by Bill Brooks
The once alive and lovely things of this place have all grown fallow, Billy Dixon said when he told me the story.
Elizabeth Brouchard
I often went to the river on warm days and contemplated what my life had to do with this place where few read or wrote or dreamed of faraway places, as I did. I liked the river because it was always moving on to someplace new and I wanted to move on to someplace new as well.
So when the weather was especially warm, as it was on that day you and I first met, I had stripped off my clothes and found a nice rock and lay watching the river. O, it was my way of being free and natural as God intended all creatures to be.
How long you had watched me before I noticed you I can’t say, and I don’t care. If it had been any other but you, I would have been frightened, horrified, ashamed. But there was something between you and me from the very first that gave me no shame where you were concerned, no guilt, no second thoughts.
You seemed as gentle as the river, as restless—and I knew your spirit and mine were kindred. I know it still.
Tom Dooley
And there before me was this field that made me think of how unhappiness had seeded itself in a place where a man had once stood with his water can talking happily to his sunflowers. It made me even more want to wash the grit from my skin and feel the cool water wash over me, and feel new again—reborn.
It was when I started across this field that I saw you lying on the rock, your back to me, the long length of it tapering down to the swell of your hips. Your legs were long as a colt’s and your feet dainty. I knew who you were by the color of your hair. Thick and reddish as a burning bush, no other girl in the valley had such hair.
I thought about turning around, going a different way and not disturbing you. It seemed mean spirited to intrude. It seemed little enough to leave you alone considering how hard it must be for you to live in this place, hearing what folks said about you—how mean and cruel such talk could be; some of them so stupid as to believe that because you couldn’t talk, you couldn’t hear. And much of the talk was cruel and pitiless, especially at the tavern (but never in earshot of your pap, Swain), and I didn’t like hearing it.
Imagine a gal like that, not being able to say whether she liked the cob or not.
Har, har.
Better for you she wouldn’t say and tell everyone about that little cob of yours and how it wasn’t doing her no good.
Har, har.
Might be a real bonus to have a woman around who’d not be yapping all the time, do this, do that.
Har, har.
Silence is golden, don’t you know.
Har, har.
I bet I could make her say something I was to get aholt of her.
Har, har—
You turned slightly as I stood there debating what to do and lifted your face toward the sun. I could see that your eyes were closed and I could see the roundness of one small breast, its nipple pink as the tip of a tongue, and I felt ashamed watching you thus. I ordered myself to leave. I didn’t want your sweet peace troubled by looking into my greedy eyes, and yet, I could not make myself go.
I stepped back into the woods a little ways and found a good-sized limb and broke it so that it cracked loudly enough to alert you someone was coming. I could see you start, reach for the dress lying nearby, and slip it on as quick and clean as new skin. I coughed and came loudly out of the trees and stopped long enough for you to see me, then waved slightly and walked across O’Leary’s field to the river.
I feigned surprise to see you.
Hidey.
You nodded and seemed about ready to run.
O, don’t worry none about me, I just come to have a swim. Powerful hot day, ain’t it?
You nodded again.
I didn’t mean to disturb you. You want, I could go on down aways. You wouldn’t have to be bothered any by the likes of me.
You had eyes that were green as the river, and though you weren’t beautiful in the way Ann was, you were pretty enough to make me want to stay there talking to you even though you didn’t say a lick.
Listen, I know you can’t talk, and I surely didn’t come down here to be yapping and carrying on. So just never mind me, okay.
I saw a book with worn red covers lying at your feet.
You were reading.
You nodded you was.
I enjoy reading some myself. Pleasant day like this is, seems a good place to read as any.
There sure wasn’t nothing of Swain in you I could see. Your pap was big and gruff with hair like a horse brush and gray pitiless eyes like I seen once on a Confederate officer who ordered some of his own boys shot for running from a fight. Surely you’d gotten those green eyes from your mother who everyone knew did not exist—for Swain was a rowdy bachelor and I never heard any rumor about your ma or where she was—dead or run off. I tried best I could to make small talk with you.
Your name’s Liza, ain’t it?
Nod.
Mine’s Tom Dooley, pleased to meet you. I stuck out my hand and waited for you to take it. And when you did, your hand was as thin-boned and warm as a sparrow’s body.
Then you withdrew your hand from mine and reached inside the pocket of your dress and took out a pencil and with it, leaned and picked up the book and began to write in it. Then you showed me what you’d written and I saw that the book wasn’t a book so much as a diary you’d written in. There on the opposing page was what looked like a poem, but I didn’t read it out of respect. Instead I read what you wrote.
I know who you are. And I’m glad to meet you too, Tom.
I told you how glad I was glad to make your acquaintance.
Then we just stood there for a time.
Elizabeth Brouchard
When I touched your hand, so rough and strong a hand it was, my breath caught in my chest and I couldn’t breathe at all for a full moment.
You seemed as shy as a schoolboy in one respect, as bold and curious as a puppy in another. I liked you immediately, and the thought raced through me that you had seen me naked and that I liked the fact you had. We sat there by the river awhile and you told me about yourself, about how you liked the river and hated the war and that someday you wanted to go all the way to the ocean and become a sailor and maybe a fisherman and I asked you why.
You looked at my written question.
O, I don’t know rightly. I guess to cross that big water and see what’s on the other side. I guess too, a feller could earn himself a nice living being a fisherman if he had a boat and knew where all the fish were. Sounds silly, I know, me never even having been that far or seen anything but rivers.
I wrote that it wasn’t silly at all and that I someday wanted to go to Paris.
My turn to ask you why?
I wrote that I couldn’t explain it fully, it was just a feeling I had in me, that I wanted to just go somewhere with lots of people and wide boulevards and visit museums and write poetry.
That sounds like a fine dream to have.
I wrote:
Without dreams, who are we, truly?
You laughed, said you thought it was a fine way to think. I wanted you to kiss me. I wanted to kiss you.
Yes, I was aware of your involvement with Ann Melton, and I’d heard rumors about other girls as well. I allowed that it was because you were still young and restless and probably starved in some ways from having been away to war for three years. It didn’t matter who you loved or did not. Not in that moment it didn’t.
For in that moment, we were just two dreamers with dreams unmet and with all our lives yet to be lived. I thought anything possible for us—even love.
Tom Dooley
I told you I’d like to be your friend. You wrote you’d like to be mine.
Let’s shake on it.
You smiled and shook my hand again and I liked the way you did it so boldly.
Had I realized then how you felt toward me, everything might have turned out differently. But I didn’t know and I co
uldn’t begin to know what you truly thought, for I saw you as something fragile, like a beautiful glass bird in some rich man’s house that fellows like me aren’t allowed to touch. I was afraid that if I did touch you, I would break you and you would be forever ruined.
And even if you had written: Kiss me, Tom—I like to think I wouldn’t have. I’d like to believe that there was one pure thing in me that would not have violated such innocence.
It felt good to sit and talk with you of dreams and not feel I’d somehow ruined you like I had Ann and Pauline, or that I had ruined myself. And it was equally good to simply sit with you and watch the river and wonder where it was going and which other rivers would join it along its journey, and which ones it would join.
It was as much fate for you to come into my life that day as was everything else that happened during that season of sorrow when the beauty and the tragedy of my days unfolded in ways I could not foretell, but are perfectly clear to me now.
Let’s shake on it.
We already did, Tom.
Let’s shake on it again.
Elizabeth Brouchard
And the time seemed swift and uncertain—like the current farther downstream where the river widened and grew deeper before it plunged over boulders and swept into the great unknown.
What did we known then, Tom Dooley, that might have saved us each our uncertain fates and keep the hangman sleeping in his warm bed undisturbed by assassinations?
O, we knew nothing, nothing at all.
For if we had, I would not have let you go so easily that day.
I would have leapt with you into the river and let it carry us to the deep uncertain places. And if we were to die, then we would have died together, clinging to each other. But if we were to live, then no river or uncertainty could have had us.
CHAPTER 6
Tom Dooley
Grayson trots his Walker up and down the road like a rich man, like a man who has nothing better to occupy his time. Pauline was there waiting for me when I returned from the river. I always had a hard time refusing a woman her needs.
She hums an old song born in these mountains long before any of us as she buttons her dress. The sun shines down on the valley so it looks like a picture of what heaven is like. I feel marked by a hand greater than my own. Pauline slinks like a cat from the side of the bed and comes to stand behind me there at the window.
That’s Mr. Grayson, ain’t it, Tom?
That horse probably cost more than I’d make in two years.
I’d steal it for you, Tom. I’d steal it and ride it to Wilkesboro and sell it for a hundred dollars and give you every red cent.
You best not be stealing any fancy horses, Pearl.
Why I’d steal ever horse in the valley for you, Tom.
She had the heart of a child, the head of one, too.
I reckon I can make do without any stole horse money.
She nibbled my ear hungry like and ran her hands down along the front of me until she found my tired cob.
You won’t do it with anyone else but me will you, Tom?
I watched until Grayson passed out of sight, heading down toward Melton’s. I wondered at the devilment he might stir up and try and stain my name with. Grayson wasn’t truly one of us, wasn’t born here in this valley and lived his whole life here like the rest of us. To me he was just a damn outsider with a fancy walking horse.
You best be getting back, Pearl.
I want to stay here with you forever. I want to hear you call me your little flower.
Someday maybe, but not today. I got me a passel of work to do.
I kissed her childish twisted mouth and watched her walk off toward Swain’s tavern with her head hung down. I knew Swain would lay into her soon as he got the chance. Her fate was cast and so was mine. All our fates were cast from the very first day, writ across heaven’s slate by gods and angels with nothing better to do.
What little comfort she found in this sorry life, she seemed to find in me. And even though she knew about Ann and me, she pretended not to and talked her childish talk of being forever and faithful lovers. I played her game because it was easier than not playing it.
Pauline Foster
I’d go to Tom’s every chance I got. Swain would worry me and worry me and every chance I got I’d run off to Tom’s and away from Swain’s pestering hands. I know Tom didn’t love me truly. But I pretended he did and for a little while I didn’t have to think about my life—being Swain’s pleasure, the fact Tom loved Cousin Ann, the fact I wasn’t ever going to find a love of my own and that she could have any love she wanted.
I hated her for that. So I went to Tom’s and I gave him what every man wants, what no man can resist. I made it easy for him and he took it and took it and I was glad he took it. I thought it would save me sooner or later, making it so easy for him, that Tom would come to love me more than Ann. But it didn’t save me, and Tom never loved me like he did her and nothing was going to save any of us. And maybe that’s how Laura felt when she fell in with Tom—that he’d save her, that love would save her. But whatever happened, love didn’t save her. If anything, it killed her. And now she is naught but the thing sin and time has stripped of flesh and blood—a ruined thing, and he is ruined because of it and so is Cousin Ann.
But I didn’t have a hand in it. And those who say I did are liars.
Tom Dooley
Soon as Pearl had gone out of sight, I set about splitting wood.
I worked hard all the morning splitting the wood I’d cut for weeks before. It felt good to bring the ax down hard and hear the crack of the wood being cleaved in two. It felt good in the way hard work will, made my muscles warm and tighten into hard knots and raised a sheen of sweat across my chest. There was still a deep anger in me I hadn’t gotten rid of because of the war and the fact my friend Louis lay buried in a hasty grave so far from his dear Minnie and darling babe. I knew that his grave was by now grown over with wild onions and bull thistles—eternally lost, as though he never existed in the first place. And I wondered about all the other boys left in unmarked graves grown over by wild onions and bull thistles. I felt anger that we’d fit that war over what came down to nothing at all. It was a ruinous event, and ruined us all in one way or the other.
So I split the wood, brought the ax down hard, as though each chunk was a politician’s head and I’d killed nearly the whole dang congress by the time I was finished.
I was sitting winded and tired when I saw what at first I thought was Grayson coming back up the road on his Walker. But then soon enough I could see it wasn’t Grayson at all, but another man and the beast he was astride wasn’t a Walker but a mule with a tail that swung round and round like a crank handle.
The stranger stopped and stared down at me. I stared back.
Black hat and coat. Black trousers and shoes not in any better condition than my own.
Friend.
He tipped his hat.
I nodded.
Can you tell me if God lives in this place?
I looked around.
If he does, I ain’t seen him lately. This place here belongs to Tom Dooley.
Can you tell me if God lives anywhere in this whole valley?
I thought about Melton and Ann and Pearl and Billy Dixon and all the rest of the folks who I knew lived in this valley. A faithless lot at best, me included. I thought about the way we lived, me and Ann in Melton’s bed, him in the corner; Pearl and me sneaking around under Ann’s very nose. I thought about Billy Dixon with his head under a slattern’s skirts for the price of a drink and to soothe a lonely heart if only for a little while. I thought about the blacksmith, Dillsworth, and what they say he did with his own daughters—Nirvana and Rose, with their broad flat faces and crossed eyes and how blood mixed with its own don’t ever come to nothing right or righteous. I thought about the way we all seemed so cut off from the rest of the world, protected, or held enslaved, depending on which way you looked at it, by the brooding mountains.
So I told the stranger how I didn’t see God in none of it.
If’n he did live here once he hasn’t been around lately.
The man shifted in his saddle, an old McClellan, and rubbed a hand between the mule’s ears. I saw a US brand on the mule’s haunch.
Then I come to the right place, brother.
For what?
Why to bring the Good News.
Meaning?
Lord, brother, haven’t you ever heard of the Good News?
If you’re talking about the Bible and what it has to say, about what’s right and wrong and preaching and raising all sorts of holy hell, then I reckon I heard of it.
His skin was the color of the moon.
Name’s Shinbone. Tyree Shinbone. I come to preach the Good News.
That Army mule sure don’t look like it’s got any Good News to it.
The gift of our Lord Jesus.
There’s a lot of folks around these parts wouldn’t mind a nice gift like that.
He scratched his neck, the collar around it dirty white, stained piss yellow from sweat. I could see by the busted veins in his sun-fried cheeks, he knew the bottom of the bottle.
God rains on the just and the unjust alike.
I took him to mean we were all in the same boat, God doing the paddling.
You been to the war, haven’t you, Mr. Dooley? I can see it in your eyes. Such hard hurtful eyes for a man so young.
I figured he must have known a thing or two about war himself, for he sure didn’t wake up one day and that mule was in his bed with him, a gift from God. That mule looked stole as anything, and he a deserter.
You want to set a spell, preacher?
Mighty grateful for the opportunity.
Tyree Shinbone
O, I told such pretty lies and I could see Tom believed them every one, for he was a gullible boy even though the war set hard in his eyes. He wasn’t but twenty or twenty two years old judging by his apple cheeks. And I was a stranger who thought it best to tell pretty lies if I was to get on with the people of this valley. So I feigned a drawl and talked in the vernacular of these people in order not to set them on edge and set them against me. Call it a sin if you will to lay claim to things in your past you’ve never experienced. But in this case, I saw each pretty lie as merely a brick set down on God’s road to salvation.