The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  I passed nobody on the road, and I didn’t tarry, either. I didn’t care to look at the little purple flowers tucked in among the weeds along the path, nor did I stop to admire the mountains floating in front of me in a blue haze. I put one foot in front of the other, and I kept my eyes on the ground in case a snake should slither across my path. All the while I was listening for the sound of voices behind me or the thud of a horse’s hooves, but nothing broke the stillness except now and then a snippet of birdsong. For my breakfast, I took one of the cold biscuits out of my blanket-sack, and ate it dry whilst I walked.

  I hoped Wilkes County would forget about me just as fast as I meant to forget about them. I didn’t care if they hanged Tom or Ann or half the county for the death of Laura Foster, as long as they left me out of it. I meant to get back to the top of the mountain, and to keep myself out of the way of the lawmen.

  I can’t say that anybody was glad to see me when I finally got back. Folk there never had much use for me, nor I for them, and absence had not made any hearts grow fonder. Still I had other kinfolk there, from my mother’s family, and though they were not overjoyed to see me trudging up the path to their door, they saw their bounden duty as kinsmen, and they let me stay awhile, provided of course that I didn’t eat too much and that I did my share of the chores, and more. They would not think to tell anyone that I was there, for my coming and going interested them not at all, and news of Wilkes County never reached the holler where their cabin stood. The outside world could go hang for all they cared. I figured to settle in until the trouble blew over down in Happy Valley, and then I would see what I wanted to do next.

  I had not been there more than a week before Ann turned up at the door, escorted by Cousin Sam Foster. It is easy enough to track somebody in these parts, I suppose, for there are few enough people, and not much else to do besides take note of their comings and goings. One of the young’uns let her in—Ann does not take no for an answer—and then they sent him to fetch me from out the garden, where I was hoeing weeds in the hot sun. I might have thought it was a rest to leave off working in the heat, but being around Ann was never restful. Either she was ordering me about to tend her babes or cook and wash up, being too lazy to do it herself, or else she was in a bate about something or other, and everyone within earshot must listen to her moaning and bewailing about whatever it was. I had been about as glad to escape one as the other, but it wouldn’t do to let her know that. I am particular about letting anybody know what I think about anything, because knowing such things might give a body power over me. When I came inside and saw her standing there beside the hearth, I wiped my hands on my aprons, tore off my poke bonnet, and went and embraced her as if seeing her had been my dearest wish in the world, but I took note of the fact that Ann did not come alone. I had walked all the way to Wilkes County in the dead of winter right by myself, and nobody spared a thought to my safety or comfort, but here in the middle of high summer Ann Melton must have a gentleman escort to ease her journey up the mountain. I added that to my stock of grievances against her.

  Either the journey had taken the shine off her perfection, or else all the worry over Tom was taking its toll, for you’d have thought her well over twenty-one to look at her. Dark hollows shadowed her eyes and cheekbones, and her dress hung on her bony frame as if it were a hand-me-down from a woman twice her size. I did not remark upon the change in her, but I was pleased to see that she had got acquainted with suffering.

  She did not mince words. “You have to come back with me, Pauline,” she said, in a voice like flint.

  I never tell people what I want. I just make sure that what I want sounds as if I am doing them a favor, so I said, “I cannot impose on your kindness any longer, Cousin. You and James were good to take me in when I was sick, but I have trespassed on your hospitality long enough.” What I meant was that with the Wilkes County justice of the peace sending out warrants to arrest people right and left, I wanted to get well away from there, before I got caught in the snare myself.

  That ought to have been plain enough for anybody to see, but most people cannot look past their own desires, and, since Ann was one of that sort, she believed my words instead of her own common sense.

  She waved aside my protests of sparing her my presence. “It doesn’t matter, Pauline. You have to come back. Tom is still in jail, and I hear they may be looking to arrest you next. If you stay here, it will look like you’ve run away.”

  Well, I had. Moreover, I couldn’t see any percentage in going back into the thick of a legal tangle. Ann made it sound as if she was worried about me, but I’d never be foolish enough to believe that. Ann Melton would not walk forty miles up a steep mountain to save me from being torn apart by wild hogs, much less just to keep me from being arrested. In fact the only thing I could think of that would make her put forth that much effort was him: Tom Dula. I can believe that she’d walk barefoot through a briar patch for his sake—and not for much else.

  Sam Foster stayed silent in all of this, looking as embarrassed as a man watching childbirth. He had done his duty to see his kinswoman safely up the mountain, but it was plain enough that he wished himself elsewhere now. James Melton had not come with her. He would have said that the farm, the children, and his shoe making kept him too busy for such an excursion, but I think the truth was that he did not much care what happened to her, and he was tired of dancing to her tune.

  I studied her gaunt face, trying to work out what she had really come about. How would my coming back help Tom? Did she want me to tell some lie on his behalf? But perhaps there was no subtle scheme for me to divine. Ann’s only gift from fortune was her perfect face; being able to think clearly and make a plan were not skills she possessed. I thought it most likely that she missed having someone to talk to, especially now. Hardly a word ever passed between Ann and James Melton, and she could hardly expect him to care that Tom had been put in jail. To Ann, it was no use fretting unless there was someone to hear you out, and she had no woman friends, for not a soul in the settlement could abide her. She thought of no one but herself, and she cared nothing for the womanly concerns of home and children. Who among them would hear her out if she wanted to weep and wail about her lover being imprisoned? Why, nobody. But she paid me eleven cents a day to cater to her whims, and I suppose that in the end she forgot that my friendship was boughten. All along she had thought she was doing me a favor by taking me in, and now she was here asking me for the favor of coming back.

  “I never bargained on being mixed up with the law, Cousin. Eleven cents a day won’t buy that.”

  She frowned a little, for she wasn’t used to being denied anything. “But we’re kin, Pauline. Couldn’t you come back for my sake?”

  Why do handsome folk always think you ought to be honored to do them a kindness? I didn’t owe her nothing. I just stared at her, wondering if she would ever realize that.

  “Pauline, there ain’t nobody to talk to. I can’t tell James about any of this, and like as not he’d be glad to get shut of Tom anyhow. You know that none of those sanctimonious biddies in the settlement will give me the time of day. And with Tom gone…”

  Ann began to weep, though she might flood the room with tears for all I cared.

  “Ain’t we friends, Pauline, as well as kin? Didn’t I take you in when you was sick? And now I am most sick to death with worry over all this, and I miss you. I miss having you around.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said. “Let me get my things.” I did not agree to go because I wanted to help either Ann or Tom, or because I cared one whit for her tears and her tribulations. I went because I wanted to watch what was going to happen. I also thought that I might need to be there in order to make sure that it happened.

  * * *

  I went back with them, leaving the cool shade of the mountain groves for the blistering sun on the cornfields of Happy Valley, and many’s the time I cursed myself for a fool for doing it. I settled back in to doing the chores on the farm, tend
ing the Meltons’ girls, and milking the cows, and listening to Ann fret about what would become of them.

  Once she said, “Poor Dula. I wonder if he will be hung. Are you a friend of Dula? I am. Are you a friend of mine?”

  I thought that worry and eating next to nothing had addled her brain, but I forced myself to smile. “Why we are of the same blood, Ann. I am more than your friend. Did I not come back with you in your time of need?”

  She sprang up from her chair, and grabbed my arm. “Come with me now then. I need to see that it’s all right.”

  I hung back, knowing what was in her mind. “Come on where?”

  She gave me a sullen glare. “Just out to the woods. Not far from here.”

  I knew what she meant, but I wouldn’t say it out loud any more than she would. Finally, I said, “You mean … to where the horse was tied up?”

  She shook her head, as pale as I’ve ever seen her. “Not there. Just down the Reedy Branch Road a ways and up the ridge.”

  I was tempted to ask her how she knew exactly where the horse had been, but she looked in no mood to be trifled with, so I kept on pretending I didn’t know what had happened. She strode to the door and held it open, nodding for me to come with her, but I just blinked at her, like I was slow to understand, and finally she said, “Come on! I need to make sure that the grave has not been disturbed. Animals might have dug her up.”

  “But what if one of the neighbors was to see us going there and tell the searchers, Ann? What then?”

  “What neighbors? My mama? Wash Anderson and his sister? They won’t think anything is amiss. They haven’t yet, have they? We’re just going out for an afternoon walk.” She tried to laugh and show that she wasn’t a bit afraid. “T’ain’t far. Come on.”

  She shooed me out the door like a stray cat, without even giving me time to stir the stew pot or put on a shawl, and a minute later, we were making our way down that steep hill that leads down to the Stony Fork Road just opposite Lotty Foster’s cabin. She wasn’t out in the yard, though—drunk already, I thought as we passed her door—and I saw no one about at the Andersons’, either. The Bates’ place was as deserted as ever. I had thought we might be heading there, for the searchers had been milling around it for weeks now, and I knew they had found the horse’s rein there, but Ann did not spare a glance for the west side of the road. She trudged ahead another quarter mile or so, directing her steps toward the wooded ridge that ran alongside the Reedy Branch trace. It was down that road near a mile that the Dulas lived, and I expected her to set off following the creek down to the Dulas’ woods, but she just kept forging straight on through the field and threading her way through the weeds, heading up the ridge. She didn’t hesitate, either. She knew exactly where she was headed.

  About two hundred yards past the creek and up the ridge, we had left the open fields of the valley, and now we were stumping along through the woods along the southern slope of the ridge, with Ann forging so purposefully ahead that it was plain she knew the way by heart. I was trailing along after her, dodging briars, trying to keep up with her, and hoping that if one of us trod on a rattlesnake, it would be her.

  I stepped on a dead branch once, and the crack it made when it broke under my foot made my heart jump clear up to my throat. I don’t get scared the way other people do, but I can be startled, by sudden moves or loud noises, same as anybody. I was more careful after that, and not so intent on keeping up with Ann. If she wanted to show me something, she could wait for me.

  We went a good ways up that ridge. I think that if it had not been high summer, I might have had a good view of the valley below, but the trees hemmed us in, making it as dark as twilight in midafternoon. The scrub oaks and pines made a canopy over the clearing, shading it from the sun. There was a bare patch underneath one of the trees, and around it the grass had been trampled down. The rest of the clearing was covered with grass or leaves, so this one bare patch caught my eye at once.

  Ann stood in the middle of the clearing and looked all around her, and I could tell that she was trying to see the woods through somebody else’s eyes—the searchers, like as not. Was there anything out of place that might make them take a closer look?

  “There’s newly spaded earth yonder by that bush,” I said, pointing to a bare patch of ground. “Anybody could spot that.”

  She gave me a hard, unbroken stare. “What do you know about it, Pauline?”

  I shrugged. “More than I care to know. Just that this is as far as our poor cousin Laura got that day. I reckon you’d know the rest, though.”

  She turned away without a word, and walked over to the bare patch, which was next to a big bush at the edge of the clearing. Then she knelt down and crawled partway underneath it. I went over there, too, and I got down so I could see what she was looking at. I was more interested in watching Ann than I was in what she was investigating. After all these months of watching her laze in her bed whilst James Melton and I did all the work about the place, it was strange to see her so energetic and determined. Seeing her hunched under that bush in her brown calico dress put me in mind of a fox, trying to dig out a nest of rabbits. I reckoned Ann had already got her prey, though, though I wouldn’t have said so out loud just then. She has a fearsome temper, does Ann.

  She crawled back out, dusting her hands on her skirt, and I peered down through the leaves, but there wasn’t much to see: only a line of newly spaded earth, as if someone had dug a four-foot trench and then filled it back in. The lower branches of the bush covered it well enough, if you didn’t know where to look, but we both knew that hunting dogs don’t go by the look of things. I decided not to point this out to Ann, though, for she was in a high-strung state as it was, and if I’d told her that trench might be discovered, I’ll be bound that she’d have tried to make me dig it up with my bare hands. Ann Melton never dug that grave, I thought. She may have stood by and watched the damp earth being spaded, but I could not imagine her soiling her tiny white hands with a shovel handle, nor putting forth the effort to dig a hole in the ground big enough to receive a human body. Oh, I could see her killing somebody quick enough. That fearsome temper of hers would carry her through that enterprise, but the arduous task of hauling a corpse up the ridge and concealing it under the soil—no, she would leave the spadework to someone else, and since I had not been pressed in to service to do it for her, I knew who had.

  As it was, she contented herself with picking up a few handfuls of leaves and putting them down over the bare spot. She made me do the same, so I scooped up a pile of wet oak leaves that had been there all winter, and I let them fall on top of the spaded earth.

  It seemed funny to think of somebody I knew and was kin to being down there, just a few inches below my fingertips. I reckon if I was to claw at the earth instead of dropping leaves on the spot, I could uncover her face and see her looking up at me.

  I would like to have seen what her face looked like, after two months dead, but I had Ann to reckon with, and I knew that if I tried to dig, Ann would either collapse in a screaming heap or else pick up the nearest rock and lay me out where I stood to keep me from telling what I knew. So I contented myself with dumping another handful of leaves on the grave.

  We didn’t stay much longer after that. Ann walked twice around the clearing, studying that bush from every possible angle, but she made no move to do anything more. I figured she wouldn’t. Moving the body was not to be thought of, even if her nerves could have stood it, which I doubted. We had brought no tools with us. Besides, I had yet to see Ann lift a finger to do anything.

  Finally she sighed and wiped her muddy hands on her skirt. “They won’t see anything. Let’s go back.”

  As I followed her out of the clearing, she turned and caught my arm, digging her nails in to my skin. “You know what’s down there, don’t you, Pauline?”

  I could see there was no point in lying to her, so I just nodded.

  She dug her nails deeper in to my arm. “Well, if you don’t keep your
mouth shut about this, you’ll be out here, too.”

  I believed her, and I resolved to be more careful of her in future. I wasn’t afraid of her—just wary, same as you’d be if you saw a snake on the path in front of you. I knew she had a temper and she was too selfish ever to be trusted, but now she had told me something she ought to have kept to herself. Now she had cause to be afraid of me, and Ann always struck out at what made her fearful. So I must be watchful.

  They say that once a dog has killed chickens, you might as well shoot it, for it has got the taste of blood and will never stop killing. I didn’t think it would come to that with Ann, but I reckoned it would be easier for her if she took a notion to do it again.

  PAULINE FOSTER

  Late August 1866

  I took to visiting the little general store in Elkville every chance I got, just to hear what people were saying about Laura Foster. Mostly, I’d just listen, but if the story looked like it was dying down, I’d blow a little on the embers to get it going again. No more than Ann talked to most of our neighbors, I didn’t figure any of it would get back to her, but she must have had her ear to the ground from worry about news of Laura, because it did.

  One time I ran into Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson there at Cowle’s store, and they were still talking about the disappearance. Ever since they went and fetched Tom Dula out of Tennessee a few weeks back, they had fancied themselves lawmen and thought it was up to them to set everything to rights—or else they were just nosier than six old ladies.

  It is more than a mile from the Meltons’ place on Stony Fork Road down to Cowle’s store, and by the time I had walked it in the summer heat I was so hot and tired that I was in no mood to suffer fools gladly.

  Jack hailed me as I came up the path. “Pauline—here—stop a minute. You’re a cousin of Laura Foster, ain’t ye?”

  I nodded, trying to edge past him and into the store, out of the burning sunshine. “We don’t much bother about the begets in the Foster family,” I told him, “but I reckon I’m kin to her right enough, through my daddy and hers. Why?”