by Bill Brooks
TOM DOOLEY
TOM DOOLEY
AMERICAN TRAGEDY
BILL BROOKS
FIVE STAR
A part of Gale, Cengage Learning
Copyright © 2016 by Bill Brooks
All scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the American Standard Bible.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Brooks, Bill, 1943– author.
Title: Tom Dooley : American tragedy / by Bill Brooks.
Description: First edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024368| ISBN 9781432832278 (hardcover) | ISBN 1432832271 (hardcover)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3823-2 eISBN-10: 1-43283823-2
Subjects: LCSH: Dula, Tom, 1843 or 1844-1868—Fiction. | Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. | Murder—North Carolina—Wilkes County—History—19th century—Fiction. | Mountain life—North Carolina—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction | Biographical fiction | Love stories
Classification: LCC PS3552.R65863 T66 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024368
First Edition. First Printing: November 2016
This title is available as an e-book.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3823-2 ISBN-10: 1-43283823-2
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Printed in the United States of America
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This one’s for Joshua, who fills me with pride.
HISTORICAL NOTE FOR TOM DOOLEY
Tom Dula was a young, twenty-two-year-old ex-Confederate soldier born and raised in the Appalachian hill country of North Carolina, in Wilkes County. He was one of three brothers who fought in the war. Before he became a soldier, he’d become intimately involved with Ann Foster, a neighbor girl, when she was just fourteen; the pair were caught in bed by her mother, which may have precipitated in Tom joining the Army when he was seventeen.
Both of Tom’s brothers were killed in the war and Tom had suffered several wounds in his three years of fighting. Upon his return home, he again took up with Ann, now married. Much is lost to history and time, but by most accounts, Ann’s husband, James Melton, knew of the affair, and so did others. Ann had two cousins, Pauline and Laura, whom Tom is reported to also have had affairs with.
Legend has it that Tom fell in love with Laura and the two had planned to run off and get married, but on that fateful morning, Laura’s body was found murdered, stabbed to death and put in a hasty grave of leaves and twigs.
Tom, fearing he would be blamed for the murder, ran off to Tennessee. A man named Grayson helped capture him and returned him to North Carolina.
Tom was arrested for Laura’s murder, and Ann Melton, her cousin, was arrested too. Tom subsequently testified in a written statement that Ann had nothing to do with it. Tom was tried and convicted and sentenced to hang.
But, was Tom Laura’s killer? Or could it have been Cousin Ann who killed her out of jealousy? Could it have been Ann’s husband who wanted to get rid of Tom? Or might it have been Colonel Grayson, who was reported to have a love interest in Laura and feared she would run off with Tom?
The former governor of North Carolina, Zebulon Vance, defended Tom pro bono because he believed that Tom was innocent.
It mattered not. Tom was convicted of the crime and sentenced to hang but won a second trial on appeal only to lose.
A local poet, Thomas Land, wrote a poem about Dula shortly after he was hanged and it became a ballad sung in the hills. Eventually it was recorded as a song for the first time in 1928. In 1958 the folk group The Kingston Trio recorded the song and it sold millions, making the ballad known around the world for the first time.
The people and events of this story are true, but obviously some of the situations and dialogue are fiction by the author.
BOOK I
CHAPTER 1
I am Elizabeth, daughter of Swain.
Mute.
Widow.
Poet.
My lover was hanged. I never whispered to him the words I had for him in my heart. I never felt his touch on this flesh of mine that ached so for him. He came to me only in dreams and we made love in dreams. It was a long time ago.
Billy, the town drunk, the schoolteacher, whose pitted face ravaged his self worth, married me. He was not my first choice. I was not his. But fate works strangely enough and Billy and I would have been married forty years last winter except the influenza killed him in the autumn. He shuddered and breathed his last as leaves tumbled from their stout oak limbs and gathered for a final carnival along the ground, or fell madly into the river and swirled away. Billy himself had grown like an old leaf that had browned and withered. We would have been married forty years exactly on Christmas day.
But the one you marry isn’t always your truest love. Tom Dooley was my truest love and he was hanged without ever knowing the depth of my heart’s song for him. For I was the sweet, sad daughter of the tavern-keeper Swain, and had an affliction that debauched my beauty.
My father was a profane man with profane friends. I was his only child. For he cursed the woman who bore me and took no further risk of being the butt of profane jokes from his own kind.
My mother, whose name was Muriel, left us both shortly after it was learned that I could not speak. Why or what the exact circumstance of her leaving had always been unclear. My father cursed her mightily on many nights—drunk and cursed of spirit—for her abandonment, not so much of me but for himself. His profanity climbed the stairs and crept under my door and found me shuddering with dread at this odd thing I was that caused him and her so much anguish as to put them asunder.
Mute, dummy, dopey the other children called me. Poor thing, devil’s child, witch’s brew were some of the names I heard fall from the lips of the elders who saw me. Purty little piece spoke the eyes of the men who drank in my father’s tavern and would have me, afflicted or no. For in spite of my affliction, or maybe because of it, such men seemed to desire me. And many of these men who my father knew and consorted with and drank with at the tavern would overlook well enough my affliction, given the opportunity to take me into some dusty backroom, or place me on a bed of moss in the woods and grind into me. So I steered clear of all men for that very reason—knowing that there is no affliction a woman can possess that will stanch the desires of certain men when they are overcome.
I grew up cursed and without true love, but still I dreamt of it. O, not the common kind of love any girl can have if she’s willing and desperate enough. For many of the men and boys of Reedy Branch would just as easily and quickly stick themselves into a knothole, or a calf, or each other if no girl were available. But it isn’t love you’d be getting,
and never love for the reputation you’d earn by performing such lewd acts with those jug-heads.
It was Tom whom I fell first and truest in love with the day I saw him return from the war. And even as I watched Ann Melton rush up to him and boldly kiss him on the mouth—though she was by then a married woman—it never stopped me from falling in love with him. And to that love I owe voice—his, and mine—a voice of written words and not those that fall from the lips like petals from a wilted rose.
It is now winter again, and I’ve decided to add my own words to the letters and notes of my lover written by him as he wasted away two years in jail before he went to the gallows.
O, I went each day to see him, and to write down what he told me, never realizing he was keeping his own diary of the events as well. For, I think he’d come to trust no one completely, so oft had he been betrayed. But if he had known how I loved him, he would have trusted me.
Still, whoever reads the words will not get the story fully. For the story of a single life is never complete but a puzzle with missing pieces. But such a story can be puzzled together enough so that some portrait can be made for others to draw a picture.
That’s all I aim to accomplish, to draw a portrait of my beloved—Tom Dooley—a man wrongly or rightly accused of murder. A boy, really, who did not live long enough to marry and have children and grandchildren. The issue of his blood stanched by the hangman’s rope. His would-be children, but angels in waiting. The one who loved him truest, his lips never kissed. In the long litany of what might have been in the life of Tom Dooley, add to it our wedding, and children never born, and a future never carved.
My veil is neither long nor black.
The women he had come to believe he loved were not my kind, and surely not his.
Some may have loved him—Laura, surely must have loved him for she paid love with her life. But Ann Melton? No. And Pauline? Hardly. Some of her testimony against him proved less love and more condemnation. She and the mad preacher, Shinbone, disappeared not long after the hanging. Perhaps they are still living together in their own madness amid a crumbling log cabin somewhere in the dark laurels. I’ve heard rumors long since about them—how a trapper or a hunter would see their ghosts, hear their feral cries in the shadowy hollows of that country. But then, that country is a land to many ghosts and strange occurrences and I don’t put much stock in such things. Most likely they are as dead as Tom.
I left that land after Billy married me.
Paris is rainy this time of year.
I teach piano to young girls whose mothers see in them promises of things they cannot see in themselves. Some are startled at first that I can’t speak but that I play the piano quite well. I write them a note telling them, my ears are perfect, even if my tongue is not. Too perfect perhaps for the rapturous young hearts whose fingers betray their dreams of becoming musical mademoiselles. The discordant, Tink! Tink! of their efforts is sometimes as irritating as a toothache.
Between my teaching piano, and selling occasional collections of poems, I manage to subsist nicely enough. My poetry, my quiet life—outside the few hours each day of teaching—my morning stroll along the boulevards, tea in a café—what more could I want, except perhaps to share it with a lover.
No, not even the power to speak do I want as much as my lover returned from the grave, or better still, never sent there in the first place. I’ve learned to live without a voice but not without love as I would have it. The simple truth is, I have come to like quite nicely not speaking. For everything is learned in the listening of others who talk away their lives, tell their innermost secrets, give away their dreams.
My time is near. I can feel it. It won’t be long before I too may be a wandering ghost seen by hunters and trappers. Perhaps a pair of lovers in some secluded glen, their mouths ripe and stained by the berries and desire while their hearts collide in tender fervor, will see me wandering those hills of mystery. But it is here in Paris where I plan to die. I will never return to Wilkes County—to all that tender terror that went on there.
O, what could be more perfect than to wander as a ghost among the places where lovers meet and give way to unbridled passions—to see them kiss and touch and withdraw one from the other dollops of desire.
O desire, how shall I tell thy story? I shall tell it as well and as truthful as any story can be.
There is a nice young man back in New York who has promised to publish all of what I send him regarding the tragic events that took my lover’s life if I promise also to send along my newest collection of poems. Well, I shall just have to do that before it is too late.
My soul is the thrush’s beating heart, its ready wings, ready to fly, to fly, to fly.
O, go along there my faithless limbs, and follow the rushing soul to its journey’s end.
I’ll go along there if you will it . . .
I do, I do will it.
Last night I had this dream of three young troubadours gathered together on a stage lit by electric lights where in harmony they sang:
Hang down your head Tom Dooley . . .
I thought them angels coming to escort me home and searched their faces for the one face I’ve not seen in ever so long.
But his was not among them and I awoke crying.
CHAPTER 2
Tom Dooley
Tomorrow they kill me. The sun will break clean in a blue sky and folks will bring their kids and butchers will sell candy and it will be the biggest event Statesville’s ever seen.
Jeeze Christ, Tom, you’re like the circus come to town—better. The show is free!
Wiley chews and spits in a tin cup between his feet. He’s got a drooping eye says kept him out of the war.
. . . and bad feet.
You famous, Tom. Most famous goddamn man I ever met. They got reporters come from all over.
Last night I dreamt of a red horse, a sailing ship, Laura in her coffin opening her eyes to gaze at me.
I’m waiting, darling Tom. Join me in this place of darkness, feel the cold in my cold, cold heart.
It sputtered me awake like I was drowning.
What’s she feel like, Tom—old sister death waiting right around the corner?
You are a stupid son of a bitch, Wiley.
Shit, I know it.
Grins. Chews. Spits. The brown juice runs down the side of the can and he don’t care no more about it than anything.
Need to go to the privy, Wiley.
Piss in that honey pot.
Like to go to the one out back.
Shit, Tom, you know I ain’t allowed . . .
You go get a shotgun, keep it aimed at my back. I try anything, pull the triggers.
He looks uncertain, as dull stupid men do when faced with a decision.
. . . and cheat the hangman?
You’d be a hero—the man who killed Tom Dooley.
But he shakes his sorry head.
Just like to see a bit of that sky one last time.
You will tomorrow.
Won’t have no chance to enjoy it tomorrow.
The muscle below his droopy eye twitches.
Tell you what. You walk me out back, I’ll give you my watch. It ain’t but a two-dollar watch, but it’d get you a lot of drinks bought after I’m hanged. Got my initials in it.
He is like an ox I’m tempting with a bucket of grain.
Goes and gets the shotgun, unlocks my cage, leads me out back through a thick iron door that screeches when he opens it. Leads me into a courtyard of sunlight. I stop and take a deep, deep breath of all that sunlit air hoping it will warm my cold blood.
Whatcha doing?
Breathing.
Keep moving.
I walk slow, take in the color of the grass, the trees standing higher than the courtyard wall, the sounds of birds, the smell of freedom. But no matter how slow I take it everything passes too quickly and before I know it, I’m back inside my cell.
About that there watch?
I’ll give it to
you first thing in the morning.
He looks disappointed.
What’s twenty more hours to you, Wiley? Why, you got your whole stupid life to live out yet.
He spits out his plug, pulls a twist from his pocket, tears off half, and stuffs it inside his fat cheek.
Silence like after a gunshot settles in.
Twenty more hours, they’ll kill me.
This I write in the papers that I’ll send to Liza, daughter of Swain—the mute and tender child I learned to love too late. But till then, I’ll keep close my thoughts, sharing them only with the ink and paper on which I write.
O, death, why has thou chosen me among all thy choices?
Was my name written in the book of life waiting to be
Pluck’d on this certain day at such and such a time? Or was it
Merely the luck of a bad hand drawn and too poorly played?
Wiley Branch—1st Jailer
He’s a pretty boy, Tom is. Too bad they’ll hang him in the cool morning. Why such a pretty boy ought to be about doing what pretty boys do. I have thoughts about him, sure. Thoughts I’m shamed to admit to anyone. I always had a taste for pretty boys but it wouldn’t do to share it with him.
What little pleasures do I got but these pretty boys. I think of all those pretty boys who went off and got themselves killed and what a waste it was, and how I’d like to have even just one of them to keep safe. I don’t know why, I just always felt that way since I can remember. But I keep it all inside me how I feel about pretty boys. Got to.
Look at him sitting there, that pretty hair fallen down over his eyes as he writes on those clean white pages. Pretty as a angel. Tomorrow he might even be a angel. Such a shameful waste. Why I’d take him home with me in a minute.
Hey there, Wiley.
I like the way he talks, the sound of his voice. It don’t bother me he calls me stupid or a son of a bitch. I reckon it’s just ’cause he knows they’re going to kill him tomorrow. I reckon he’s got a right to be irritable. So I don’t get mad at him for saying such things to me.
