The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  At that she hugged me again, and I stood it as best I could. “Oh, Pauline, you are the best friend I have! I knew you’d not let me down.” Those muddy eyes of hers were fair dancing with excitement. “I’m just going off now to see my Johnny. I can’t let him come to the house, of course. Daddy seen me talking to him one time, and I thought he was going to take a switch to me, but I swore to him there warn’t nothing in it. But you could come with me and meet him, Pauline. Then I could say I’d been off with you. Maybe we could bring back wild onions or a mess of salad greens for supper, and say that’s why we went.”

  I nodded, and kept my smile plastered on. That was the first sensible thing I had ever heard said about Wilson Foster. But to go and see John Anderson would take me right back to the Meltons’ place, and I had no mind to walk an extra ten miles just to accommodate her, so I said, “I’ll keep my eyes skinned for wild greens as we go along then, but I’ll not come back with you once we get back to Reedy Branch, I’ll just go back up to Ann’s place and start supper there.”

  I was kinda anxious to meet Laura’s nut brown boy. I reckoned he’d be more interesting than the sorry old farmers around Elkville, but we never did get all the way to the Andersons’ farm. Maybe he knew she was coming, though she had not said so. For all of Laura’s hugs and honeyed words about what a boon companion I was to her, I knew that she had got in the habit of lying to keep folks from finding out about her lover. And she had not told him about having the pox, which is a silent lie. So I had no cause to think that she would be entirely truthful with me, for all her fine sentiments of friendship. Perhaps she was not such a fool as I took her for, which was just as well for her lover, for she could get him killed quick enough. I might have told on the pair of them just to see the fur fly amongst those dull farmers in Elkville, but for the fact that I had other mischief in mind.

  Anyhow we never reached Reedy Branch together, for before we had gone more than three miles, at a place where the road was bounded on either side by woods, a voice called out to us, and Laura clutched my arm and motioned for me to stop. I peered into the woods, trying to catch sight of a figure among the trees, but it was late in the day and the shadows lay deep in the pines.

  A moment or so later, I heard a whistle from the woods, and before I could utter a word of caution, Laura had left the trace, and was hurrying toward the thicket, with her skirt hitched up to her shins, the better to run. I muttered a foul word under my breath, and set off after her.

  I had resolved to be cheerful and welcoming no matter how awful the fellow was, but when I reached the edge of the woods, she was in his arms, and, when I caught sight of his face, I had to admit that he looked a durn sight better than I thought he would. You can’t put any stock in the descriptions a besotted woman gives you; they can’t see straight. But Laura’s part-Shawnee—or whatever he was—had a lean face with dark eyes over sharp cheekbones, and his skin had a copper cast to it that did put me in mind of the Indians. He was dressed shabby, like any old farmhand, but I had known better than to expect anything else. I couldn’t see what he’d want with drab little poxy Laura, but maybe her pale skin made up for the rest of it. I reckon it must have. He acted right glad to see her.

  I caught up to them then, threading my way through the tall weeds of that overgrown field and into the woods, mostly keeping my eyes cast down looking for snakes.

  “This here’s my cousin Pauline Foster. She knows about us,” Laura told him.

  He met my stare with one of his own, and he nodded slightly, just to show he had heard her, but he looked none too pleased to see me standing there. I guess his dealings with people hadn’t given him any reason to trust strangers, especially white ones.

  I smiled anyhow, because I choose my enemies with care. This man didn’t matter to me one way or the other, so I had nothing to lose by being civil. Sometimes, if people are fools, friendliness makes them think you’re on their side. “You’ll get no hindrance from me,” I told him, which was true enough.

  He looked down at Laura and back at me, and then he said, “Well, all right then. I’ll take her word on that. She’d never do me any harm if she could help it.”

  We walked on a few feet farther into the woods, so that passersby on the road wouldn’t spot us. We settled ourselves down on the pine straw, Laura nestled up against John, who was careful to keep his distance from me, and we kept our voices low as we talked. I kept quiet at first, not knowing what he might take offense at, and half hoping he’d forget about me altogether, so that I could listen to their plans, but I made him too jumpy for that. He watched me the way I had kept an eye out for snakes in the untilled field.

  “My cousin tells me you are wanting to go west,” I said, watching his face when I said it.

  He nodded. “I’m tired of being a farmhand around here. I’ll take what work I can get over the mountain.”

  “Were you free before the War, or just lately?”

  He gave me a hard look. “I’m free now, and that’s all that matters. The rest is over and done with.”

  “Well, I hope you get your new start then.”

  Laura kept saying, “I’ll be so glad to get shut of this place!” and then she’d reach up and stroke his cheek, or lay her head on his shoulder.

  Finally, because the boredom of watching the two of them was making me sweat, I said, “So you mean to make a run for it, you and her, do you?”

  He glanced left and right, as if he thought I had salted away a regiment of soldiers in the bushes. But there was nobody around but just us three. “I’m moving on west to Tennessee, maybe farther. Miss Laura here, she has a mind to go with me.”

  I almost laughed at the “Miss Laura,” but he was right to be careful. Best not even to drop the “miss” in private, lest you make a habit of it, and slip up one day in public. “How are you planning on going?” I asked him. “On foot? You’d better not let her daddy catch you, else he’ll beat her like a tin drum, and I reckon they’d just hang you.”

  He didn’t flinch when I said that. But that didn’t surprise me. He would have to be more crazy than brave to have taken up with a white woman in the first place, so I knew he was what folks would call uppity and dangerous. Well, so was I, but mostly I had enough sense to keep anybody from finding out about it. Maybe he did, too, but I doubted it. You could read his feelings on his face like watching clouds scud across a March sky. He’d live longer if he went west. And longer still if he went alone, but I could see that he meant to take her with him.

  “We would have a horse,” he said at last.

  “Just the one?” I inclined my head toward Laura, who wasn’t paying our talk any mind. She was leaning up against him, and plaiting blades of grass into a ring, while she hummed to herself.

  “Just the one.”

  “You’ll not get far enough fast enough with two of you on one horse.”

  He smiled at that, but his eyes stayed cold. “They’d hang me quicker for a horse thief than for taking off with her, don’t you figure?”

  “Best not to get caught at all. You know, her daddy has a horse.” I don’t know how he came by it, him being a sharecropper and all, but he sure enough had a little white mare that was about as drab and scrawny as his daughter was.

  Laura looked up when I said that. “Yes, that’s the one. We mean to take Daddy’s horse. They couldn’t do much to me, could they? If it was me that took it?”

  “Of course they couldn’t,” I said, not because I believed it, but just to speed things along. “I reckon you’d stand a better chance of getting clean away if you each had a horse, though. Else they might catch up with you on the road before you reached Tennessee.”

  They looked at each other then, like the horse was already taken and they were galloping away to the west—they was seeing it happening in one another’s eyes. I kept still, to let the thought take hold in their heads. I was watching a mayfly buzzing around in the field, looking for cow dung. Mayflies flit above the ground on fairy wings, but th
ey don’t live long.

  “We will make do with one,” John Anderson said.

  “Do you think we could?” said Laura, catching both his hands in hers, her eyes shining like mayfly wings. “Just take Daddy’s old mare, and light out of here before anybody misses us?”

  He hesitated, and glanced over at me again.

  “You ought to start early,” I said. “As near as you can to sun-up, before too many people are about. Just meet somewhere and go. They’ll not hear about your plans from me, now or ever.”

  That decided him. “Let’s go tomorrow. First light.”

  “You don’t want to go to her house,” I told him. “Somebody might see you, and then they’d hunt you down for sure. Best to meet up someplace where you won’t be seen.”

  “She’s right, John. I’ll pack my clothes and take the horse come sun-up. Where can I meet you?”

  “At the Bates’ place. It’s only a stone’s throw from the Andersons’, so no one will see us together on the road. We’ll meet there and head straight for the mountains.”

  Laura hesitated. “What if somebody was to see me on the road before I get there? They’ll know I’m running away.”

  “Why, tell them you’re running off with Tom. Nobody would mind about that, and by the time they find out any different, the two of you will be long gone. You mustn’t tell anybody—anybody—who you’re really going with. If you do, you’ll get John hanged for sure.”

  John Anderson nodded, liking the plan. Then he turned back to me. “Swear that you won’t tell about us running off. On your life. Swear it.”

  And I swore, hand on heart, and eyes awash with tears. I meant it, too. Oaths are nothing to me. Some fool who can’t keep a secret is trying to make sure that somebody else will, that’s all. So I always tell people what they want to hear. But this time I meant it.

  An hour or so later I hurried back to the Meltons’ place to tell Ann that Laura Foster was eloping—with Tom Dula.

  PAULINE FOSTER

  May 24, 1866

  For once I didn’t mind the long, muddy walk back from German’s Hill, for I needed every mile of the journey to think out what to do next. It was like trying to piece together squares on a quilt to make a pattern, only sewing is stupid and tedious work, and I had always hated it—but this cutting and piecing together of people’s lives makes my heart quicken with excitement.

  I walked back along the trace, following the fading sun, which was just about to sink below the blue mountains in the distance, where I’d come from back in March. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the clouds stopped and the mountains began; they had that same blue hazy look against the sky, as if one was no more solid than the other.

  I didn’t meet anybody on the road, and I’d scarcely have taken note of it if I had, for my mind was running faster than a snow-melt creek, thinking on what I would say and who I needed to talk to before morning.

  I could have ended Laura’s fine plans for an elopement then and there, I think, if I’d told her secrets in the right ears. If I’d warned her daddy that he was about to lose both his mare and his daughter, I reckon he’d have put a stop to it. Or if I’d told some of the neighbors—or that high and mighty Colonel Isbell, who thinks he is the lord and master of everybody in the valley—that Laura Foster was fixing to run away with a colored man, they’d have stepped in. And if I had just told that nut brown boy of hers that Laura was afflicted with the pox—I doubt if even her white skin would have made her a prize to him then. Being hanged for running off with her or catching the deadly pox from her—it was all the same in the end. Death. And more than she was worth.

  But I had no particular score to settle with Laura Foster, except for the fact that somebody loved her. She was making foolish choices, and she would bring about her own ruin without any help from me. I reckoned that I had more wrongs to repay in other quarters, and I meant to see those debts of cruelty paid in kind, hurt for hurt. It would take a careful piecing together, though, this blood quilt in my head. One dropped stitch and all would come undone.

  When I neared the Melton place that evening, it was already gathering dark and the wind had picked up some, making a tedious journey of the last mile, but I would have walked barefoot in the snow to deliver the news I brought back with me.

  I was almost to the house when out of the dark, a white hand grabbed my arm and jerked it hard. “What are you doing back so late? James will be wanting his supper!”

  I could just make out Ann’s pale face in the moonlight, but I had known it was her already. I could smell the whiskey on her breath, as I squirmed to get free of the grip of her claws on my arm. “Why don’t you fix his supper your own self then? You’re his wife, aren’t you?”

  She tossed her head. “Don’t you sass me, Pauline. I am going over to my mama’s tonight. I told you that this morning.”

  I saw that she had a little bundle of clothes with her, and then I remembered that she had declared that she would be gone to Lot Foster’s place by evening. I laughed. “Why are you going there, Ann? Can’t you sleep with Tom here like you always do?”

  She tightened her grip on my arm and shook me once or twice for good measure. She would have slapped me, but she was near drunk, and I kept twisting this way and that to avoid her.

  “I have seen Tom already,” she said. “Though not for long. I said I would get him some whiskey tonight. If he don’t come for it, I’ll send one of the girls to fetch him at the Dulas’ place. Though she mustn’t say it straight out if that cat of a sister of his is in earshot. I don’t mind his mama knowing, but his sister is a devil about trying to keep us apart.”

  I choked back a laugh. I wanted to say, “Some people are funny about adultery, I guess,” but that would only have set her off again, so I swallowed my bitter words, and asked instead, “How did he seem to you tonight?”

  She shrugged. “Tom? Same as always. Restless. Why?”

  When she said that, I closed my eyes for two heartbeats and decided to take a stab in the dark. Chances were that my words would come to naught, but if they struck home, I would have done what I set out to do, and what I had planned on that cold walk back from German’s Hill. “Well, I don’t think you will see Tom anymore tonight at all,” I told her. “I don’t doubt that he’ll be afraid to face you. You know how Tom Dula is. Always easy and smiling, saying whatever he thinks folk want to hear, and not to be trusted an inch toward keeping his word. Or perhaps he has told you already?”

  “Told me what? Why should he be afraid to face me?” Ann’s voice quavered, and she forgot to tighten her hold, so I wriggled out of her grasp, with marks of her fingernails stinging my arm, and glad for yet another injury to pay her back for.

  “You mean he didn’t let on to you?” I shook my head. “Well, if he didn’t say nothing, I don’t reckon I should. Anyhow, I have sworn to keep it a secret.”

  Ann dropped her bundle of clothes into the weeds, and took me by both shoulders, but I stood my ground, and she thought better of shaking me again. The wind whipped that black hair of hers into clouds around her face, and she shook her head to get it clear of her eyes. “We put you up, Pauline,” she said, with tears of rage in her voice. “We let you stay with us out of Christian charity.…”

  I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from laughing at that. Oh, yes, Christian charity, indeed—to work me like a field hand, doing the kitchen chores and cleaning the cabin, tending her babies and the animals, and helping out in the fields—while she lay around like a farrowing sow, not doing a hand’s turn of work. Yes, they were the souls of kindness, all right. But I pretended to see the sense in what she said, and after a moment’s pause, I said, “All right, Cousin, if you think it is my duty to confide in you, then I will break my oath and tell you. You might as well know now as later, so that it won’t be such a shock to you when it is over and done with.”

  She let me go again, and took a step back, clapping her hand across her mouth. She gulped down a few deep draughts of th
e night air before she said, “Is it Tom? What about him?”

  I shook my head. “You may have seen the last of him.”

  “Why?” She looked about her, wild-eyed in the moonlight, and in an instant she would have gone running to the Dulas’ place, so I said quickly, “He means to run away with Laura Foster, first thing in the morning. Come sun-up.”

  She stared at me for a moment as though the sense of my words couldn’t quite sink in to her head, and then she threw back her head and laughed, ending with a sob of relief. “Tom run off with that mud hen? Has the pox addled your brain, Pauline? What would he want with her?”

  “He means to marry her.”

  “And what use is a wife to Tom Dula? Like teats on a bull, that’s what—no use at all.” She laughed again. “No job. No land. No money. Oh, he’d make a fine bridegroom indeed.”

  “Well, it would make his sister Eliza happy, wouldn’t it? And maybe his mother as well, just to see him settle down with somebody and quit pining after you.”

  “He never would, though. He loves me. He’s told me so often enough.”

  “Maybe he said the same thing to Laura Foster. And to Caroline Barnes before her. Anyhow, they are eloping in the morning. She told me herself. She says they are heading west to start fresh.”

  Ann put her fist up to her mouth, and stood stock-still, for all the world as if she had forgotten I was standing there. I thought she might faint, and if she had, I’d have left her where she lay, but after a moment or two, she just whispered, “I don’t believe it,” in a watery voice that ended in a sob.

  I shrugged and said nothing. The less you argue with people the more they believe you.

  She peered at me, willing me to speak, but I kept still. “I’ll ask him myself then! I’ll march straight over to his mama’s, and make him tell me face to face like a man.”