Tom Dooley

by Bill Brooks

  The slow version again, or the fast one? There’s two you know.

  The slow.

  I lay and wept.

  Elizabeth Brouchard

  O, I’ve heard the ballad too. But I did not weep for sorrow as much for anger it had to be written at all.

  I wouldn’t be surprised they sing it still in those cold dark hills—my father’s own tavern, late at night, the drunken sots.

  But what would I know of cold dark hills?

  For in the spring, Paris is charming and far, far away from cold dark hills.

  CHAPTER 39

  Tom Dooley

  I cannot finish my story. You see, time and circumstance and the hangman won’t let me. So I put down what I could, all that’s in me. I wrote it down on sleepless, fevered nights by waxy yellow lamplight and by full moon’s paler light, when there was a full moon and I could see well enough after they honored my one request to be moved near a window where I could at least see the stars.

  Sometimes it is my hand does the writing and sometimes my hand is guided by what I can only guess as Laura’s spirit. But whatever it is or was, whoever it is or was wrote it, it is an honest telling. That’s all I can say. It is honest.

  Mick.

  Yes, Tom.

  Will you do one last thing for me?

  Certainly.

  Will you see this gets mailed when they let you out?

  Of course, lad.

  In the morning they will hang me.

  I know, I know.

  You can have my Bible too.

  You won’t be needing it, but I can’t say’s I will either . . .

  I’ve got out of it all I can. If I ain’t got the necessary parts by now, it’s too late.

  The lord will be forgiving, you can count on that, me boy.

  You think? Let’s hope you’re right then.

  I seen it, lad.

  You seen what?

  The light of peace in dying men’s eyes—men who never believed in anything, no kind of Jesus or Jehovah until the time came for them to pass over. I seen it a hundred times in the war. He’s watching over you now, as we speak. He knows your heart, Tom. He knows when a heart’s not strong enough to carry such burden. He knows forgiveness. He’s pure love, Tom. Pure love.

  The hammers of the carpenters still ring in my ears from earlier in the afternoon when they built my scaffold. I heard the carpenters laughing some, talking between blows, as though they were building a house. I guess they were—my house of inequity. Even Creps commented on it.

  Fresh pine sawed at the mill, smells sweet as the piney woods theyselves. The square will be full tomorrow, Tom. You’ll be the whole show!

  I am no longer a man but a curiosity.

  O, play your fiddle for me, Mick. Play it low and play it sweet. Play it sweet as those piney woods, sweet as wildflowers, sweet as a sweetheart’s kiss.

  O, wish that I could play for you, Tom. Wish I could play glory and freedom for you. Wish I could play you up a pair of wings to fly from this terrible place.

  In the last hour I try and summon forth memories soft as a lover’s kiss, and none with the sharpness of broken glass, or death to them.

  Of these I write:

  When I was a boy, I owned a tick hound pup I named Cicero. He was tan and black and could run three counties at the scent of a rabbit without stopping. I can’t recall what happened to him. Like all other wonderful things, he was just gone from me one day.

  I know now that the sounds I heard in my loft bed coming from below on those sharp cold winter nights were the hustings of my father working his politics on my mother for her love. These followed by her soft murmurings of consent. O, if I could have known such sweet and pure love . . .

  Louis sits wrapped in his ragged wool blanket, his eyes tired with war, his mouth subtly set like the mouth of a Greek god. He is taut and beautiful as a girl. Our loneliness is soothed only by our shared desire not to die lonely.

  Ann is naked, striped by slats of sunlight in an air dusty with the scent of dried corn. For moments at a time she is sheer pleasure and I dissolve into her until I am no more. This before foul reality shaped our sin.

  O, frail Pearl lying upon my bed under heaven’s moon, curled into me like a child asking me to take her again and again—and when I do, she still yearns for more and arches her back like a restless cat. Her hunger for me is unquenchable.

  Laura . . . O, I can’t think of her just in pleasurable ways. For death has tainted everything we were, every good memory is poisoned. And yet, I see her dancing in the rain, her hair wet and dark—her beauty greater than all women.

  Of these, I loved her best.

  I hear Cicero’s baying off in the deep woods growing faint.

  Sun settles beyond the blue ridges.

  Darkness crawls down off the mountain slopes, slipping through the trees, coming near. A nightingale wings wildly across the black silver sky hurrying homeward. Silence follows the spilling ink of night.

  Carry me down.

  Footsteps coming!

  Mick jerks his head round sharply, I do too.

  Then our eyes meet across the span of life.

  Goodbye.

  Goodbye, Tom.

  You won’t forget?

  No, I won’t forget.

  Well then . . .

  It will be okay, Tom. Maybe an instant of pain, but that’s all she’ll be, and then you’ll see glory. I wish I were going with you. I surely do . . .

  My last words writ quick:

  Dear Liza. Judge for yourself if the hand that could have writ this, this same hand that so truly gave the heart voice, could have harmed even a single hair on Laura’s head? I was just a man in love. And this is what love’s brought me . . .

  Up the scaffold stairs I go onto the platform, the waiting hangman with waxed moustaches.

  He fits the rope around my neck.

  The old pastor steps close.

  Is there anything you’d like to say, son? Confess? Any prayer you’d like me to pray o’er you?

  No.

  Then I hear as the crowd hushes, their faces turned upward, waiting, holding their breath and waiting just as I hold my breath and wait—Mick’s keen Irish voice:

  Hang your head low, Tom

  Hang your head low.

  Weep for your soul, Tom

  Weep for your lover’s soul

  Fare the well, Tom

  Fare thee well . . .

  It is finished.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bill Brooks is the author of over 40 historical novels, many of them Western Frontier. His novel, The Stone Garden: The Epic Life of Billy the Kid, was selected by Booklist as one of the 10 Best Western novels of the previous decade. He lives with his wife, Diane, in Florida after living in the Midwest and West.