The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  I went back to taking James Melton’s drawers off the line, moving slow and careful so as not to drop the clean clothes in the mud, for my head was spinning a little from the whiskey. “Well, it is true, Ann. So let them talk.”

  “No.” She shook her head in that slow, deliberate way that folk do when they’re drunk. “Let them think he comes here for another reason.”

  “Like what?”

  She stepped back and looked at me, the way you’d size up a calf at market. “You’re a spinster, Pauline. I reckon he could come courting you.”

  “Well, you can put that lie about, for all I care,” I said. “I won’t dispute it, if Tom was to say it’s so.”

  “Tom is no good at telling lies. He’s too lazy to remember them. So it has to be true. I need you to sleep with Tom.”

  PAULINE FOSTER

  Mid-March 1866

  All I know about love comes from watching them that is afflicted by it, but what Ann was asking of me did not square with what I’d seen of that ailment before now. I finished taking the clothes off the line, stuffed them in the basket, and headed for the barn, out of the rain-speckled wind, and out of earshot of James Melton, on the off chance that he would mind about any of this.

  Ann followed me in, and sat herself down on a hay bale, patting it for me to sit down beside her.

  “You are a-wanting me to bed down with Tom Dula,” I said, saying each word as slow as a Bible oath, and watching her face while I said it.

  She looked away from me, shrugging a little, and she pulled a blade of straw out of the hay bale and began to twist it in her fingers. “People are talking,” she said, so soft that I could barely hear her.

  “Those that aren’t deaf and blind, you mean. The way you two carry on, it’s a wonder the whole world hasn’t heard the tales about the pair of you.”

  Ann giggled, and looked back at me, blinking real slow, and I wondered if she was going to throw up or pass out, but she took a few gulps of cold air, and seemed to steady herself. “I never could hide my feelings, Pauline.”

  “Well, people may talk, but that won’t kill you. Why do you care? I ain’t heard your husband complaining.”

  Ann shrugged. “He don’t care. But if people keep talking, he might.”

  I said again. “You’re a-wanting me to do it with Tom?”

  She nodded.

  I laughed. “You’re drunker than I thought, then, Cousin. I thought you loved Tom Dula. Not that I can see why.”

  She nodded again.

  I stared at her, trying to see what the angle was in all this. I was ready to believe that love was only a fairy tale, like saying that the stork brought babies or that there was gold at the end of a rainbow, but Ann’s eyes glittered with unshed tears. She looked sorrowful enough to be suffering from something, and I couldn’t make sense of it. “You don’t talk like any lovestruck body that I ever heard tell of,” I told her. “Most women would scratch my eyes out if I was to lay with their man. So how come you’re so ready to foist him off on me? Like you’re throwing him away.”

  Ann reached for another wisp of hay, not looking back at me. Her dark hair had come loose from its bindings, and it curtained off her face to where I couldn’t see her expression, but her voice was steady when she finally answered me. “Sex ain’t nothing. If you’re thirsty, it don’t matter which cup you drink out of, does it? What Tom does in the hay, that don’t change what we have, or what we are to one another. He loved me afore he went to war, and he came back loving me. He will always love me, no matter what. Nothing he does with you will change that. He’ll never quit me.”

  None of that made a lick of sense to me. As far as I could tell, once a man bedded a new woman, he abandoned the old one. As often as men went looking for a new woman on their own, I thought it was foolish of her to encourage it. I could see her wanting to get rid of him, because he had no prospects and I didn’t see what use he was to her, anyhow, but if she did still want him, then she ought to be worried about losing him to the next girl in the straw. I wasn’t a believer in true love, but I’d take my oath that anger and envy were real enough. I had felt those things firsthand. If I did as she asked, then sooner or later jealousy would take hold of her, and I didn’t want to lose my place here when she thought better of what she wanted me to do.

  I pretended to think it over. “How do you know Tom is willing?”

  She laughed. “Oh, Tom don’t care. He’ll do anything I ask him to do. And bedding some woman is about as pleasant a chore as he could think of, especially if you get him likkered up first. You aren’t bad to look at, Pauline. You’re skin and bones, but he’ll be happy to oblige you all the same.”

  “He won’t be doing me no favor,” I told her, and it made me sore that she might think so. “I don’t feel a thing for Mr. Tom Dula. I can’t see nothing special about him at all. But if you want him serviced, I’ll do it. Same as I milk the cow and slop the hogs. It’s all one to me.”

  “Good. It’s better if you don’t like it too much.”

  “But how is that supposed to keep folks from suspecting you and Tom?”

  “Oh, he’ll brag about it afterward. Men always do. Word will get around, but I don’t reckon you care about that. I reckon you had your share of soldiers back up the mountain.”

  “Not ’cause I liked it overmuch,” I said.

  “But you’ll do it?”

  I shrugged. “As long as you don’t regret it afterward and turn me out.”

  “No. It has to be done.” She peered up at me, turning things over in her mind, and then she said. “I don’t expect you to do it for nothing. There’s a jug of whiskey in it for you.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll drink half of it first.”

  I was still puzzling, though, over how she could bear to see him go off with another woman, if she loved him as much as she said she did. Now that her being with Tom was no secret from me, one night as I peeled potatoes for supper, I felt emboldened to ask her how it came about—her and Tom.

  Ann smiled. “I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t there. The Dulas didn’t live any distance at all from my mama’s place, and we used to meet up—him and his brothers and some of us Fosters, and we’d all play Indian in the woods. He was a tough little boy, young as he was. He never cried or ran from anything.

  “I remember one time this little dog of his had got to chasing a rabbit, and it went down a hole near the edge of the creek. I guess it got trapped in there, because we could hear it whimpering, but it wouldn’t come back out. That hole was so deep we couldn’t even see the pup, and I was crying thinking it would be dead for sure. It might have been a snake hole, even. When we knelt on the bank and looked down in it, we could see some broken tree roots, but the pup must have been eight feet down or more.

  “Well, Tom told me to hush, and he dropped down on his knees beside that muddy hole in the creek bank, and listened for a minute. I was about to tell him that I’d run get his daddy and brothers to bring axes to help him widen the hole, but before I could say a word, Tom shot forward headfirst into that hole, shinnying down it until I couldn’t even see his feet anymore, and then I started to cry even louder. But a couple of minutes later, that dog clambered out of the hole, caked in red mud. And I looked down to see if Tom was following him, but the dog had made such a stir getting out that the hole was caving in. I started digging with my bare hands, and down at the bottom Tom was digging upward, and after what seemed like an hour, I saw his muddy hand clawing up through the dirt. I grabbed him and kept pulling until he was free. He looked like a gingerbread man, all caked with mud like he was, but he didn’t care. He kept saying, ‘I saved my dog. Done it all by myself.’”

  Ann smiled, remembering that day on the creek bank. “He never did thank me for saving him, but I never forgot what happened. Tom loved that little no-account dog, and he was bound and determined to save it, no matter what. I knew then that if Tom Dula loved you, he’d do anything in the world for you.”

 
; As long as it didn’t take too long, I thought, setting the paring knife at another potato skin. Tom Dula was lazy. I never saw him do a lick of work if he could help it. I thought that if Tom was to like you enough, then he might do some brave, quick thing—like risking his own skin to pull you out of a hole, or snatch you out of a burning house. Yes, he might do that. He was brave enough. But if that dog had been stuck in the hole for, say, a month, and Tom’d had to bring it food and water every single day without fail—why, I reckon that dog wouldn’t have lasted a week. He had a quick kind of courage, but not the slow, steady kind that would last you a lifetime.

  I dropped another potato skin in the pail for the hogs. “So that’s when you set your heart on Tom, then?”

  Ann shook her head. “He wasn’t more than eight when that happened. He was just one of the gaggle of young’uns to me for the longest time, and then one day—he wasn’t. I don’t know how he came to look different to me after all that time, but we had a long snowbound winter when I was fourteen, and I didn’t see him for a month or more, and then, come spring, when he turned up again, I just looked at him coming through the field, and I thought, There you are. Not like you’d think that about some neighbor who happened to drop by, but a stranger feeling, as if you had been looking all your life for a lost treasure, and suddenly you had stumbled upon it. I found him then, and I knew we were meant for one another.

  “He knew it, too.” She laughed. “We just came together like a compass needle points to north. I don’t even think we said much. Tom ain’t one for talking overmuch anyhow, but his eyes were so deep and blue when he looked at me, I liked to drown in them.”

  “You started young,” I said, for I knew that Tom was a year younger than Ann, so he’d have been thirteen.

  She laughed. “I showed him how. He weren’t my first. But being with him was like nothing else for me before or since. Oh, we were in rut that spring, him and me, worse than the rabbits. We’d sneak off together every chance we got. Mama even caught us one time in her bed, and she run Tom off with a broom, and then laid into me with a razor strap. We kept to the woods thereafter, Tom and me. Oh, that was a fine summer.”

  I understood the words to what she was saying, but not the tune. Never in my life had I felt much of anything for anybody. For me one person was the same as all the rest, and all of them let you down sooner or later. Trusting people was just asking for trouble. I tried to figure out what folk wanted, and I’d give it to them, as long as it got me what I needed, but I never put any feelings into it. It was just a way to get along in this world. Whenever I heard somebody talk about this deep feeling they had for someone they said they loved, I thought I must be missing something, but I didn’t know what it was. It never seemed to profit them that had it, though, so I reckoned I was better off without. And maybe they were only fooling themselves, anyhow, for I couldn’t see that love made any difference in how they acted—not in the long run.

  “But even though you are saying how much you loved Tom, you went and married James Melton,” I said to Ann. “Right soon after that rutting spring, and well before Tom went off to war. You were fifteen when you wed, didn’t you tell me?”

  She nodded. “It didn’t change anything, though. Tom knew that. I reckon James Melton knew it, too. But he would hang around me, looking like a starving dog in a smokehouse, wanting me so bad he could taste it. And I said no a time or two, but then I got to thinking about it. What else was there? James had a little land and a house of his own, and he made some money by being a cobbler and wagon-making. He works hard, and he’s good at making things, I’ll give him that. Tom never had anything, and I couldn’t see that he ever would. Tom doesn’t care to work, and he never seems to want much. If his belly is full, he is happy to pass the time doing whatever he takes a notion to, be it fishing or fiddling, or just walking in the woods. That’s fine for a lone boy, I reckon, but it’s no way to keep a wife. So I figured to marry James, so that I’d have a home, and mayhap if James was to die, why, then I could marry Tom, and he could live there on the farm with me. He’d never make a farmer, but I could take care of him, anyhow. That mama of his won’t live forever.”

  “I guess you didn’t figure on the War coming.”

  “No.” She sighed. “That liked to kill me.”

  “Tom going off to fight, and James staying home?” I said.

  “Well, no. It wasn’t like that. James joined up in the summer of ’61, long before he had to. Tom didn’t go till the following spring, when they were making the men go to fight. I don’t reckon he wanted to go. But James did. So I had most of nine months here with Tom still at home and James gone. They were in different regiments, too, so I did all my waiting and worrying twice over. Well, thrice, I reckon. My brother Pinkney fought, too. He and James were both in the 26th North Carolina. Most of what I know about James’s time in the army came from him.”

  “I didn’t even know your husband was in the War.” It didn’t square somehow with that quiet shadow of a man I’d known nigh on a month now.

  “He don’t talk about the War. He’s not the same since he came back. He just works and keeps to himself. He was lucky to come back at all, Pink says.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, he was all right for the first two years, but then the 26th fought at Gettysburg, and James was wounded—left shoulder and right leg. He still limps a little. You might’a seen that.”

  I nodded. “He got shot at Gettysburg?”

  “Yes. It’s no wonder. Pink says James volunteered to carry the regimental colors into battle. So everybody else is shooting bullets, and he’s carrying a damn flag. Of course he got shot. Never a thought for me. What was I supposed to do if he got himself killed?”

  “Marry Tom, I reckon. Maybe he thought he would be doing you a favor if he got killed in the War.”

  “But what if Tom had got killed, too? Then where would I be? I used to ask myself sometimes, if only one of them was to come back, which one would I want it to be?”

  Anybody with any sense would have picked James Melton in an instant, but that bundle of twigs and feathers and scraps of bright cloth that passed for Ann Melton’s mind probably thought otherwise. “And you were hoping for Tom?”

  She nodded. “Tom and me—we’ve been together all our lives. We loved each other as children.”

  I laughed. “I would have thought you’d had enough of him.”

  “Well, that was before I married up with James. I’m not sorry about it, though. I knew I couldn’t be marrying up with Tom. It would have been a waste not to lay with the one person in the world I truly did love. I’m glad we did. I hadn’t any business to marry James, I reckon, but he had land and a trade, and I needed so bad to get away from home. I couldn’t stand it another day—mama with her likker and her endless stream of men, and another baby every year. So I let James take me away, because he so much wanted to. I reckon he’s sorry now.”

  That was exactly what I was thinking, but I took care not to show it. “He seems like a good man, though. You didn’t love him a bit?”

  “Of course I do. He’s kind and he works hard, and he was wonderful brave in the War. I wish I could be like him, Pauline, but I’m not. I could never be that steady and good. I’m just like Tom. Good-looking and lazy, but passionate, too, to those we truly love—to each other—and able to laugh and have fun, instead of thinking all the time about working and saving up some money. We’re just the same, Tom and me. We come from the same place, and we’re made of the same clay. And maybe the devil spit in it before God made us, but at least we belong together, him and me.”

  “It seems hard lines on your husband, you feeling like that.”

  “I love them both, Pauline, but not in the same way. My love for James is like that field out there that he spends half his time plowing and sowing and weeding, and all. It will change. The crops die in the winter, or dry up in a summer drought, or the soil gives out, so that you must let it lie fallow for a time and let the weeds take
it. It comes and goes, that field. But Tom … Tom is like that green mountain you can see rising there in the west, holding up the sky. It never changes. It will be just the same forever.”

  “Well, you’re not the same, are you? You up and married somebody else the first chance you got.”

  “That didn’t change anything! If I had married Tom, where would it have got us? Starving in a ditch somewhere? I thought maybe if I married a man with land and prospects, then I could do something for Tom. Maybe we could help him get a place of him own, or maybe James could hire him on to help build the wagons.”

  “Even I know Tom Dula better than that.”

  “Well, it’s true. He isn’t interested in taking up a trade. I misjudged how much I could push him into doing something. But I’ll not forsake him, whatever he comes to be. If this whole state had been laid waste by fire and cannons, and Tom had lived on, then I’d be content to keep going. But if not a single foot of Carolina soil had been touched in the War, but Tom had died in battle, then this world would be a desert to me, and I’d quit it as quick as I could.”

  I shook my head, for none of it made a bit of sense to me. “Well, you were luckier than most women. Luckier than you deserved to be. Both your men went to war, and both of them came back.”

  “A thousand times I wished the War had made my choice for me. In a way, though, Tom’s going off to fight helped me live through it. I didn’t mind when we had to drink chicory instead of coffee, and do without meat ’cause bushwhackers stole all our chickens, because I knew that, wherever he was, Tom was going hungry, too, and it made me feel closer to him.”

  From the sound of it, James Melton had suffered a deal more than Tom had, but he wasn’t the sort of man who lets on about his troubles or his sorrows, so I guess Ann never knew or cared what he went through. I wondered about it, but there was no use trying to explain any of that to Ann. Instead I told her, “There was a woman up home in the Globe that dressed up like a boy and followed her man off to war. You ever think of that?”