The Ballad of Tom Dooley

PAULINE FOSTER

May 26, 1866





On the last Friday night in May, old Wilson Foster was stumping all over the settlement complaining loud and long about Laura running away from home. The weather was fine that evening, and after supper, instead of staying home, people congregated up at the Meltons’ house, passing the pleasant evening with one another and enjoying the fresh air after a long winter of being cooped up in smoky little cabins. We had a houseful, and hardly enough likker to go around. Ann’s brother Thomas Foster had come over, along with Will Holder. Jonathan Gilbert, who sometimes worked for James Melton, was still there, helping him cut leather for shoe making. Washington Anderson turned up, of course, hunting Tom, but he wasn’t around, for once.

Foster hadn’t been asked to the party, but he showed up in the yard outside just as the light was fading, dressed in his usual raggedy farming clothes, and he shuffled into the cabin, looking forlorn.

“Have any of you’uns seen my Laura?” Wilson Foster asked them, after he’d downed a few swigs from the jug to take the chill off his bones.

Nobody had.

“Well, I reckon she might have took off with Tom Dula. I’ve caught them in bed together a time or two. Has he been around?’

Tom Foster spoke up. “I seen him just a while ago this evening. But he was by hisself. I never did see Laura.”

The men looked peeved to be put off their drinking by an old man bearing troubles, but at first they were polite enough, saying it was a shame that Laura had gone missing. Nobody reckoned there was much to it—maybe she had gone off visiting kinfolks up in Watauga. Will Holder said he hoped he’d find her soon, then they’d turned their backs on him and went back to what they were saying before, not giving him another thought. Well-brought-up people will be civil to anybody, but you shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking you matter to them. I wondered if old Foster had figured that out, or if he even cared.

He didn’t seem to heed their indifference, but just went on moaning about how ungrateful Laura was to have gone off and left him, and how he didn’t know what he was going to do with all those young’uns to take care of, in addition to all the extra chores. I wondered if I was the only one wondering who was looking after his children while he was out and about, visiting with all and sundry, but nobody spoke up, and I never heard that anybody in the settlement offered to do any cooking or laundry for him, either.

While he went around, asking if anybody had seen his daughter, I kept still in the doorway, watching Ann to see how she was taking this news, but her face was as blank and innocent as a barn cat’s. I wished I’d had more turns at the jug. It’s easier to put up with fools when you have a tot of likker warming up your insides to deaden the noise. Good thing I’d had a drop or two to drink before he came, but it was wearing off now, and I could have used reinforcements.

Somebody handed old Foster a gourd of whiskey, and I hoped that would shut him up, but between gulps, he went on and on about how hard it was on him with Laura gone, and then he started in again, bewailing the loss of that infernal horse, and saying that he reckoned he could do without Laura well enough, but he wanted that mare back.

“She ought to be easy to track,” he said. “She’s got a sharp pointy place on one hoof where I had started to file it down, but had to leave off afore it was done. You look for that pointed hoof print in the dirt, and you’ll find my Belle. I know which way she was a-going. I tracked her past the Scotts’ place and down the river road. Picked her up again on the Stony Fork Road, and found tracks all the way to the old Bates’ place. She went off the road then. Started through an overgrown field, and I lost the trail. Don’t reckon she can have gone far, though.” He looked around, hat in hand, eyebrows raised, waiting in certainty for someone to offer to help in the hunt.

I’d had a bellyful of hearing about that horse, and I was tired of listening to the old man whine about his young’uns, as if nobody else in the world had a hard row to hoe in life. As if nobody here ever lost somebody to the War, or got a sickness they’d never get well from, or worked every day sun-up to dark and still stayed poor and hungry. I was tired of hearing it. So I stood up, and called to him over the heads of half a dozen folks, “I’ll get your horse back for you, Uncle Wilson. Just gimme a quart of whiskey, and I’ll bring her right on back to you.”

The men had been talking and laughing amongst themselves, so loud you could hardly hear yourself think, but when I said that, it was as if I’d dropped a hornet’s nest into their midst. All the talking stopped at once, and they all stared at me and him, waiting to see what was going to happen next. I thought they’d take it as a joke, but I had misjudged, because nobody laughed. And everybody remembered.

Uncle Wilson stood there for a minute, staring at me with his mouth open, and then he just shrugged and turned away. I guess he figured I was making fun of him, which was true enough, I suppose, though I did want that whiskey awful bad. It was no secret that I was powerful fond of hard likker, and they must have thought that was all there was to it: me trying any way I could to get another jug. I didn’t say anything else after that. Maybe I had said too much already.

Thomas Foster, who had not been brought up well, and who had taken more than his share of the whiskey, must have been as tired as I was of the old man’s lamentations, and he began to make sport of his uncle. He set a twig alight in the fireplace and began to stagger around with it. He stumbled against Wilson Foster, and set the old man’s beard afire. They scotched the sparks in a moment, and Wash gave him a dipper of water to soak it in, but even then he didn’t take the hint and leave.

Finally, James Melton, who always had a kind word for everybody, if he spoke at all, patted his arm a trifle gingerly, and said, “Surely Will is right. Your Laura has gone to visit relatives. I reckon we could pray for her safe return if it would ease your mind any.”

This was too much for Foster’s temper, for he had come in search of information, not threadbare homilies. He leaned in close to James Melton, though he was too short to reach his face, and he breathed out fumes of bad breath and whiskey. “Why, man, I don’t care if I was to never see the little hussy again, but the thing is, she went and stole my mare. And I damn sure want that horse back.”

His salty language put James off almost as much as his breath did, and with a sigh of disgust, he turned away from the old man, and sat down near the fire with a bit of shoe leather he was working on. A couple of the men who overheard him just nodded, not at all surprised at his words or his attitude. Most everybody hereabouts knew that there was no love lost between Laura and her father, and horses did not come cheap. Wilson Foster didn’t even own his own land. It was a wonder he had a horse at all, and he certainly wouldn’t part with it without a fight.

I was standing in the doorway, next to Ann Melton, well away from the smoke and the fumes in the little cabin. Ann was watching the road like she was expecting Tom to turn up any minute. The men didn’t much want us in there anyhow. Nobody ever had much good to say about Ann, for her carrying on with Tom Dula was common knowledge in the settlement, and, as for me, I was just the hired help, so I counted for nothing.

After Wilson Foster had sat down next to Will Holder, waiting for another turn with the jug, I heard Wash Anderson tell him, “My older sister saw your daughter this morning, Mr. Foster, just after sun-up. She said Laura was riding east along the road past her place, and that she stopped and spoke to her for a moment or two. I don’t reckon my sister would want me to tell you that, but it’s so. She said that Laura meant to get away from home, and she wished her well. Said she wouldn’t say anything that might help you find her and drag her back.”

Wilson Foster looked like he wanted to argue about this, and I reckon I could have told him a few home truths about his daughter, but I kept my resolve to be quiet and let people jump to their own conclusions.

Jonathan Gilbert nodded. “It is all well and good for Laura to take care of her brothers and sisters and keep house for her father, but she’s past twenty-one now, ain’t she? I reckon she’s entitled to a man of her own—if she can find one.”

There was a pause before Thomas Foster said, “Of course, she has never lacked for companionship, has she?” The way he said it, you knew he didn’t mean Sunday-school chums. You don’t have to spend too long in a group of respectable people before one of them bares poison fangs. The only difference between them and a rattlesnake is that a rattler has the decency to warn you before it strikes. People never do.

They had heard about Laura’s goings-on, all right. I wondered if any of these fellows knew firsthand about her dalliances with men, and whether they knew she had the pox, but nobody spoke up about that.

Then when the talking died down for a minute, I heard James Melton say to old Foster, “You must be worried something fierce, Mr. Foster. Even if she has gone off to see some kinfolk, these are perilous times, especially for an innocent young girl. There are still bushwhackers about, and I do not yet trust the roads. I hope nothing has happened to her on her journey.”

I was beginning to get a little irritated, listening to all this soft soap about poor Wilson Foster and his beloved missing daughter. He had spent a good half hour lapping up sympathy and making himself important over the disappearance of Laura, whom he didn’t care two pins for. I thought it time to take him down a peg or two, in front of all these mealymouthed fools.

I walked up to him, like I was going to give him another helping of sympathy, and then I said, loud enough for everybody to hear, “I know you must be worried, Uncle Wilson, seeing as how Laura may have run away with a colored man.”

He glowered at me, not at all happy to have that brick dropped in front of half the settlement, but, as he turned to leave, all he said was, “I am afraid of that, too.”

That shut everybody up for a good half minute, and then of one accord, they all turned away and began talking about ten different things at once to cover the sound of all that plain-speaking. Ann gave me a look when I said that, but she kept silent. Laura Foster might have been forgotten then and there, but I was not prepared to leave well enough alone.

* * *

The day after Laura went missing, Tom Dula came early to the Meltons’ house, wanting James to fix his fiddle and to get his shoes mended. Ann was not at home, but he did not ask after her, and it would have been no use if he had, for I didn’t know where she’d gone. Will Holder stopped by again, and they all commenced to drinking and swapping lies, same as always.

We sat up most of the night, till the fire burned low, and then we all drifted off to sleep any old how. I ended up sharing a bed with Tom Foster.

An hour or so before sun-up, Ann came dragging in. I woke up when I felt the cold air when the door opened, and I saw her standing over by the fireplace, taking off her wet shoes. The hem of her dress was wet, too, as if she had walked a ways through wet grass. She got undressed and slid into the bed alongside me.

I didn’t have long to loll abed, though, for with daybreak, my chores commenced. I had milked the cows, and gathered the eggs, and came back in to cook the breakfast, and Ann never stirred.

Later, when Tom came in with that fiddle of his, wanting James to mend the bridge for him, I said, “Well, here you are bright and early. We all figured you had run off with Laura Foster. Her daddy was here last night, trying to trace her, on account of her making off with his mare. He said he reckoned that you and her had run off and got married.”

Tom stopped in his tracks and looked at me like I was foaming at the mouth. Then he laughed, and helped himself to a dipper of milk out of the pail. “What use do you suppose I have for Laura Foster?”

I shrugged. “You’ve been sniffing around Wilson Foster’s place for weeks now, so everybody reckoned you’d gone away with her.”

He finished the milk, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Well, I’m here and she ain’t, so that settles that, doesn’t it?” He gave me a hard stare as he said it, daring me to say one more word on the subject.

I just nodded, and tried to look like I was scared of him. Maybe he didn’t know where Laura Foster had gone, but I was certain that she wasn’t coming back.

* * *

The settlement talked about Laura Foster and precious little else all the way until Sunday. After all, Laura was a young, unmarried girl, and nobody knew what had become of her. Her disappearance was a nine days’ wonder. There isn’t much to talk about in a little farming settlement, especially with the War being over. For nigh onto a year, no news certainly had meant good news—no more death rosters sent back from the battlefields to break people’s hearts; no more bad news about shortages or rationing to drive folks to the brink of starvation; no more terrifying reports of armies headed this way to steal the food or requisition the livestock or burn the barn. The War had given everybody enough excitement to last a lifetime, and they weren’t sorry to see it end.

Now, though, human nature being what it is, people were beginning to tire of the sameness of peacetime in the backwoods. They craved a little excitement again. Not more war and death, to be sure, but just a tidbit of scandalous news to spice up the endless talk about crops and weather.

All the people I met at the store and on the way there—well, the women, anyhow; I don’t know what the men talked about—ruminated over Laura’s disappearance like so many cows chewing cud. A few of the timid old ladies would have it that she had been set upon by bushwhackers and carried away, but most of the rest, who knew about Laura’s soiled reputation, figured that she had gone off of her own accord, probably run off with some man fool enough to want her. I did more than my share of visiting the neighbors that week, but mostly I just listened to the talk, and held my peace.

There was a group of ladies at the store on Saturday, eager to swap stories about Laura’s disappearance. Mrs. Betsy Scott was chief among those who held that she had run away on purpose. Now the other Mrs. Scott was adding her pennyworth of information about seeing Laura on the morning she left—the last time anybody ever saw her. Maybe Mrs. Scott figured that enough time had passed now for Laura to get clean away from here, and over into Tennessee if that’s where she was headed. If that was so, then it wouldn’t do any harm if she told what she knew. Anyhow, she gave herself airs about it until I wanted to shake her like a terrier with a rat. When you know something for a fact, and other people act like they know it all when they are just guessing, it is hard not to shout at them. My smile felt like it was tacked on with ten-penny nails, but nobody seemed to notice.

“I know for certain that she was leaving for good,” Miz Scott said to anyone who would listen. “When I saw her on Friday morning, she had a bundle of clothes slung over the saddle, and she said she was going to meet somebody at the Bates’ place. Well, it must have been Tom Dula she was meeting. Everybody knows that Laura and Tom were … sweethearts.”

When she said that, not a one of us could look at anybody else for fear we’d bust out laughing. Sweethearts. Well, then, I reckon every hen in the barnyard is sweethearts with the rooster. But in a little settlement, nearly everybody is kin to everybody else, so you don’t go slinging mud at anybody if you can help it, or else you’ll start a kinfolk squabble that would last longer than the War.

I was tempted to tell her the truth just to see the look on her face, but that would have run contrary to my purposes. I bit my lip, and kept still, letting her run on.

“When I saw Laura that morning, I even asked her had Tom come to her place—for I was surprised at hearing that Tom Dula was willing to run away with any girl at all, especially if it would end with him having a wife to support.…”

There were murmurs of agreement all around at this point. Nobody could quite picture Tom Dula choosing to work for a living, and he never seemed overly fond of Laura—not enough to make the sacrifice of his freedom, anyhow. Nobody came out and said, “You don’t buy a cow when the milk is free,” but I’ll wager I wasn’t the only one thinking it.

“She said that they were going to run away to Tennessee.”

I bit back a smile. So Laura had told the nosey biddy that she was running off with Tom. That might buy the pair of them some time, because nobody would have cared if she eloped with Tom. Let them worry that trifling scandal to death while she made away with her nut brown boy. That’s what I would have done. Let Miz Scott think that, then.

A stout old widow woman, who was no fool, spoke up. “The Bates’ place is north of you, ain’t it, Miz Scott? Why, I reckon it would take that Laura Foster the rest of her life to reach Tennessee if she was a-riding north instead of west.”

There used to be a blacksmith’s forge at the Bates’ place, but it was long gone now, and the place had fallen to ruin and the yard was choked with weeds. The only reason that anybody would go there would be to meet somebody they didn’t want to be seen with.

Miz Scott pursed her lips. “I am only repeating what I was told. Maybe the two of them met somewhere, and then turned around and headed west from there. There’s more than one road that will get you over the mountain to Tennessee. But I recall that I did tell her that if it were me, I’d have been farther along on the road by that time of morning. She said she had started as soon as she could, and that they were meeting at the Bates’ place.” She kept nodding her head, like she was daring any of us to contradict her. Nobody wanted to argue with her, for she looked on the verge of a temper, and that would have broken up the gossip party. Somebody said they hoped that Laura made it to wherever she was going.

“But it seems strange, all the same,” one of the younger wives said thoughtfully. “If Tom came to her place at sun-up, like she said, why didn’t she just go off with him then? Why would she wait and meet him a couple of hours later at the Bates’ place?”

“And Tom Dula doesn’t have a horse. Were the two of them fixing to try to get to Tennessee on that one mare?”

“But she did not go off with Tom Dula,” the stout old widow reminded them, nodding hard to drive home her point. “Because Laura Foster may be gone, but he’s still here.”

Mrs. James Scott touched her arm to show she agreed with her. “I thought of that myself.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice to just above a whisper. “Now I saw him on that Friday morning. I had finished breakfast by then, and I spied him walking up the road. I asked him did he want to come in, but he said he wanted to meet up with my brother.”

Washington Anderson, that would be. And I knew where Wash had been the night before: at the Meltons’ place. There was a whole crowd of us in that little cabin—but not Ann and not Tom, for she had gone to her mother’s, and he was off somewhere—his mother’s house, for all I know. But that Thursday night, Wash Anderson was with me at the Meltons’. And he still would have been there Friday morning, like as not, as much as we all had to drink the night before.

Everybody looked interested in the other Mrs. Scott’s news about Tom. She said, “My neighbor Hezekiah Kendall says he saw Tom on Friday morning, too, just before I did. Around eight o’clock. Mr. Kendall asked Tom if he had been ‘after the women,’ and Tom answered, ‘No. I have quit that.’ When he stopped at my place, I didn’t ask his business, and he didn’t tell me. But he was headed toward the Meltons’ place.”

They all looked at me then, so I said, “Well, he got there, all right. I was just bringing in the milk pail Friday morning when Tom showed up.”

They looked at one another then and got all quiet for a minute. Then they all started talking at once about something else.

* * *

Anyhow, a day or so later, I heard that Wilson Foster had got his mare back on Saturday evening, although it wasn’t on account of me, and I never did collect that quart of whiskey from him, which is all I cared about the matter. The day after Laura stole the mare, it just showed up back in the yard outside the barn, still bridled, but with the lead rein snapped in two, as if it had been tied to a tree branch, and broke the rein, pulling itself loose when being tied up had made it hungry and scared enough to break free. The mare may have wandered around for a while, but it wasn’t far enough from home to be lost, so after a couple of hours it went on back to German’s Hill where it belonged. When I heard that, I thought: Wilson Foster got his wish. He got his horse back, but not his daughter. And it looked as if I had got my wish, too.

* * *

I was down at Cowle’s store when I heard about that, a day or so afterward, and at the time I had made no effort to join in the conversation, but later on, back at the farm when I was alone with Ann, I had plenty to say about it. “Did you hear Wilson Foster has got his horse back?” I asked her, that evening, as I was making the chicken and dumplings for supper.

Ann nodded, but she wouldn’t look at me. She had been mighty quiet herself those past few days. She didn’t seem to care if she ate or not, and she had spent most of last Friday in bed. Now, Ann was bone lazy at the best of times, but that was unusual, even for her.

“Well, I reckon they’ll be sending out the searchers by tomorrow, then.”

“Searchers?” She froze. “Why would you say that?”

“Stands to reason, don’t it? Last week Laura ran away on her daddy’s mare, and now she has not been seen for days. Then the horse shows up with a broken lead rein, and there’s still no sign of its rider. Since the mare found its way home, people will figure that where it was tethered couldn’t have been very far from home. Seems to me like Wilson Foster ought to be hollering for men and hunting dogs to start combing the woods to see if they can find Laura. She can’t be far off, not now that she’s on foot. The horse proved that.” I said all this as calmly as I could, but I was watching Ann’s every move while I was saying it, and it was all I could do not to laugh. She looked scared to death and her hands were trembling.

Ann glanced at me, and then she looked toward the cabin door, as if she expected a search party to break in on us at any moment, but all was quiet. James Melton was outside somewhere, still tending to his chores, and we’d had no visitors all day. Still she spoke so softly I had to strain to hear. “They’ll not find her.”

I shook my head. “The dogs might.”

* * *

I was wrong about the searchers, though. They didn’t use dogs, so it took them a lot longer to find her than it ought to have. In fact the whole thing began to look like a nine days’ wonder that would die down in a few more weeks until people completely forgot that a girl had gone missing.

Not that I cared one whit about her, but if I could help it, people wouldn’t forget she was gone.

The week after Laura Foster disappeared, the month of June began, and every time folks got together they were still making guesses about what happened to her.

I couldn’t let on that I had a good idea about what had happened to Laura, and who she had been going to meet. I was saving all that. I was looking forward to watching Ann fall apart, waiting for the trap to be sprung. I planned to say as little as possible, and let the rumors take their course, unless people showed signs of losing interest in the story, and then I might chivvy them along a little to keep it going. I thought I would do more than my share of visiting in the days to come, just so I could listen to the tongues wagging.

It turns out that I needn’t have bothered, though. All it takes is for one person to keep worrying away at something, like a dog with a marrow bone, and then you can rest assured that sooner or later something will come to light. I thought I would have to be the person to keep prodding everyone to wonder about the fate of Laura Foster, but I reckoned without J.W. Winkler. He’s a young fellow with a farm near Elkville, and I don’t know what any of it had to do with him, for he wasn’t a magistrate or a lawman, or any kin to the Fosters that I knew about, but he took it into his head to take charge of the hunt for Laura, and he for one did not believe that she had gotten away to Tennessee.

At Cowle’s store I heard some of the neighbors talking about how groups of men had gone out in search of some sign of Laura. Most of them gave up after a day or two, for it was the busy time of year for farmers, and they had enough to do to take care of their livestock and their fields, but J.W. Winkler would not let the matter rest. After the others went home, he kept on combing the woods alone, starting at the old Bates’ place, where Laura had told Mrs. Scott she was headed, and he walked every path he could think of to get from there to the Dulas’ place.

“He is bound and determined to find her,” said the storekeeper, handing me the candy I had bought with the two pennies I had to spare.

“Why?” I asked her. “He wasn’t sweet on her, was he?”

“No, that’s not it. He said she deserves a Christian burial. And he said there’d be no peace for her family until she was found.”

Well, strictly speaking, I was part of Laura Foster’s family myself, and it didn’t make any difference to me whether he dug her up or not, but I simply nodded to the storekeeper, big-eyed and solemn, and told her what she expected to hear: what a fine and determined man Mr. Winkler was, and how I hoped there was nothing out there in the woods for him to find.

I think he gave up for a little while, because, after all, he had a farm to run same as the rest of them. The month of June dragged on, and we went ahead with the planting and the weeding, and the rest of the weary round of chores on a farm in summer. The searching may have eased up for a while, but the talking didn’t.

On Saturday the 23rd of June, after we had finished a long day’s work, Tom Dula stopped by the house, as he did most days. I was stewing up a mess of soup beans and corn pone for supper, and James was working on sewing the sole of a shoe, sitting on his bench in the doorway to catch the fading light. Ann was somewhere about the place, using the outhouse or taking a stroll to cool off likely as not. She wasn’t doing anything useful, that’s for certain.

Tom came up to the door, smiling and sniffing at the smell of supper cooking, but I didn’t speak to him, for whether or not he stayed to eat with us was not on my say-so. As he stood there on the threshold, James Melton put down his needle and looked up at him. I watched them there side by side in a shaft of sunlight—one blond and tall, with sharp features and hands never still, even in the evenings, as he worked his other trades to shore up his efforts at farming; the other dark-haired and handsome, as gracefully lazy as a cat on a hearth rug. I didn’t feel much of anything for either one of them, except maybe a little respect for Melton, because he earned his keep, and disgust at Dula, for lazing about, living off his mother and doing not a hand’s turn if he could help it. I always did like dogs better than cats. I wondered how those two felt about each other. They had been neighbors all their lives, even in that Union prison camp, and they shared a woman—whether one of them knew that or not. I wondered about that, too.

James Melton set down the shoe he was holding and looked up at Tom. “I didn’t expect to see you back here anytime soon.”

Tom squinted down at him—maybe from the glare of the sun. “Why is that?”

“Well, people are going around saying that you killed Laura Foster, so I thought you’d have lit out of here by now.”

Tom stood very still then, but his expression did not change. “Who has been saying that?”

“The Hendrickses, for one.”

There was such a long, taut silence between them that I was sure Tom wasn’t going to answer. I even thought he might haul off and hit James Melton without even letting him get up. But then Tom laughed and said, “Well, I reckon the Hendrickses will just have to prove that, and perhaps take a beating besides.”

Melton nodded, and I don’t know if that nod meant that he believed Tom or that he hadn’t expected him to say anything else. Anyhow, he picked up his shoe again and went back to work without saying another word. Tom came in and sat for a minute. He nibbled at a piece of corn pone, but then he got up and started pacing, and before too long he had barged back out the door and was gone.