by Bill Brooks
This same Billy Dixon who, comes the night, drinks at Swain’s to escape whatever sorrow ails him, cursing his lot in life, bemoaning all manner of travesties. I’ve heard him. I’ve sat in the tavern and watched him damn his own life and slobber his heart out to anyone who would listen. Once I went out back of Swain’s to relieve myself in an alley and saw Billy down on his knees in the mud, his head up under a slattern’s dress. I could tell it was him by the checked trousers he always wore. And I felt sorry for him listening to her cries of false ardor for him as he worked away at her.
Oh, Billy child, oh, Billy . . . you’re such a good lad there . . .
It was after that he confessed to me he had no true friends and wondered would I be one to him. I didn’t know how to answer, but over time allowed I understood the lonely heart of a man, and told him about the war a little but not overly much. It seemed to break him down some to have someone to share thoughts with. But it turned him into a stray cat that once you set out a bowl of cream for comes round again and again. I had no heart to turn aside his offer of friendship. I never thought of Billy back then as my own true friend. That came later on.
Billy Dixon
I’d see Tom in Swain’s most nights. He’d sit to himself and drink and it seemed to me he was as lonely as I was. So we had that in common: our loneliness. But we had something else in common too. We had Ann in common, only Tom did not know of it, unless she told him, and I doubted that she ever had. For she threatened me with the High Sheriff was I ever to say anything about our relations. Tom did not seem to me a man who was very worldly in spite of the fact he’d been off fighting in the war for three years. He seemed a simple, shy young man with no more in common with most of the folks in Happy Valley than myself. So I took to him because of our alienation, and maybe I took to him a little because Ann had taken up with him even though she was married to Melton and maybe there was a little bit of me that wanted to know what secrets he held to get women to love him like that.
So I bought us a round and forced my company upon him. And when he did not reject me, I told him of my troubles—about women mostly.
Listen, Tom. I’m cursed with this pitted face. No decent woman will have anything to do with me.
He suggested I give the Widow Weaver a try, her husband having fallen under the wheels of a wagon that broke his neck the winter previous. He suggested that she wasn’t too old or alarming in looks for me, and that I might make a handy father to her three youngsters—me being a schoolteacher and all.
Tis hard for a widow with children to find a good man considering all the good men who never came back from the war, his argument went. There was something somber and distant in his voice whenever he spoke about the war, even just a little.
O, I know, Tom. I know it. But I’ve given the Widow Weaver a chance and she refused me. Even though Happy Valley is bereft of eligible men, she will not have me.
The one I saw you with that night . . . out there in the alley . . . what about her?
Flo? O, hardly would she make a proper wife. I paid her four bits for the privilege of going under her skirts, so desperate was I for relations. She’d do it with anybody for as little as even a twist of tobacco. You won’t spread it around you seen me with her, will you, Tom?
No, no.
In the span of a few drinks, we became friends, I think.
Tom Dooley
And so I paused there for a little while, listening to the children reciting their numbers for a man whose loneliness they might never know, realizing that as children go, they more likely laughed at him behind his back and called him made-up names.
For a moment I felt the need to go to Billy and tell him of where I’d just come from, tell him what it was to sleep with a man’s wife in one bed and him in another there in the same room. I wanted to ask Billy if, being a man well educated, he could tell me what it must be like for Melton to lie there in the stony silence of his soul and listen to his wife carry on with another, all the while knowing that she would only give herself to her husband under physical force. Something she told me happened more than once.
I’d never give myself to him willingly, Tom. It was understood right from the start. I fight him each step, claw at his eyes and face until he forces me down . . . That’s the only way he has me.
I didn’t like to hear of it, of course. It made me angry enough to want to kill him. But I know what it is to kill a man and it ain’t easy, no matter what the circumstances. I’d seen my share of kilt men in the war. And if you’ve not seen a body with a chopped-off hand or a torn away leg amid a field of harvested corpses, then don’t tell me about what it is to kill a man.
O, I hate to keep thinking about it, but every little thing keeps coming back to me at the oddest times. I listen to the children and remember that among us boys was a good elder who prayed over us and said were anything to happen to us, God would understand and forgive us our sins and take us into his heavenly kingdom. He said that God understood the mortal plight we’d been placed in by our country and so on and so forth. He was a Scots and rolled his R’s and was later shot by his own troop who mistook him for a Yankee spy as he made his nightly visitations to the boys.
I’d rather go home than to heaven.
This, Louis told me tearfully one sodden night when the rains fell so steadily the cold and dampness nearly drove us mad.
So would I, dear friend, so would I.
Do you think it’s wrong, Tom?
What?
What we’ve been driven to do?
The war, the killing?
That, but the other, too?
I still feel sometimes his tender hands under my tunic.
Sure it is, but who is to say if we’ll even live beyond tomorrow’s morning coffee? And if’n we don’t, then who is to say for certain there is a heaven or a hell, or if God is in charge of it all, or if nobody is?
And as his hands explored the tender places as he spoke of his lovely Minnie and how she’d do such sweet and tender things for him and how he would for her.
O, how I miss her, Tom. When a man cleaves to his wife, no man can put that asunder.
Yes, yes, I know. And she must miss you just as terribly, Louis.
His sobs were of tenderness lost.
But when life turns on us and tears us away from those we love dearest, tears us away from everything good and decent and makes the world around us so terrible . . .
In the night we could hear the thunder, like cannon, rolling o’er us, or was it the other way around?
Sometimes he called out her name—Minnie . . .
I’m ashamed now to admit it, but Louis and I shared what human things the war allowed us in those cold dark times under blankets soaked in rain and snow, and we shared what we could on warm summer evenings when we’d sneak away from the encampment to be alone and hear unnamed rivers slip their banks.
The sudden cessation of the children’s voices causes me to look down at my worn boots. What terrible shape they’re in.
Melton is a cobbler and I will need new ones soon. Would it be too much to have Melton make me a pair—would it only add insult to injury? There is no other cobbler throughout the entire valley.
The hoarfrost has burned out of the mountains, and now they stand darkly blue and brooding down upon the valley and me and Billy, Ann and Melton, and all the rest.
Ann was there at the station when I left, sturdy-limbed and hopeful. And she was there again when I marched home, this gaunt thing with all hope snuffed out. She said she hardly recognized me.
I can never forgive you, Tom, for letting Melton have me.
Had I know the terrible price I paid for the adventure, I would have not gone.
O, Tom, these years have been terrible for us both.
Then you married him?
I had no choice.
You could have waited, run away and hid yourself?
If not Melton, surely then another like him, dear sweet Tom. All that stayed behind were the lam
e and the old and the niggers.
But you had to know I’d return.
We read the death lists, but some told that not all the dead got listed. And after two years of not hearing from you . . .
Well, I forgave her for her impatience. For that is what lovers do, forgive each other even in the face of lies and deceptions. I was too weary to care much and even a lie told well seemed to me equally as suitable as the truth told badly. As I stood there by the vine-snaked fence, Raymond, the daft colored man, came up the road and paused, staring toward the schoolhouse. He used to be the Irishman’s man, but quit along with the other few slaves in Happy Valley when the Proclamation came down. I don’t know that he wanted to quit, but when the Irishman died, he dint have a choice. Daft and childish he stood there, his lips blubbering in effort to speak.
I likes to hear the childun sing.
They weren’t singing, Raymond. They were reciting their numbers.
I knows it, Mr. Tom. But sometimes they sing and I like to hear ’em.
I could see the welts along his arms and across his bared calves exposed below his too-short trousers. I could see the welt around his neck. Welts like black snakes. Put there no doubt by a black snake whip.
You better keep moving, Raymond. Someone might get the wrong idea you standing outside the schoolhouse.
He grinned broadly in his innocence, not knowing that I understood about how some men in the valley would equate Raymond’s presence in the vicinity of little white children, little white girls most especially. But when I said again how he should move along, he nodded and went on down the road. I think he worked some for Grayson now.
The schoolchildren’s voices were raised again and I went on down the road. Pauline was sitting on my front step when I arrived home again. She looked up with those brooding eyes so unlike those of her cousin Ann’s.
Where you been, Tom. I’ve been a-waiting.
Stayed at Cecil’s the night. Helped him build a hog shed and we drank after and I fell out there on a pallet.
It was a lie. But I didn’t figure I owed any truth to Pauline.
I’ve been a-waiting for you, Tom. Came early this morning, soon’s I could get away from the tavern. Mr. Swain doesn’t like me to be gone from him. I told him I was sick with female troubles. He said, go on then, come back ’round soon as you’re feeling better.
I took her face in my hands in spite of my indifference.
You look half starved. Don’t Swain feed you?
He takes advantage of me, Tom.
But don’t he feed you?
I won’t eat his food.
I led her into the cabin and closed the door behind us shutting out the bright morning, Ann’s passion still running like a fever in my blood. I placed Pauline before me and began deliberately to undress her. I had no heart to take her, but she was there and we both knew why she’d come to see me. So I took her like she wanted me to.
O, Tom. O, Tom.
Tears of joy or tears of sorrow, I cannot say, spilled from her eyes.
I shouldn’t take advantage of you like Swain does.
Love me, Tom. Love me hard as I love you.
You’re just a little sad thing, ain’t you? Like a little sad flower growed all alone.
Yes, call me that, Tom. Call me your little flower.
With great exhaustion I took her and she did her best to satisfy me. And later we lay still with the day waning toward the noon hour ushered in by the harsh caw of ravens somewhere.
You ought not to have come here today, Pearl.
Pearl was the pet name I’d decided to give her. Pauline sounded like too old a name for her.
I wanted to be with you, Tom. I wanted to be with you like this. And I’m glad I come, ain’t you?
You know I can’t see you regular. You know about Ann and me.
I know. I know all about you. I don’t care, though. I just want you to love me, Tom.
It can’t be nothing regular. Just so you understand that.
I don’t care. I don’t care if it ain’t regular. Just once in a while, Tom. Just once in every little while.
We slept and woke again and she lay herself atop me and kissed my mouth in an unschooled way until she roused my cob again and we fornicated, but this time there wasn’t anything new in it for me and I finished quick and told her she had to go.
I stood in the doorway and watched her go up the path back toward Swain’s. She turned and waved as she neared the road and I waved back knowing she had taken some of my pride with her, had carried it off and would never give it back.
Beat the drum, Tom.
Pauline Foster
O, how I loved Tom. But he never loved me. A girl can tell if a boy loves her or he don’t. But I pretended he did, and I thought if I were to go to him often enough and give myself to him freely, he might come around to loving me. He might.
And so I went that frosty morning to see him acting all pitiful and telling him things about Swain, how he treated me. And that was the first time we did it—Tom’s pity turned to passion and mine did too and we did it there on his pallet. But I didn’t care. He could have done it to me a hundred times and I wouldn’t have cared. I know he loved Ann and she loved him. And I knew she was jealous and would come after me if she found out. But knowing how jealous she was just made it that much more pleasurable to me—to take Tom from her, even if just for a little while and make him mine. I wasn’t the pretty one of us cousins. Ann was the prettiest. Ann got ever thing she ever wanted. And I know things about her Tom don’t know. I know she did it with Billy Dixon for money and I know she did it with my own brother one time when she’d come for a visit. Did it in my daddy’s barn. Said she’d seen my daddy doing it with my mama and it give her the itch to do it too.
Ann can be awful cruel and incautious.
And maybe what I did in giving myself so freely to Tom was to get back at her a little. I wanted to steal the thing she loved. And maybe in the stealing, something got stole from me, too.
Elizabeth Brouchard
O, I read these things and they cause my heart to flood with ache. And I ask myself why I read them at all . . . For haven’t I had life’s fair share—my life with Billy, a long and uneventful marriage that was in its own right kind enough, gentle enough, did not demand too much of me or feast on my heart in the journey?
So why agonize at the doings of the now dead as I read their tales?
Billy I can understand—his undoing was his homeliness. Ann’s and Pauline’s and Laura’s were just the opposite. And Tom’s, well, Tom’s was his easy enough charm and natural inclination toward the gift of self.
Love’s hunger I understand—but not all spoken in the name of love is love.
But desire instead. A hungering desire that feasts upon the tender hearts unsuspecting.
O, were it to have feasted on mine as well, be it love or desire.
This I declare—Elizabeth Brouchard.
CHAPTER 5
Tom Dooley
There, on the river rock, flat and white as a biscuit. There where the jewel green water washes along the muddy, root-exposed banks—where leathery turtles sun themselves, their ancient eyes closed to the warmth—is where I first met you, you who would escape me, love, ill-fated ends.
O, how I hated Swain, for he was a detestable man in every respect a man could be detestable, and I thought anything issued from him was detestable as well. But having caught a glimpse of you that day—there on the rock, stretched out as you were in such an innocent way, I could not find anything detestable about you.
I had cut through the woods to reach the river, it being such a hot day I thought I would go for a swim. This was before Raymond was found drowned and attached the name Death to the river. Billy Dixon talked often about the river being the mother to our valley.
For, she is life itself to this whole valley and all of those of us who live in it. Look how she gives herself to the crops and the dry haunted mouths of the thirsty. Look how she flows,
has always flowed long before any of us arrived here—and will keep right on flowing long after all of us are gone.
Billy could grow maudlin and spew words freely, most especially when he was drunk. But I liked to hear him talk of such things, talk of this valley and the things in it like they were alive.
But beware, Tom, she will take life too if you don’t respect her. In the rainy season she floods and will snatch little children and the foolhardy who’d try and cross her. Never cross a raging woman.
You mean river?
River, woman, they are all the same. She just does what her nature is. She is woman and as faithless as any.
I admit I didn’t always understand Billy’s meaning. But I understood how he could think of the river as a female. I liked to think of the river as a female too. And maybe Raymond did too, and maybe that’s why he gave his life to it when he couldn’t have the woman he was promised. I don’t know. It’s only a guess and a wild one at that.
The sun burned terrible hot that day, left the body feverish so that only the woman river could cool it. I heard her whispering voice as I came to the edge of the wood and started across the little fallow field that lay between wood and river. The field had once been beautiful and full of sunflowers with yellow faces and brown eyes that watched over everything. The sunflowers had been planted by O’Leary, who owned the bicycle shop. His only boy, Samuel, had gone off to the same war I had. And in the absence of a son, the Irishman had planted the sunflowers and nurtured them and talked to them like they were his sons. You could see him some days standing out among them under his straw hat, his water can in hand, his lips moving. But when I returned from the war, the sunflowers had disappeared and the field lay fallow, as it now stood.
Billy Dixon told me this story: When O’Leary’s son was killed—shot through the throat in the war—and he read the boy’s name on the death list down at Swain’s, he went the next day and scythed down the sunflowers, then poured coal oil over the ground and set it afire and spent the rest of his days drinking hard and cursing his field. This, until some men found him one day sitting dead in a rocker on his porch, a pocket pistol clinging to one dead finger. The porch faced off toward the field. He is buried here under a large ancient rock with his name and that of Samuel’s, chiseled into it by an unknown hand.