The Ballad of Tom Dooley

PAULINE FOSTER

Late August 1866





I took to visiting the little general store in Elkville every chance I got, just to hear what people were saying about Laura Foster. Mostly, I’d just listen, but if the story looked like it was dying down, I’d blow a little on the embers to get it going again. No more than Ann talked to most of our neighbors, I didn’t figure any of it would get back to her, but she must have had her ear to the ground from worry about news of Laura, because it did.

One time I ran into Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson there at Cowle’s store, and they were still talking about the disappearance. Ever since they went and fetched Tom Dula out of Tennessee a few weeks back, they had fancied themselves lawmen and thought it was up to them to set everything to rights—or else they were just nosier than six old ladies.

It is more than a mile from the Meltons’ place on Stony Fork Road down to Cowle’s store, and by the time I had walked it in the summer heat I was so hot and tired that I was in no mood to suffer fools gladly.

Jack hailed me as I came up the path. “Pauline—here—stop a minute. You’re a cousin of Laura Foster, ain’t ye?”

I nodded, trying to edge past him and into the store, out of the burning sunshine. “We don’t much bother about the begets in the Foster family,” I told him, “but I reckon I’m kin to her right enough, through my daddy and hers. Why?”

“We’re trying to work out what happened to her,” said Ben Ferguson. “Tom Dula’s not talking, so we’ll have to figure it out for ourselves.”

I set my face into polite blankness and heard him out. People thought that we Fosters should care more than other people about what happened to our cousin, being blood kin, but if anything, I think we cared less, for we knew her better, and she wasn’t much use to anybody.

Ben said, “She took her daddy’s horse and went off on her own, so we know she wasn’t kidnapped. And when she saw Miz Scott on the road that morning, she said that she was going off—with Tom Dula, some say. Only she’s gone and he’s still around, so you’ve got to wonder what became of her.”

It was all I could do not to laugh. The two of them looked like puppies smelling guts at a hog killing. I think Ben could read, and he must have been filling his head with pirate tales or some such folderol out of a book. Or maybe they had missed the War, and were trying to scare up a little excitement now to make up for it.

“We’re going to go on searching for her,” Jack told me. “She’s dead. We’re certain of that. And Tom done it, but we don’t know what he did with the corpse. But we reckon we’ll find it.”

I didn’t think the two of them could find their bottoms with both hands, and for all my vows to hold my peace about the matter, I could not stop myself from twisting the tails of those two fool hounds. “Why, you may be sure she is dead,” I said, just as solemn as a burying preacher. “Why, I killed her myself. Me and Tom Dula did. Can’t tell you where we put her, though. But you all keep looking. You’re sure to find her sooner or later.”

With that, I pushed my way past them and on in to the store, while they were still standing there, rooted to the ground, speechless with shock. I made it all the way inside before I fell to laughing so hard I could not speak my order, but it is dangerous to jest with fools, for they are liable to believe anything.

After I had finished passing the time of day at the store, I figured I would give the Meltons the slip a while longer, as long as I was out. I could always claim later that I had been feeling poorly. I left the store and went south along the river road to the house of Mrs. Alexander don’t-you-never-call-her-Celia Scott. I had been there once that day already, early that morning, but somehow Ann had tracked me there, and she boxed my ears for leaving the house without her say-so. The government had put an end to slavery three years back, but I swear you would think the Meltons hadn’t heard about it, for they sure as hell acted like they owned me.

“What are you doing out visiting when your chores ain’t done?” Ann Melton had barged in to Miz Scott’s house so soon after I got there that she must have caught sight of me on the road. She grabbed hold of my arm, and shouted right in my face. “Nobody gave you leave to go off a-visiting! The cows want milking, and there is breakfast to be got, so you can just march yourself back home with me and get started on it.”

Having a witness to this coarse treatment emboldened me. “Why must I do both, Cousin Ann? Milk the cow and cook the breakfast? I’ve not seen you do a hand’s turn in many a day.”

She slapped me hard then, and, putting one hand on my arm and winding the other one around a hank of my hair, she half dragged me out the door and down the road. Treating me like a slave afore company just made me all the more determined to give her the slip, so after I’d been to the store, I headed back to the Scotts’ to finish my visit, and maybe to cadge a biscuit and honey, for before Ann hauled me away that morning, Miz Scott had told me she would be baking.

As soon as I had knocked, Miz Scott met me at the door, pale-faced, and peeking over my shoulder to see if Ann was following along behind me. Seeing nobody else in the road, she pulled me inside, barring the door behind me. Then she sat me down at the table and she poured me a dipper of cold water into a tin cup. Before I could even take a sip, she had put the plate of new-baked biscuits on the table next to a pot of honey, and she bade me help myself. She didn’t have to tell me twice, so I reached for a biscuit, and contrived to look like I had come a-visiting for the pleasure of her company.

“I was sorry to see that unpleasant scene that passed between you and Mrs. Melton this morning,” she said, pulling up the other chair, and pouring water for herself into a chipped china teacup. “Your cousin is quite a high-strung woman.”

I nodded, taking care to look sorrowful and a little afraid. “She has the temper of a penned-up bull, does Cousin Ann. You wouldn’t want to cross her, Miz Scott. It’s as much as your life is worth to make her angry.” I said that last bit slow and soft to give her time to catch my meaning.

Miz Scott turned pale, and she clapped her hand to her mouth. After a moment she whispered, “Have you ever known anybody to make her angry?”

“Besides me, you mean?” I took a sip of water and pretended to think on it. “There wasn’t any love lost between her and our other cousin, Laura Foster over to German’s Hill. I reckon you’d know the whys of that, same as everybody else around here. Ann and Tom Dula have been lovers ever since they were young’uns and figured out what sex was, and, even though she is married herself, Ann pitched a fit when he took up with Laura Foster. I heard her threaten Laura’s life.”

Miz Scott gasped and her eyes bugged out, froglike. “What are you saying, Pauline?”

I shook my head. “You must judge for yourself, Miz Scott. I must live with the Meltons, and it’s not my place to say anything.”

“But Laura has been gone these many weeks. And you say that Ann threatened her. Can you possibly mean … that Ann?”

I shook my head. “It’s as much as my life is worth to say any more, ma’am. You’ve seen her in a temper. Can you blame me for not speaking out?”

Miz Scott opened her mouth to argue with me, but then she shut it again, and I reckon she was remembering Ann pitching a fit in her house that very morning, and she saw the sense in what I said. After that, she tried to talk about the weather, and to tell me about a new dress she was fixing to make with a bolt of blue calico she had got from the store, but her eyes kept straying around the room, and she kept on repeating herself and losing the thread of her story, and I think her mind must have been somewhere else. I just kept smearing dollops of honey on those biscuits, and swallowing them as fast as I could, while I let her talk.

She was on her third cup of water, and she had just about run out of things to say, when a pounding on the door made her spill the contents of the cup all over the table. She tried to sop it up with her apron, while the pounding went on, louder and faster. She gave me a big-eyed stare, and whispered, “Is it her?”

I tried to remember what people do when they are afraid. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, and made as if to bite down on the side of my fist. The pounding shook the door, and Miz Scott kept glancing toward it, while she tried to mop up the water with the tail of her apron. At first I thought she was just going to sit there and hope the visitor would go away, but the knocking never let up, and finally a voice said, “Open this door or I’ll break it in!” and she had to get up and unbar it.

Ann Melton pushed past Miz Scott without so much as a how-de-do, and made straight for me with a look on her face that bespoke murder. “What are you doing here again?” She put her face up close to mine and screamed at me.

I didn’t bother to answer her, but just sat there, taking note of the way her eyes got all squinty when she shouted, and seeing little flecks of spit on her lower lip. I judged that Miz Scott would be too upset by Ann’s carrying on to notice whether or not I was cowering in fear.

“Pauline, you have no business to be out gossiping. You have got to come home!” Without waiting for me to speak, she grabbed my arm and jerked me up out of my chair. Then she gave me a great push in the small of my back and sent me stumbling toward the still-open door.

I grabbed on to the doorjamb and looked back at Miz Scott with pleading eyes, hoping she’d remember this scene if ever the time came. It is easy to get the better of high-tempered people like Ann. They get so caught up in their moment of rage that they lose sight of the consequences. But I don’t.

Ann turned me loose, but only so she could shake her fist in my face. “I heard what you told Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson, about how you and Tom killed Laura Foster. The story is all over the settlement by now. You have said enough to Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson to hang you and Tom Dula, if it was ever looked into.”

I shrugged. “You’re as deep in the mud as I am in the mire.”

She made as if to slap me, but she stayed her hand, and hissed in my face, “How could you tell such a lie as that?”

I hung my head and made my voice quaver. “I said it in jest, Cousin. I reckon I lose my head when I’ve been drinking.”

“If you don’t learn to hold your tongue, I will see to it that you lose the rest of your head as well. And if I catch you gossiping and telling lies again, Pauline, you’ll end up the same as Laura Foster.”

Miz Scott let out a little squeak when she heard that, and Ann, still blazing with wrath, rounded on her, and said, “You had better never tell what you heard here today, Celia Scott. Do you hear me?”

Miz Scott just stared at Ann open-mouthed, the way I often see people do when someone screams at them. It seems to freeze them in their tracks, the way deer turn to stone when they hear a noise in the woods. I could see the sense of it for deer, but not for people. When someone shouts at me, I know that they are too het up to think straight, and I find myself looking down on the scene as if I were watching from outside myself, while I try to find a weakness that I can use against them. I was cold and watchful now, but Ann had forgotten me for the moment.

She hustled me out the door, and as we stood on the path, I said, mild as milk, “Do you really think she’ll keep quiet about this?”

Ann’s eyes narrowed, and she glanced back at the still-open door. “Wait here, Pauline, else I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life.”

Without waiting for an answer, she stormed back up the walk to the front door, where Miz Scott stood twisting the tail of her apron, and watching us, to make sure we were leaving. When she saw Ann coming, she took a step back and made to slam the door, but Ann was too quick for her. She blocked it with her body, leaning against the door, and changing her tone to a near whisper, as cold as the March wind. I could still hear her, though.

She said, “Miz Scott, that there Pauline Foster is a liar and a troublemaker. You’d best not be repeating what you heard her say today in your house. For, so help me, if you get me or Tom in trouble by spreading Pauline’s lies, I will follow you to hell to make you wish you’d held your tongue. Do you understand?”

Miz Scott looked at her for a long moment, like she wanted to answer back, but finally she just said, “I hear you. Now get off my land,” and she slammed the door in Ann’s face.

Ann stood there for a moment, still whey-faced with rage, and then she came back and grabbed my elbow again. “Come on, Pauline. We’re going back home, and by god you’ll keep your mouth shut from here on out, or I will kill you myself. You hear me?”

I did. And, what’s more, I believed her.

* * *

She was right about what I said to Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson, though. One ought never to jest with a lawman, for they have a grim view of the world. By the end of August, the pair of them had mulled over my remark for a couple of weeks, and no other evidence had turned up to lead them to Laura Foster, so they came to Reedy Branch and arrested me.

I didn’t mind. I don’t get affrighted like other people, and besides, it was only those two prize fools Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson who came to collect me, and I reckon they were more uneasy about it than I was. Ben Ferguson blushed and stammered as he read out the warrant calling for my arrest, and Jack Adkins said, “Now, Pauline, don’t take on, but we are bound and sworn to bring you in to answer on a charge of murder, but we reckon they’ll let you go once you tell them the truth about what you know.”

“We won’t tie your hands or nothin’,” Ben added. “But you must give us your word you’ll come along peaceable. You can ride up in front of me on my horse, for it’s a long way to Wilkesboro.”

I nodded and gave them my word that I would go along willingly, which I would have promised them regardless, because to my mind saying something is not the same as meaning it. I believe I could have got away from them if I’d had half a mind to. They had sidearms, but I didn’t think either one of them had the sand to shoot an unarmed female. They were both so embarrassed at having to arrest a woman of their acquaintance that they could hardly keep their minds on what they were doing, and they kept telling me that all would be well—as if their word was any good on that point. I nodded and tried to look grateful for their concern, but I thought that going to jail would be a fair bit of adventure, and maybe a chance to do some mischief as well. Anyhow, it would be better than doing all the farm chores and still having to cook three meals a day for the Meltons. Since I was a woman, I’d get a cell to myself, and I could use the rest.

It was a fine afternoon, and we took our time following the river road toward Wilkesboro so as not to overtax Ben’s horse. Horses are dearer than people in Carolina these days, since the Confederate army put them through battles like meat through a sausage grinder. I leaned back and washed my face with sunshine, eyes closed, and smelled the fresh-cut hay as we ambled past the fields and woods on the way to town. I was glad I didn’t have the cast of mind to be a worrier, so that I could enjoy the ride, instead of dwelling on what would happen once I got there.

Wilkesboro is a fair-sized town, sitting on a little rise above the plain, with a line of wooden storefronts facing the town square: a towering red brick courthouse with pitched roofs and a white columned porch atop a flight of white stone steps. Behind the courthouse, just before the town ends in fields again, stood the squat two-story brick jail with barred windows on the right-hand side, both upstairs and down, where the prisoners were kept. I wondered where Tom was.

On the ground floor of the building sat two white painted doors: a small and ordinary looking one on the left side, where the windows weren’t barred, and a wide oak door squarely in the middle of the building. Ben Ferguson swung off the horse and caught its reins. “That there is the jailer’s quarters,” he said pointing left, as if I couldn’t figure that out for myself.

He helped me down out of the saddle, and steered me by the elbow toward that wide center door. I looked back toward the courthouse, the way we had come, and from where I stood I could look straight down the dirt street, past the trees, to a wall of blue mountains hazy in the distance, mingling with the clouds. Watauga County lay that way, and beyond it Tennessee. I wondered if Tom Dula could see the mountains from the window of his cell.

I thought about calling out to him, to see could he hear me, but they hustled me in past that stout oak door, which was banded with iron on the inside, in case anyone tried to help a prisoner break out of jail. We stood in a wide hallway that ran the width of the building, and off to the right a flight of wooden stairs went up to the next floor. Through the open door on the left, I could see the jailer’s parlor, a tidy little room with a rag rug over a plank floor and a dark heavy china cupboard set against the wall by the fireplace. I was hoping that they’d take me in there for questioning, but they started up the stairs, and ushered me in to a whitewashed room at the back of the building, with nothing in it but a cot and a bucket. It was cleaner than the Meltons’ place, but too sparse for comfort. I didn’t plan to stay long.

Jack Adkins turned to leave. “You stay with her, Ben. I’ll go get Sheriff Hix.”

With that, he was gone. I walked over to the window, and peered out through the iron bars, making sure that I could see the mountains on the horizon. Sure enough, they were there, and I thought to myself that if I ever got out of here—and I meant to—then I’d head back to those hills and never come down again.

Ben was fidgeting over by the doorway. “It’s no business of mine what you do, Pauline, but if you want my advice, I think you’d better tell the sheriff everything you know. Ever since Laura Foster disappeared, you’ve been dropping hints right and left, and the word has got around. First you offered to get Wilson Foster’s horse back in exchange for a jug of whiskey. Then you told Ben and me that you and Tom had done the killing. Now, I can’t see any reason for you to have done this murder, if in fact that’s what it was, but I warn you that they will not let you out of here until they are satisfied that you have told them whatever you know.”

I hung my head and tried to look shame-faced. “I get to joking when I’ve been drinking, Ben. That’s all it was.”

He just stood there looking at me, as blank-faced as a sheep, and then he turned away without saying a word, and shut the door behind him. I heard the key turn in the lock, and then the sound of his boots clattering down the stairs. I figured they’d be back soon enough with the high sheriff, but until then I was on my own. I started wondering where Tom was. There was a downstairs cell across the hall from the jailer’s quarters, but the door had been open, so I knew he wasn’t in there. The upstairs room they had put me in was at the back of the building, and I knew that on the other side of that back wall, there’d be another room beside this one, facing the front. I walked over next to the empty fireplace and tapped on the wall.

“Tom?”

I put my ear to the wall, but I couldn’t hear anything. I tried again: “Tom, it’s Pauline!”

Maybe the walls were too thick for him to hear me, for all I got back was silence.

* * *

The sun was making long shadows on the lawn out my window before I heard footsteps on the stairs again. I had sat down on the cot to wait, but now I got up and stood in the middle of the room and waited for them to open the door.

The first man through the door was a lean middle-aged man in a black suit coat with a stern expression that told you he was the one in charge. Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson flanked him like lap dogs. The sheriff sized me up through narrowed eyes. “So you are Perline Foster.” He fairly spat the words, and I decided to let him say my name any way he felt like.

I hoped he was one of those older men who looked at any young girl as a daughter, because then if I stayed all polite and big-eyed he might think me an innocent fool and let me go. I wished I knew how to cry, because that would really make him pity me, but I never did learn how to do it. The best I could do was to take deep breaths and make my voice all quavery, and dab at my eyes as if there were tears about to fall.

“I didn’t do nothing, sir. I was just joshing with Ben and Jack here so’s they would take notice of me.”

“Oh, they noticed, all right. We have Tom Dula locked up here for the murder of Miss Laura Foster, and you claimed that you helped him. When these peace officers testify to that in a court of law, I reckon you’ll hang right alongside Dula.”

I saw then that there was room for only one big-eyed, innocent girl in this matter, and that was Laura Foster, who garnered all the pity by being dead. What’s more I was mindful that when the sheriff talked about hanging me, it was no empty threat. When President Lincoln was shot at the end of the War last year, folk said they rounded up everybody who was anywhere near the actor that did the shooting and strung them all up together in Washington. One of them was a woman—the landlady who ran the boardinghouse where the actor stayed, and they hung her same as the others. I wasn’t scared, but I saw that I might have stepped in to more of a trap than I had bargained for. These lawmen were hell-bent to make somebody pay for the killing of Laura, and they didn’t much care who, as long as it was solved quick. I thought I had better get myself out of trouble, before they decided to make me the scapegoat alongside of Tom Dula.

I hung my head. “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

They ended up keeping me in that cell all night, but I didn’t mind, because after everything I told them, I knew I could never go back to the Meltons’ house anyhow. Leastways, not while Ann was still there—but after all I had told them, I didn’t think that would be much longer. They kept asking me the same things over and over, until the light faded from that barred window, and they had to light the oil lamp to keep going. Right around full dark, the jailer brought me some beans and corn bread, and they waited while I wolfed it down, and then they went right back to peppering me with questions.

I told them why I had come down the mountain in the first place, and what I was ailing from. Sheriff Hix got even more squinty-eyed then, and looked like he had stepped in something, but it ain’t a crime to be sick, and he didn’t have to like me, as long as he believed me.

So I told about how it was at the Meltons’ farm, with Ann doing no work and not even sharing a bed with James. I allowed as how many’s the night I had seen Tom Dula and Ann Melton rutting together in her bed with James asleep an arm’s length away. I said that Ann had made me have to do with Tom Dula out in the barn one time, so that people would think he was coming to the farm to see me instead of her. And when Tom took up with our cousin Laura Foster? Yes, Ann surely did mind that Tom was going over there. They had set-tos over it more than once. And the night that Tom ran off to Tennessee, I saw her take a knife out from underneath her bed and give it to him.

The Sheriff leaned in close and stared me in the eyes. “Do you think the pair of them killed Laura Foster together?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “I never seen it happen. But Ann showed me the grave.”

You’d have thought they’d been struck by lightning when I said that. They looked at one another and then back at me, but I met their gaze as steady as a rock to show I wasn’t lying. Finally Mr. Hix said, “Where is it?”

“On the ridge beside the Stony Fork Road. Across from the Bates’ place.”

He nodded. “We’ll ride out to Reedy Branch in the morning, and you can take us there. Is there anything else you care to say?”

I thought about it for a minute or two before I shook my head. They would never hear one word about John Anderson’s part in the story if I could prevent it. Not that I cared one whit about saving Cousin Laura’s nut brown boy, but if the lawmen were to find out about him, they’d hang him for sure and seek no further for culprits. That would let Ann off the hook, which was no part of my plans.

“That’s all I can tell you,” I said.

* * *

I thought it was just as well that Tom Dula couldn’t hear through that wall between our cells, for if he had known what I was telling the lawmen about Ann, I think he would have torn that wall apart with his bare hands to get to me. As it was, I slept well, with the cool night breeze blowing in from the window, and no snores or thrashing bedfellows to disturb my rest. I could sleep past daybreak, and whatever they gave me for breakfast, I would not be the one who had to cook it. Then when the sun had burned the mist away from the hills, I’d go back to Reedy Branch, but not walking and begging favors, like I had back in March. This time I would ride like a queen down Stony Fork Road, and they would all be sorry that they had treated me with scorn.

I hoped it would be a pale horse. That would be fittin’.