The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “I heard about her. She and her man were in the same regiment as James and my brother. But I don’t reckon I could pass for a boy, do you?” Ann smiled and touched her breasts. “Anyhow, if I had gone, Tom would have ended up having to look out for me, and so I’d have been a danger to him. It was better for me to wait here. I never had no word from him, of course. Even if he could write, I couldn’t read a letter. But all the same, if he had died, I would have known. The instant it happened, I would have known.”

  “So now he is back. What happens now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ann. “Whatever he wants to happen, I reckon.”

  * * *

  There was one person in Wilkes County who could keep a secret, apparently. Dr. George Carter wasn’t bruiting it about that his patient Pauline Foster had the pox. Sy-phi-lis, he called it, when he spoke to me about it, but he didn’t talk about it to nobody else. Or if he did, it didn’t reach the ears of the ordinary folk in the settlement, for Dr. Carter did not associate with the likes of them. He went to elegant parties with the quality folk, up at Colonel Isbell’s fine house, drinking wine out of crystal goblets, and dancing on polished oak floors under a crystal chandelier. I had never seen the inside of such a place, but some of the women had been inside the Isbells’ house on some errand or other, and they never tired of singing its praises.

  Maybe I didn’t matter enough for him to talk about.

  Whatever the reason, the real story of Pauline Foster’s shameful ailment did not get threshed out in the gossip mills of Happy Valley. They figured me for consumption, I think, as pale and scrawny as I was, and I never told them any different.

  There are some that would say that I should have told Ann what my illness really was. When she bade me to lay with her lover Tom Dula, I might have spoke up then, and told her that I had the pox, and that if she threw us together, she was condemning Tom and a raft of other people—including herself—to share my affliction. I’ll bet she would have thought twice about her plan then. But I never gave her the chance to reconsider—and why should I? If you ask me, Ann Melton was already blessed enough in this world. She had the sort of beauty that made men tongue-tied to look at her—worse than that, they thought she had the look of a fine lady. “An aristocratic beauty.” Her that would lay with a drover for a sack of coffee beans. And she had a house and a husband, and two men that loved her.

  What did I ever have? What did this world ever give me, except pain, and hunger, hard work, and finally a deadly affliction, that would carry me off, like as not, afore I ever saw thirty. And sick as I was, I washed Ann Melton’s drawers after she had been with her lover; and I cooked her food, and scrubbed her floor, and emptied the slop jars every morning. What charity did I owe her? It seemed to me that she had been given too much already. And perhaps it was up to me to even the score a little, for all the plain, unloved women who must trudge through life in bone-weary misery. Pretty, selfish, stupid Ann had it coming, for she never gave a thought to anyone’s needs but her own. And if Tom Dula was brought low in my trap to ensnare Ann, that was too bad. Back during the War I had seen enough of soldiers to know that they showed little enough mercy to others, and I was satisfied to pay one back in kind when I could.

  * * *

  I was as good as my word—that time, anyhow. One evening that week as we drowsed by the fire, after a supper of salt-crock beans and corn bread, I managed to put away half a jug of that clear-as-water whiskey they made in copper stills in these parts. By the time Ann got to yawning, and James Melton, bone-weary from a day of wagon-building, stumbled off to bed, I was swimmy-headed and beginning to nod off myself.

  Ann poked me in the ribs. “Stay awake, Pauline! Tom is coming by any time now.”

  The drink had loosened my tongue. “Do I get the bed tonight then?” I asked, grinning up at her.

  Her face clouded over, and she raised her hand to slap me, but seeing the look on my face, she let it fall again. “You asked for this,” I said.

  “Don’t mean I want to watch it happen, though. Take him along to the barn loft.”

  * * *

  The fire had burned low, and I had been listening to James Melton’s snores for a good while when the door opened on a gust of cold wind, and a shadow fell over the threshold. I glanced over at Ann’s bed, but she was buried deep under the pile of quilts, as still as a hollow log. I’d bet she wasn’t asleep, though. For all that she insisted on this being done, I knew she minded about it. —Good.

  I stood up, and wrapped a thick wool shawl around my shoulders, waiting to see if Tom was going to come over to me, but he just stood there in the open doorway. He glanced over at Ann’s bed for a long moment, and then back over at me, jerked his head like he expected me to follow him. Then he backed out, and let the door close softly behind him.

  I got up, a little wobbly on my feet, and went out into the yard. The night air was a little milder now that we were well in to March, but there was still enough of a chill to shake the whiskey glow off me. The moon shone like a gold locket through the branches of the white oak tree, and the black shape of the barn loomed before me.

  I shivered a little from the wind, but I wasn’t scared. What we was fixing to do—why, I had done it a hundred times before, and Tom Dula didn’t look like the best or the worst of them. I didn’t feel much of anything. Good or bad, I didn’t figure it would last long, and it wouldn’t mean any more to either of us than partnering for a reel at a settlement dance. Less, in fact, for there’d be no one watching us.

  I could see him standing just inside the barn, leaning against the wall, and watching me, with a funny half-smile on his face. I wondered if he was happy about getting a roll in the hay, or if it pleased him that I didn’t want to. Some men are like that. I didn’t know what Tom Dula was like, behind that handsome face and the easy smile.

  He tried to take my arm, but I shook him off. “Let’s get this over with.”

  * * *

  He held the ladder while I climbed up into the hayloft, but I didn’t bother to thank him for it. If I was to fall and break my neck, it would have done him out of his fun, that was all. He didn’t kiss me, but I could still smell the whiskey on his breath, and I knew that he had been making a night of it somewhere else, before he ever came here. Not a word passed between us. Tom didn’t talk much anyhow, and I didn’t care to make things any more pleasant for him than I had to, so I just hitched up my skirts and lay back in the straw and let him get on with it, hoping the whiskey in my belly would keep me from minding too much.

  I spent the few minutes it took him to get done with it wondering what Ann Melton saw in Tom Dula that I never did. Well, I’ve had worse. He wasn’t old or fat or toothless, but the others had given me something for my trouble—a few coins or a drop of whiskey. I reckon he thought he was doing me a favor, being as young and likely-looking as he was. I didn’t get nothing at all from Tom Dula that night, not even so much as a kind word or a thank you. But I smiled and hugged myself in the cold darkness of that hayloft, knowing that I sure as hell gave him something that night.

  * * *

  I am trying to think back on when I first encountered my other cousin, Laura Foster, but it’s not the kind of thing I’d be likely to remember. Laura Foster wasn’t the sort of girl who sticks in your mind. Had I met her once when we were children, long before the War? Maybe. I remember Ann from those days, running around like a wild Indian, with her black hair flying loose and not a stitch on under her dress, but if one of that horde of barefoot young’uns had been six-year-old Cousin Laura, it had slipped from my memory. I think of her now in the faded colors of early fall, when the green leaves are going yellowish and the fields of goldenrod fade to a muddy brown. That was Laura Foster … small and sallow-skinned, with broom-sedge hair and witch-hazel eyes, so quiet and colorless that if you blinked she might disappear.

  She was old Wilson Foster’s oldest girl. We were kin somehow or other, but since I was not a legal child, I never bothered to lear
n the rights of it. Her daddy tenant-farmed over at German’s Hill, maybe five miles from the Meltons’ and the Dulas’ farms. Laura’s mother took sick and died sometime before the War ended, leaving Laura to look after her three brothers and a baby sister. Well, they didn’t any of them starve to death or die of cholera, and that’s the best that can be said of the care she took of them. Mostly, she went her own way, same as Ann did, except that Ann married young to get out of having to tend to her mama’s brood, while Laura went on living at home in German’s Hill, likely because there was no other place for her to go.

  She and Ann, both cousins to me, were chalk and cheese. Where Laura whispered and wavered, Ann carried herself like the Queen of Sheba—all fire and rolling thunder. She burned you where you stood with her bright beauty of tumbling black hair and dark, flashing eyes. By being more alive than anybody else, she squeezed your heart until you never forgot her for an instant. I didn’t say you would love her, though I reckon there was more than one man that did. Wanted her, anyhow. But no woman I ever knew could stand her. She made no pretense of caring a fig for anybody but herself, not even troubling to ask after anybody’s health or family, and when an older woman tried to converse with her, she was bored and she showed it, tapping her foot or gazing about the room, looking for some man to charm or something better to do than be talked at. The women all knew her reputation, too. None of them liked Ann enough to protect her from the scandalmongers, who were only telling the truth, after all. A woman who makes free with any man she pleases has no friends among her own sex, but Ann never cared about that, either. Tom Dula was all the society she ever wanted, and the rest of us she barely tolerated, if she noticed us at all.

  I had no more use for the settlement’s old biddies than Ann did, but I took care to keep in with them, because it seemed foolish to make enemies when you didn’t have to. Those respectable old women might be useful one day, though I never tried to make Ann see that. You couldn’t reason with Ann.

  She was like pokeberries, Ann was—bright and tempting to look at, but pure poison through and through. I suppose jealousy was part of the reason women hated her so much, but then Ann never took the trouble to make anybody like her. I guess she figured that the sight of her was all she ever needed to give. You never knew which way the wind would be blowing with her. One day she might be all smiles and sweetness, asking after your health and wanting to hold your new baby, and the next day she’d breeze past you on the road, taking no more notice of you than she would a stray guinea fowl.

  Since I had to stay in the same house with her, I used to watch her, trying to figure out the rhythm of her moods, for my peace of mind depended upon keeping on her good side. But if there was ever any rhyme or reason to the weather of Ann Melton’s humors, I never found it. I ended up thinking that she was doing it simply to keep folks off balance around her, trying to guess at her mood, as if she was calling the tune. It gave her the upper hand—I worked that out—but I soon decided that I did not care to dance to her fiddling. I began to act just the same whether she behaved fair or foul, and pretty soon I began to see less of her moodiness, though she gave it in full force to everyone else. Except Tom Dula, of course. He always saw the sunny side of Ann.

  Or at least, he did until he took up with Laura Foster, come spring.

  It wasn’t as if she found out in some underhanded way. Tom never troubled to lie. I always thought he was too lazy to exert himself by trying to remember some falsehood. Besides, he cared as little as she did what anybody thought of him. He was young and handsome, and people seem to find it easy to forgive a man like that.

  Tom came over to the house one evening in late March, in time to cadge a bite of supper with us. He sat there by the fire, spooning rabbit stew into his mouth, and, for once, Ann was not all smiles and sweetness. She sat huddled up on the floor next to his stool, holding his cup of water for him, and leaning her body against his leg, smiling into the firelight like a satisfied cat. I had the sewing in my lap, and I was seated in the cane chair, a ways back from the hearth, pretending not to listen to what they were saying.

  “Are you coming back later?” she murmured softly to Tom, glancing over at James Melton, who was at the table, nodding in his chair.

  Tom sat very still. “Not tonight, darlin’. I’m headed over to German’s Hill in a little bit.”

  Ann stiffened, and turned to look up at him. “That’s a long walk on a dark night. What do you want to go over there for?”

  “I just feel like it.” He was keeping his voice light, as if the conversation was of no consequence at all, but the air felt the way it does when the leaves turn over on the trees, about an hour ahead of the thunderstorm, and there was that same quiet that comes right before all hell breaks loose.

  “Well, you must be fixing to go visit somebody,” said Ann, still speaking so softly that you could have heard a snake rattle in the log pile.

  Tom shrugged, and, from the look on his face, I judged he was wishing he had thought up a lie when she asked him, but anybody who had fought his way through Petersburg and lived through a Yankee prison camp does not run from a fight—and maybe that was what Ann liked best about him: that she couldn’t run roughshod over him, like she did over most everybody else. I never saw James Melton cross her once. I worked beside him every day in the fields for months, but I think I knew him less than I ever knew anybody.

  Tom was smiling down at Ann, like he was daring her to keep hectoring him, and presently he said, “Why, I didn’t know I had to answer to anybody about where I go and what I do.”

  “You don’t need to tell me. I know. You’re going to see my own cousin Laura Foster,” said Ann.

  He laughed. “Well, now, she wouldn’t be the first of your cousins that I was acquainted with, would she now, Pauline?”

  I glanced up from my sewing and met his eyes with a blank stare. There was a mocking glint to them, and although he was smiling, I didn’t think he was happy about anything.

  That flicked Ann raw, though, for she could hardly object to him seeing Laura Foster when she had foisted him off on me not even a month ago.

  “After all, Ann, it ain’t like Laura is married or anything, is it?” He was looking over at James Melton, who was still in his chair, awake now, and intent upon mending a harness, and paying us no mind. “It ain’t like we care who beds with who?”

  From the way Ann’s eyes glittered, I thought she was going to break out into a storm of weeping, but she just kept staring up at Tom, taking his measure, and finally she shrugged and turned back to the fire. “Please yourself, Tom. I doubt you’ll get much joy out of that stringy little mud hen.”

  Tom stood up and set his tin plate on his stool. He patted Ann on the head and winked at me, like I shared a joke with him, “Well, Ann,” he said, heading for the door, “maybe I can teach her a thing or two.”

  That night I slept in a pallet on the floor, because Ann’s bed shook with her sobbing.

  PAULINE FOSTER

  Late March 1866

  So we hunkered down and waited on spring, and it seemed a long time in coming, and nothing much happened in the meantime. When the weather was foul, James Melton occupied himself with mending shoes. I did the cooking and the washing, and what farm chores there were to be done while the weather held cold.

  Once a week, I would plod up the muddy road to the place where the doctor saw his Elkville patients, and I took the bluestone medicine what he give me, but I felt little better for it. Some days I was tolerable and some days worse, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to it. Ann mostly slept the days away under her pile of quilts, or else she paced that cabin like a penned-up bull.

  “It would take your mind off your troubles if you was to help me make the biscuits,” I told her one afternoon, when I judged she would wear a path in the plank floor if she was to keep pacing.

  She shot me a scorching look with those black eyes of her. “I don’t want to take my mind off it. I want to feel every second of misery I’
m having so that I can give it back to Tom with interest when I see him.”

  “I thought you said it didn’t mean nothing—him being with anybody else. And, anyhow, it means folk aren’t gossiping about the two of you anymore.”

  She snatched up an unmended shoe and shied it in my direction, but she was so wide of the mark that I just stood there and watched it thump against the wall, and fall to the floor.

  “I reckon you heard the new gossip,” I said, fixing to hurt her a lot more than that slipper would have hurt me. “They do say that old Wilson Foster caught Tom in bed with Laura the other week, but he’s not so particular as your mama was. The word is that he let them be. Of course, Laura is twenty-one, not fourteen like you was.”

  “Tom don’t care,” said Ann, plopping down with her elbows in the flour where I was kneading dough. “Nobody thinks less of a man for doing what comes naturally. More fool the woman that lets him. If Laura thinks he’s going to marry her on account of it, she has another think coming.”

  “Unless there’s a baby on the way.”

  Ann shrugged. “No telling whose it would be, though. Tom wasn’t her first, not by a long chalk. If you haven’t heard the other tales told about our cousin Laura, then let me tell you I have.”

  “Must run in the family,” I said, laughing, because name-calling never bothered me none. “And there are stories a-plenty about you, too, Ann. You and the cattle drovers. They say you’d sell your favors for a jug of whiskey or a scrap of cloth.”

  She gave me one of her black looks. “I lived through the War, didn’t I?”