The Ballad of Tom Dooley

PAULINE FOSTER

March 1866





March finally wore out, and the fields got green again, but all that meant to me was that I’d be working in the fields as well as doing all the household chores. It made it easier to walk the mile or so to a neighbor’s place to visit a spell, when I wasn’t too tired of an evening to manage it. My fever never did come back, though, and that rash I’d had when I came here had faded away altogether, so I began to think that Dr. Carter’s bluestone cure had done its work. He said I had to keep going to see him, though. Some ailments, he said, were like flies in winter—just because you didn’t see any around didn’t mean they were gone for good.

“I don’t think you are well, Pauline,” he told me, when he gave me my latest dose of medicine. “And I think you might still be able to pass this disease to someone else if you were intimate with him.”

“Oh, I’ll be careful,” I told him. I meant I’d take care in deciding who it was I wanted to infect. Sometimes I felt like that angel with the flaming sword that drove Adam and Eve out of Eden: I had a God-sent weapon that would bring death to ever who I chose.

* * *

“We have not seen so much of Tom Dula lately,” I said to Ann one afternoon. I had spent all day planting corn in the field with James Melton, and when I got in, stiff-backed and bone-weary, Ann had told me to wash her bed sheets before I started on supper. I couldn’t refuse for fear of losing my situation, but I figured I owed her a little pain in return, so while I was making biscuits to go with the stew, I made that remark about Tom, as innocent I could make it sound, knowing it would be salt in her wound, and glad of it.

Ann stiffened for a moment, but then she made her voice light, and she said, “Well, it’s planting time. Everybody around here has plenty to do right now.”

I snickered. “Reckon he’s planting something, all right. Over at Wilson Foster’s.”

Ann slapped me hard, leaving a white handprint on my cheek from the flour. I just smiled at her and went back to kneading the biscuit dough. She wiped her hands on her skirt, but she just kept standing there. Her nose got red, and I saw one solitary tear leak out of the corner of her eye and slide down her cheek.

Finally she said, “He don’t care nothing about Laura Foster.”

“Well, in case his mama ever dies, I reckon he’ll need somebody to look after him. He might be giving some thought to that. Besides, a marriage seldom comes about on account of what a man wants. If I was you, Ann, I’d be studying about what Laura wants.”

Ann picked up a ball of dough and began to roll it around in her hand. Then she squashed it flat on the flour cloth and pressed down hard with her palm. “It ain’t like he has anything to offer anybody,” she said.

“I couldn’t say,” I said, taking care to keep my voice light and indifferent. “But her mother is dead, leaving a passel of children and Wilson Foster himself needing to be looked after. No love lost between Laura and her father, from what I hear. Now if it was me, I reckon I’d take just about any opportunity to get shut of all those young’uns and an ornery father who used me as a house servant. Did you not find yourself in that self-same situation when you were fifteen?”

She gave me a stricken look then, and I knew I had hit the mark. Ann had married James Melton to get away from a fractious parent and a home life of toil. She must have known as well as I did that Tom Dula was a deal more appealing to a young girl than old sobersides Melton had ever been. Maybe Laura Foster had precious little to gain by marrying Tom Dula, but what did she have to lose?

“It won’t change anything,” said Ann, pounding another biscuit into the floured cloth. “Tom would never.”

I took the dough away from her and rolled it back into a ball. “I expect you’re right,” I said, keeping my eyes on my work. “Just because he’d have a place of his own, and somebody making him dinner, and waiting to warm his bed, there’s no call to think he wouldn’t want to hang around here, on the off chance that your husband will drop off to sleep.”

Ann edged me away from the table. “Go see her, Pauline. Tonight. After supper. Just pass the time with her this evening and see if you can tell what’s on her mind. She may be mixed up with somebody besides Tom.”

“Go see her?” I laughed. Ann never thought about anything but what she wanted. “Why, she lives all the way over in German’s Hill. Even if I was to stop there only long enough to say how-do and drink a cup of water, I doubt if I could make it back here by sun-up.”

Ann stamped her foot. “But I want to know what she’s up to! I can’t rest until I do. Why don’t you go tomorrow after midday and walk over there? I’ll tell James to let you.”

I thought it over. The prospect of a walk over to see my other Foster cousins was a pleasant thought for me, if the day was fine, and if I had to indulge in tale-bearing at Ann’s bidding, I reckoned it would be worth it. Besides, I was curious to see for myself how the land lay between Tom Dula and Laura Foster. I might be stingy with the truth when I got back to Ann, but I’d like to know for my own satisfaction. No use to make it easy on her, though.

“I’ll be awful tired tomorrow, Ann. You know I ain’t well to begin with. I don’t know … to make a long walk over to German’s Hill, and then to have to walk all the way back here, and get up at the crack of dawn and cook breakfast…”

Ann stuck out her lip. “I suppose I could give you a hand with the morning chores, then. But you had better find out something worth telling when you get there, Pauline. If you go over to Wilson Foster’s and spend the evening getting drunk and sleeping it off instead of talking to Laura and coming on back, I’ll take a switch to you. I swear I will.”

* * *

I got the half day off, all right. I never once heard James Melton tell his wife “no” about anything. Maybe he was scared to, but I don’t reckon he could have been worried about rat poison in his food, for I never saw Ann do that much cooking. So off I went on that next afternoon, while Melton tilled the field alone, with his two milch cows yoked to the plow. I hated to wear out shoe leather trudging through the muddy trace to German’s Hill, when I could have got there in an hour or so on horseback, but if James Melton could not afford even a scrub horse, at least he could cobble me a new pair of shoes.

The walk was pleasant enough in the late afternoon, but I decided to stay the night, for spring nights are still bone-chilling cold, and I had no desire to make my way home on foot close to midnight in that weather, especially since this visit was being done as a favor to Ann, and I was disposed to inconvenience myself as little as possible on her account. Why is it that fine-looking folk always think they are doing you a favor by letting you do them one?

We still weren’t far enough into spring for there to be much to see on my way to the Fosters’ place—a few green leaves on trees here and there, and sprouts of grass amid the mire of rain-soaked fields. The road ran along beside the river, and it was as brown as the fields from the spring rains. I thought it looked like a trail of tobacco spit, not at all like the clear little streams we have up the mountain in Watauga County. I am not much moved by the beauty of nature anyhow, because every place I’ve ever seen looks about the same. I hoped that the Fosters would have something decent to eat and that they’d offer me some of it, and even more I hoped that there would be a full jug of whiskey and not too many people around to share it with. Whiskey is better than scenery. Better than people, too. It doesn’t ask you for anything in return.

I never paid much attention to the begats in our family, but as near as I could figure it, Wilson Foster’s daddy had been a brother to my grandfather, so we were cousins, same as I was with Ann’s mama Lotty Foster. Prosperity did not seem to run in the Wilkes County branch of the family, for Wilson was not much better off than Ann’s family. He farmed in German’s Hill, but he didn’t own the land, just worked as a tenant, so he barely cleared enough from farming to feed his family. Laura was the oldest, of an age with Ann and me, and after her came three boys and a baby girl. Their mama was dead, though, probably birthing that last child, though I hadn’t bothered to ask the particulars of it. What cooking and cleaning was done about the place fell to Laura, for there was no money to pay a servant.

It was a dingy white frame house that didn’t look big enough to house six people, but I suppose that the little ones all slept piled together somewhere like puppies. It looked like a house that nobody cared about—not Wilson Foster, because he was too shiftless to own it, and not his landlord, because he probably figured that a ramshackle place with a leaky roof was good enough for a tenant farmer’s family.

I didn’t feel sorry for them, though. They had a roof over their heads, and a woods full of game to put meat on the table, and they had lived through the War. There’s many that had to make do with less than that. Besides, the Fosters were not what you would call a close family. We didn’t think we owed anything to one another, and we didn’t flock together like guinea fowl, preferring our own company to the outside world. Look at Cousin Ann. She didn’t take me in out of the kindness of her heart. She let me stay so that she could have a servant for next to nothing. If that is family feeling, you can have my share of it.

* * *

I sat looking at the house for a minute, before I approached the door. Before I could hello the house, one of the boys came around from the side of the house, and stood a few feet away from me, staring. I made sure he didn’t have a rock in his hand, and then I bade him a good evening, but he just glanced at me wall-eyed, and gave me the barest nod to acknowledge my greeting. Shy around strangers, I thought, and I left him be, and walked on up to the house, wearing a plaster smile, and ready to be the long-lost cousin from the mountains, if that’s who they needed me to be.

At first nobody answered my knock, but inside I could hear a child hollering, “Somebody’s come a-calling.”

I waited, because there’s no use in rapping again if they know you are there. By and by, the door opened enough for a small head to peek up at me, and a big-eyed boy stared at me for a moment or two, before he said, “What?”

I gave him a careful smile. “It is all right,” I said. “I am kin to you. Which Foster boy are you? James?”

He shook his head. “Naw. I’m John. It was Elbert what brung you up to the door.” That got him talking, which is why I pretended to think he was James, who is seventeen. This sorry little pup couldn’t have been twelve yet. I knew that the best way to get some folks to talk is to let them correct you. After that, he forgot to be bashful, and I edged past him and headed straight for the fireplace, for it had been a cold walk from the Meltons’ place to German’s Hill. While I warmed my hands, I glanced around, seeing exactly what I had expected to see: a few sticks of homemade pine furniture, a rag rug on the floor, and some pans and a cast-iron skillet hanging from hooks in the ceiling.

Nobody ever got rich being a tenant farmer, and Wilson Foster was proof of it. After a minute or two my eyes got adjusted to the dim light, and I spied my cousin Laura over next to a cradle, holding a lap-baby in her arms. This must be the youngest of the brood, the one that their mother had probably died giving birth to. That, too, was a commonplace, among poor folk. The women just keep spitting out babies, and wearing themselves out with tending to the brood and doing all the farm chores, until finally one day they birth one baby too many, and die trying. Most men managed to get through at least two wives in a lifetime. The wonder of it was that any woman was ever fool enough to walk into that trap, but most all of them did, sooner or later. I supposed that my cousin Laura would, too, if she ever got the chance, though one baby seemed the same as another to me, and since she had one to tend to as it was, why would she go off to saddle herself with another one?

She was a little thing, Laura was. The top of her head wasn’t much higher than a broom handle, and I’ve seen gourds bigger around than her waist. She had mousy brown hair, and good cheekbones in a heart-shaped face, but she wasn’t a patch on Ann, for looks or brains.

When my feet and hands stopped tingling, I left the hearth and went over to the cradle, where Laura was. She had got the baby to sleep now, and she set it down in its old rag quilt, laying a bony finger to her lips to warn me not to wake it with any loud talking. I needed no cautions on that score. The last thing I wanted was to have my visit marred by the bawling of a smelly young’un.

I nodded to Laura to show her that I understood the warning, and pointed for her to come back over to the hearth. We dragged a couple of pine stools up close to the fire, and put our heads together to talk in low voices. I didn’t see Wilson Foster anywhere about, and I reckoned he had not come in from the fields yet, which was fine with me, for I had not come all that way to suffer through idle chit-chat.

“I don’t know if you know who I am,” I said to Laura.

She nodded. “Yes. You have the look of the Fosters, I reckon, but I had already heard tell you was working over to the Meltons’ place, so I’d a-knowed you anyhow. Not too many strangers about. Leastways, not females.”

She didn’t seem put out to see me, and I wondered if she had heard the gossip about me and Tom, and whether she cared about it or not. Best not to speak of it right away. “I envy you your home and family, Cousin, for I have none.”

She shrugged. “The house is rented, and as for family, I’d as lief give you some of ours, for they are no end of trouble to tend to, night and day. Trying to take care of it all killed my mama.”

“I thought I’d heard that the baby there was the cause of her passing.”

Laura glanced over at the cradle, where the small assassin slept in peace. “She was worn out, anyhow, and birthing that last child took more strength than she had. I doubt not she was glad to go, in the end.”

I mustered the smile I use when I have worked out the right thing to say. “I’m sure it eased her passing to know that her brood was left in your loving sisterly hands.” I didn’t believe any such thing, but I thought it might please her to hear it said.

“Well, I hope I do my best.” Laura looked away and scowled as one of the younger boys ventured into the room. “What is it, John? Get along to bed now! I’ve no mind to fool with you this evening.”

“I’m still hungry, Sister,” he said, in a treble voice, on the verge of tears.

Laura sighed and shook her head. “There’s cold biscuits in the tin plate in the pie safe. Get you one, and mind you don’t make a mess with the crumbs in your bed, for I’ll not change it.”

The boy snatched his biscuit, and crept away past us. When he had gone, I turned back to my scrawny cousin, beaming in pinchbeck admiration. “Why, all this responsibility for home and children will serve you well when you have a husband and a home of your own.”

Laura took up the poker and stirred the fire. “I reckon it will.” She didn’t seem none too cheered by the sentiment. “But for the War, I’d have been wed long ago, but now there’s scarcely enough men to go around, though my spinsterhood is not for want of trying. I reckon I could have set my cap for a fat old widower, but that wouldn’t be no different from staying here.”

“It can’t be as hopeless as that,” I said. “After all, you are only just past twenty now, and the War is over, so it may not be long before somebody makes you a bride. I hear tell you have a sweetheart.”

She turned on me, still holding the poker, likely forgetting she had it in her hand, but she looked like she’d spied a snake. “What have you heard?”

I laughed. “Oh, not a word about a fat old widower, Cousin. I hear tell that a handsome young soldier is paying court to you.”

She sat back down on the stool, and the firelight made shadows on her ashen face, but there was no trace of the pleasure a girl usually shows when you tease her about a beau. She sighed. “Oh, I reckon you’re talking about Tom Dula. When Daddy caught us together, I knowed it would get about. Well, Tom is fine to look at, and he is one for sport, right enough, but what would he do with a wife?”

“Why, take her home to the Dula farm, of course. His mother still lives there, but what of that? The rest of the Dula young’uns will be out and gone before too long, and old Miz Dula won’t last forever.”

“No. But our cousin Ann will. At least it will seem like it to me.”

“Ann Melton? Why would she come into it? She has a husband already.”

“Some say she has two, and she seems likely to keep them both.” Her lip curled, and she twisted a hank of her broom-straw hair. “Don’t you wish you were beautiful, Pauline?”

It hurt to be reminded so matter-of-factly that I was not, but I never flinch when I have been stung. “Well, Cousin, if beauty would give me a golden palace to live in, meat and whiskey every day, and servants to do my bidding, I would welcome it, but I cannot see that beauty has given our lovely cousin any more than the lot of an ordinary plain woman: a dull husband and a middling farmstead. Where is the wonder in that?”

Laura shrugged. “More than I ever got, or you either. But it may yet come right for me. There’s somebody else who is sweet on me. Folks around here wouldn’t think him even as good as that no-account Tom, but leastways he would be proud to have me.”

That was the first interesting thing that drab little cousin Laura had said. “Well, who is your suitor then, missy? A bald old farmer or a cripple home from the War?”

She shook her head. “I mustn’t say. We cannot have it known. But what about you then, Pauline? Do you have a sweetheart waiting for you back up the mountain?”

“Yes, and his name is legion. I have come down here to get cured of my love sickness. Pox. The wages of sin, folk tell me.” I had Cousin Laura’s measure by now. She kept to herself, not that she had much choice living so far out from the settlement, and she wasn’t the type to tell tales. She was sitting on her own secret like a broody hen, and so I entrusted her with mine—not that I cared anymore who got to know of it. The damage was done, I reckoned.

“I’m very sorry for your trouble,” Laura said primly, in a voice so soft I could hardly hear her.

I reckon she was shocked by what I’d said, because her eyes got big, and she leaned a little away from me, like she was a-skeered she might catch it from me. I did not bother to tell her that, like as not, she already had.