The Ballad of Tom Dooley

PAULINE FOSTER

Late March 1866





So we hunkered down and waited on spring, and it seemed a long time in coming, and nothing much happened in the meantime. When the weather was foul, James Melton occupied himself with mending shoes. I did the cooking and the washing, and what farm chores there were to be done while the weather held cold.

Once a week, I would plod up the muddy road to the place where the doctor saw his Elkville patients, and I took the bluestone medicine what he give me, but I felt little better for it. Some days I was tolerable and some days worse, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to it. Ann mostly slept the days away under her pile of quilts, or else she paced that cabin like a penned-up bull.

“It would take your mind off your troubles if you was to help me make the biscuits,” I told her one afternoon, when I judged she would wear a path in the plank floor if she was to keep pacing.

She shot me a scorching look with those black eyes of her. “I don’t want to take my mind off it. I want to feel every second of misery I’m having so that I can give it back to Tom with interest when I see him.”

“I thought you said it didn’t mean nothing—him being with anybody else. And, anyhow, it means folk aren’t gossiping about the two of you anymore.”

She snatched up an unmended shoe and shied it in my direction, but she was so wide of the mark that I just stood there and watched it thump against the wall, and fall to the floor.

“I reckon you heard the new gossip,” I said, fixing to hurt her a lot more than that slipper would have hurt me. “They do say that old Wilson Foster caught Tom in bed with Laura the other week, but he’s not so particular as your mama was. The word is that he let them be. Of course, Laura is twenty-one, not fourteen like you was.”

“Tom don’t care,” said Ann, plopping down with her elbows in the flour where I was kneading dough. “Nobody thinks less of a man for doing what comes naturally. More fool the woman that lets him. If Laura thinks he’s going to marry her on account of it, she has another think coming.”

“Unless there’s a baby on the way.”

Ann shrugged. “No telling whose it would be, though. Tom wasn’t her first, not by a long chalk. If you haven’t heard the other tales told about our cousin Laura, then let me tell you I have.”

“Must run in the family,” I said, laughing, because name-calling never bothered me none. “And there are stories a-plenty about you, too, Ann. You and the cattle drovers. They say you’d sell your favors for a jug of whiskey or a scrap of cloth.”

She gave me one of her black looks. “I lived through the War, didn’t I?”

* * *

As the days grew longer and the wind quit howling, and the world slowly began to turn green again, I found I was feeling better, and I thought that perhaps Dr. Carter had cured me after all. My rash and my fever went away, and I began to feel less miserable than I had in many a month. I was still a forlorn hired girl, with no prospects and no one to look out for me, but at least I was still young and spry, and the fine weather made it easier to go calling on folk. I didn’t like any of them much, but listening to them talk was better than fetching and carrying for Ann every waking minute. Besides, you never know when some little nugget of scandal will repay you the trouble of listening for it.

One afternoon in late March I was walking up the road in search of something to do besides farm chores, when Wash Anderson hailed me from the edge of the woods. He had a blanket slung across his shoulder, and he was whooping and waving an earthenware jug up over his head, like a damned fool.

I hitched up my skirts, and plowed through the tall grass over to where he was standing. Wash Anderson is another young buck who lives with his widowed mama and his sister Eliza, just down the hill from the Meltons’ place. He hangs around the settlement without being good for much, same as Tom. It’s a wonder these fellows don’t miss the War, as bored as they all seem to be with peacetime, and them never doing any work if they can help it. If I was a man and I had my health again, I believe I’d amount to more than they did. He is an amiable enough fellow, is Wash. Always good for a tune or a jest, and good enough company if you’ve nothing better to do, but he wasn’t a patch on his buddy Tom for looks: round-faced and tow-headed, with a foolish grin, and though he wasn’t yet thirty, he had a gut on him that spoke to his fondness for likker and food. I had no use for Wash Anderson in the ordinary way of things, but I take care never to get on the outs with anybody, and, besides, Wash Anderson brandishing a full jug of whiskey was a tolerable sight.

“What do you want?” I asked him, hands on my hips, and showing him that I wouldn’t put up with any sass from the likes of him.

“How do, Pauline,” he said, making a mock bow, as if I was a fine lady, but the smirk on his face put a sting to it. “Me and Tom Dula are fixing to lay out in the woods this evening with this here jug, and another one just like it, and make us a party of it. We would be right glad if you was to join us.”

I could smell his breath from two feet away, and I flapped my hand to stir the stench away from my nose. “Seems like you have already started in on that jug without us.”

He gave me a wobbly grin and reached for my arm. “Just feeling the spirit move us, Pauline. Come on.”

I let him lead me into the woods then, keeping my eye on the whiskey jug to make sure he didn’t trip over a log and spill it out on the ground. I didn’t care if Wash Anderson broke his fool neck, but it would be a shame to waste good whiskey. Anyhow, I had nothing better to do that evening. I had much rather call on Wash’s sister, Mrs. Scott, or walk over to Miz Gilbert’s to spend the evening and maybe cadge a bite of supper, but if either of them had any gossip it would keep, and I’d just as soon pass the time with a jug as eat, even if it meant putting up with the likes of Wash and Tom Dula. I could suffer them well enough, for the sake of their whiskey. I reckoned they might try to make me pay for my share by letting them lay with me, but if I could put it off long enough, they might be too drunk to manage.

As soon as we had gone a ways into the woods, where the evening light was green, a-shining slant-wise through the leaves, I began to hear faint, shrill sounds, and I stopped in my tracks, thinking at first that it was the cry of a bobcat. But as I stood and listened, the screeching stopped, and then the sounds came together and made a tune, and then I knew that Tom Dula had already beat us to the meeting place, and that he was amusing himself on his fiddle while he waited.

I am not much of a music lover, though I suppose I like a lively dance as well as the next girl. It’s just that the tunes all sound more or less the same to me, and if the fiddler is an indifferent player, they all sound like scalded cats. I started forward again, following the sound, and it was a likely melody, though I did not know its name. I judged that he played it well, for the sound of it did not set my teeth on edge. I decided that Tom was a better fiddler than most I’d heard. I suppose he ought to be, though. It ain’t like he ever let work get in the way of his practicing.

We found him sitting on a fallen log with his back up against an oak tree, eyes closed and wrapped up in the tune he was playing. I held back for a moment watching him, because the way he moved with that bow in his hand showed more grace than I had ever seen in him before. A shock of hair slipped down across his forehead, and he glowed with the fever of his playing. For a moment there I thought I could see how Ann could be so taken with him. He was so handsome sitting there, lost in his fiddling, that he could have been one of those magic creatures they tell about in fairy tales, sitting there in the woods in twilight, conjuring up music. Funny, I felt closer to him then than I had back there in the barn when he had his pants down.

The music didn’t cut any ice with Wash Anderson, though. Maybe he was already too drunk to notice. He staggered right on past me and plopped down on the log next to Tom, jostling his elbow with his shoulder, and, even though Tom was playing a sad, slow tune, Wash stamped his feet and let out a “Woo-eee!” to spur himself into a reveling frame of mind, I reckon.

Tom opened his eyes, looked from one of us to the other, and then he sighed and set the fiddle down behind the log, well away from Wash and his muddy boots. I sat down on the other side of Tom, almost shy at seeing this new side of him. “That was fine playing you was doing just now,” I told him.

Wash whooped again. “Didn’t you know, Pauline? Why, that was Tom’s job during the War. He was a musician for the mighty Confederacy. We was in it together.”

“What regiment were you in, then?” I said, hoping to take a long turn at the jug while they went maudlin with memories of the War.

“Company K, 42nd North Carolina,” Tom muttered, looking none too pleased to have the matter brought up. I never had heard him talk much about soldiering.

I turned to look at him. “They had a fiddler in the army? What for? Did you play for the officer’s dances?”

His frown deepened to a furrow. “I was a drummer, that’s all. It wasn’t music they wanted; it was somebody to mark time for the marching. When the army wasn’t getting itself shot to pieces at Petersburg and Cold Harbor, they liked to pass the time in camp by making us do drills. They had us beating out the cadence for that. And during a battle we’d beat out the regiment’s commands—charge or retreat. Like a code. There wasn’t much music to it. Just keeping time.”

Wash had spread out the blanket in the clearing in front of the log, and he began to tap a cadence on the side of the whiskey jug, but nobody paid him any mind. I nodded my head toward him. “Was he a musician, too?”

Tom shook his head. “Naw, he was just another warm body put out there to get shot at, same as everybody else.”

“I hear you got took prisoner.”

I felt Tom shiver when I said that. “Yeah, but it didn’t spare me much. I lasted until a month before the armistice, and after that I was just waiting until it got to be my turn to go home. They let us out by state—in the order that our states had left the union. First one to secede was the last to get to go home. Hard luck on those South Carolina boys.”

“So you made it right up to the end of the War before you got captured?”

“Yeah. March of ’65. That was only last year, wasn’t it? Seems like a lifetime ago. I got took at Kinston, when we went up against General Cox’s Federals. They got more than a thousand of us in one fell swoop. I shouldn’t have been there at all. I was sick with the fever off and on through my whole enlistment. I’d go to the hospital and start to get better, and they’d send me back to the line again, and the fever would come right back. If I’d a-been a Federal soldier, they’d have sent me home for good, but the Confederates would have kept the dead in the ranks if they could have figured out a way to keep them standing up.”

“And they wouldn’t have smelled any worse than the rest of us,” said Wash, hooting and slapping his thigh. Then he scooted down off the log, and sprawled out flat on his back, with his arm curled up around the jug. He lay there, peering up at us from the blanket, and the sight of his whiskery face, upside-down in the fading light, put me in mind of a goblin, except he didn’t scare me none. Drunks and fools—I was used to both by now.

I leaned down and wrenched the jug out from under his arm, and then I knocked back a long, burning draught of whiskey. It was raw and strong, and burned my throat all the way down to my stomach. I had tasted better stuff. This was rotgut—good for nothing except getting a body drunk, but that was all right with me, because that’s all I required. I figured that if I kept the two of them talking, they wouldn’t take their turn on the jug too often, and I couldn’t think of anything worth hearing from Wash, drunk as he was, so I said to Tom, “I never met anybody who had been in a prison camp before.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, you have.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I reckon you know James Melton, since you’re living at his place. He was there.”

I could barely see his face in the fading light, and I wondered if he was making a joke, but his voice was quiet and steady, like he meant every word.

“I never knew that. He never talks about the War. Did he serve with you?”

“Same war, same army—that’s about all. He joined up early, in the summer of ’61, the 26th North Carolina, same as Ann’s brother Pinkney. Wash and I went into the 42nd, in the spring of ’62. He had a hard war, did James. He was tomfool brave, too.”

I resolved to find out more about that, for it didn’t square with what I had seen of him. “Funny to think of you and James Melton being neighbors both here and there. Did the two of you stick together there in the prison camp?”

He shook his head. “I never saw him at all. We were in different regiments, and him being wounded might have made a difference in where they put him. I don’t know. We have talked about it since, him and me, and we reckon that I was already in there a month before he got taken prisoner in Richmond—early April, that was. And he didn’t reach Point Lookout until early May. They let me out a couple of weeks before him, too. I was already home three weeks before he got back.”

“What was it like, then, being a prisoner?”

He was quiet there in the darkness for so long, I didn’t think he was going to answer me at all, but finally he said, “I saw the ocean.”

I never had, of course, being born up the mountain two hundred miles from the Carolina coast. “The ocean. Well! What’s it like?”

Tom nodded toward Wash, sprawled out on his back and trying to keep a leaf in the air with his breath. “It’s like that there blanket, only wet.”

“The Federals kept you penned up by the seashore? That sounds all right. I have heard tell that rich folk go to the shore for pleasure, of a summer.”

“Not like this they don’t.” He was fairly spitting out the words. “I never want to smell salt in the air again as long as I live. The Federals packed a thousand of us in like cord wood on a train to Maryland, and when we got there they stuck us on a godforsaken spit of land caught between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. We were penned in like hogs on a stretch of dirty sand, crammed into tents that gave us no relief at all from the weather. Like hogs.”

“I reckon it was crowded then?”

“More people than you’ve ever seen in your life, Pauline. Maybe twenty thousand, I heard somebody say. We had no firewood, and damn little of anything else. The water was so filthy, we could taste the shit in it. All we ever thought about was food.”

“I thought the Yankees had plenty of food.”

“Maybe they did. But they didn’t feel like giving us any of it. When they heard that Yankee prisoners down south were doing without something, they’d take it away from us to get even. They’d turn us loose on a stretch of shore sometimes to wash, and while we were there we’d snatch up what we could find—seaweed or clams and such. But there were thousands of us Rebs and damn few shellfish. I learned how to catch rats, though.”

I took another pull from the jug to wash that thought out of my head. “Naw, I couldn’t eat rat.”

Tom wasn’t looking at me. He was staring off into the woods, like he was somewhere other than here. “I reckon we had some boys who couldn’t bring themselves to eat rat neither. Most of them didn’t make it out of there.”

“How long were you shut in there?”

“Long enough. Three months, more or less—March to June. I lost track of the days, but I was spared the bitter winter and the late summer storm season. It was bad, though. When they turned me loose to walk home, my clothes hung off me like I was a scarecrow. Hand over the jug.”

I passed him the whiskey and didn’t much begrudge it to him. I could see he needed it. “What do you reckon then, Tom? Was that there camp worse than the War itself?”

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and looked down at Wash, who was laying there with his eyes shut. “The War was different for everybody. Anybody who wasn’t there can’t be told what it was like. Sometimes it was so dull, I felt like I was sleep walking, and then again sometimes a minute seemed to last most of a day. We saw things that all the whiskey in the world won’t wash out of my head. I was sick half the time, too.”

“So you said.”

“Well, I was.” He scowled at me, not liking that I’d said that, making light of his troubles, but men always make a song and dance about the least little bit of suffering. They can’t tolerate half of what a woman endures as a matter of course.

“I thought I’d never get enough to eat again,” he said. “Even now—and I have been home ten months—my mama lets me have a hunk of corn bread to put by my bed in the night. I dream sometimes that I am back there in the War, or penned up in that infernal camp, and I wake in a cold sweat. The bread laying there within reach reminds me that I’m home safe again.”

“Well, it’s over now,” I said briskly, for his voice was shaking a little, and I was scared I might laugh at the thought of this big strapping soldier crying out in the night for his mama. Maybe Ann would have felt like comforting him, but I didn’t. Besides, I had not come out here to take on any more sorrow. I had enough troubles of my own without having to listen to other people’s laments. “Best not to think on it, Tom. It don’t seem to be troubling Wash there none. The best way to heal any wound is to pour whiskey on it.”

He took another pull on the jug. “I’ll tell you this—once I got shut of that war, I decided that I had done all the hard work and doing without that I intended to do in this lifetime. From now on, I’m going to take it easy, and play my fiddle, and take orders from no man.”

“Sounds like a fine life,” I said. “If you can keep clear of working.”

“And another thing. I’ll never let them put me in prison again. No more being penned up like a hog. I’druther be dead.”

Wash Anderson had been dozing while we talked, but he sat up all of a sudden, and made a grab for the whiskey. “Play another tune, Tom! All that war talk will just bring you low and spoil the evening for all of us.”

Tom gave him a faint smile, and reached back behind the log for his fiddle and bow. After a minute of twiddling with the strings, he began sawing away on a spritely tune, and when he was done, I asked him what it was.

“Soldier’s Joy,” he said softly. “I always wondered what that might be.”

He played a few more tunes that evening, but mostly we passed the jug from hand to hand, and by and by they got tired of music, and reached for me instead of the whiskey, but by then they had both got so drunk they couldn’t do it but one time each, so I told myself that I got off cheap on that occasion. I got no pleasure from rolling on the cold ground and being pawed at by the likes of them.

I endured it, but when Tom tried to jump me a second time and couldn’t manage it, he rolled over beside me and peered at my face in the pale moonlight. He rubbed the back of his hand along my cheek, which was sallow and rough, from the harsh winter. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “Damn, Pauline, it’s too bad you ain’t pretty like your cousins. That would make it easier to do you. But for plain girls, once is my limit.”

I never forgave him for that. From then on, anything that happened to him, I figured he had it coming.