The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Ballad Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  I hoped he was one of those older men who looked at any young girl as a daughter, because then if I stayed all polite and big-eyed he might think me an innocent fool and let me go. I wished I knew how to cry, because that would really make him pity me, but I never did learn how to do it. The best I could do was to take deep breaths and make my voice all quavery, and dab at my eyes as if there were tears about to fall.

  “I didn’t do nothing, sir. I was just joshing with Ben and Jack here so’s they would take notice of me.”

  “Oh, they noticed, all right. We have Tom Dula locked up here for the murder of Miss Laura Foster, and you claimed that you helped him. When these peace officers testify to that in a court of law, I reckon you’ll hang right alongside Dula.”

  I saw then that there was room for only one big-eyed, innocent girl in this matter, and that was Laura Foster, who garnered all the pity by being dead. What’s more I was mindful that when the sheriff talked about hanging me, it was no empty threat. When President Lincoln was shot at the end of the War last year, folk said they rounded up everybody who was anywhere near the actor that did the shooting and strung them all up together in Washington. One of them was a woman—the landlady who ran the boardinghouse where the actor stayed, and they hung her same as the others. I wasn’t scared, but I saw that I might have stepped in to more of a trap than I had bargained for. These lawmen were hell-bent to make somebody pay for the killing of Laura, and they didn’t much care who, as long as it was solved quick. I thought I had better get myself out of trouble, before they decided to make me the scapegoat alongside of Tom Dula.

  I hung my head. “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

  They ended up keeping me in that cell all night, but I didn’t mind, because after everything I told them, I knew I could never go back to the Meltons’ house anyhow. Leastways, not while Ann was still there—but after all I had told them, I didn’t think that would be much longer. They kept asking me the same things over and over, until the light faded from that barred window, and they had to light the oil lamp to keep going. Right around full dark, the jailer brought me some beans and corn bread, and they waited while I wolfed it down, and then they went right back to peppering me with questions.

  I told them why I had come down the mountain in the first place, and what I was ailing from. Sheriff Hix got even more squinty-eyed then, and looked like he had stepped in something, but it ain’t a crime to be sick, and he didn’t have to like me, as long as he believed me.

  So I told about how it was at the Meltons’ farm, with Ann doing no work and not even sharing a bed with James. I allowed as how many’s the night I had seen Tom Dula and Ann Melton rutting together in her bed with James asleep an arm’s length away. I said that Ann had made me have to do with Tom Dula out in the barn one time, so that people would think he was coming to the farm to see me instead of her. And when Tom took up with our cousin Laura Foster? Yes, Ann surely did mind that Tom was going over there. They had set-tos over it more than once. And the night that Tom ran off to Tennessee, I saw her take a knife out from underneath her bed and give it to him.

  The Sheriff leaned in close and stared me in the eyes. “Do you think the pair of them killed Laura Foster together?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” I said. “I never seen it happen. But Ann showed me the grave.”

  You’d have thought they’d been struck by lightning when I said that. They looked at one another and then back at me, but I met their gaze as steady as a rock to show I wasn’t lying. Finally Mr. Hix said, “Where is it?”

  “On the ridge beside the Stony Fork Road. Across from the Bates’ place.”

  He nodded. “We’ll ride out to Reedy Branch in the morning, and you can take us there. Is there anything else you care to say?”

  I thought about it for a minute or two before I shook my head. They would never hear one word about John Anderson’s part in the story if I could prevent it. Not that I cared one whit about saving Cousin Laura’s nut brown boy, but if the lawmen were to find out about him, they’d hang him for sure and seek no further for culprits. That would let Ann off the hook, which was no part of my plans.

  “That’s all I can tell you,” I said.

  * * *

  I thought it was just as well that Tom Dula couldn’t hear through that wall between our cells, for if he had known what I was telling the lawmen about Ann, I think he would have torn that wall apart with his bare hands to get to me. As it was, I slept well, with the cool night breeze blowing in from the window, and no snores or thrashing bedfellows to disturb my rest. I could sleep past daybreak, and whatever they gave me for breakfast, I would not be the one who had to cook it. Then when the sun had burned the mist away from the hills, I’d go back to Reedy Branch, but not walking and begging favors, like I had back in March. This time I would ride like a queen down Stony Fork Road, and they would all be sorry that they had treated me with scorn.

  I hoped it would be a pale horse. That would be fittin’.

  PAULINE FOSTER

  September 1,1866

  I thought it would be just me and a couple of lawmen going back to Reedy Branch, but word had got out that I was fixing to tell them where to find the body of Laura Foster, so that by the time we rode out from Wilkesboro to the Stony Fork Road, we must have looked like Stoneman’s Cavalry paying a return visit to the county.

  I was in exalted company, though they took little enough notice of me, except to follow my directions. Colonel Isbell himself was there on a fine blood horse. He had vowed to see the matter through to its grim conclusion, and he was true to his word. There was an older man with him—another one of the gentry, I judged, from the look of his mount and the cut of his clothes. J.W. Winkler, who had spent weeks searching the area and had found the mare’s broken rein back in June, met us as we proceeded up the Reedy Branch Road. I waved to him, but he looked right through me as if he didn’t know me at all. They all thought I should have gone running to the law a few weeks back, as soon as Ann led me to that clearing, but I had to think it over. What was to stop them from thinking that I had lied about Ann’s taking me to the grave site? It seemed to me that if I showed anyone where it was, that proved only that I knew its whereabouts—not that anyone else did. And I thought that the more unwilling I was to tell what I knew, the more likely they would be to believe me. So it proved, anyhow, for no one ever doubted my story—and, indeed, it was true as I told it, but the lawmen had no way of knowing that for sure. I was lucky that they took my word for it, but then people will often believe what you say if you are calm in the telling of it. They seem to think that people who are tearful or het up are telling lies, but sometimes it’s the other way around. I can lie till the cock crows and never turn a hair, while a truthful fool will weep and storm while he tells his tale, in an effort to be believed. I hoped Ann would wail and shout when they arrested her. That would seal her fate, for sure.

  When we got to the spine of the ridge, well past the Dulas’ farm, heading toward Stony Fork Road, where the Meltons’, Lotty Foster’s, and the Bates’ place all sat within sight of one another, I signaled for the procession to stop, and, with my back to the creek, I pointed them toward the steep slope in front of us that led to the wooded crest of the ridge.

  “She led me up there,” I said, stabbing with my finger upward toward the tall trees. “I waited on a fallen log, while she went and looked at the grave. But it lies up there on the ridge somewhere.”

  They turned their horses toward the field, and picked their way along, studying the ground as they went, but they were well below where me and Ann went, so it weren’t no use, but I didn’t bother to say so. One of the riders stayed close to my mount as we climbed. All the way from town they had taken care that somebody stayed near me all the time, in case I took a notion to run, but I was staying put to see what happened. I sang out when we reached the dead log, and I climbed off that horse, and settled back down on it. As I watched, the men spread out, working in pairs,
slipping this way and that, through the bushes and past the trees, always searching for broken branches and clabbered ground. One of the Wilkesboro men stood next to me with a pistol on his hip, watching the searchers go across the clearing and head farther up the slope, but he wasn’t interested in passing the time of day with me.

  It was cool in the shade up there on the ridge, and I leaned back in a shaft of sunlight, smelling dead leaves and damp earth, and watching three gray pigeons flit about in the treetops. I could have done with a dipper of water and a hunk of bread and meat, because it had been a long time since my jailhouse breakfast, such as it was, but none of the searchers stopped to eat. I suppose that hunting for a body three months dead had put them off their feed.

  They kept circling higher and higher up the ridge, going slow, and peering down at the ground as they went. Then a good ways above where I sat, I heard shouts, and the men came back out of the thickets and from the lower woods, and they all headed up at once in the direction of the yelling.

  I reckoned they had found her.

  Nobody bothered to tell me what was going on, but a few minutes later, someone ran back down and called out to my minder, “Mr. Horton’s horse shied like it smelled something foul, and the colonel got down and saw that new sod had been put on the ground there. We think it’s her down there. You can take the prisoner on up to the thicket to identify the remains. I’m off to fetch the doctor.”

  With that, he nudged his mount, and began to pick his way around the logs and underbrush, heading down the slope toward the Reedy Branch Road. It was a good two miles from here to Cowle’s store and from the river road, two miles in the other direction to Elkville, so I judged it would be more than an hour before Dr. Carter would arrive to have his say about whatever the searchers unearthed.

  I had seen dead folks before. They died often enough from want and wounds back in the War, and a time or two I had to help with the laying out, but I had never seen what was left of a corpse after three months underground. I wondered if they would be able to tell who it was if they did find anything.

  When we reached the thicket where the searchers were gathered, I edged my way past a couple of men until I could see what they were doing at the grave site. Colonel Isbell and Mr. Horton had dismounted now, and they had scraped away the sod covering from the dug-out trench, and I could see that there was a cloth-covered lump lying there, not even two feet below the level of the ground: a shallow grave, indeed, but still deeper than I could picture Ann digging with her fine white hands.

  The Colonel knelt beside the trench, and pointed to a mark on the side where the covering sod had been removed. “Look at that cut. The blade of a mattock made that, I’ll be bound.”

  The other men looked at one another. Word had got around with the rest of the gossip that Martha Gilbert had seen Tom out skelping with a mattock near Lotty Foster’s place on the day before Laura went missing. But nobody said anything.

  Then, with everybody still watching, he reached down and lifted the bundle of clothes out of the hole so that we could see what was underneath. What, not who. It didn’t look like a “who” anymore. What was left was a cloth-covered pile of skin and bones that put me in mind of a slaughtered hog—a skinny one that had run wild on the mountain and then died at the end of a harsh winter.

  One of the lawmen motioned for me to come closer, and I stepped up to the very edge of the hole. “Is that Laura Foster?” he asked me.

  The body was set in on its side, but faceup, and, although the hole was nearly two feet deep, it had been dug too short to accommodate even a body as small as that one. The legs were tucked up under the corpse, to make them fit. It was no proper grave. Just a place to dump a hunk of rotting meat.

  I glanced around at the faces of the searchers. Some of them looked green around the gills, and the rest were ashen with anger and muttering amongst themselves. I looked back at the decaying lump of flesh that used to be my cousin. I knew her better than any of them did. But what was the use of taking on over her being dead? She was past hearing us now.

  The skin on the face was mostly gone, but there was a hank of light brown hair still attached to the scalp. I knew that color. I could just see her feet, where they were tucked up behind her. She was wearing little leather shoes that I had seen James Melton making for her. They had held up better than the dress material in the damp earth.

  I knew the dress, too: it was a checkered one, homemade. I had seen her cutting the cloth and stitching it. Over top of it she had put on a dark wool cape that was maybe too warm to wear on a May morning, but it was too good for her to leave behind, so she’d put it on anyhow. It was fastened around her shoulders with a pinchbeck brooch pin, the only finery she had. I wondered what would become of that with her dead.

  It was her, all right.

  The lips were drawn back in that skinless face, and I could get a clear look at her teeth. They were big teeth for her little face, and there was a space between the two front ones. Anybody who knew her would recognize those teeth.

  “It is Laura Foster,” I said. “I’d know her by her teeth—that space in-between the front ones. And I was with her when she sewed that there dress she is wearing.”

  Several of the others muttered in agreement. Most of them were acquainted with her—and it crossed my mind that some of them knew her maybe too well, though they’d never own up to that now. But even with the face mostly eaten away by the damp and the worms, we all could tell it was her.

  One of the searchers said, “How did she die?” He wasn’t talking to me, though, so I didn’t answer.

  “Doctor’s on his way,” the Colonel told him. “We ought not to touch the body overmuch till he can examine it.”

  “You reckon she was carrying a child?”

  I had to put my hand across my mouth to hide a grin. What would that have mattered—to Tom or anybody else? Why, Lotty Foster had five young’uns by as many fathers, and nobody had bothered to marry her. If Laura Foster had been the Colonel’s girl or the daughter of a lawyer or a doctor, then there’d have been a hue and cry if she fell pregnant, and the poor fellow courting her would have been hauled before the justice of the peace at the business end of a shotgun for a hasty wedding. But Laura’s good name was in the mud long before Tom Dula ever took up with her. She had no more notion of chastity than any of the other Foster women, which is to say: none at all. Were these graven fools really thinking that Tom had killed her to keep from having to marry her? Why if she had put such a notion to him, he’d have laughed in her face—or else told her to saddle that baby on one of her many other lovers.

  I didn’t say any of that out loud, though. I could see that the sight of that bony little corpse was already making the searchers forget the real girl they had known all her life. By the time they had given her a proper funeral and commenced to heaping cabbage roses on her grave, every one of them would be remembering Laura Foster as a pure and beautiful maiden, a princess right out of a fairy story. T’would be no use trying to remind them what she was really like. She had been replaced by a changeling, and they had already forgotten the real girl.

  “Wait for the doctor,” somebody said. “He’ll know.”

  * * *

  They left her there right where they found her, so as not to disturb her before Dr. Carter got to see her. One of the deputies untied the bundle of clothes, though. On the morning Laura went missing, Mrs. Scott had seen it slung over the bare back of that mare, and that was how she had come to ask where Laura was heading. Considering that the bundle was all that Laura Foster had in the world, it was a sorry little parcel, indeed. A few scraps of raggedy underclothes, a wooden fine-tooth comb, a yellowed cotton nightdress … it wasn’t much to show for twenty years of living on this earth, but I wasn’t sorry for her, for I had no more possessions to my name than she did, and maybe she had all that she deserved, at that.

  The men stood around smoking or talking quietly to one another, and they all turned away from the sight of Laur
a’s body lying there in the hole. I suppose it seemed uncivil to them to be carrying on with the small pleasures of living in the presence of one who could no longer enjoy them. It wouldn’t have put me off my feed to look at her, but there were pleasanter sights in the wildwood, and nobody had anything to eat, so I walked a little ways away from the grave, and sat down in a patch of sunlight, thinking I might close my eyes and rest until the doctor came. It was only then that I remembered that I had not screamed when they showed me the corpse. I cannot weep, but I wished I had remembered to scream or make like I was going to faint. Somebody might remember that I did not act affrighted enough and hold it against me.

  * * *

  Finally we heard shouts from the field below that told us the lawman was back, bringing Dr. George Carter in tow. When they finally reached the laurel thicket where we were congregated, the doctor stood there alone for a moment, looking like a lord, sleek in his black cloth suit and string tie, and his shiny black boots, while the rest of the men were in ordinary work clothes, and muddy from a morning spent combing the woods. I raised my hand and gave the doctor a little wave, because, after all, I was his patient, and I had been seeing him regular these six months or so, but he looked right on past me as if I had been one of the hounds. Maybe he thought I was mixed up in the killing, or maybe he thought my pox made me not fitten to associate with, or maybe he just didn’t see me. I didn’t care much; he had other things on his mind.

  Colonel Isbell went forward and shook Dr. Carter’s hand, and the rest of the crowd parted as if he was Moses, and he walked over to the open grave and knelt down beside it. He stared down at the sorry little heap of flesh for a minute or more, but all he said was, “Well, now…,” and he blinked his eyes a time or two real fast. I don’t reckon doctors cry, either.