The Ballad of Tom Dooley

by Sharyn McCrumb

  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.

  Tom Dula looked in at the Fosters now and again, but not nearly as often as Ann thought he did, for he loved the fields and woods, and the coming of spring meant that he could spend more time rambling in the sunshine, or-more likely-out napping under a tree where nobody could find him to put him to work. I reckon he did his share of hunting, too, though, because somebody had to put food on the Widow Dula’s table, and with her other boys killed in the War, the job of supporting the family fell to Tom. He was happy enough to fish for his supper, or to snare some rabbits in the woods, but I never did see him behind a plow.

  I never failed to ask Laura had she seen him since I last stopped in, and she’d give me a blank look as if it took her a moment even to recollect who he was. Then she’d shrug and tell me if he had or hadn’t been by, as if it didn’t matter to her one way or the other, and she couldn’t be bothered to spare him a second’s thought while she was busy dreaming about her sweetheart.

  All of this news of their mutual indifference would have made Ann shout for joy, but I took care that she would learn none of it.

  ***

  At least the walks I took for my visits to German’s Hill were easier now, since the wind had stopped cutting through the valley like a skinning knife, and the lengthening spring days meant that I could near ’bout get there before nightfall now. Laura would be weaving in the evening after supper was done with, making cloth for a new dress for herself, and I always made a show of admiring it, hoping to put her in a good enough mood to make me one, too, for Dr. Carter’s nostrums took all the money I made at the Meltons’, and I couldn’t even remember the last time I had anything new to wear. Everything I had was faded, or patched or threadbare, and I longed to throw the lot of it into the fire, but I had no way of getting anything better.

  What the War didn’t make impossible to get, it made too expensive to come by, so mostly we did without, and I was tired of it. If I could get a decent dress for the price of honeyed words and listening to a daydreaming fool, then I’d do it. I wish there had been a loom at the Meltons’, for I’d even have been willing to learn weaving myself to get something clean and new to wear, but since Ann never did much of anything, there wasn’t any use in James Melton buying one, for it would have been quilted with cobwebs before Ann ever got a yard of cloth out of it.

  Anyhow, I suppose it was best that I kept going over to Wilson Foster’s place to keep abreast of Cousin Laura’s doings, while I kept on thinking what I could make of that secret. Meanwhile, I had each long walk back to think up new tales to tell Ann about how devoted Tom was to Laura, and how she doted on him. Of course, Ann could have gone over to German’s Hill herself anytime she pleased and found out the truth of the matter, but I knew full well that she would do no such thing. Walking five miles up a muddy trace was not something Ann would willingly do, even for the best of reasons, and the Meltons had no horse, so she must go everywhere on foot. Her mother lived down the steep hill and across the Stony Fork Road, and she made that journey tolerably often, mostly to foist the children off on her, but there were few other destinations that she deemed worth the effort it would take to get there.

  Ann never did care much for the society of other women, nor they for hers. She felt it was her right to be the center of attention, and she liked to be petted and made much of. Having to pass an evening sewing, or listening to the prattling talk of another woman on subjects that did not pertain to her, would have bored her to screaming fits. The thought of listening to other people’s babies wailing, and having little children underfoot, putting their sticky hands on your dress, was enough to keep her from visiting most of the women on nearby farms, except when being stuck at home had made her miserable enough to endure a neighborly call.

  Ann was never one to do anything out of duty or for the sake of other people’s good opinion. Besides, she was so furious with Laura these days that she would never willingly go over there and face her rival. Ann was fond enough of shouting at folks and leaving her finger marks on them when they displeased her, but she dreaded looking the fool. I only had to hint a time or two that Laura would laugh at her jealousy and make sport of her misery, and when she got to believing that, it would have taken wild horses to get her over to Wilson Foster’s place. It’s funny how easy it is to make people believe what they want to believe or what they are most afraid of.

  Ann hated every word I said about Tom Dula and Laura Foster, but never once did it cross her mind to doubt my word. One time she got so furious over what I had to tell that she went and kicked over a slop jar I had not yet emptied, and I had to get down on my knees with a rag and mop it up and then scrub the newly cleaned floor all over again, but it was worth it, just to see her weep.

  ***

  You know how the Bible said that God called things into being just by saying the words of creation out loud? Let… there… be… light. Well, I reckon I know what that must have felt like, because in my own way I was doing much the same. It seemed like things I made up in my head turned into truth just because I spun tales about them and passed them off as gospel. The hardest part was to keep from laughing.

  Ann practically pushed me out the door to go visiting in German’s Hill, and when I got back, sometimes around sun-up, if I had stayed late and slept over, she’d be in a bate to get me off alone so she could hear what I had to tell. It wasn’t easy, either. Sometimes I had been up drinking until the wee hours, and on that damp morning walk back, with my stomach queasy and my head pounding with every step I took, I’d be hard-pressed to get my thoughts together well enough to dissemble to Ann.

  “Well, roll out the biscuit dough,” I’d say, “while I catch my breath and get the eggs going in the skillet. It will take a while to tell you everything.”

  Most times Ann would be so crazed to know the worst of what was happening between Tom and Laura, that I could get her to do more than half the chores, while I spun out my tale, which I had worked up on the long walk back. It wasn’t easy, neither, trying to think up sweet talk and what courting couples might say and do. All that syrupy nonsense always bored me so much that I never paid it any mind when folk were doing it around me for real. Now I was having to invent a romance out of whole cloth, and it was harder work than plowing with the milk cows.

  One time Ann almost caught me, though, for I had just opened my mouth to tell her a new tale about Tom Dula’s visit a-courting Laura, when Ann interrupted me to say that Tom had spent yester evening with her and James Melton. Hearing her out gave me time to think up a new piece of news, so when she drew breath, I told her that Laura had wept and raged for want of seeing her sweetheart last night. I got out of that predicament all right, but it was a near thing, and I thought to myself that in future I’d best wait and hear Ann’s news before I delivered any more of mine.

  It worried me that Tom had been here while I was gone. “Did he say anything about Laura?” I asked Ann, trying not to sound overly concerned about it.

  She shook her head. “He never says two words about her. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he didn’t give two hoots about her.”


  “He’s trying to throw you off the scent, Ann. He knows there’ll be trouble if you find out how things are between him and Laura.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t like it, but I don’t reckon it matters. Remember I told you about that Caroline Barnes what he courted a while back? That blew over, and this will, too. He’ll always be at my beck and call. Always.”

  I went back to kneading biscuit dough then, and thinking on how I could use that.

  Every now and again, Tom really would show up at Wilson Foster’s place, and then I’d breathe a sigh of relief, because it meant I could have some real conversations to recite to Ann instead of having to conjure everything up out of my head on the cold walk back. Mostly, though, even when he did come, I’d have to improve on that, too, for there wasn’t much between Tom and Laura that I could see. He didn’t look calf’s eyes at her or sweet-talk her like courting fellows generally do. Seemed to me like he’d as lief talk to her brothers as her.

  Most times of an evening, when he did show up in German’s Hill, Tom would slink in like a stray dog, flashing a smile to whoever caught his eye, and if he was invited to take supper, he’d pull up a chair between the boys, and tuck in with the rest of them, talking farming or hunting, or whatever anybody had a mind to run on about. Oh, he’d wink at Laura now and again, especially when he wanted biscuits or taters sent his way, but then Tom always winked at the ladies. I’d seen him do it to fat, gray widows twice his age at a social, and he didn’t mean nothing at all by it. Maybe it made him feel important to watch old ladies giggle and blush when he showed them a penny’s worth of his sunshine. He even tried it with me a time or two, but I just looked at him like he was something I’d have to scrape off my shoe, so he quit trying to dazzle me. Tom Dula didn’t have one single thing that I wanted, except that it was in his power to hurt Ann Melton, and for that alone I tolerated his society.

  He didn’t seem to affect Laura much, either, with his smiles. Maybe her head was already too full of thoughts about her other lover, but truly I think that Tom’s charm mostly worked on fat old ladies that he wouldn’t have looked at twice, for real feelings. He was a handsome boy, and not much man about him, for all that he had been in the War. I think marrying-age women have to be more practical about who they take an interest in, but those dried-up old sticks who sat out the settlement socials gossiping in corners-why, they just beamed on Tom Dula as if he was a brand-new speckled pup. They didn’t mean anything by it, either, I reckon. Maybe he was just a pretty child to the likes of them. But child-bearing women had too many real babies underfoot to bother about a handsome boy, who wouldn’t work or settle down.

  Once at a social when Tom’s name came up in conversation, one of the younger women said, “Tom Dula? Why, he’d be like having a blood racehorse on a tenant farm-nice enough to show off, but useless for everyday.” And all the other ladies around her nodded in agreement.

  The exception to that was Ann. Ann never would hear a word against him, and for his part, no matter what other dalliances he might get up to, it seemed like he never changed toward her, either. I think if there is such a thing as love, which I don’t altogether believe, then what Tom felt for Ann was real, and the rest was just a way of making his life easier by giving people what they wanted, as long as it didn’t cost him nothing. He would take anything pleasant that was foisted upon him-sex with a likely young girl was the same as a piece of pie to him, as far as I could see-but it meant no more than that to him, either.

  I had to be careful carrying tales to Ann about Tom Dula. I didn’t want to make her so mad that she’d light in to Tom when next he came around. I wanted her simmering mad, but not aflame. Anger muddies up people’s minds, so that they don’t think clearly and they act too fast, without counting the cost of what they’ve done. I am blessed not to have that affliction. Nothing shakes me inside. When people pour their boiling anger over my head, I just get colder and slower inside, like a bear in a winter cave, and let them rage, while all the while I am thinking how I will hurt them down the road, when they have even forgotten how they treated me. I never forget anything.

  ***

  So we lived through that first winter since the end of the War, and though folk said it was a mercy not to have to hear about any more men dying, and not having shortages from the blockades and the armies attacking the railroads, things still weren’t altogether peaceful again. There were bushwhackers still at large, attacking travelers on the roads or robbing isolated farms. We didn’t worry about them overmuch, since there wasn’t anything any of us had for them to take, but it was a reminder that times were hard, and likely to stay that way for a good while yet.

  Most of the time, even if the devil himself had been riding roughshod through the Yadkin Valley, I would have been too tired to care, for me and James Melton and those two sorry milk cows had every foot of the farm to plow and seed, and at the end of the day in the fields, we all had other work to do, besides, even the cows. It was hard lines on all of us, I figured, to have to work two jobs-me in the fields and doing the house chores besides, and James Melton making shoes of an evening, when he was so tired, he’d fall asleep in his chair and pitch forward until he woke himself up, and then he would yawn and stretch, and go back to sewing leather again.

  Ann didn’t change with the seasons. She still lay abed as long as she could, swallowed in quilts, and she took no more notice of the farm in spring than she had in winter. Some of that might be to my credit, though, for I had given her other things to think about. If Laura Foster’s dark lover was really going to carry her off, it would be soon.

  I didn’t think about the three of them all the time. I had my chores, and my doctor visits, and a jug of whiskey when I could get it, and the company of the fools in the settlement and now and then a man, when I felt the urge, but all the time in the back of my head, like crickets chirping in a nighttime field, my mind kept clicking along on ways to get back at Ann and Tom. I didn’t always heed those thoughts, any more than you listen to the crickets, except when everything is still, and you are not busy with chores-but they are there whether you heed them or not. Always there. I thought May would drag on forever, and though the weather was fair, I itched with impatience for something to happen-and finally it did.

  One afternoon, when James Melton had gone off to buy salt or nails-I forget which; doesn’t matter-Tom had stopped over to the house, and he and Ann were making sheep’s eyes at one another. I could tell they wanted to be alone, so I made myself look busy in the cabin so’s I could spoil their dalliance.

  Finally, bold as brass, Ann says to me, “Why don’t you leave off sweeping, Pauline, and go over to the Fosters’ for a spell?”

  I smiled to myself. I wasn’t to be got rid of as easy as that. “Why, I would. But coming home in the dark is a perilous journey.”

  She looked at Tom and they both smiled. “Why, Pauline, what would bushwhackers want with you?” asked Tom, giving me that wink, like he always does when he thinks he is charming some silly old biddy.

  I shrugged. “It ain’t that. It’s the darkness. The brush and briars is awful grown up along the way, and the ground is so uneven, that I’m afraid I’ll trip and fall in the night and break my neck.”

  I could tell it would be nothing to them if I did, but Ann could hardly force me to go unless she gave the problem a lick and a promise, to humor me. She turned to Tom. “She’s right about the path. It could use some tending to, and it ain’t like you got anything better to do, Tom. Why don’t you go borrow my mama’s mattock, and see can you smooth it out some?”

  Tom yawned and stretch. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, only considering doing it at all to please Ann. I could fall down a well for all he cared.

  By then I had decided that anything was better than standing around watching the two of them paw at one another, so I put away the broom in the corner, and said I would go anyhow, but that if I broke my neck coming back from German’s Hill in the dark, it would be on their heads. They just
laughed and told me to be off, and I reckon they forgot about me altogether two heartbeats after I shut the door behind me.

  ***

  I didn’t really have anything fancy worked out in my head. When it comes to making people do things, it’s like chasing chickens in the barnyard-you never know which way they’re going to run. Sometimes, though, I test folk in little ways to see if I can make them run the way I want them to. So most of what happened just happened. All I did was flap my apron at them to begin with, so to speak, and the rest just followed naturally.

  I was a good half mile from Wilson Foster’s place when Laura came running toward me, so I stopped, and when she got near enough for me to see the grin on her face, I knew she was big with news.

  “He’s wanting to go, Pauline!” she said, giving me a hug out of pure rapture, and I stood as still as I could and did not shudder.

  Her sallow skin was pink with excitement and she must have brushed her hair a hundred times that afternoon, because it was shiny and smooth, tied up at the nape of her neck with a scrap of frayed pink ribbon. She had on her homemade calico under an apron, though, so I knew that whatever was going to happen wasn’t happening now. She wasn’t ready yet.