There was a group of ladies at the store on Saturday, eager to swap stories about Laura’s disappearance. Mrs. Betsy Scott was chief among those who held that she had run away on purpose. Now the other Mrs. Scott was adding her pennyworth of information about seeing Laura on the morning she left—the last time anybody ever saw her. Maybe Mrs. Scott figured that enough time had passed now for Laura to get clean away from here, and over into Tennessee if that’s where she was headed. If that was so, then it wouldn’t do any harm if she told what she knew. Anyhow, she gave herself airs about it until I wanted to shake her like a terrier with a rat. When you know something for a fact, and other people act like they know it all when they are just guessing, it is hard not to shout at them. My smile felt like it was tacked on with ten-penny nails, but nobody seemed to notice.
“I know for certain that she was leaving for good,” Miz Scott said to anyone who would listen. “When I saw her on Friday morning, she had a bundle of clothes slung over the saddle, and she said she was going to meet somebody at the Bates’ place. Well, it must have been Tom Dula she was meeting. Everybody knows that Laura and Tom were … sweethearts.”
When she said that, not a one of us could look at anybody else for fear we’d bust out laughing. Sweethearts. Well, then, I reckon every hen in the barnyard is sweethearts with the rooster. But in a little settlement, nearly everybody is kin to everybody else, so you don’t go slinging mud at anybody if you can help it, or else you’ll start a kinfolk squabble that would last longer than the War.
I was tempted to tell her the truth just to see the look on her face, but that would have run contrary to my purposes. I bit my lip, and kept still, letting her run on.
“When I saw Laura that morning, I even asked her had Tom come to her place—for I was surprised at hearing that Tom Dula was willing to run away with any girl at all, especially if it would end with him having a wife to support.…”
There were murmurs of agreement all around at this point. Nobody could quite picture Tom Dula choosing to work for a living, and he never seemed overly fond of Laura—not enough to make the sacrifice of his freedom, anyhow. Nobody came out and said, “You don’t buy a cow when the milk is free,” but I’ll wager I wasn’t the only one thinking it.
“She said that they were going to run away to Tennessee.”
I bit back a smile. So Laura had told the nosey biddy that she was running off with Tom. That might buy the pair of them some time, because nobody would have cared if she eloped with Tom. Let them worry that trifling scandal to death while she made away with her nut brown boy. That’s what I would have done. Let Miz Scott think that, then.
A stout old widow woman, who was no fool, spoke up. “The Bates’ place is north of you, ain’t it, Miz Scott? Why, I reckon it would take that Laura Foster the rest of her life to reach Tennessee if she was a-riding north instead of west.”
There used to be a blacksmith’s forge at the Bates’ place, but it was long gone now, and the place had fallen to ruin and the yard was choked with weeds. The only reason that anybody would go there would be to meet somebody they didn’t want to be seen with.
Miz Scott pursed her lips. “I am only repeating what I was told. Maybe the two of them met somewhere, and then turned around and headed west from there. There’s more than one road that will get you over the mountain to Tennessee. But I recall that I did tell her that if it were me, I’d have been farther along on the road by that time of morning. She said she had started as soon as she could, and that they were meeting at the Bates’ place.” She kept nodding her head, like she was daring any of us to contradict her. Nobody wanted to argue with her, for she looked on the verge of a temper, and that would have broken up the gossip party. Somebody said they hoped that Laura made it to wherever she was going.
“But it seems strange, all the same,” one of the younger wives said thoughtfully. “If Tom came to her place at sun-up, like she said, why didn’t she just go off with him then? Why would she wait and meet him a couple of hours later at the Bates’ place?”
“And Tom Dula doesn’t have a horse. Were the two of them fixing to try to get to Tennessee on that one mare?”
“But she did not go off with Tom Dula,” the stout old widow reminded them, nodding hard to drive home her point. “Because Laura Foster may be gone, but he’s still here.”
Mrs. James Scott touched her arm to show she agreed with her. “I thought of that myself.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice to just above a whisper. “Now I saw him on that Friday morning. I had finished breakfast by then, and I spied him walking up the road. I asked him did he want to come in, but he said he wanted to meet up with my brother.”
Washington Anderson, that would be. And I knew where Wash had been the night before: at the Meltons’ place. There was a whole crowd of us in that little cabin—but not Ann and not Tom, for she had gone to her mother’s, and he was off somewhere—his mother’s house, for all I know. But that Thursday night, Wash Anderson was with me at the Meltons’. And he still would have been there Friday morning, like as not, as much as we all had to drink the night before.
Everybody looked interested in the other Mrs. Scott’s news about Tom. She said, “My neighbor Hezekiah Kendall says he saw Tom on Friday morning, too, just before I did. Around eight o’clock. Mr. Kendall asked Tom if he had been ‘after the women,’ and Tom answered, ‘No. I have quit that.’ When he stopped at my place, I didn’t ask his business, and he didn’t tell me. But he was headed toward the Meltons’ place.”
They all looked at me then, so I said, “Well, he got there, all right. I was just bringing in the milk pail Friday morning when Tom showed up.”
They looked at one another then and got all quiet for a minute. Then they all started talking at once about something else.
* * *
Anyhow, a day or so later, I heard that Wilson Foster had got his mare back on Saturday evening, although it wasn’t on account of me, and I never did collect that quart of whiskey from him, which is all I cared about the matter. The day after Laura stole the mare, it just showed up back in the yard outside the barn, still bridled, but with the lead rein snapped in two, as if it had been tied to a tree branch, and broke the rein, pulling itself loose when being tied up had made it hungry and scared enough to break free. The mare may have wandered around for a while, but it wasn’t far enough from home to be lost, so after a couple of hours it went on back to German’s Hill where it belonged. When I heard that, I thought: Wilson Foster got his wish. He got his horse back, but not his daughter. And it looked as if I had got my wish, too.
* * *
I was down at Cowle’s store when I heard about that, a day or so afterward, and at the time I had made no effort to join in the conversation, but later on, back at the farm when I was alone with Ann, I had plenty to say about it. “Did you hear Wilson Foster has got his horse back?” I asked her, that evening, as I was making the chicken and dumplings for supper.
Ann nodded, but she wouldn’t look at me. She had been mighty quiet herself those past few days. She didn’t seem to care if she ate or not, and she had spent most of last Friday in bed. Now, Ann was bone lazy at the best of times, but that was unusual, even for her.
“Well, I reckon they’ll be sending out the searchers by tomorrow, then.”
“Searchers?” She froze. “Why would you say that?”
“Stands to reason, don’t it? Last week Laura ran away on her daddy’s mare, and now she has not been seen for days. Then the horse shows up with a broken lead rein, and there’s still no sign of its rider. Since the mare found its way home, people will figure that where it was tethered couldn’t have been very far from home. Seems to me like Wilson Foster ought to be hollering for men and hunting dogs to start combing the woods to see if they can find Laura. She can’t be far off, not now that she’s on foot. The horse proved that.” I said all this as calmly as I could, but I was watching Ann’s every move while I was saying it, and it was all I could do not to laugh.
She looked scared to death and her hands were trembling.
Ann glanced at me, and then she looked toward the cabin door, as if she expected a search party to break in on us at any moment, but all was quiet. James Melton was outside somewhere, still tending to his chores, and we’d had no visitors all day. Still she spoke so softly I had to strain to hear. “They’ll not find her.”
I shook my head. “The dogs might.”
* * *
I was wrong about the searchers, though. They didn’t use dogs, so it took them a lot longer to find her than it ought to have. In fact the whole thing began to look like a nine days’ wonder that would die down in a few more weeks until people completely forgot that a girl had gone missing.
Not that I cared one whit about her, but if I could help it, people wouldn’t forget she was gone.
The week after Laura Foster disappeared, the month of June began, and every time folks got together they were still making guesses about what happened to her.
I couldn’t let on that I had a good idea about what had happened to Laura, and who she had been going to meet. I was saving all that. I was looking forward to watching Ann fall apart, waiting for the trap to be sprung. I planned to say as little as possible, and let the rumors take their course, unless people showed signs of losing interest in the story, and then I might chivvy them along a little to keep it going. I thought I would do more than my share of visiting in the days to come, just so I could listen to the tongues wagging.
It turns out that I needn’t have bothered, though. All it takes is for one person to keep worrying away at something, like a dog with a marrow bone, and then you can rest assured that sooner or later something will come to light. I thought I would have to be the person to keep prodding everyone to wonder about the fate of Laura Foster, but I reckoned without J.W. Winkler. He’s a young fellow with a farm near Elkville, and I don’t know what any of it had to do with him, for he wasn’t a magistrate or a lawman, or any kin to the Fosters that I knew about, but he took it into his head to take charge of the hunt for Laura, and he for one did not believe that she had gotten away to Tennessee.
At Cowle’s store I heard some of the neighbors talking about how groups of men had gone out in search of some sign of Laura. Most of them gave up after a day or two, for it was the busy time of year for farmers, and they had enough to do to take care of their livestock and their fields, but J.W. Winkler would not let the matter rest. After the others went home, he kept on combing the woods alone, starting at the old Bates’ place, where Laura had told Mrs. Scott she was headed, and he walked every path he could think of to get from there to the Dulas’ place.
“He is bound and determined to find her,” said the storekeeper, handing me the candy I had bought with the two pennies I had to spare.
“Why?” I asked her. “He wasn’t sweet on her, was he?”
“No, that’s not it. He said she deserves a Christian burial. And he said there’d be no peace for her family until she was found.”
Well, strictly speaking, I was part of Laura Foster’s family myself, and it didn’t make any difference to me whether he dug her up or not, but I simply nodded to the storekeeper, big-eyed and solemn, and told her what she expected to hear: what a fine and determined man Mr. Winkler was, and how I hoped there was nothing out there in the woods for him to find.
I think he gave up for a little while, because, after all, he had a farm to run same as the rest of them. The month of June dragged on, and we went ahead with the planting and the weeding, and the rest of the weary round of chores on a farm in summer. The searching may have eased up for a while, but the talking didn’t.
On Saturday the 23rd of June, after we had finished a long day’s work, Tom Dula stopped by the house, as he did most days. I was stewing up a mess of soup beans and corn pone for supper, and James was working on sewing the sole of a shoe, sitting on his bench in the doorway to catch the fading light. Ann was somewhere about the place, using the outhouse or taking a stroll to cool off likely as not. She wasn’t doing anything useful, that’s for certain.
Tom came up to the door, smiling and sniffing at the smell of supper cooking, but I didn’t speak to him, for whether or not he stayed to eat with us was not on my say-so. As he stood there on the threshold, James Melton put down his needle and looked up at him. I watched them there side by side in a shaft of sunlight—one blond and tall, with sharp features and hands never still, even in the evenings, as he worked his other trades to shore up his efforts at farming; the other dark-haired and handsome, as gracefully lazy as a cat on a hearth rug. I didn’t feel much of anything for either one of them, except maybe a little respect for Melton, because he earned his keep, and disgust at Dula, for lazing about, living off his mother and doing not a hand’s turn if he could help it. I always did like dogs better than cats. I wondered how those two felt about each other. They had been neighbors all their lives, even in that Union prison camp, and they shared a woman—whether one of them knew that or not. I wondered about that, too.
James Melton set down the shoe he was holding and looked up at Tom. “I didn’t expect to see you back here anytime soon.”
Tom squinted down at him—maybe from the glare of the sun. “Why is that?”
“Well, people are going around saying that you killed Laura Foster, so I thought you’d have lit out of here by now.”
Tom stood very still then, but his expression did not change. “Who has been saying that?”
“The Hendrickses, for one.”
There was such a long, taut silence between them that I was sure Tom wasn’t going to answer. I even thought he might haul off and hit James Melton without even letting him get up. But then Tom laughed and said, “Well, I reckon the Hendrickses will just have to prove that, and perhaps take a beating besides.”
Melton nodded, and I don’t know if that nod meant that he believed Tom or that he hadn’t expected him to say anything else. Anyhow, he picked up his shoe again and went back to work without saying another word. Tom came in and sat for a minute. He nibbled at a piece of corn pone, but then he got up and started pacing, and before too long he had barged back out the door and was gone.
ZEBULON VANCE
Tom Dula and Ann Melton … what a long time ago that was. A brief interlude in my life, really, when I practiced law in order to feed my family while I waited to be let back into politics. As soon as the government permitted Confederate officials to reenter the political fray, I went back into the election business, and ended up in the Senate, where I mean to die in harness. I have not represented a defendant in court in decades, and I never will again, but from time to time my memory summons up those two star-crossed clients of mine, and I see them as they were in 1866—young, handsome, and indifferent to the opinion of the world in general. I did not understand them at the time, and I believe I thought that when I had attained age and wisdom, I would come to know what it was that motivated them, what was in their hearts. But as I sit drowsing by this fire in a Washington parlor, I know that I am as far from comprehending them as ever.
We are bound for different heavens, those two rustic souls and I.
They loved each other, I suppose, or what passes for love with young and passionate people, whose impulses are not tempered by education or moral guidance. Their lives were without purpose or direction, and so perhaps they became each other’s purpose.
But Ann Melton was married to another. I recall that well enough, for that is the one thing in this matter that I do understand. She was born to a drunken slut of a mother, and by some wondrous chance she grew up to be a beauty—that was her one chance to escape the squalor of her mother’s life, and it is no wonder that she took it. A prosperous man with a house and land and the means to put food on the table offered her a home and marriage, and at the age of fifteen she took it. I find no wonder in that. It is the best thing I know of Ann Melton.
I would have done the same. Perhaps I did, in fact. I would like instead to think that in marrying my H
arriette I was fortunate to have fallen in love with a gentlewoman whose breeding and social connections were so perfectly suited to advance my own ambitions. I hope I made her a good husband. I meant to, and she never uttered a word of complaint, bless her, but she was worth her weight in gold for a man with political and social aspirations well beyond his personal means. So in my youth I let my head rule my heart, so that my choice of a partner should further my ends, for I had much to accomplish.
How then to explain my second marriage? My dear Harriette, delicate soul that she was, passed away in 1878, and by then I was forty-eight years old, well past the giddiness of youth, and serving in the United States Senate. Having established myself as a respected and prosperous statesman, I no longer had need of anyone’s assistance to make my way in the world. I was never a ladies’ man, nor one who had any interest in dalliances with the fair sex. Like a plow horse with blinders on, I saw only the furrow that I must plod along, and no amiable distractions ever kept me from my duty.
I suppose when I became a widower, I could have indulged myself in sensuality at last: married some fair-haired beauty, and eased into my dotage with a pretty doll to amuse me as the fires of ambition burned low. Or I could have dispensed with matrimony altogether, and immersed myself in the neverending duties of a serving senator.
But I did neither of those things.
Ah, Flossie Martin. What will they say of you in the sonorous biographies that are sure to be written when I finally take leave of this world?
Precious little, I’ll warrant. My Harriette was beloved in my home state, for its aristocrats counted her as one of their own, and she stood by me through all the tribulations of the early years, braving the dangers of war in the Governor’s Palace, never leaving my side until I sent her away in those last frenzied weeks of the conflict. To the North Carolinians who elected me Governor twice over, and sent me back to Congress to represent them before the nation, Harriette Espy will forever be Mrs. Vance.
The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel Page 17