousand other ragged souls.

  “Tom was at Petersburg, and Cold Harbor,” she said.

  “I went in as a company drummer, but by the end of it, the army needed fighters more than drummers.”

  Ann hugged him closer to her. “And he got took prisoner at Kinston near the end, and finished up in a prison camp up in Maryland. Took him nigh on two months to make it home, and with me out here watching the road for him every day and worrying if he was safe, until my tears turned the dust on my cheeks to mud.”

  Tom Dula turned to look at the empty road, and it was a moment or two before he spoke again. “I was lucky, I reckon. I lived through the Yankee prison camp, and I finally did get home. That’s more than John and Leny did.”

  Ann nodded. “Strange to think of it that way, Tom. Them being dead and gone. And you were the youngest. I know your mother was near as thankful to have you back as I was.”

  I just kept looking at the pair of them, neither one seeming to remember that I was standing right beside them. I kept quiet, because there wasn’t much I could think of to say, except to congratulate this fellow for outliving his brothers, which didn’t seem fitten. Besides, I was more interested in how the land lay between him and Cousin Ann, for I had not seen her sparkle with warmth or joy at all until this Rebel boy walked out of the woods.

  “How long have you been back?” I said, thinking he must have arrived yesterday, from the way Ann was carrying on.

  “It’ll be a year midsummer,” said Ann, but her smile faded as she looked at me, for my speaking up had reminded her that I was watching them. She narrowed her eyes, and said, “Well, this standing around isn’t getting your chores done, Pauline. When you see to that hen, there’s washing to be done.” She looked up at Tom. “James is in the house, cobbling right now. Let’s you and I go talk in the barn where it’s warmer.”

  I went back into the hen yard, watching them hurry, arm in arm, toward the barn, and I was thinking, “It’ll be warm enough wherever the two of you fetch up.” But it was all the same to me who Ann chose to carry on with. I couldn’t see anything special about this boy, worth making such a fuss over. But a minute or two later, as I wrung that chicken’s neck, I found myself thinking of the two of them entwined together in the hayloft, and, when the wind eased up a bit, I fancied I could hear laughter and soft voices.

  ***

  We finally did get around to visiting the neighbors. The early March weather was still harsh, but it was a fallow time for farms, and people were naturally tired of having been cooped up all winter. They began to host get-togethers at one house or another through the rest of the winter. These occasions weren’t fancy parties: just a couple of old fellows sawing away on a homemade fiddle or a mandolin, while jugs of corn liquor, clear as water, passed from hand to hand, to fuel the talking. There was dancing, too, but not enough young men to make much of a go of it. People wore their ordinary everyday clothes: there were no fancy ball gowns or silk cravats to be seen at a Happy Valley party. Why, even the soldiers’ uniforms I’d seen at a dance or two back during the War had been more elegant than this, and the gaiety seemed a notch below the soldiers’ merry-making, too, but I understood that. The soldiers were drowning out thoughts of the morrow, knowing that they might be dancing their last reel, or seeing a willing girl for the last time. Such darkness as that had forced them to raucous revelry. The fever pitch was lacking in the festivities of a winter gathering in a world that was now peaceful, but poor-and missing some of those boys who would never come home.

  I wore my best calico, which was clean but faded, and had seen me through most of the War. There were some women better turned out than me, but I am twenty and tiny, which counts for much. I did not lack for partners when I cared to dance. Even the fat old ladies and the scrawny war widows were not left wallflowers, for there was no belle of this ball, except my cousin Ann, who was no favorite among her own sex, but by the menfolk she was much desired. I don’t say they thought well of her, but they would have taken any favor from her she cared to bestow, and no one seemed to mind James Melton’s presence among the watchers.

  I did meet the other Tom-Ann’s brother, Tom Foster-among the congregation at the dance. This Tom was a gawky, raw-boned boy, a couple of years younger than Ann, and not a patch on her in looks, but then, knowing the reputation of Lotty Foster, their mother, the two of them might have had different fathers to account for the lack of family resemblance.

  When the dancing commenced, Tom Dula played the fiddle alongside the mandolin player for a reel or two, which called to my mind that he had been a company musician in the army. He played well enough, I suppose, but not as if he’d practiced or cared much for the skill of it, but only because music-making happened to be a thing that came easily to him. I don’t think he ever bothered with anything that didn’t come easy. He didn’t keep at it long, and he seemed to prefer the moonshine to the merry-making, same as I did. I spent most of the evening within arm’s reach of the whiskey jug, and sitting on a bench with a gaggle of older ladies, because I wanted to know more about Cousin Ann, and I judged that not much went on in the settlement that those old cats didn’t know about, so I sipped ’shine and listened, and every now and then I would drop a word into the stream of talk, to set the current off in the right direction.

  Once, when Ann hauled Tom to his feet and made him partner her in a quadrille, I remarked to no one in particular, “They make a fine pair, do they not? What a shame that Ann did not meet Tom Dula soon enough to make a match of it.”

  With a short bark of laughter, the white-haired lady beside me said, “Why, they had ample opportunity. Those two have knowed each other all their lives.”

  “And been sweet on one another near ’bout that long,” said Betsy Scott. “Lotty Foster used to tell about the time she caught Tom Dula buck naked in Ann’s bed. She said she run him off with a broom.”

  The two old ladies looked at each other across me, and I could hear them thinking, “Lotty Foster is a fine one to be upholding chastity,” for it was common knowledge in the settlement that Lotty herself could be had for the price of a drink. I had been thinking that Ann married young to get away from the sight of that at home, but now I thought I might have been wrong about that.

  The ladies were still reminiscing about the long and close acquaintance of Tom Dula and Ann Foster. “When Lotty caught them in bed… that would have been before the War, wouldn’t it, Betsy? Yes, I thought as much. So Tom he couldn’t have been much more than fourteen.”

  As the talk flowed around me, I watched the two of them, Tom and Ann, laughing, as they clasped hands and skittered down the row of dancers to take their place at the end of the line. Ann’s face was alight with the heat of dancing, or perhaps with the joy of being partnered with Tom. I had never seen such a look about her in the vicinity of James Melton.

  “Why didn’t she marry up with him, then?” I wondered aloud.

  Mrs. Scott shook her head. “Marry a boy of fifteen? Why, it was not to be thought of. James Melton had land and a roof over his head. At fifteen Tom Dula had none of that, and lo these seven years later, I am bound to say he still doesn’t.”

  “And never will,” said her companion in scandal.

  Mrs. Scott nodded. “Like as not. Ann wanted to get shut of her mother’s house, with all of those young’uns underfoot. If she had married Tom, she might still be stuck living with her mama-or with his’n, and where’s the escape in that?”

  The white-haired woman laughed. “Anyhow, I don’t reckon Ann Melton would have to marry Tom Dula to get what he’s good for. Any woman in these parts can have
that for the asking. And there have been enough of them ready to ask-including Ann herself, to this day.”

  I kept staring at the dancers. The fiddlers had taken up another tune, and Tom and Ann, still hand in hand, had set off dancing again. I looked around the room, trying to spot Ann’s husband in the crowd, and, by and by, I placed him over in the corner, sitting with the older men who favored drinking over dancing.

  I nudged Mrs. Scott, and nodded my head toward James Melton. “He doesn’t mind?”

  “Does he mind?” Mrs. Scott turned to stare at me, as if I was a mule she was looking to buy. “You’d know that as well as anybody, wouldn’t you, Pauline? Aren’t you working over to their place these days? How does it strike you?”

  I shrugged. “Like he hardly knows what’s going on around him,” I said. “I got to wondering if he had ever got kicked in the head by a mule.”

  Betsy Scott laughed. “Better if he had been. He is so far under the spell of your pretty cousin Ann that some folks around here are saying she’s a witch.”

  She got up to fill her cup just then, but I kept turning her question over in my mind. Ann and James Melton. They got along well enough, as married people do-like two yoked mules, obliged to plow the field together. They get along by getting on with the work, and not worrying about what their feelings may be toward one another. But, as far as I could see, that’s all there was between them-two yoked people getting on with the work of living. Keeping body and soul together on a scraggly hill farm in the aftermath of that war was enough to keep anybody’s mind set on the furrow straight ahead, for neither food nor money was easy to come by these days. I’d have thought no more about it, if I hadn’t seen the way Ann looked at Tom-a look that said being cold and starving were trifling matters compared to the fever of wanting him.

  All right, then. If she felt that fierce about Tom Dula, why was she still with James Melton at all? It isn’t as if James Melton had any money or position to speak of, and Ann had little enough reputation to ruin, so what kept her bound?

  There was some sense in her stopping there as long as the War lasted, for Tom was away in the fighting, and where else could she go? But next month would mark a year’s time since the War had ended, and Tom had finally got shut of the army, and walked home from that prison camp in Maryland last summer. They had told me all that themselves. And yet, here was Ann, nine months after Tom came home, still being wife to another man, still “Mrs. Melton,” to all the world. What kept her there? Those babies might have tied another woman to hearth and home, but I never saw Ann pay any mind to hers.

  To see her and Tom together, you’d think that as soon as she saw him walking down the road, she’d have thrown her clothes in a flour sack, and took off after him, no matter what.

  The fiddlers swung into a new tune just then, as if they were reading my mind.

  If I had a needle,

  As fine as I could sew;

  I’d sew that gal to my coattails,

  And down the road I’d go.

  I tapped my foot in time to Shady Grove, thinking I might get up and dance after another cup or two of whiskey. “Why didn’t she go off with Tom when he came back from the War?” I wondered aloud.

  “Like as not, she wasn’t asked,” said Mrs. Scott.

  ***

  I puzzled over that riddle for a good many days afterward, but I knew the answer would come to me. The Bible says that not a sparrow falls but what the Lord knows about it. In Happy Valley the fate of sparrows might go unremarked, but every human being in the settlement was watched and judged and commented upon on a daily basis, it seemed to me, and not out of Christian concern, either. There was little else to talk about, I reckon. Once you have done with the weather, and who was sick, how the crops were faring, and all the birthing and dying news, then what was left, except to tabulate the sins and follies of your neighbors?

  I was a nine days’ wonder back when I first arrived. Every old cat in the settlement was itching to find out what business I had in Wilkes County, and, when they learned that I was here to see Dr. Carter, they tried even harder to nose up the reason for it. The first thing that leaps to any old biddy’s mind when a single woman turns up in the settlement is: “Is she in the family way?” Though a moment’s thought would tell them that pregnancy was hardly a reason to consult a doctor. An unwed girl might well leave her own community to birth her baby elsewhere, but she’d not trouble a doctor to help her do it when there were midwives a-plenty to be had. What would a man doctor know about bringing babies into the world anyhow?

  They used every neighborly visit and settlement social as a chance to look me over, but there was no telltale bulge beneath my apron, and the rest of me was as scrawny as ever.

  Finally, though I’m sure it pained those gossips to do it, they gave up all hope that I might be a wayward woman saddled with a bastard child. Well, I was a wayward woman, if they but knew, and I wish they had been right in their first guess. I’d rather have paid for my sins with a brat than with the pox. It would be a deal easier to get rid of a babe, for one thing. A dose of pennyroyal tea, or a corset cinched as tight as it will go-and if that fails, you can smother the newborn with a cloth and tell folk that it died in the night. There’s plenty that do. I’d fall pregnant a dozen times if it would rid me of this pox.

  Is it not a wonder that the human race goes on at all? All men give you is pain and sorrow, and I cannot see why any woman would have aught to do with them. Young girls prate enough about love, but that doesn’t seem to last as long as pox, either. I suppose they do it for their keep, for when you are turned out of your mama’s house, it is better to go and be someone’s wife than to hire out as a servant. And for the rest, the girls who cannot or will not make a match with some fellow, then laying with men is an easy way to get money: selling yourself for a few minutes to some randy young lout, who is foolish enough to waste good drinking money on a roll in the hay. I make eleven cents a day laboring hours in the fields; servicing strangers pays better than that. Anyhow, a girl must live.

  Since all that is true, I could not see what it was that Ann wanted with Tom Dula. She had her house and her keep, thanks to that husband of hers, and I reckon Tom Dula wasn’t paying her nothing for her favors, for I never saw that he had a penny to bless himself with. He was living at home with his mama, and doing less work than anybody I ever saw, and I don’t think he ever figured on doing anything else. The future to him was just going to be a succession of days as similar to one another as glass beads on a string. Ann couldn’t go off with Tom, because Tom wasn’t studying on going anywhere-ever. So I didn’t see that she had any call to shine like a candle flame whenever he came in sight. As far as I could tell he was just another poor, no-account ex-Rebel, and if he wasn’t bad to look at, time would take care of that soon enough. Maybe my cousin was love-smitten with Tom Dula, but that was one pox I did not get.

  ***

  “People are talking about Tom and me.”

  It was near dusk, a few days after the party, and Ann had followed me out to the yard, so she could talk to me while I went on with my chores. The days were getting milder now, as March wore on, but I knew that that only meant there was more work ahead on the farm. I was taking the dry clothes off the line, and setting them in the woven basket to bring in. Those that were not all the way dry yet could hang up by the fireplace. It had been a gray day, always threatening to spit rain, but never quite doing it.

  I stopped, holding one of her petticoats in midair. “Talking about the pair of you?” I started to laugh. “I don’t reckon they’re resorting to telling lies, Cousin Ann. I know what goes on the nights you turn me out of the bed.”

  A couple of nights a week, Ann would make up a pallet on the floor, and tell me to sleep there. I crawled under the quilts, but I did not sleep. I lay awake there in the dark, listening to the raspy snores of James Melton, alone as always in his bed, and in the dead of night, I’d feel the cold draft from the door as someone came in, walking slow
and quiet, trying not to make a sound. Then the soft footfalls would stop on the side of Ann’s bed, and I could hear a sigh and a moan, and then the sound of the covers being drawn back, and the soft thump of boots hitting the floor.

  The first time it happened, I lay there real still, wondering if somebody had come to cut our throats in the night-the War had not been over long enough for such fears as that to subside. But before a minute had passed, I heard a sigh and a giggle, and an answering grunt, and then the rustling of the bed covers, and I knew what was going on in the bed. Ann had banished me to a pallet on the floor, because she knew that Tom Dula would be paying her a visit.

  I raised up a little, trying to peer through the darkness over at that other bed-the one where James Melton lay asleep. If Tom coming in had woke me up, how did he sleep through it? Did he really hear nothing in the bed a broom’s length from his, or did he not care what Ann did? I shook my head in the darkness. If he had been seventy, there might have been some sense to it, but James Melton hadn’t reached thirty yet. I puzzled over it a few minutes more, until the weariness of the day’s work pulled me under again, and when I woke up at cock crow, Ann was sleeping peacefully in her bed alone.

  Now here she was, standing there red-cheeked and shivering in the yard, telling me that folk were beginning to talk about her and Tom Dula. So help me, I laughed in her face.

  She got all squinty-eyed at me then, and her mouth cinched up. “You are forgetting yourself, Pauline,” she said, spitting out the words. She wobbled a little where she stood, and I could smell the whiskey on her breath. We had both had a drop or two of likker to keep out the cold that afternoon, and to make the hours pass quicker. “We are letting you stay here so you can keep going to the doctor. I’ll thank you not to laugh at me.”

  I shrugged. “I ain’t said nothing to nobody. Folk can’t help seeing what’s put right in front of their noses.” Excepting, maybe, your husband, I thought. But I didn’t want her to turn me out in the cold, and I was not drunk enough to speak my mind, so I said, all sweetness and sympathy, “I reckon what you feel for Tom just shines through, and you can’t help people noticing it.”