The Ballad of Tom Dooley (2 page)

PAULINE FOSTER

March 1866

Wilkes County, North Carolina
. Why, I wouldn’t go back there again to save my life.

That’s why I went in the first place, though.

On account of Dr. George Carter being there, and him being a real doctor, and not just some old besom practicing root medicine and faith healing. I had tried the other kind, and I wasn’t getting any better, and folk kept saying that maybe Dr. Carter down in the foothills could cure what ailed me with a bluestone or maybe a salve of lard and quicksilver.

I had kin over there in Wilkes, which is how I heard tell of him in the first place, and that was what set me on going, even if I had to walk the forty miles to get there.

Nobody up home seemed to know the cure for what I had, but they all knew how I got it right enough.

The old woman I went to was the one who birthed the babies hereabouts, and she made poultices and tonics for them as took sick, so at the end of February, 1866, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I went along to her. Not at first, when I found the sore, because when you’re young and strong, you just ignore little aches and pains, figuring that soon enough they will go away by themselves. Only this one didn’t.

By and by, when my throat got sore and my head commenced to ache, I wrapped up some butter I had churned fresh that morning, so as not to be beholden for the favor I was asking, and I walked across the brown grass streaked with rime until I reached her forlorn little cabin at the edge of the woods, same as everybody around here did when they hurt bad enough.

Nobody knew how old she was, but the old folks remembered her as a widow woman, and she was still spry as any of them, so it was thought that her potions must work, else how would she still be quick and well after so many years. I would not have gone to her for beauty treatments, though, for her face was as brown and wrinkled as snits, which is what she called pieces of dried apple, so she was not from these parts to begin with. Nobody from here said that word. I think she may have come over from Tennessee, and there are those that would tell you that she had the Sight, but I never set much store by talk such as that.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,
not that I take much stock of the Bible neither, but I did agree with St. Matthew about that. We all of us have the same fate coming by and by, and I was never inclined to rush out to meet it. But she talked like she knew things, and people fought shy of her on that account, for fear of what she might tell them that they’d rather not know.

I had no need of her fortune-telling, and not much for her beauty salves, neither, I’d judge. Despite my sickness, I am a likely-looking woman, mostly because I am young. At least I am little and needle thin, which makes my eyes look big as a calf’s. I have a good hank of coarse dark hair, a short straight nose, and a pale heart-shaped face. I’d show better with a dusting of rice powder and a dab of rouge to smarten me up, but there were no complaints about my looks, not even now when the War took men more’n the five miles from home they used to travel in search of a wife. I reckon that to a scared and lonesome soldier any scrawny gal of twenty can pass for a beauty, though there is real handsomeness in the Foster line that some say I got just a touch of.

One of my Wilkes County cousins is such a beauty that she puts the rest of us in the shade, though it makes her a devil for pride and sloth and willfulness. I never lacked for admirers, or at least for them that was happy to take what I was willing to give, but I reckon men would rather be tormented by a hell-bent beauty than settle for a plainer girl with a will to work and an even temper. Leastways, my cousin Ann was married at fifteen, and I had already reached twenty without having anybody want me any longer than a week. I don’t know that I’d a-wanted any of them, neither, but nowadays, knowing I am ailing, thinking back on being spurned is like holding a hot coal between my breasts. I had suffered the sleights of false-hearted lovers, and I had spent their coins, and now I was sickening from their attentions, branded as a loose woman for what the War had made of me. It was hard lines, all round, but I had no one to complain to. I must shift for myself, as ever.

*   *   *

After the old woman set my offering of butter into a bowl on a wet rag, she bade me lay back on the pine table near the fire, and, while I stared up at the roof beams, she hoisted up my dew-soaked skirts, and spraddled my legs. She looked at the chancre on my private parts, more for form’s sake than to tell what I had, for I reckon she knew that afore I had spoken ten words. But she squinted into my mouth, too, and, when she saw the white flesh where it ought to have been pink, she nodded, looking more satisfied than sorry.

“’Tis pox.”

Well, I was sorry indeed, but I was no more surprised than she was, staring up at her over my belly. “I judged that it was. Can you cure it?”

She locked eyes with me for a long moment, and then she spat on the floor. “I reckon I can tell you how you came by it. You was bit by a trouser snake.”

She saw my puzzled look and cackled. “I say you have been a-laying with all and sundry. And I reckon that you have been paid for your wickedness with the wages of sin. Going with just the one man will make a girl fall pregnant, like as not, and that can be attended to if need be, but spreading your favors amongst the drovers and trappers and soldiers like you done will get you poxed sooner or later, and so it has done for you. And that is a graver matter than a swollen belly.”

I met her eyes with a stare as bold as brass, for if she was looking for me to hang my head and weep for my waywardness, she’d be a long time waiting to see it. She was as old and dried up as broom straw, and I reckon she had forgotten what it was like to be young, and, anyhow, when she was in my time of life, there weren’t no war on, and that makes a world of difference to the course of a life.

I was sixteen when the War commenced. It didn’t reach us right away, tucked up in the mountain fastness like we are. There is not much up here worth fighting over, and not enough flat ground or spare provender to accommodate a big army, anyhow, but within a year or so, we began to hear about battles flickering just beyond our boundaries, and we knew that at any moment the war might flare up and engulf us in its flames.

Before the War ever came to us, the young men went away to it. Mostly they didn’t want to, though, except for the fools who thought they were heading off to a grand adventure. The rest were caught in the net of a law called Conscription, that said unless you could pay your way out of the army, or else managed a big plantation or a hospital or suchlike, then you had to go and serve in the Confederate army, on account of North Carolina having left the Union. But they never asked our opinion about secession, and most folks up here said it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

When the bureaucrats enforcing Conscription started hauling our young men out of the mountains, I had just turned eighteen, and I was hoping for a spell of dancing and courting to sweeten my salad days, before I settled down to a lifetime of farm work and childbirth, and all the cares of growing old. But I was done out of that youthful dalliance by the War.

Before I could have any fun, all the likely young men went off to the flatlands where the fighting was, and the young girls all wept to see them go, knowing they might not ever come back. So they said good-bye as hard as they could. Being young and knowing you might not live to grow old makes a nonsense of all those silly rules about virtue and chastity—anyhow, that’s how it struck me, and the soldiers were happy enough to take memories of a sweetheart away to war. Some of them came back now and again, sent home to recuperate from war wounds, or maybe they just walked away from an encampment one night and hightailed it home, and they weren’t shy boys anymore, after what they’d seen and done, and I welcomed them home as well. It wasn’t a love match, really, or if it was, it was them being in love with the whole idea of soldiering and danger and sorrow—not just taking a shine to one young woman. When you see a baby-faced young fellow eying you like a starving dog, and you know that he may not live to see another spring, he wants you to give him all the springtimes he’s ever going to miss in one gulp. He doesn’t mind parting with his money for the consolation, neither, and mostly I lived on that.

Then, of course, in ’64, the War finally found us here in the hills, and suddenly food was scarce, and soldiers were burning farms and making our lives a misery, and then it became a practical matter to give a man what he wanted for a slab of meat or a warm blanket. Whatever you have to do to survive shouldn’t count as a sin. It don’t seem fair to me that soldiers get forgiven their trespasses after the peace treaty is signed, but that the rest of us are condemned to eternal guilt by the long memories of our neighbors.

I figured it was my war wound, that touch of pox that I got along with the meat scraps and the blankets the soldiers give me. I wish I had some warm memories of love and joy to salve the affliction and make me think it was a fair exchange, but I never had that. I took what the soldiers had, and they did likewise, and, if they cheated me in the bargain, they are mostly dead and buried by now at Antietam or the Wilderness or Chickamauga, past being revenged upon. Dead or alive, I reckon they have all forgot me now, and I never cared now what happened to any of them.

I am alone.

I wasn’t about to fall to weeping in front of a judgmental biddy like this granny woman, but her words froze my belly to my backbone nonetheless, for I had seen men afflicted with pox, and that they had died raving was not the worst of it. Before it came to that, the skin of the sufferer would curdle and crust with fearsome sores, bubbling and running like salt pork in a hot iron skillet, so that not even the bravest Christian could stand to go near them.

I was not afraid of what would come to me, but I was angry that I could not see my way out of this trap. And I was only twenty-two. Too young to be looking at such a fate. I reckon most girls would be scared enough to fall to praying, only I didn’t believe there was anybody out there to hear me, and, if there was, He had let this happen, so I didn’t see no use in begging favors of Him now. Didn’t nobody in this world give a tinker’s dam for me, and I didn’t hold out much hope for mercy in the next one, either. I had to shift for myself, same as always, and let the rest of the world beware.

“Mayhap, salts of mercury will help you some,” the old woman said. “A doctor could give you that.” She laughed and recited that old jest I’d heard a time or two from the soldiers: “
One night with Venus, and a lifetime with Mercury.”

I scowled at her as I hitched down my skirts and clambered off the table. Then and there I made up my mind that I would go elsewhere to find a doctor, for I would get neither cure nor sympathy from the root doctor biddies up there. I had no qualms about leaving Watauga County. I’d be no more alone anywhere else than I was there. But freedom costs money, and I had none.

“I reckon there’s a doctor down the mountain in Wilkes County,” I said. “I have people down there, and I believe I will go to them.”

The fire blazed up just then as a new bit of dry wood caught alight atop the logs. The old woman’s eyes lit up as well, and she fixed me with a narrow gaze. “If you up and go to Wilkes County, nothing will come of it but sorrow.”

I shrugged. “I don’t see how it could be any worse down there than where I’m at right now.”

She shook her head. “There’s no hope for you anywhere. Better if you was to die here, without troubling anybody. It’s you that carries the sorrow within you, and if you venture down into Wilkes County, you will take death and dishonor right along with you, and you’ll spread them like the pox that brands you.”

“On other people, you mean?” I laughed. “Why, that ain’t nothing to me. I’d see the whole world pole-axed in one blow if it would make me well and happy. Or even if it wouldn’t.”

“Nothing will make you well. The death you will bring to others may gladden your heart, though. That is a greater sickness than the pox, and it, too, is beyond my power to cure.”

“Oh, I don’t want cured of that,” I told her as I wrapped up in my shawls and made for the cabin door. “If my body has to hurt, I think it is a blessing that my heart never will. It don’t even the score, but it helps.”

*   *   *

For the next day or two, whenever I had occasion to speak with anyone, I led the conversation around to doctors, hoping for one that I could get to without much travel or money, and I asked in particular about Wilkes County. By and by somebody mentioned that there was indeed a good one by the name of Carter down the mountain in Wilkes. As soon as I heard that, I made up my mind to choose that doctor, on account of the kinfolk I had there, not that I thought they’d be overmuch glad to see me. My father came from Wilkes, and he had left a brother and cousins back there when he moved the forty miles west up to the ridgetops near Blowing Rock, but he had never married my mother, so they took no notice of me, those Fosters, for all that I called myself one.

The Fosters are not a close family, nor a clan that can be counted upon to rush to one another’s aid in time of trouble, any more than I’d have bestirred myself to help them. I would not be welcomed with open arms by my Wilkes County cousins. But I reckoned if I made it worth their while, and added a dollop of guilt into the brew, then one of them would be bound to take me in. Best not to tell them I was coming, though, or they’d put me off for certain.

*   *   *

When the end of February came and the wind let up a little, I packed my clothes in a canvas poke, and, come sun-up, without so much as a good-bye to anybody, I set off along the trace that led east and down the mountain.

It takes most of a week to get over to Wilkes County, following the old buffalo trace, first along Lewis Fork Creek, and then down into flatter country along the Elk Creek Road that leads to Wilkes County, where my people had come from before the War. Walking from Watauga County to Wilkes is a long, bitter journey to make in the tail end of winter, but miserable ain’t the same as important, so there’s no use making a tale of my six-day walk back to the family seat. The war years brought so much suffering to the folks in these mountains that for me to complain about any hardships on my journey would be like spitting in a well. I’ve known worse. Everybody around here has.