The Ballad of Tom Dooley (17 page)

“I am sure this is most bewildering to you,” I said, attempting to put her at her ease.

She rolled her eyes and permitted herself a small mocking smile. “I understand it all right. People have been talking all summer, and they figure one of us killed Laura Foster.”

“Or that you did it together.”

“Well, we didn’t.”

“Do you know how Miss Foster met her death?”

She shrugged and looked away. “It’s nothing to do with me—or Tom.”

“Well, there’s no percentage in trying the two of you together, in any case. I intend to request severance in this case. That means that you will each have your own trial.”

She nodded. “Different juries?”

“Yes.”

“And in his trial, you’ll say I did it, and in my trial you’ll say he did it, and we’ll both walk free.”

I blinked. I had expected her to demand that I discover the real killer. “Well, I hope that we may see both of you acquitted of this terrible deed, but I would be remiss in my duty as your lawyer if I did not warn you that if you are convicted, you would be hanged.”

She gave me a pitying smile. “They’ll never put a rope around this pretty neck.”

PAULINE FOSTER

May 1866

Ever since I found out that I had got the pox, I had been keeping still and listening whenever folks talked about it. They said it takes people in different ways, some faster than others, so I could not know what is in store for me. They said, though, that sometimes the disease poisons the mind, driving the sufferer to madness, and causing him to thrash and rave in a world of delirium until he finally rots from the inside, and dies. That may be a mercy, to be deprived of thinking so that you don’t realize what has become of you. But the future never troubles me overmuch. What I got to wondering about more and more was whether the madness of the pox had anything to equal the lunacy afflicting them that called themselves “in love.”

By the beginning of May, Ann Melton was pacing the floor like a penned-up bull downwind of heifers, and imagining Tom at Laura Foster’s place at any given hour of the day. It was tempting to think that the pox had got to her quick and gone to her head, and I can’t say I would have minded much if it had, but she seemed the same as ever on any subject except Tom. I tried to reason with her a time or two, more to get some peace than to give her any, but she would not be comforted with common sense, so I gave it up, and let her rave.

It didn’t sweeten my day any, though, to have to listen to her carping while I did the chores, sweeping around her feet like as not, and stepping over her to pick up an old bed quilt that had fallen on to the floor, while Ann wept and cursed Tom Dula for the faithless hound that he was.

“I don’t see that he’s changed,” I said once, to shut her up. “He is the same rotter now that he was at fourteen, bedding a married woman, and anybody else who would let him. I don’t see why it’s bothering you now. You’ve had most of your life to get used to the way of him. And you ain’t tied to him, so if he makes you as miserable as all that, you need never see him again. Just stick to your husband, who never gave you a minute of grief, and forget about Tom Dula.”

Ann laughed. “That won’t happen.”

“Likely not. Well, then, if you’re just fuming about his latest dalliance, why, you said yourself that such carryings-on don’t signify nothing to Tom.” Here I paused and pretended to be busy with my sweeping, but all the while watching her out of the corner of my eye. “Unless you think Cousin Laura means more to him than the rest.”

She threw me a look. “’Course not!” she said, as if I had suggested that chickens could talk. “Tom ain’t never loved nobody but me, and he never will. I know that as well as I know my own name. As if he could prefer a scrawny milksop like her over me! He’s just trifling with Laura to pass the time, and to spite me for not dropping everything in my life for him. I reckon he thought I’d go off with him when he came back from the War, and I was so thankful to see him, I might have done it, but if I had, we’d have both starved. I have told him so often enough, but he won’t see sense about that, and it hurt him that I refused to go. I think he minds about it still. That’s how I know that ’tis more spite than devotion that takes Tom over to German’s Hill.”

I shrugged. “Bid him not to go then. If he is as set on you as you claim, he’ll do what you tell him to, won’t he?”

She laughed merrily at that. “What? Tom? Harken to me over a dalliance, when I up and married James Melton without a by-your-leave to him? Why it would just give him that much more joy in doing it, knowing he was paying me back as well.”

I stopped straightening out the tangle of quilts on her bed, and turned to look at her. “Well, if it don’t mean any more than that to him, then why do you care about it?”

She got all quiet then and put her face in her hands. Then she said, so softly that I barely heard her, “Because it wounds me to think about him being with her.”

“You mean like you being with James Melton?”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“I had to live, didn’t I? Had to get shut of my mama before I ended up like her, with a passel of fatherless young’uns, and nothing to look forward to but the next bottle.”

I shook my head. “Even so, it’s funny to hear you harping on faithfulness, while you are still living with that husband of yours.”

Ann shrugged and turned away. “It’s different. Tom knows.”

*   *   *

Spring had finally come to the valley, and I was glad of the warm weather, for I was mortally tired of wearing the same dirty, sweaty clothes all the time, and not getting a chance to wash them. The Melton cabin stank of sweat and chimney smoke and unwashed chamber pots, but now that the days were fine I could go out in the yard and boil the clothes in the kettle, and on warm afternoons, we could leave the doors open and air out the room for a while. I didn’t feel much like giving the place the scrubbing it needed, and if Ann didn’t insist upon it, why, I wouldn’t, but I figured out how to get rid of most of the stench, just to make it livable in there.

I gloried in the sunshine, not even minding the chores so much as long as I could be outside, and I was feeling stronger with every passing day. I thought maybe Dr. George Carter’s treatments had worked and made me well, but when I asked him about it, he said not. He thought it was only the mild spring weather that made me feel better, and that I still needed more treatments of bluestone and mercury. I hoped he was wrong about my sickness, but I did see how the sunshine could make me feel well, even if I wasn’t. The farm work was still hard and never ending, but at least I didn’t have to do it in bitter cold. There was less wood to tote, and soon we’d all be eating better as the gardens began to come up, and the game became more plentiful in the woods. There ain’t much meat on a baby rabbit, but it’s easy to kill, because it ain’t got the sense to run from the hunter. And full-grown courting rabbits aren’t much harder to pick off, because they seem to lose their minds come mating time, and forget to be careful.

My dim cousin Laura put me in mind of a courting rabbit herself these days, for she was so snake-charmed over that dark lover of hers that she’d walk into any snare you cared to lay in her path, so little did she notice anything going on outside her own head. All I had to do was nod and smile, and sit still and listen while she rattled on—and she’d have kept it up by the hour, if I could have stood it, but nothing she ever said interested me in the least, except that when I wasn’t thinking about six other things, then I was sifting through all the babble, listening for something I could use. She wanted me to brush that long scraggly hair of hers until my arm ached, and all the while she’d be daydreaming out loud about that golden day when she’d get shut of her old life forever, and ride off into the west with her man. She hardly remembered I was there, for she was barely there herself. She had moved clear into the future, and she’d be sleepwalking until she caught up to it.

Tom Dula looked in at the Fosters now and again, but not nearly as often as Ann thought he did, for he loved the fields and woods, and the coming of spring meant that he could spend more time rambling in the sunshine, or—more likely—out napping under a tree where nobody could find him to put him to work. I reckon he did his share of hunting, too, though, because somebody had to put food on the Widow Dula’s table, and with her other boys killed in the War, the job of supporting the family fell to Tom. He was happy enough to fish for his supper, or to snare some rabbits in the woods, but I never did see him behind a plow.

I never failed to ask Laura had she seen him since I last stopped in, and she’d give me a blank look as if it took her a moment even to recollect who he was. Then she’d shrug and tell me if he had or hadn’t been by, as if it didn’t matter to her one way or the other, and she couldn’t be bothered to spare him a second’s thought while she was busy dreaming about her sweetheart.

All of this news of their mutual indifference would have made Ann shout for joy, but I took care that she would learn none of it.

*   *   *

At least the walks I took for my visits to German’s Hill were easier now, since the wind had stopped cutting through the valley like a skinning knife, and the lengthening spring days meant that I could near ’bout get there before nightfall now. Laura would be weaving in the evening after supper was done with, making cloth for a new dress for herself, and I always made a show of admiring it, hoping to put her in a good enough mood to make me one, too, for Dr. Carter’s nostrums took all the money I made at the Meltons’, and I couldn’t even remember the last time I had anything new to wear. Everything I had was faded, or patched or threadbare, and I longed to throw the lot of it into the fire, but I had no way of getting anything better.

What the War didn’t make impossible to get, it made too expensive to come by, so mostly we did without, and I was tired of it. If I could get a decent dress for the price of honeyed words and listening to a daydreaming fool, then I’d do it. I wish there had been a loom at the Meltons’, for I’d even have been willing to learn weaving myself to get something clean and new to wear, but since Ann never did much of anything, there wasn’t any use in James Melton buying one, for it would have been quilted with cobwebs before Ann ever got a yard of cloth out of it.

Anyhow, I suppose it was best that I kept going over to Wilson Foster’s place to keep abreast of Cousin Laura’s doings, while I kept on thinking what I could make of that secret. Meanwhile, I had each long walk back to think up new tales to tell Ann about how devoted Tom was to Laura, and how she doted on him. Of course, Ann could have gone over to German’s Hill herself anytime she pleased and found out the truth of the matter, but I knew full well that she would do no such thing. Walking five miles up a muddy trace was not something Ann would willingly do, even for the best of reasons, and the Meltons had no horse, so she must go everywhere on foot. Her mother lived down the steep hill and across the Stony Fork Road, and she made that journey tolerably often, mostly to foist the children off on her, but there were few other destinations that she deemed worth the effort it would take to get there.

Ann never did care much for the society of other women, nor they for hers. She felt it was her right to be the center of attention, and she liked to be petted and made much of. Having to pass an evening sewing, or listening to the prattling talk of another woman on subjects that did not pertain to her, would have bored her to screaming fits. The thought of listening to other people’s babies wailing, and having little children underfoot, putting their sticky hands on your dress, was enough to keep her from visiting most of the women on nearby farms, except when being stuck at home had made her miserable enough to endure a neighborly call.

Ann was never one to do anything out of duty or for the sake of other people’s good opinion. Besides, she was so furious with Laura these days that she would never willingly go over there and face her rival. Ann was fond enough of shouting at folks and leaving her finger marks on them when they displeased her, but she dreaded looking the fool. I only had to hint a time or two that Laura would laugh at her jealousy and make sport of her misery, and when she got to believing that, it would have taken wild horses to get her over to Wilson Foster’s place. It’s funny how easy it is to make people believe what they want to believe or what they are most afraid of.

Ann hated every word I said about Tom Dula and Laura Foster, but never once did it cross her mind to doubt my word. One time she got so furious over what I had to tell that she went and kicked over a slop jar I had not yet emptied, and I had to get down on my knees with a rag and mop it up and then scrub the newly cleaned floor all over again, but it was worth it, just to see her weep.

*   *   *

You know how the Bible said that God called things into being just by saying the words of creation out loud?
Let … there … be … light.
Well, I reckon I know what that must have felt like, because in my own way I was doing much the same. It seemed like things I made up in my head turned into truth just because I spun tales about them and passed them off as gospel. The hardest part was to keep from laughing.

Ann practically pushed me out the door to go visiting in German’s Hill, and when I got back, sometimes around sun-up, if I had stayed late and slept over, she’d be in a bate to get me off alone so she could hear what I had to tell. It wasn’t easy, either. Sometimes I had been up drinking until the wee hours, and on that damp morning walk back, with my stomach queasy and my head pounding with every step I took, I’d be hard-pressed to get my thoughts together well enough to dissemble to Ann.

“Well, roll out the biscuit dough,” I’d say, “while I catch my breath and get the eggs going in the skillet. It will take a while to tell you everything.”

Most times Ann would be so crazed to know the worst of what was happening between Tom and Laura, that I could get her to do more than half the chores, while I spun out my tale, which I had worked up on the long walk back. It wasn’t easy, neither, trying to think up sweet talk and what courting couples might say and do. All that syrupy nonsense always bored me so much that I never paid it any mind when folk were doing it around me for real. Now I was having to invent a romance out of whole cloth, and it was harder work than plowing with the milk cows.