by Bill Brooks
Tom Dooley
Melton didn’t come home that afternoon, and I was just as relieved he didn’t. I was glad not to have to have him in the room with us, nor worry what went through his head and feel my own sin try and swallow me alive soon as the passion burned out. That’s when the sin hit me hardest, soon as the passion burned itself out. That’s when I’d promise myself I wouldn’t go back. All the long walk home I would set my mind to stay clear of Melton’s. I told myself I had Pearl, even if she wasn’t as pretty as Ann, at least she wasn’t a married woman. And there were other unmarried girls I could have had if I wanted. Plenty of them. The war had left the whole valley thin on eligible young men. I’d ask myself what did I need another man’s wife for? I’d curse myself for shaming myself, and shaming old Melton. I’d promise myself after every visit that it was the last time I’d see her. But then the hours would pass into days and sometimes a whole week, and I’d feel the hunger for her come gnawing at me again. I’d hear her seductress voice whispering in my ear, whispering things that would make any man weak to her, and I’d get myself on back there, Melton or no.
If only I had ever thought there’d have been any chance for you and me, Liza, I could have washed all this sin away and made myself something proud for you. I just never gave it a real consideration—that you’d see anything in ol’ Tom Dooley. Never did.
Ann lay naked next to me, unashamed of her nakedness, me unashamed of mine.
We’re like Adam and Eve. There’s nobody exists except us in times like this, Tom.
I reckon.
I’m the one who loves you truer than anyone.
You’re pure temptation.
Not me, this.
She took my hand and placed it on the damp nest of her sex, her womanly scent strong in my nostrils. I was weaker to her than to anything or anyone and she knew it. She was pure temptation. I told her about Shinbone.
There’s a preacher come to the valley.
I’d say he’s come too late to save the likes of us, Tom. We’re our own salvation if anybody is.
He preached to me the other day, when it snowed, after I’d left here that last time.
I never knowed you to be the kind that’d take to preaching.
It wasn’t something I planned.
You feel the need for saving, Tom? You feel the need to have some preacher save you from me . . . from this?
She moved my hand, opened her legs wider.
I feel the need for something.
And I know just what that something is.
I stayed that afternoon with her, until the hour got to where we had to light candles and an oil lamp. She looked different in the shadows and the dancing light, looked like a spirit, wicked and destructive. Maybe I wasn’t in my right mind, but I thought she spoke in words I couldn’t understand as she made me take her again, all the time talking crazy words that made no sense.
Next time I came to Shinbone’s camp, I stopped and said I wanted to ask him something. He was sitting on a blackened stump the fire had swept over when O’Hearn burnt down his field. He had a scarf wrapped round his neck and was smoking a pipe. A Bible lay open across his knees. He hardly looked up when I approached.
You’ve been walking the far way ’round, avoiding me ain’t you, Tom?
I reckon so. You making out any good?
The sheep are all lost in the wilderness and have not yet found their way home.
In other words, nobody’s come.
They will.
I couldn’t see how a man could live as Shinbone did. How it was he hadn’t starved to death or froze or had the bears set on him, him with nary a dog to warn him, was a wonder to me. Maybe his god was watching over him after all.
I told him what happened with Ann, only didn’t mention her by name, just told him the gibberish that come out of her mouth.
Tongues, Tom. This person you’re talking about was speaking in tongues.
Tell me what would make a body speak in tongues.
His eyes glittered and maybe it was the firelight caught up in them, or maybe it was something else made them glitter so.
She got the holy spirit come over her.
Could be the devil, couldn’t it?
Could be, I’d sure like to meet her, Tom.
That’s ain’t possible, you meeting her.
He gave me a knowing smile.
With God, all things are possible. Don’t you believe it so?
Hell, I don’t know.
I thought of poor Louis whose embrace saved me from so much madness and wondered why it was God would let a Yankee shoot a sweet boy like him through the heart when he had a wife and child depending so heavily on him coming home again. That Yankee didn’t just kill Louis that day, he killed Louis’s wife and baby. And he killed a little of me too. That Yankee’s ball should have found me if anyone; I never had nothing waiting on me like Louis did. Whatever thoughts I had of the possibility of God ceased that day Louis got shot. They ain’t no God would let such a thing happen.
You got some thoughts on all this, Tom?
I think some folks just get crazy from trying so hard to believe in something outside themselves. Onliest thing a man truly has to cling to is himself.
Come closer to the fire, Tom. Come into the light so I can show you something.
And when I did, Shinbone showed me his hands. His palms were marked with wounds.
What you think of them there?
Looks like you got shot through and through, both hands.
No. I never got shot.
Then what happened?
Jesus is what happened.
I got to get on.
Wait and I’ll tell you a story about these hands.
It ain’t something I care to hear.
It might make all the difference to you, Tom.
Sorry, Preacher. I got me some place to go.
He stood there in the fire’s light, his marked hands beginning to weep blood. It sent something dark through me and I left him standing thus and headed off into the gloaming.
Now I wished I’d stayed and heard his story about how he got them wounded hands.
Elizabeth Brouchard
Do you, Tom? Do you wish you had stayed and let Preacher Shinbone tell you the story of his hands? Or was it merely a dream you dreamt, a vision of things to come? Tell me true, Tom, and I’ll write it well and tell it true and everyone will believe.
But the hour has long passed to answer such things. And in his place stands silence.
Outside the children play in the park, chasing after one another with gaily colored streamers of red and blue while their mothers sit on a bench and tell each other small secrets of what it is like to be a married woman, to have gay children, to live such a sweet and simple life.
And I, here at my window, with the summer evening’s light falling across the page, watch the children in the park and wonder at their fate.
Thy hand writes the true words of lives lived and lost, of hearts shattered, of worlds now gone and yet to come.
I, Elizabeth Brouchard, daughter of Swain, mute, poet, sit and write the words and watch the children playing.
CHAPTER 8
Tom Dooley
Pearl ran away from Swain’s, came to me for refuge.
You’re all I got that’s decent to me, Tom.
What he do this time he’s not done before?
Oh, don’t make me say, Tom. Don’t make me tell of it.
Winter was hard on us by then. Worst anyone could recall. The oldest man in the valley, Mr. Racine, claimed he was a hundred and one years old, said he’d never seen a winter like it.
Worst I seen wasn’t close to this.
Pearl shook with fear.
You can’t make me go back, Tom.
Never said I would.
The problem was, I couldn’t have her move in with me and I couldn’t send her back to Swain, for I knew what such terrible fear was like, the kind that would cause you to shake like you had a fever and
promise God anything if he’d save you. It’s been my experience, he never would.
I held her all that day and into the night, the snow falling constantly until it felt like the weight of it might crush us all.
Finally I got her to speak about what it was that Swain had done to frighten her so.
He sold me off, Tom. Sold me off to that daft nigger, Raymond.
She took to sobbing as my arms held her.
He sold you off to Raymond for what purpose?
To be his woman, to go and live with him and cook and clean for him and lay with him.
Why would he do something like that?
Money, Tom. Swain would do anything if there was a dollar in it. He told Raymond he could buy me for forty dollars.
Where would somebody like Raymond get that kind of money?
She was like a beaten child, sobbing so hard she couldn’t speak.
Did Raymond . . .
No, Tom, I wouldn’t let him. God no! I’d end up with a daft colored baby and then what would I do?
I’ll go have a little talk with Swain soon’s the weather clears.
Don’t tell him where I am. He’ll sure come and get me and give me over to Raymond. He won’t want to give him back his money.
She was cold with fear. The snow fell hard.
Pauline Foster
Maybe I lied some to save my skin, to save my sanity, to keep Swain from using me so hard day and night. I didn’t want but one man and that was Tom. And if I had to lie some to get free of Swain and to get Tom to love me, then tell me what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with a girl wanting love and doing what she has to do to get it?
Tom Dooley
The snow was the only thing that kept Swain from looking for Pearl. The snow kept everything bogged down. And all a body could do was what a body could do and Pearl and I were constantly intimate with each other while the weather stayed rough. I had no fear about Ann finding us because she couldn’t travel, either. The wonderful thing was the great silence that befell the valley and lay along the ridges. There was unspoken beauty to it all and it was a wondrous thing to see the land rumpled in pure white and the sky as blue as glass, the snow sparkling like sugar. The trees stood black along the slopes, and the creeks ran wet black, and not a thing moved nor took flight. The world had become a dream.
As I stood staring out at it, I wondered if the winter had killed the crazy preacher, if come the thaw he’d be found froze to death, his ranting forever silenced. Crazy old bastard that he was, and yet, somehow I worried over the thought of him suffering too.
One especially brutal cold night I dreamed of Louis. It was an intimate dream. And sometimes it was Louis I was intimate with, and sometimes Louis turned into Pearl. Other times it became Ann. I remember we were in a dark place together, a stranger’s house with no light except the light night gives and I was talking to Louis.
I thought you were dead, that that Yankee shot you and we buried you. I even took the letter Minnie sent you from your pocket—it was stained with blood—and I made a small boat and tied the letter to it and let it go drifting on the river current.
No, that must have been a dream you had, Tom. For you can clearly see I ain’t dead.
Far off I heard the cannon thunder, then the crack of brutal cold working against the wood walls.
I’ve missed you, Louis.
He came to me and put his arms around me and laid his head on my shoulder. I kissed his forehead tenderly. But when I opened my eyes it was Pearl I was kissing and she became a flame of fire that set my clothes ablaze. I ran out into the snow and threw myself headlong into it, the cold and the flame both burning my skin. Then Louis was holding me, his tender hands cradling my head.
You killed me, Tom. Your love killed me. It was you and not Minnie I was thinking of when the Yankee ball struck me. It was you I was thinking of in those last moments as my life bled from me. Not Minnie, Tom. It was only you.
Louis, Louis.
And as he lowered his mouth to mine, he turned into Ann and I could see the knife blade flash in her hand just as she brought it down toward my heart. I started awake from the dream and found it was just me and Pearl there in the bed. She was fast asleep. And when the snow stopped falling, I walked to Swain’s.
You can’t sell something you don’t own.
You don’t know nothing about it, Dooley. You bring her back.
I have to, I’ll call the High Sheriff on you.
You want her all to yourself. Her and all her kin too. You want ever damn girl in the valley because you think you can have them just because you feature yourself some sort of hero, some sort of jackleg lothario. But to me you ain’t shit. You’re just another briar-hopping ridge runner what will end up with a head full of bug juice and no account.
What’s right is right, say what you will. War’s done over now, Swain. Slavery’s done over too.
I’m coming for her, Tom Dooley. I’m coming and when I do, better be nothing stands in my way.
Swain Brouchard
O, I’ve a true time of it, trying to make due with what I have. It ain’t easy, this hand I been dealt. Ain’t a bit easy. You, of all people know the story, so why ask it again? O, that thing about Pauline? Don’t believe a damn bloody word. She’s a liar and a slattern. And so was Tom Dooley. I gave her work when no one else would, when her mother lay sick and nearly dead and the only work that girl could expect was to take men out back for two bits a throw. And she sure did plenty of that, before I took her in and gave her honest labor. I gave her shelter and a square meal and paid her two dollars a week. But I guess she forgot to mention any of that.
Sure, sure, that nigger Raymond came around, but I wouldn’t let him drink inside. He’d come in and buy his liquor and take it outside and drink it and I reckon that’s how he struck up with Pauline, maybe seeing her take men out back. I can’t say as a fact, but I heard tell she took him out back a time or two and charged him twice the going rate ’cause he was a coon. But it don’t concern me, least it didn’t till Tom Dooley showed up here one damn winter day—that winter before he murdered Laura—and started in on how I had no right to sell Pauline off to Raymond. I told him how it was.
Sell her off? Why I ain’t sold nobody off to nobody, ’specially no goddamn nigger.
Well, you better not, either.
So I told him to get shed of my place, and if I, by God, wanted to sell that slattern off to Raymond or any damn body else, it wasn’t none of his business and if he thought it was, we should go outside and take to fistfighting, because there ain’t a feller in the whole of this valley going to tell me what I can or cannot do—especially no murdering son of a bitch like Tom Dooley.
Hell, he wouldn’t fight me. If he had, I would have broken his damn head in. That’s all I got to say about it.
Tom Dooley
I then went on to Grayson’s and spoke to him, said I wanted to talk to Raymond.
You leave off on him, Tom. He’s not full right in the head.
It’s just something I need to say to him, something I need to clear the air about.
You cause him to quit me, you’ll have to take over his work until I can find a new man.
I won’t have nothing to do with his quitting you, Mr. Grayson. He quits, it won’t be because of anything I have to say to him.
Go on, then. Be quick about it, Raymond’s got plenty of work ahead of him.
I found Raymond down at the river cutting blocks of ice. Steam rose off his head. He had maybe thirty blocks of ice stacked on a sled. He stopped cutting when he saw me, smiled that daft smile of his.
Hidey, Mr. Tom.
Raymond.
He rubbed a spot behind his ear.
Want you to know that the contract you made with Swain to buy Pearl . . . Pauline, well, that’s no good. You best go and see if you can get your money back.
He didn’t stop grinning, but you could see the change in his eyes.
I don’t understand, Mr. Tom . . . I paid
Mr. Swain forty dollars . . .
Plain and simple, Raymond. You can’t just go around buying and selling folks. ’Specially white folks. It’s illegal, and what Swain did was illegal and he knew it was. So nobody’s blaming you for this. But was you to take up with a white woman, even one Swain’d sold you . . . well, they’s folks around here would hang you for it, or worse.
He didn’t say anything, but the grin melted like some of his ice was melting on the sled from the sun glancing off the world.
Mr. Swain say I give him forty dollars, I could have her. I gave him forty dollars.
Where’d you get forty dollars from, Raymond?
Saved it. Been saving it for a long time, Mr. Tom.
You didn’t steal any of it?
No, sir.
Best you go see Swain and ask him for your money back. That’s all I have to say. I’m sorry it turned out this way. I know what it is to get your hopes set high on something, then have them fall through.
I walked back to my cabin, pausing now and then to catch my breath, for the snow tugged at my legs like a desperate thing trying to pull me down. It seemed like the snow was so deep and beautiful and pure it didn’t want anyone trampling on it and ruining its beauty.
The only time I looked back as I climbed the slope away from the river, I saw Raymond setting on the ice sled, his head in his hands. I could almost feel his grief rising like the steam of his labor from him. I told Pearl what I’d done and she wept and kissed my hands and said she’d make me an uncommon wife, that she’d cook and clean and give me children, all that I wanted.
No, that’s not why I done it and it ain’t what I want, Pearl.
What then?
You can’t stay with me.
But surely you love me, Tom, or you wouldn’t have gone to Swain and Raymond and told them it was all wrong what they done to me.
I went because it was the right thing to do, because nobody has a right to buy and sell a body.
