Tom Dooley

by Bill Brooks

  That there’s the Big Dipper, Tom.

  And that’s the Archer, Sagittarius.

  Grayson’s after her too, you know.

  I know it.

  And so is Swain and Sam Pie and George Hare and about every fella who ain’t married or wished he wasn’t.

  I know it. Laura’s a damn fine-looking girl and I aim to have her for my own.

  You going to fight them all?

  I have to I will.

  We were finally able to get up but neither of us had the heart to do any more fitting that night so we drank the rest of Billy’s liquor instead and got well enough oiled so as the cuts and bruises didn’t hurt near as bad. The jug empty, Billy tossed it into the dark.

  You that set on her, I won’t go round her anymore, Tom.

  Hell, I know you’re lonesome, Billy, but they’s plenty of other gals.

  He shook his head and some of the cabin’s light fell on his face and I could see his eye was swollen and I could see his pitted cheeks and he looked gruesome. I felt sorry for him because I knew it was hard for him to get with girls. I knew it was why he took to paying for the privilege of shoving his head up under the skirts of tarts. I felt damn sorry for him.

  You know something, Billy?

  What?

  That Pauline’s a nice gal.

  The one who works for Ann?

  Pauline’s her cousin, Billy.

  What’re you saying?

  I’m saying she’s a nice enough gal and she don’t have a beau.

  I think maybe I got a broke tooth.

  I brushed off the seat of my pants, tucked in my torn shirt, and stood with an ache in my ribs while a star shot clean across the sky.

  It’s your choice, Billy. I was you, I’d get myself over there before someone else does—Sam Pie or George Hare, one of them.

  Hell, I might, Tom.

  You ought to.

  Maybe I will.

  I feel like I’ve fallen down a flight of stairs.

  Same here.

  See you ’round, Billy.

  See you ’round, Tom.

  And that’s how I squared it with Billy Dixon. But I can’t be sure. Laura’s secret was unknown to me and in the end, I guess we all had secrets needed keeping.

  This I write in my accounts, these things about Billy and me and Laura and the others so that you’ll know, Liza, that it wasn’t only me who had such an interest in her, but it was only me they blamed for her death.

  Elizabeth Brouchard

  O, Tom. If only you could have looked into the future and saw that Billy wasn’t to stay lonesome forever. O, what little fate’s ironies accompany us in our journey through the living land, surrounded as we are by the unknowable truths like airy threads attaching themselves to us all. We dance like puppets, twist and turn and bow at the puppeteer’s command until he tires of us and cuts the strings and we all fall down.

  How strange thy journey, how bittersweet thy destiny.

  Billy Dixon

  Yes, Tom and me fought like wildcats over her. I won’t deny it. But thinking back on it after so long, I can’t see why either of us fought a single minute for her. It was Tom who came out on the short end of things, and it is this I regret most. But no one loved her hard as he did, and no one made as much a fuss over her as he did.

  But then you know, Liza, that young men are foolish men—the most foolish of all God’s creatures—dumber than oxen—and I wasn’t immune from such foolishness. Not then I wasn’t. This I confess this to you now.

  Tom Dooley

  The jailer brings me my meals. He shoves the plate under the bars and waits till I take out my spoon and fork from my pocket. He has a big belly, short legs, hair stiff as straw. Never combed. His name is Augustus Keyes.

  Keyes is a right proper name for a jailer.

  You got me there. I don’t reckon my daddy ever thought the family name would end up in a place like this.

  May be more to a name than we know, name like Keyes, you turning out a jailer.

  Yessir, may be. You want an extra slab of side meat with your hominy, Tom?

  Side meat or shoe leather?

  Keyes brays like a mule, but he’s a good little fellow and I put his name down in my accounts as well. He has a wood leg to go along with everything else. I asked how he come by it.

  Chopped it off by my own hand.

  Hell of a thing to do—was you mad at yourself over something?

  Wasn’t intending to.

  Had to hurt something awful.

  Like you wouldn’t believe.

  He says he chopped it off whilst splitting poplar chunks—laughs, says any damn fool ought to know a leg from a poplar stump.

  Supper is like every supper, just like breakfast is like every breakfast and dinner like every dinner. Everything is the same in this place. I ache in my bones for something new, just as I’d once ached for Laura. To pass the time and not to think of Laura I palaver with Keyes over supper.

  Tell me all the details about that chopped off leg.

  I was just splitting wood is all, same as I’d done all the time.

  How old was you?

  I was near seventeen, eighteen, maybe.

  Must be something to go through life with a chopped off leg.

  You don’t want to know.

  I guess I don’t.

  You going to eat that side meat?

  I see the hunger in his eyes, tell him to go ahead and have at it, offering him a biscuit to eat with it. He sits on a three-legged stool while he eats. I’m thinking: four wood legs and one of flesh and bone; with that many legs a fella could walk all the way to Egypt.

  Darkness creeps up the stairs and in through the window. It comes in silent, the darkness, and gets close on a man and I ask Keyes to light a lamp and he does and it gives some comfort. Then he goes down the stairs to his quarters, his wood leg thumping, and closes the door behind him and slides the bolt with a scraping sound, a sound of something final and everlasting. The cold silence seems to rise up through the stairwell, ooze out of the walls. I sit on my bunk and think about how the days seem to go so slow and yet so quick at the same time, and realize that the passing of each brings me one day closer to my eternal end.

  I think of young men dying young, and think of dear Louis.

  The really good thing about Louis’s dying was it came quick, unexpected. We were rushing forward in a charge, these ragged boys that we were. We probably looked like we were grinning but we weren’t. Into the rattle of the muskets of Billy Yank we charged, into the spitting tongues of flaming death. The lead balls buzzed round us like a thousand angry bees, and when they’d strike something—flesh or bone—there’d be this flat hard slap of a sound. And whatever boy they struck, it would drop him. Some cried out and some did not. The dead would lay like they got hit, their eyes half open, only the light gone out of them, their hands clutching musket or air. The dark stains of their wounds percolated up through their shirts, their pants, all the while their open mouths grinned.

  Still, onward and onward we charged in ragged lines that became more ragged as we fell out and stumbled forward, holding our breath for as long as we could, expecting the stinging kiss of death.

  Slap. Slap. Slap.

  Oooh! Aiyee! Oh goddamn!

  The boys toppled like young trees in a bitter wind.

  &

  Louis turning in that last fatal moment to look at me as he mouthed the words—We’ll make her, Tom. We’ll cross this field, and I’ll keep marching, all the way home to see my darling wife . . .

  And I started to yell back—We’ll make her, Louis, nothing can kill us, we’re timeless—when the ball struck him. Slap!—like that. And I watched him topple facedown into the grass, then roll over slow, thinking he’d get up again. But he never did. Instead he lay there a moment blinking, his beauty undisturbed except for this small bloody bubble over his heart with nothing else to mar him. He never said what it felt like to die. I never got a chance to ask.

 
; I hear Keyes clumping around on his wood leg downstairs in his quarters, a gut full of side meat. Probably bitter still about his chopped off leg. Some bastards are just luckier than they know.

  Augusta Keyes

  O, I never yearned to be a keeper of caged men. Before I lopped off my leg I dreamt of being a prizefighter. I was strong and willing and knew a fellow could make himself a nice enough living fighting for purses at county fairs and such. I’m built strong all over, even my legs—it was no small feat for me to chop one off. No small feat (feet) ain’t that a joke somehow? My pa wanted me to be a lawyer and I could have been that too. And I was engaged to a pretty lass and could have married and done well. But hell, something simple as a glancing bit of steel changed my whole history.

  Tom Dooley’s the most famous fellow I ever kept, and a fine decent fellow to boot. In another time and place, we might have been friends. I might have challenged him to a boxing match, or a foot race. We might have swum in the river and went to the dances and dated beauties.

  In another time.

  Tom Dooley

  Newbolt comes at his usual hour—right after dusk—and I’m almost glad for the company. He is fragrant with the smell of onions, cigar, and whiskey.

  Tom.

  Mr. Newbolt.

  He takes up the stool Keyes sat on, its legs farting against the stone.

  How are you this evening?

  How well is a man in my condition supposed to be?

  Yes, I suppose you’ve a point there, lad.

  We play out the silence with each another. Out of anguish the silence causes, I tell him the story about the fistfight with Billy Dixon that time; he seems to enjoy it, scribbling notes, asking a few questions. I flower it up some: how Billy and me fought for the better part of an hour busting chairs over each other, tearing up his place, busting out windows with each other’s heads and so forth.

  Newbolt takes to it like a cat to a bowl of milk.

  I’ve heard it said that Southern men have rather short fuses and are not given to threats but are quick to defend their honor. Would you say that’s true, Tom?

  Well, I sure never expected old Billy to jump on me, if that’s what you mean.

  But jump on you he did.

  Yes, sir. I guess we Southern boys are somewhat hot tempered.

  And would you say it was this hot temper of yours that led to the final trouble with Laura?

  You’re forgetting something, Mr. Newbolt?

  His heavy breathing awaited my answer.

  I wasn’t the only hot tempered boy living in these ridges when that there final trouble occurred.

  Point taken.

  He struck a match and it flared and the light danced in his small dark eyes as he suckled the end of his cigar, then shook out the flame with a snap.

  I’ll tell you something else too.

  Yes, Tom.

  It ain’t just the men in these parts with hot tempers.

  I could hear him scribbling away in the shadows.

  Go on, Tom. I’m listening.

  Winston Newbolt

  O, I’m not at all surprised at the embellishments of Tom Dooley. He was a plain-spoken fellow, but still, even the plain-spoken ones are likely as not to throw a little sugar atop a story if you act like you’re willing to buy into it. But for the most part, I confess that I found him rather sincere when it came to denying his role in the murder of Laura Foster.

  He seemed to me to be truly affectionate of the poor girl and quite grieved at her death. But then his grief may have been out of guilt as much as out of anything. I’ve never yet interviewed a jailed man who proclaimed his guilt, and like as not, I never shall.

  Still in all, I much liked him and was a bit sorry to see him go to the gallows.

  Elizabeth Brouchard

  Someone once said to me: Every hundred years, all new people. O, it was said in jest of course over aperitifs at the Café du Monde, and we were all a bit delirious in our youth and libertine ways. Death seemed so remote there in the fullness of our lives, a distant unimaginable thing. And how many times have I heard someone say, If I die, as though there were any question about it.

  Tom and Laura and the others are all dead—as dead as Shakespeare and his Romeo & Juliet. And so is Billy, and so, too, is love I suppose; at least for me. But now, when I read over the notes and letters it makes them seem not dead at all. And when I give into memory, they are all alive still.

  In a hundred years there will be all new people to replace us all, and a hundred years after that, and a hundred years after that.

  But in a hundred years, there will still be the same memories of all the old ones carried in the new hearts—and they shall never perish.

  Let not their words perish. Let not their stories go untold.

  I’ve done what I can to see that it is so.

  CHAPTER 17

  Tom Dooley

  Moon walked through the valley and I followed along behind it.

  Ann.

  Silence.

  Ann.

  A shuffling inside the cabin.

  Ann.

  Door opened on creaky leather hinges.

  Where have you been, Tom?

  Been gone. He in there?

  No, gone to town, gone to the tavern.

  Silence.

  Well, you coming in?

  No.

  No?

  I ain’t coming in.

  Then what are you doing here?

  The moon stood smiling down at me, at this tragic thing I’d become inside my heart. Full of wanton lust uncontrolled—weak as the weakest sinner. I had no say in my own doings is how I felt.

  But surely Ann knew my soul better than I knew it.

  I don’t know why I come. I was just following the old moon.

  Damn you, Tom Dooley. You come to try and break my heart, break my spirit is why. You won’t have me yet you won’t leave me alone, either!

  Her hand fell sharp and flat against my cheek, stinging it with resentment. I’d vowed not to see her again—vowed it a hundred times—but with my heart heavy from seeing Grayson’s horse that morning down at Laura’s, I felt a need for some untold revenge: if Laura was going to see Grayson, then I’d, by God, see Ann. O, it was such foolishness I know, but that is how crazy bone jealousy can make you.

  Elizabeth Brouchard

  Your unrequited desire for Laura led you to Ann.

  Yes, I guess that’s a fancy way of putting it.

  Your raging jealousy of one turned into lust for another.

  Made me as blind as drinking bad whiskey.

  You needed to prove something.

  Yes.

  And such love and jealousy and rage are born of a sickened heart, but such I think I can understand. But it was not true love, Tom. For love has no room in its house for jealousy and rage.

  O, I know it don’t, Liza.

  Tom Dooley

  I had convinced myself I was just going there to tell her I was finished seeing her; that I was in love with Laura. Maybe I wanted to make her mad as me, jealous as I was jealous. All the way there, following the moonlit path, I schooled myself in the language I’d use to tell Ann we were quits, to hurt her with.

  But once the door opened and you saw her and she told you Melton wasn’t there, your heart aching away for Laura the way it was . . .

  It was the slap that done it, Liza, strange as that sounds.

  It set you off. It stung your passion, your anger, your jealousy.

  O, I hate telling of it, but it lit a fire in me, burned up all my resolve.

  Tell of it fair and true, Tom. Tell of it fair and true.

  When she slapped me, sudden like that, my blood heated so quickly I had no time to tame it. I took hold of her and pulled her to me cursing myself for doing so. And she didn’t dally, but urged me on.

  Go on, Tom, you know you want to. Go on and take what you came here for! Take what’s legally Melton’s if you want it.

  Her words were as much an ache in
my heart as the sting in my cheek. Everything inside me seemed to explode. I took her there in front of the cabin, down in the dirt. Are you sure you want to hear of this?

  Let what has begun not stop—don’t be faint with me.

  All right, then. I ripped away what little she was wearing and took her with her eyes full of moonlight. She was like a ghost, like the way Louis was a ghost—both of ’em stuck in my goddamn head.

  Don’t be faint, Tom.

  I took her hard, like we was a pair of dogs. Hard enough to make her cry out, and when she did, that was all it took and my passion flooded from me. I hated myself.

  Were you ever going to let her alone, Tom? Or did you think you could make it work, the lot of you—Ann and Pearl and Laura all together, and Melton thrown in the mix—seeing them alternately whenever the mood struck?

  O, I don’t know. I never thought beyond the moment about it.

  Ann Foster Melton

  In spite of whatever anyone’s told you, little mute child—Tom had a hunger for me that no other woman could satisfy in him. He was a hog for my kind of love. He’d see me and right off start rooting round. Maybe he’s told you different. Standing there in the shadow of the gallows, maybe he’s told you all sorts of things. But truth is, Tom was a fool for me and I think he killed Laura Foster because he couldn’t give me up and she told him she wouldn’t tolerate him seeing the both of us. Laura might have seemed pert to some, but she could have a black heart when she wanted to. Maybe it led to a big row between them and with his hot temper and hers to match, he stabbed her like everyone says he did. He always did carry a clasp knife.

  You’d probably not know what it is to love someone so hard it’s worse than the wanting of life itself. That’s the way Tom loved me, more than life itself. I think maybe Laura stood in the way of his wanting to keep loving me. Maybe it made him mad having someone tell him what he could and couldn’t have and he killed her because of it. But if you ask me do I know for sure if he killed her? I don’t. But a man standing in the shadow of the gallows is liable to say all sorts of things to save himself.

  Tom Dooley

  That night, there in the yard with Ann, O, I can’t tell you how pitiful I felt having done what I done to her—for it wasn’t love or anything like it that caused me to do what I did that night. And to make it worse, she was full of vile threats to me.