The Ballad of Tom Dooley

PAULINE FOSTER

May 24, 1866





For once I didn’t mind the long, muddy walk back from German’s Hill, for I needed every mile of the journey to think out what to do next. It was like trying to piece together squares on a quilt to make a pattern, only sewing is stupid and tedious work, and I had always hated it—but this cutting and piecing together of people’s lives makes my heart quicken with excitement.

I walked back along the trace, following the fading sun, which was just about to sink below the blue mountains in the distance, where I’d come from back in March. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the clouds stopped and the mountains began; they had that same blue hazy look against the sky, as if one was no more solid than the other.

I didn’t meet anybody on the road, and I’d scarcely have taken note of it if I had, for my mind was running faster than a snow-melt creek, thinking on what I would say and who I needed to talk to before morning.

I could have ended Laura’s fine plans for an elopement then and there, I think, if I’d told her secrets in the right ears. If I’d warned her daddy that he was about to lose both his mare and his daughter, I reckon he’d have put a stop to it. Or if I’d told some of the neighbors—or that high and mighty Colonel Isbell, who thinks he is the lord and master of everybody in the valley—that Laura Foster was fixing to run away with a colored man, they’d have stepped in. And if I had just told that nut brown boy of hers that Laura was afflicted with the pox—I doubt if even her white skin would have made her a prize to him then. Being hanged for running off with her or catching the deadly pox from her—it was all the same in the end. Death. And more than she was worth.

But I had no particular score to settle with Laura Foster, except for the fact that somebody loved her. She was making foolish choices, and she would bring about her own ruin without any help from me. I reckoned that I had more wrongs to repay in other quarters, and I meant to see those debts of cruelty paid in kind, hurt for hurt. It would take a careful piecing together, though, this blood quilt in my head. One dropped stitch and all would come undone.

When I neared the Melton place that evening, it was already gathering dark and the wind had picked up some, making a tedious journey of the last mile, but I would have walked barefoot in the snow to deliver the news I brought back with me.

I was almost to the house when out of the dark, a white hand grabbed my arm and jerked it hard. “What are you doing back so late? James will be wanting his supper!”

I could just make out Ann’s pale face in the moonlight, but I had known it was her already. I could smell the whiskey on her breath, as I squirmed to get free of the grip of her claws on my arm. “Why don’t you fix his supper your own self then? You’re his wife, aren’t you?”

She tossed her head. “Don’t you sass me, Pauline. I am going over to my mama’s tonight. I told you that this morning.”

I saw that she had a little bundle of clothes with her, and then I remembered that she had declared that she would be gone to Lot Foster’s place by evening. I laughed. “Why are you going there, Ann? Can’t you sleep with Tom here like you always do?”

She tightened her grip on my arm and shook me once or twice for good measure. She would have slapped me, but she was near drunk, and I kept twisting this way and that to avoid her.

“I have seen Tom already,” she said. “Though not for long. I said I would get him some whiskey tonight. If he don’t come for it, I’ll send one of the girls to fetch him at the Dulas’ place. Though she mustn’t say it straight out if that cat of a sister of his is in earshot. I don’t mind his mama knowing, but his sister is a devil about trying to keep us apart.”

I choked back a laugh. I wanted to say, “Some people are funny about adultery, I guess,” but that would only have set her off again, so I swallowed my bitter words, and asked instead, “How did he seem to you tonight?”

She shrugged. “Tom? Same as always. Restless. Why?”

When she said that, I closed my eyes for two heartbeats and decided to take a stab in the dark. Chances were that my words would come to naught, but if they struck home, I would have done what I set out to do, and what I had planned on that cold walk back from German’s Hill. “Well, I don’t think you will see Tom anymore tonight at all,” I told her. “I don’t doubt that he’ll be afraid to face you. You know how Tom Dula is. Always easy and smiling, saying whatever he thinks folk want to hear, and not to be trusted an inch toward keeping his word. Or perhaps he has told you already?”

“Told me what? Why should he be afraid to face me?” Ann’s voice quavered, and she forgot to tighten her hold, so I wriggled out of her grasp, with marks of her fingernails stinging my arm, and glad for yet another injury to pay her back for.

“You mean he didn’t let on to you?” I shook my head. “Well, if he didn’t say nothing, I don’t reckon I should. Anyhow, I have sworn to keep it a secret.”

Ann dropped her bundle of clothes into the weeds, and took me by both shoulders, but I stood my ground, and she thought better of shaking me again. The wind whipped that black hair of hers into clouds around her face, and she shook her head to get it clear of her eyes. “We put you up, Pauline,” she said, with tears of rage in her voice. “We let you stay with us out of Christian charity.…”

I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from laughing at that. Oh, yes, Christian charity, indeed—to work me like a field hand, doing the kitchen chores and cleaning the cabin, tending her babies and the animals, and helping out in the fields—while she lay around like a farrowing sow, not doing a hand’s turn of work. Yes, they were the souls of kindness, all right. But I pretended to see the sense in what she said, and after a moment’s pause, I said, “All right, Cousin, if you think it is my duty to confide in you, then I will break my oath and tell you. You might as well know now as later, so that it won’t be such a shock to you when it is over and done with.”

She let me go again, and took a step back, clapping her hand across her mouth. She gulped down a few deep draughts of the night air before she said, “Is it Tom? What about him?”

I shook my head. “You may have seen the last of him.”

“Why?” She looked about her, wild-eyed in the moonlight, and in an instant she would have gone running to the Dulas’ place, so I said quickly, “He means to run away with Laura Foster, first thing in the morning. Come sun-up.”

She stared at me for a moment as though the sense of my words couldn’t quite sink in to her head, and then she threw back her head and laughed, ending with a sob of relief. “Tom run off with that mud hen? Has the pox addled your brain, Pauline? What would he want with her?”

“He means to marry her.”

“And what use is a wife to Tom Dula? Like teats on a bull, that’s what—no use at all.” She laughed again. “No job. No land. No money. Oh, he’d make a fine bridegroom indeed.”

“Well, it would make his sister Eliza happy, wouldn’t it? And maybe his mother as well, just to see him settle down with somebody and quit pining after you.”

“He never would, though. He loves me. He’s told me so often enough.”

“Maybe he said the same thing to Laura Foster. And to Caroline Barnes before her. Anyhow, they are eloping in the morning. She told me herself. She says they are heading west to start fresh.”

Ann put her fist up to her mouth, and stood stock-still, for all the world as if she had forgotten I was standing there. I thought she might faint, and if she had, I’d have left her where she lay, but after a moment or two, she just whispered, “I don’t believe it,” in a watery voice that ended in a sob.

I shrugged and said nothing. The less you argue with people the more they believe you.

She peered at me, willing me to speak, but I kept still. “I’ll ask him myself then! I’ll march straight over to his mama’s, and make him tell me face to face like a man.”

I shook my head and let my shoulders sag, trying to look like I pitied her.

She got very still then, taking deep breaths and twisting her hands together, and I reckon she realized that screaming at a man is no way to get him back. “Do you swear this is true, Pauline?”

One of my favorite things in the world is to lie by telling the strict truth. I said, “I swear that Laura Foster told me she was eloping come sun-up tomorrow.”

She looked doubtful again. “How? It’s a long walk to Tennessee.”

“She’s taking her daddy’s mare. I reckon it’ll carry the two of them, as little as she is. ’Course, there may be a child on the way, but it won’t weigh anything yet. She’s not showing that I could see.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Not in so many words, but why else would he be in such a hurry to marry her?”

“What would that matter? That baby could be anybody’s.”

“Well, she’s a pretty little thing, isn’t she? So meek and frail. Maybe he wants to think it’s his.”

Ann flung herself away from me, and started up the road. “I’ll scratch his eyes out!”

Now I grabbed hold of her arm. “You need to simmer down, Cousin. Do you think that’s likely to do any good? If he is fixing to run off with her, then having you tell him he can’t will just make him bound and determined to go. At least, that’s how it looks to me.”

Ann stopped, took a deep breath, and looked up at the stars instead of at me. “But I can’t let him go. He’s all I ever cared about, Pauline.”

“I know,” I said softly, hoping that she would hear sympathy and understanding in my voice, even though it wasn’t there.

“I could tell Uncle Wilson. He could stop Laura from running off.”

I nodded. “For a day maybe. Or even a week. But if they mean to do it, they will. Besides, Uncle Wilson might be relieved to see somebody make an honest woman of Laura. Why should he care how you feel about it?”

We stood in silence for a moment in the cold night air, Ann staring up at the stars and me thinking furiously, trying to stay one step ahead of her threats. It was too early for lightning bugs, and even the crickets were silent that night. I waited, letting her turn the whole problem over in her mind. I thought I heard her choke back a sob.

“He doesn’t care nothing about her, Pauline!”

“Well, he wouldn’t be the first man to marry to get a housekeeper, would he? Maybe he just wants to settle down—like you did. And you may think Laura cares little enough about him, too, but you must know how bad she wants to get away from that house, tending all those young’uns. For all she knows, this may be her one chance. A lot of good men died in the War. There aren’t enough of them left to go around.”

Ann had been drinking already that evening, and that was a stroke of fortune for me, for it dulled her thinking even more than usual. She didn’t think to wonder why two unmarried people of legal age would bother to run away to Tennessee to get married, when they could have invited the whole of Elkville to a wedding if they’d a mind to wed. I’m glad she didn’t think of that, for I had no answer ready there. And she didn’t seem to think it strange that an idle fellow like Tom would leave a comfortable home where he did precious little work to go and shift for himself in a strange place. It’s hard for people to think straight when you have hit them with the thing they fear most in the world. She went right past wondering if it was true and straight into wondering how to stop it.

“Where is she meeting him, Pauline?”

“Why, at the Bates’ place around daybreak,” I said. “I think if you were to watch the road from your mama’s house, you’d likely see her go by, if you wanted to go over there and talk to her. You’d want to get her alone, though—before anybody else comes.”

I could tell by her breathing that she was mad enough to spit nails. That and the drink is likely why she didn’t ask me a sensible question, like why Tom and Laura would meet up at the Bates’ place. Laura lived five miles away, and Tom’s house was a mile east, down the Reedy Branch Road, and from the Bates’ place they’d have to backtrack to get on the road that led up the mountain to Tennessee. Why would they meet there when there were miles of woods between Laura’s house and the mountain road? Why the Bates’ place? Because it was a stone’s throw from John Anderson’s quarters. But if my luck held, Ann would not know that—at least not until it was too late to save her.