The Ballad of Tom Dooley (26 page)

We went a good ways up that ridge. I think that if it had not been high summer, I might have had a good view of the valley below, but the trees hemmed us in, making it as dark as twilight in midafternoon. The scrub oaks and pines made a canopy over the clearing, shading it from the sun. There was a bare patch underneath one of the trees, and around it the grass had been trampled down. The rest of the clearing was covered with grass or leaves, so this one bare patch caught my eye at once.

Ann stood in the middle of the clearing and looked all around her, and I could tell that she was trying to see the woods through somebody else’s eyes—the searchers, like as not. Was there anything out of place that might make them take a closer look?

“There’s newly spaded earth yonder by that bush,” I said, pointing to a bare patch of ground. “Anybody could spot that.”

She gave me a hard, unbroken stare. “What do you know about it, Pauline?”

I shrugged. “More than I care to know. Just that this is as far as our poor cousin Laura got that day. I reckon you’d know the rest, though.”

She turned away without a word, and walked over to the bare patch, which was next to a big bush at the edge of the clearing. Then she knelt down and crawled partway underneath it. I went over there, too, and I got down so I could see what she was looking at. I was more interested in watching Ann than I was in what she was investigating. After all these months of watching her laze in her bed whilst James Melton and I did all the work about the place, it was strange to see her so energetic and determined. Seeing her hunched under that bush in her brown calico dress put me in mind of a fox, trying to dig out a nest of rabbits. I reckoned Ann had already got her prey, though, though I wouldn’t have said so out loud just then. She has a fearsome temper, does Ann.

She crawled back out, dusting her hands on her skirt, and I peered down through the leaves, but there wasn’t much to see: only a line of newly spaded earth, as if someone had dug a four-foot trench and then filled it back in. The lower branches of the bush covered it well enough, if you didn’t know where to look, but we both knew that hunting dogs don’t go by the look of things. I decided not to point this out to Ann, though, for she was in a high-strung state as it was, and if I’d told her that trench might be discovered, I’ll be bound that she’d have tried to make me dig it up with my bare hands.
Ann Melton never dug that grave,
I thought. She may have stood by and watched the damp earth being spaded, but I could not imagine her soiling her tiny white hands with a shovel handle, nor putting forth the effort to dig a hole in the ground big enough to receive a human body. Oh, I could see her killing somebody quick enough. That fearsome temper of hers would carry her through that enterprise, but the arduous task of hauling a corpse up the ridge and concealing it under the soil—no, she would leave the spadework to someone else, and since I had not been pressed in to service to do it for her, I knew who had.

As it was, she contented herself with picking up a few handfuls of leaves and putting them down over the bare spot. She made me do the same, so I scooped up a pile of wet oak leaves that had been there all winter, and I let them fall on top of the spaded earth.

It seemed funny to think of somebody I knew and was kin to being down there, just a few inches below my fingertips. I reckon if I was to claw at the earth instead of dropping leaves on the spot, I could uncover her face and see her looking up at me.

I would like to have seen what her face looked like, after two months dead, but I had Ann to reckon with, and I knew that if I tried to dig, Ann would either collapse in a screaming heap or else pick up the nearest rock and lay me out where I stood to keep me from telling what I knew. So I contented myself with dumping another handful of leaves on the grave.

We didn’t stay much longer after that. Ann walked twice around the clearing, studying that bush from every possible angle, but she made no move to do anything more. I figured she wouldn’t. Moving the body was not to be thought of, even if her nerves could have stood it, which I doubted. We had brought no tools with us. Besides, I had yet to see Ann lift a finger to do anything.

Finally she sighed and wiped her muddy hands on her skirt. “They won’t see anything. Let’s go back.”

As I followed her out of the clearing, she turned and caught my arm, digging her nails in to my skin. “You know what’s down there, don’t you, Pauline?”

I could see there was no point in lying to her, so I just nodded.

She dug her nails deeper in to my arm. “Well, if you don’t keep your mouth shut about this, you’ll be out here, too.”

I believed her, and I resolved to be more careful of her in future. I wasn’t afraid of her—just wary, same as you’d be if you saw a snake on the path in front of you. I knew she had a temper and she was too selfish ever to be trusted, but now she had told me something she ought to have kept to herself. Now she had cause to be afraid of me, and Ann always struck out at what made her fearful. So I must be watchful.

They say that once a dog has killed chickens, you might as well shoot it, for it has got the taste of blood and will never stop killing. I didn’t think it would come to that with Ann, but I reckoned it would be easier for her if she took a notion to do it again.

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.