by Bill Brooks
Can I bring you anything, Tom? A Bible perhaps?
Some foolscap and a pen and ink. No Bible.
So you can write your folks, people you love?
Yes.
The weight of a Bible has a certain comfort, Tom.
Have you met the wild preacher, the one called Shinbone?
She shakes her head, not sure of what I’m talking about. I don’t tell her the true reasons I want the foolscap.
I can pray with you, Tom. I can write things for you if you can’t write them yourself.
I learned to write some . . . well enough for what I have to say. Pray? I don’t know about all that. I tried my hand at it during the war and it didn’t seem to take.
Well, you wouldn’t hold it against me if I was to pray for you and the others were to pray for you, would you, Tom? You wouldn’t think of it as meddling?
No, ma’am. Pray all you want.
I write things down as they come to me, not in any order, just as they come to me. Sometimes I have dreams and wake up and write them down when the moon is bright enough to see by. If not, I try and remember the dreams and write them down when there is enough morning light. I can’t always remember them, though, just the terrible ones.
I keep the foolscap under my pillow and the ink bottle and pen in my shoes under the cot. Time passes more easily when I write instead of just sitting here and thinking of all the things that have transpired in the last season. I call it the season of my sorrow. For that’s what it has been right enough, except for you, dear Liza. The year began with such promise, with Laura’s arrival in the valley. It began as a season of joy and ended as one of sorrow.
I like the sound the pen makes as it scratches across the page. I like the feel of how the paper resists the nib, then gives into it. I like seeing the words being born out of the pool of indigo ink. I write slow and careful because I like getting lost in the wet black curves and lines. From me, these things flow, from a place I didn’t even know existed these things come forth, these thoughts and words. And I am amazed at what the words say when I’ve finished, for I never know ahead of time. My hand is blind.
I read the words over whilst I eat my meals: breakfast of pone and black coffee, dinner of mush and pone and black coffee, supper of side meat and hominy and black coffee. I read and eat slow to make the time stretch on and on—these precious moments in which I can escape my captors, my judges, my executioners.
I even write about the reporter, how he stays close to the shadows, becomes hardly more than a strange voice without face, without hands or arms or body—just a glowing tip of a cigar. He comes in the evening and sits on a stool in the shadows and smokes his cigar and asks me to tell him of the events of the murder.
How’d it come about, Tom, all this nasty business? Who were your co-conspirators? Was it a ménage à trois? I’ve heard that it was.
I told him I didn’t understand what he meant? He called himself a Brit, but said he worked for a newspaper in New York City.
He wrote it down on a piece of paper—that strange phrase—and slipped the paper to me through the bars.
It means a love triangle, Tom. The phrase is French.
I looked at those strange words and thought, my god, there’s a whole other language out there in the world I’ll never get to know more about.
The French have such lovely phrases for their sordid deeds.
I don’t know how to answer him, nor even know if I want to. He is very patient and persistent without being pestering. He wears a straw hat and a black suit—what I’ve seen of him in the light—and a gold chain across his waistcoat that I suspect has a fancy gold watch attached to the end. I saw reporters in the war, most of them scurrilous drunkards. Newbolt isn’t like any of them. He seems like a man who would hate war or anything loud and rebellious. Curious, but cautious.
As Newbolt waits for me to tell him of the events, his breathing is like the purr of a large tomcat accompanied by the dry sound of his cigar burning to ash.
I can’t say for sure what it was or wasn’t, Mr. Newbolt, what or how this trouble began. I still ain’t figured it out completely.
Take your time, Tom. I’m here for the duration.
The duration?
He sucks deeply on the cigar, patient as an old tomcat.
I don’t know how to tell it right.
I’ll help you, lad. Just say it in your own words. That’s always best, you know, simple words.
You don’t seem like a fellow who would admire simple words.
Oh, I do, I do indeed. I’m not like most of my countrymen. What good are fancy words if no one can understand their meaning? Like, ménage à trois, eh? Fine example.
He chuckles and I hear water dripping somewhere.
They say you were quite a war hero, Tom.
I stuck three years, got captured twice, came down with the rickets once, the scurvy once, the shits a dozen times. You call that a hero, I guess I was one.
It went like that between us each time. Newbolt sitting in the shadows smoking his cigar, asking questions in that educated manner, scribbling, me trying to keep a close hand on what I said and didn’t. It wasn’t just my life at stake in all this. Poor Laura was already dead, of course. There was every possibility they’d hang Ann as well as me, and maybe Pearl too. So you see, Liza, it wasn’t just I wanted to save my skin the reason I didn’t tell him everything. I wanted to save theirs too if I could, in spite of everything that happened.
Shinbone came regular to see me too while I was in Wilkesboro. He, for one, never asks me if my hand was in murder.
God knows the truth of what happened, Tom. I don’t need to be asking you those sorts of questions. Righteousness shall prevail.
If it is righteousness, why am I here, Tyree?
Who can know the ways of man or God, Tom?
Sure not me.
He brings me hard candy, a checkerboard to pass the time, his philosophy on the nature of things.
You were both were star-crossed, Tom, you and Laura. Like Romeo and Juliet but without all the family feuding.
They must live in the next county, for I never heard of them.
You never heard of them! Har! Har!
Shinbone’s laughter climbs the cold, stone walls of my prison.
Tyree Shinbone
O, I could not help but feel akin to poor Tom—a brother in the spirit, only he did not know it, would not accept any godly delegation. So, we played checkers instead and talked little of the lord and the soul’s salvation. He simply wouldn’t have any of it. And what sort of Christian would I be to shove righteousness down a dead man’s throat? So instead I spoke of things he might take to:
Love and death seems to go together, Tom. It’s the death of one or both of the lovers that makes love more bittersweet. Why most great works of literature tell such stories—that’s why they’re great works.
Jesus Christ, Tyree, I don’t need to hear of such things. Move your man.
Tom was a righteous enough checker player.
Tom Dooley
Each visit, I learn a little more about Tyree Shinbone. Things come out of him I don’t expect, like that whole business about Romeo and Juliet. He confesses over the weeks of coming to visit that he’s well read, that half the things, maybe most he’s told me before were lies. He don’t know why. He tells me he was educated in Pennsylvania. He tells me that his daddy made a fortune in the railroad business and his mother was a debutante, as if I knew what that was. I wanted to ask him how he went from being a rich man’s son to a tramp for Jesus. But I held off, figuring he’ll get around to it if he wanted me to know. He’s always been damn mysterious. But it never did stop his philosophizing about all manner of things. And for all I know everything he’s revised might be damn lies as well. Still, listening to him lie is better than staring at these walls.
Your story is timeless, Tom, and we are timeless, folks like you and me and old Romeo and Juliet. I think God just made some of us to be timeless. A hun
dred, two hundred, years from now they’ll still be telling of you and Laura Foster, just like they still tell of Romeo and Juliet.
Who the hell cares? I won’t, will you?
Shinbone’s eyes can get as blue as winter ice, his hair a tangle a rabbit couldn’t free itself from. I guess he can’t be more than ten years older than me, but he looks to be old as Moses.
I think Tyree Shinbone was going crazy even then. He’d talk of this and that and a lot of it made no sense. But he brought me candy and the latest news:
They say Ann’s a raving bitter shrew.
They still got her locked up then?
Well over a year, Tom, same as you.
And what of Pearl?
Shinbone kept his own consul when it came to word of Pearl. Fell silent as though struck by an anvil.
And Melton? What do you hear about Melton in all of this?
He just stays out there at his place wild as a goat.
And Grayson?
Why concern yourself over Grayson?
He’s the one led them to me, laid all this at my feet.
Grayson’s gone back up to Tennessee the way I hear it.
He was rational at times, and I thought he might be trusted. But now I can see that I could trust no one but you, Liza.
The trouble began early, soon after Laura and her pap had settled in, the suitors came calling. Among them: Grayson, Swain, Billy Dixon, Sam Pie, and George Hare, about every unattached man in Yadkin Valley wanted to court Laura. I came over the bald not long after Laura found me dancing in the rain. Came to court her proper, win her heart, her passion, her everything. I brushed off an old suit and had Barter McClee cut my hair. Barter, you know, cut hair and was the undertaker. I bet you buried plenty in your time.
Snip, snip.
Lost count, but I buried about everybody come to this valley and died. Men, women, children.
Snip, snip.
Don’t it bother you, working with the dead?
They don’t complain. I used to be a tax collector. Lord, how folks complained.
Snip, snip.
I seen plenty of dead myself. I’m still bothered by it.
We all just vessels to carry our spirits around in, Tom. Once the spirit has fled, we just empty vessels is all. I just bury the vessels of what people once was.
Cut that hair good, would you? I aim to go a courting.
I’ll do her.
Snip, snip went his shears.
I gathered wild flowers from the meadows: loblolly, firewheel, Sweet Betsy, trout lilies, oxeye daises, lady slippers. I gathered the flowers under a sky swept with mare’s tails and tied the stems together with a piece of bright red ribbon I bought in the mercantile from Mizrus Boots. It looked like I was carrying a rainbow in my hand.
That’s a right enough pretty ribbon, Tom.
Thank you, Mizrus Boots, it’s for someone special.
Mizrus Boots was the sister of Polly Boots, who came to visit me in jail and bring me the foolscap and pen. Her name was Lydia, I think.
I’ll bet your buying it for that new gal whose daddy leased land from Mr. Melton, I’m guessing.
Yes’m. Her name is Laura.
She’s a cousin to Ann Melton and Pauline Foster, ain’t she?
Yes’m, she is.
Pretty girl from what I hear.
Yes’m, pretty as this piece of ribbon.
I wondered, looking into Mizrus Boots’s happy old eyes if she’d ever knew the love of a man in her time. It seemed impossible to believe that such happy women as she and her sister would not at one time or another known a man or two along the way. Seems to me you can’t know happiness without having known some kind of love or another.
Pardon my rambling ways, like I said, I just write this as it comes to me.
I took the ribbon and started for the bald.
But when I came over the bald and started down the other side, I saw Grayson’s walking horse tied up outside. My heart turned to stone. I reckon they were all inside the little cabin together, Grayson and Laura and her pap. All I could think about were those times I’d gone to Melton’s and the three of us were inside together, and how it never stopped me and Ann from our intimacies, the fact Melton was there. Maybe it wasn’t stopping Grayson either—him a man of money and means; maybe his high-stepping ways had won her over. Surely they would have won her pap over. Maybe she got a look at his fancy horse and fine clothes and realized what a mistake she’d made with me. Why else would Grayson be inside? Hell, I threw those flowers to the ground, ribbon and all, and walked on back to my place.
My mood made me think of mournful times. I could see gray troops coming out of the mist—their muskets carried high—a line of ghosts. And I could hear mournful fiddles playing, too.
Beat the drum, Tom.
I could hear the rattle of drums drown out the mournful fiddles and watch as the gray line began to stagger and fall and disappear under thunderous black clouds that rolled over the beautiful land of farmers, tinsmiths, cobblers, sweet children.
O, I see Laura’s face now, even as I write of these things. I see her there on the wet cold walls of this my eventual tomb. Her voice calls out to me day and night.
Tom, Tom.
She holds out her hands to me and I move toward her, for I want to have her hold me and take away the stain on my soul. But when I try, she fades away and there is only this silence. I think this silence will be like the silence of lying in my grave.
Elizabeth Brouchard
This madness wore the mask of a commoner
&
seduced you, Tom,
took way your foolish heart
&
sold it for the price of folly.
For, you thought
that youth was everything, and everlasting
&
the day would not be seen when you drew your final breath.
But rest there now in earth’s bosom there by river’s glory. Rest, rest and watch the sun come and go for a thousand years and tell me if you can, how one’s bones feel turning to dust after the heart’s long been silenced.
CHAPTER 16
Tom Dooley
O, I thought I’d eliminate the competition one by one, and first on my list was Billy Dixon. I thought as a somewhat friend, he’d see the light the easiest and if he didn’t, I’d make him see it. So not long after I’d seen Grayson’s horse outside Laura’s cabin, I went to see Billy.
Billy Dixon!
Half drunk, he came to the door of his squalid little cabin, for he was no better off than any of the rest of us, even though he was more educated and had gone a year to college in Raleigh.
Get out here, Billy, we need to talk.
Tom?
Goddamn right.
The last of the plum evening light was draining out beyond the ridges. Peepers had begun their evening song from down in a marsh beyond the cabin. On hot evenings, the marsh stank of muck and critters that had crawled in there and died, or got done in by other, larger critters. It was a dark place I never liked going.
Billy stood with his braces hanging down, his shirt off, the yellow light of his cabin behind him so he looked more like a shadow than a man.
Tom?
How many times you got to ask? Yes, it’s me. Now get out here.
He stood there scratching his head, the liquor in his brain twisting his thoughts. I walked up closer to the porch.
That damn roof’s about to fall in on you, Billy.
He looked up, then back at me, squinting in the dim light.
You come all the way here to tell me about my porch roof?
I came all the way here to tell you Laura Foster’s spoke for.
Why, who’s spoken for her, Tom?
You damn fool, I have.
Off to the west I could see lightning snake through the darkening sky, but too far off to hear any thunder.
Why, Tom, I thought you and Ann were . . .
Were what? Ann’s a married woman.
&n
bsp; Hell, Tom, everybody knows about you and Ann.
You don’t know a thing, Billy. You only know what you hear and you take that as the gospel. I’d think an educated man such as yourself would be above rumors.
You saying it’s not so?
I’m saying stay the hell away from Laura. You can go after any gal in the whole valley, any in Wilkes County for all I care. Why you can go all the way to Watauga County if you’ve a mind to, but Laura’s spoken for.
Shit, Tom. Shit.
There wasn’t a soul in Wilkes County more surprised than me when Billy come flying off his porch and hit me a good one in the jaw.
Billy, what the hell you doing?
I’ll fight for her, Tom. I’ll fight you or anybody.
It was about the worst fistfight I ever was in. Billy hit me and I hit him and we continued that way until neither of us could raise a fist or draw a breath all the while the dark closing in on us. We lay there with just a bit of buttery light falling on us from inside Billy’s cabin. Our faces were bloody and our lips busted and more blood still leaking from our noses. My mouth tasted like salt and copper pennies. We coughed and spat and tried to get up and finish the other, but neither of us could, so we just lay there wishing we’d die or get better quick.
Where’d you learn to fit like that, Billy?
At college. I was on the boxing team.
Hell, you must have been the A number one champ.
No, I was the worst one on the team.
Then I’d sure enough hate to get into it with the champ.
Me too.
An owl hoot from a nearby tree sounded like a question nobody had an answer for.
I’ll come back after I heal up some if I have to.
You come on ahead, I’ll be waiting for you.
You’d rather take a whipping than leave her alone?
I’m the loneliest fella in this whole county, Tom. I reckon I’ll take what I have to for love or even something like it.
We lay there quite a spell. The stars appeared in the sky and we lay there looking at them.