by Bill Brooks
Tom Dooley
We dug a shallow grave, Ann and me, and placed poor Laura in it along with a bundle of clothes she’d brought, a poor trousseau, and covered her up with dirt and leaves and twigs and my tears fell upon the grave so heavily Ann cursed and tore her dress out of anguish not for Laura, but for my love for Laura.
Take me, Tom. Take me here and now. Take me atop her damn’d grave. For my flesh is all afire with need and I want you to prove to me you love me and not her.
I was stunned she would suggest such a thing and told her, no, I would not do it.
O, don’t you see—don’t you understand what odd feelings it sends through me to see you grieve for her so hard? Take me here, upon her grave and prove to me your love. Or, who knows what I might say if this were found out.
It would be a ghastly mean thing to do . . .
Take me, goddamn you—rape me if you must!
Leave me be.
She tried to get me to do it. She exposed herself, lay on the ground with her legs apart clutching at herself, her face twisted into a mask of madness.
And so I ran. I ran away and told myself I could never come back, that I could never stop running unless, or until, I reached the sea.
You wanted the truth, Liza, well there it is . . .
Elizabeth Brouchard
O, Tom, the sea awaits us all. If only you’d listened to it and gone before that fateful hour . . .
Or, listened to the truest heart . . .
I was mute, but you were blind . . .
& deaf.
So all our hearts turned into stones that sank into the waiting sea . . .
& rest there still . . .
O, God, yes.
BOOK III
TESTAMENT
CHAPTER 28
Ann Foster Melton
All is sorrow, bent and cold like old iron twisted by a force unseen. Why do you come to question me when my hands are without blood?
O, fair sister, Tom told me you were there that day—this from the mouth of your lover. Do you deny it?
Damn Tom Dooley and his lust, and damn his dead lover, for I’d nothing to do with it, this evil they claim.
O, wind, I hear thy name singing
Evermore of love and sweet regret,
Of end days when thy shadow
Creeps into light places and
Brings dark & cold everlasting.
He says you and he . . .
Before the war I took up with him, and after. And in between James married me and tried to wrap me in his withered limbs and squeeze from my heart every drop of loving blood I had in me for Tom Dooley. I should have let him. How better off I’d be.
Tell me true of thy story, for what is there to gain or lose in the telling?
O, the first time words flowed from his mouth like bees from the honey hive. Their sting was sweet.
The way I understand it, this affaire de coeur did not stop after you married Mr. Melton and Tom came home again . . . I saw him there that day at the station. And I saw you there as well, your arms wrapped round him . . .
He was a fiddler turned drummer to rally the men and watch them fall—ragged gray soldiers from the sky into hell, I suppose. The hero, the hero, the little drummer boy. I could not help but desire him still.
You always loved him, Liza, you poor wretched mute . . .
Winston Newbolt
You are a fair and pretty lass and I would be a dolt not to tell you those things you ask, Miss Brouchard:
I stood once upon the ramparts of Bull Run and watched the struggle as all the while men in beaver hats picnicked with women under parasols as though it weren’t a war at all but a great stage drama, you see—this Civil War that in the end ground the very bones of fair-haired boys, that ate its young. O, they surely were somebody’s boys, but they weren’t mine.
Blood is blood.
Do tell.
Ann Foster Melton
I wash my privates now with a rag squatting over a tin pan of cold water. How do you think it feels for such a pretty gal as myself, once married to a wealthy man in Reedy Branch, to squat over a pan and slop cold water o’er her privates, lady that you are?
There is hope yet, for Tom has not gone to the gallows and word has it that Mister Vance will be defending you.
O, you turn away & avert your eyes like I’m less than you. But all my life men have looked at me as if I were something they’d like to eat, to ravish, to pass around like a jug of liquor. A woman knows the beastly hunger of men from birth to grave. But I suppose you in your delicate ways, you with your dumb tongue will never know such things. Be glad you don’t.
I met him in the spring that year the war started. He had the eyes of a child. But when he returned, he’d left his child eyes behind somewhere, there beyond the mountains in places where the dead were.
But before he went off to become a drummer—on that spring day—his blood was innocent. O, I don’t mind telling you about it.
Why I’m off to fit the war, says he, and wouldn’t you do a brave boy a favor by going down to the river with me.
The river! Why what would possess me to do such a thing?
For the chance to swim and a taste of this fine chicken in my poke and . . .
He had his poke slung over his back and grinned like a possum.
I’m Tom Dooley and live the other side of Reedy Branch and reckon I never seen you round here before this very moment. Why you must be an angel dropped straight down from the sky.
Me, an angel!
I told him my pap and me had just moved from Wilkesboro and we didn’t get to beyond Reedy Branch much. But I think he knew whenever a pretty gal set first foot in Wilkes County and he had come to secret me out. Surprised he didn’t go after you as well . . . except for, of course, you don’t speak a damn word.
Wilkesboro. Well then you’re a city gal.
What if I am?
I heard me some interesting things about city gals.
I asked him like what.
Heard they’re bodacious.
That’s a big old word for a briar hopper.
I know plenty more and I could show you some things even a city gal might not know.
I don’t know what you got cooking in that kettle head, Tom Dooley, but I’m a virgin and aim to stay such till I marry.
Virgin! Lord, such talk.
I can confess it to you now, Liza Brouchard, I wasn’t—for other boys had had at me before I ever come to Wilkes County. But even you know it wouldn’t do a gal no good to confess such doings with other boys, now, would it?
I’m a freeborn child and speak my mind. You like it I do?
I surely do.
So I went on down to the river with him—the first fatal step in the journey of my undoing.
And when we heard the river’s song, and stood upon its banks, we saw two shadows cast upon the water, his and mine, as fate would have it, like wingless angels we stood as if anchored to the earth, to this place that would draw us again and again in times of love and hate—where death, too, would come to visit.
And if you’d known then this outcome now . . .
Lord I’d a run and kept running.
That’s a pretty dress, do you intend to swim in it?
O, lordy no! My pap would skin me—it was my ma’s.
Well, best hang it on a branch then.
His gaze fell on me and never strayed as he shucked his clothes.
Well? You swimming or not?
This, he asked me while standing naked as any boy I ever seen—then plunged like an otter into the green waters of the Yadkin and swam careless.
O, he was as pretty as a god and I swam that day with him, his flesh wet and slippery against mine. And I knew when he kissed me I’d been kissed not by a boy, but a pretty little god.
You thought him a god?
O, he wasn’t any true or goodly god, but one that proved false, the sort the Bible warns you about.
Do you read the Bible much?
Does it bring you comfort?
It makes the time less a numbing thing.
When we climbed out of the water and lay on a rock, he started talking his game again.
I’m going to war, you see. And maybe I won’t make it home again, and maybe I won’t never love me a gal, and never marry or have me any children.
You expect to breed me, here and now, leave me with a belly full of a child never to see its pap?
Wait . . .
And he went to his poke and pulled out a fiddle and a bow.
Thought you said you were carrying fried chicken in that poke?
O, he laughed like the devil, then began to play for me so sweetly I wept. I wept not for weeping’s sake alone, but because his tears encouraged mine, because the sounds he wrought from his fiddle called down the angels.
Then when he stopped playing, this pretty little god with tears streaming down his cheeks came close and laid himself in my arms and begged me to save him from all things terrible.
Like what, Tom?
I ain’t no true fighter. My hand don’t fit a gun. And someday I aim to earn my living as a fiddler, though I dream of the sea and becoming a captain. But surely if I go to that ol’ war, there’s ever chance I will be kilt. I can feel the cold death a waiting for me. But I must go help the boys whup old Billy Yank lest I be scorned as a coward.
He said this with such great drama I nearly laughed.
You don’t look like the whupping sort.
My heart is full of sorrow, but go I must.
Then let your sorrow come into me, let it abide in me. Let me be the cup you fill your sorrow with. But not here, not out in the open where ever body can see.
Then, where?
I thought and thought.
How about my pap’s corncrib?
He near fell over with laughter.
Corncrib? Why, gal, tha’s the strangest place I ever heard.
But before you know it that’s where we wound up, there in that hot stifling corncrib crushed down upon the dry ears.
It was a long time we lay there watching the world through the slats. I had no heart to tell him it wasn’t my first time in a corncrib with a boy, or in a haymow or inside a milking house, either.
I feel a specialness, Tom.
Me too, I swear it.
As though we’ve been bound by something greater than we know.
That which binds us will never be broke.
It must be God’s will.
Surely it must.
But we did not count on murder.
And if they hang you as could surely happen . . .
Then triple murder it will be and the blood of us all will stain those left, and not one soul, living or dead, will be untouched.
Tell me how it came to pass that you and Tom were able to carry on before your husband’s very eyes.
Some men are woven without fiber, and for what I did to him, what I allowed in his house, I am now ashamed of. For, he dint have it in him to face Tom down, to take charge of his own wife, to put an end to our sin. I can’t explain it, really. Mr. Melton is a good man with weak resolve. Perhaps he thought that if he tried to stop me, I’d leave him and go off with Tom for good.
So he was shy about you and willing to abide in your ways?
He bided his time, thinking maybe I’d wear out on Tom—that ours was a fire would quickly burn out. But it never did, till now.
Did he know about you and Tom before he married you?
Yes, I told him my heart was with another.
Tell me how it came to be that you married Mr. Melton if your heart was given to Tom.
It was in the second year of Tom’s absence that Melton came to courting.
I won’t lie; I need a wife. You’re young and pretty and I’m twice as old and no prettiness to me. But I got land and a house and some other holdings and some say I’m not the richest man in Reedy Branch—not like Swain who owns the tavern. A young gal could do worse than me; marry for something as inconsequential as love and end up worked out by the time she’s thirty. Men are scarce these parts now the war has begun—you know it, I know it. I’ll give your pap a nice purse if you’ll agree.
I have me a sweetheart named Tom Dooley off fighting in that there war, Mr. Melton, and already gave my heart to him.
Suppose he don’t come home—plenty won’t from what I read on the death lists posted down at Swain’s every day.
Why, the boys will whup those Billy Yanks easy, probably be home by autumn.
They didn’t come home last autumn. And they didn’t come home last winter neither. You could end up a spinster you ain’t careful. You’re what, about sixteen, already? They’ll be plenty widows and single gals looking for theyselves a man like me time this war is through. You want to take your chances, see if this Tom Dooley comes home?
He had a sure way about him; as though he had his whole life planned out and was going to see it worked through just like he’d planned it. But every day that passed and I did not hear from Tom it seemed to me he had foretold the future of his never returning and Melton kept watering my seed with his words.
And when Tom didn’t come home at the end of that second year . . .
I married Melton.
But did you think Tom might return someday, or did you think he was . . .
Dead? His name never showed up on the death lists, but I never got a letter from him, either. Augustus Sweet’s boy went off to that war and never came home and nobody ever heard if he lived or died. Some who did come back was missing an arm, a leg, a hand, I wasn’t sure I wanted a part man, even if it was Tom. I thought maybe marrying Mister Melton was a sure thing. You knew what you were getting right up front, in spite of his age and shortcomings.
It seemed so. I gave to Melton what was Tom’s—the very thing he left behind. That first night we was together was worse than any war in my way of thinking . . .
Come here and rest beside me, sweet little gal.
Melton lay abed and patted the coverlet as the moonlight shone in his eyes like tiny pieces of milk glass.
I ain’t ready for that yet.
Sure you are, come on here and rest next to me now, don’t make this any harder’n it has to be.
He called me Ivy instead of my name. So I asked him:
Who’s Ivy?
Why, did I say Ivy?
I later learned Ivy was his dead wife and all the while that night as he . . . he called me Ivy.
Ivy, Ivy, Ivy.
It was like being buried under a pile of sticks that a muskrat was trying to burrow into. It scratched and hurt and was not tender in any way, and after, I felt dirty as a muskrat.
And so you and Melton were husband and wife for some time before Tom came home again.
A letter finally arrived from him.
Dear Ann . . . the usual of how he missed me, and a list of reasons he’d not written before: marching all the time, sickly, under attack, captured.
James Melton had all but put out the fires that had raged in me for Tom, not with his own fire, but with the coldness of his being. So when Tom’s letter came, I felt a new fire burning in me.
O, my pretty little god was safe and returning to me
& in spite of Melton’s legal paper declaring me his
Property, I vowed I’d see Tom Dooley the moment his
Pretty little god feet touched again the Soil of Reedy
Branch—the fiddler, the drummer, the once lost love.
And I did see him.
He threw his arms around me and whispered long faithful promises . . .
O, Ann, the journey has been long . . . my eyes have witnessed such terrible things . . .
Hesh, hesh, don’t talk of things that wound you, but tell of things
residing still in joyous places.
We went to the river, to the very place we’d first went three years before, and he looked at the same water with his now weary red eyes, all the wonder wiped clean from them.
It’s exactly like it was, like I seen in my mind all those terrible nights when thunder roared and it rained steel upon us shattering our bones and breaking our bodies . . .
I placed my lips on his lips and stanched the flow of his bitter travail, for I did not want to hear it—the horrible hours stolen from him: Thy sweet innocence. I lost my fiddle somewhere between here and a fiery woods . . .
I’ll get you a new one.
We stood looking at our twin selves rippling on the water, then his knees buckled and he fell to the grass and I fell with him and gave myself again to him as naturally as if he were my husband and I his wife.
And now you are here in this terrible place.
Yes, now I am here . . .
Look at me little mute sister. Look at me as if I am still the beauty I once was, as though I am still a woman who can seduce a man as I once could so easily, and not as I am, this ragged thing who washes her cunny in a cold pan of dirty water and waits for the hangman to come.
Elizabeth Brouchard
How I both loathe and feel sorry for you, Ann Melton, wife of James, unfaithful harridan, that you are. Your mouth twists with your lies and yet your eyes are full of fear, you tremble as a trapped fox and bare your feral fangs at any who would come near you.
Tell me, how does such a wench win the hearts of men other than by your course beauty? How does any but the most impoverished of spirit man abide in thee?
If such as beauty brings, I am glad I did not have it.
CHAPTER 29
The Testament of Billy Dixon
The world is an empty place for those of us who know not beauty or wealth, who lack in the social graces—I count myself among these. What do you want to know, dear Liza, that you don’t already know?
Everything.
I know this: I was just a poor pit-face schoolteacher where the rest of this valley was concerned, most especially by these mountain fellas.
But not by me, Billy.
O, save me from my friends, for thy enemies I’m well aware.