The Ballad of Tom Dooley (30 page)

“I just wondered,” I said.

It set my mind at ease somewhat to know that John Anderson could not be a witness in court, but I was still afraid he might go seek out one of the lawyers, and tell them the truth about Laura’s elopement. I had not seen him alone since Laura went missing. I think he knew how dangerous it would be for him if anyone guessed the truth. But if he ever got to the point where he didn’t care, he could ruin everything, for he could put me squarely back into the case. I didn’t want it known that I had lied to Ann. If everyone kept quiet about how it really happened, the law might hang them both.

*   *   *

I waited it out, though. Least said, soonest mended. I was right to do that. They found Tom guilty. The court ordered him to hang in Statesville on November 9, 1866, but the lawyer, Governor Vance, labored on Tom’s behalf as if he were being paid in gold instead of working for nothing. He fought and objected and quibbled about every little thing, fighting like he was back in the War again. He was an important man with half the quality folks in the state counting themselves as his friends, so he got his way.

By and by we heard there was to be a new trial for Tom, on account of they hadn’t got it right the first time around. I never understood the rights of it. Since the high court only met twice a year, spring and fall, that gave Tom another six months of life, or six more months to spend penned up in a cell, depending on how you looked at it. I remembered what he had said about that Union prison camp, and I reckoned he was burning to get out, one way or another.

Ann continued to bide in the jail, and months went by with nothing done about her. Since Governor Vance had arranged for them to be tried separately, she would have to wait until it was settled with Tom, once and for all, before they would consider her part in it.

The next time the court met, we all got ready to traipse down to Statesville to say our piece all over again, but then we heard that the defense wasn’t ready, on account of some of their witnesses not turning up. That was Mr. Vance, up to his old tricks again, we figured, so things got moved along to the fall of 1867. A year in jail for Tom, with that first death sentence hanging over his head. I thought that if I were the Iredell County jailer, I’d invest in a couple of extra guards.

I was back in Elkville in June, visiting folks, and mainly asking around to see what was transpiring in the court case. That’s when I heard that Governor Vance was trying to round up new witnesses for the second trial, and I began to worry that he might stumble on to somebody who knew more than he bargained for. He might use his fancy tricks to get Tom off on new evidence, and then turn around and get Ann freed based on her beauty and the Governor having friends in high places.

I decided to pay a call on someone while I was there. I went to see James Melton first, and found him well and working as hard as ever. He looked older than his years, perhaps from all the worry and from having to run the place all on his own now. The little girls were still too young to be much help.

“I just came by to say how-do,” I told him, sipping the tin cup of well water he had given me. “How is my cousin Ann faring in jail?”

He sighed and mopped his forehead with a rag. I thought that I could see strands of gray in his yellow hair. “You’d do better to ask her mother about her. It’s a long way to town, and I have no time to go.”

“Don’t you miss her?”

He thought about it. James never was one for making hasty replies. “She was beautiful, you know. Like having a fairy maiden out of an old ballad come to stay, but you know how those songs end. The fairy always goes back to where she came from. She never stays forever. And after a while it just seems like it was all a dream.”

I just looked at him, while I tried to picture lazy, foul-tempered Ann Melton as a fairy queen, but it sounded like pure foolishness to me. One thing was clear, though: as far as he was concerned, she was gone.

I left him soon after that, just as it was gathering dark, and I walked down the hill to the Andersons’ house, but I didn’t aim to pass the time with Wash or his sister Eliza. Wash was all right when he was sober, but that Eliza was a milk and water miss, and it near ’bout put me to sleep to try to talk to her.

Everything looked just the same as it always had. The Bates’ place was as desolate as ever, though I didn’t suppose anybody ever gave it a second thought anymore, if they had to look at it every day. Laura was dead and buried, and Tom and Ann were away in jail, so life went on. But there was one person that I thought would still remember, and it was him I had come to talk to.

I found him in the barn, milking the Andersons’ one old cow. I was surprised that he had stayed around after what happened, but then the government had set all the slaves free four years back, and he hadn’t gone off then, so maybe he was the staying kind. As soon as I thought that, though, it came to me that John Anderson had been wanting to run off with Laura Foster, and maybe he still wanted to get away—more than ever now that she was dead. But he had seen that when Tom Dula tried to run off, it just made everybody think he was guilty of killing Laura. John Anderson couldn’t afford to have people wondering things like that about him. Somebody might have seen something while they were keeping company together, and if folks put two and two together, he’d hang for sure.

He glanced up when he saw me, and I saw him startle for an instant. All he could see was a shadow against the bright light outside, and Laura and I were like enough in form and height—both of us little and scrawny—though many would say she was more fair of face. I didn’t care, though. Look where it got her. After a couple of heartbeats, he worked out who I was, but he had to finish the milking, so he just nodded how-do, and went back to what he was doing. I stood there just inside the barn until my eyes got accustomed to the light, and I watched him squirting jets of milk into the pail. I could smell it, the hot sweet smell mingling with the odor of fresh-cut hay and cow piles glistening with flies.

He was leaner than the last time I had seen him, and he seemed a little darker, maybe from working in the summer fields—or else the dim light in the cow byre made him seem so. He had a fine chiseled face, though, that put me in mind of a mountain back where I come from that they called The Grandfather. He was handsome enough, but I don’t reckon most people bothered to look at him. All they’d see was somebody’s slave, good for doing the farm work, and that’s all. It’s a wonder Laura ever saw more than that, but I reckon she did. He’d not find a woman like her again—and maybe he’d live longer for the fact of that.

When he finished the milking, he stood up and hoisted the pail out of reach of the cow’s hoof. He set it down near the door, and turned to look at me. “How do, Miss Foster,” he said, quiet and careful, in his white-folks voice.

I smiled. “You don’t have to bow and scrape to me, John Anderson. I know you of old.”

His face stayed as blank as the cow’s. “Was there something I could do for you, ma’am?”

“I kept your secret all this past year, John. Come sit a spell with me, and tell me how you are.”

“I can’t see how that concerns you, Miss Pauline.”

I settled myself on top of a pile of clean straw, and the cow wandered back outside, so after a minute of standing there with his fists clenched, he sat down an arm’s length away from me, eying me like I was part rattlesnake.

“You went away,” he said.

“I did. I have people up the mountain, and I went back to stay with them. I thought it might be perilous to stop on here for a while. I’ll bet you’d have left if you could have.”

He nodded. “I used to dream about it. Only in my dream, it would be me and Laura astraddle her daddy’s mare, heading up that mountain that looks like it rises up out of the woods behind the back pasture. Reckon I’ll never see those mountains up close now.”

I took a blade of straw and twirled it between my fingers. “People forget, John. A year has come and gone. Give it another one or two, and nobody will even mark your absence. You are a free man, ain’t you? Go as you please.”

He leaned back and pointed out the barn door and up at the sky, where a full golden moon was just coming up over the ridge. “See how big the moon looks when it rises? Looks like it’s almost touching the ground. When I was little, I used to think that if you climbed to the top of the mountain, you could touch it. But one night I climbed all the way up the ridge, and when I got there, the moon was as far away as ever. Now, I reckon freedom is like that. You think that if you just go someplace else you could touch it, but when you get there, it will still be a million miles away.”

“You and Laura might have made it, if you went far enough out west to where they don’t care about such things. Indian Territory, maybe.”

“Well, that is past praying for. Laura is dead and gone. And I am thinking that once the harvest is over and done with, I will get away from here. At least then I won’t have to look at that ridge where they found her buried. Maybe I could sleep better then.”

“Where would you go?”

“The Andersons have property over the county line, at German’s Hill. I thought I might do some sharecropping on my own over there, if Mr. Washington is willing to let me try. I think he will. It’s only Caldwell County—not over the mountain, not Indian Territory, but maybe I can start living again there. Find me another woman.”

I smiled at his foolishness. “Another gal like my cousin Laura?”

“No!” He hit the straw with his fist. “As little like her as ever was. I have done with that. I’ll find me a good steady woman of color, who can help me tend a farm, and make a life over there, where we don’t have to sneak around in fear of our lives.”

It was like listening to James Melton all over again. The Foster women seem to have the power to bewitch a man, like the fairy queen in the old ballads, but sooner or later, he wakes up on a cold hillside, with a handful of dust and ashes, and after that all he wants for the rest of his life is a plain ordinary woman who will share his burdens, instead of a moonshine maiden who gives you dreams and leaves you with nothing.

The moon had climbed higher than the ridge now, and it was so dark in the barn that we both looked like shadows. I leaned back in the straw, feeling drowsy and peaceful. Neither one of us said anything for a while. Then I heard John sigh, a heavy, weary sound like a tired old horse.

“What?”

He sighed again. “It’s just that you put me in mind of Laura, sitting there in the hay like that, all in shadow. You favor her.”

“Laura and me were blood cousins, so we ought to.”

“I’ll miss her until the day I die.”

I thought the day he died might have come sooner if she still walked the earth. I didn’t say that, though, because I was mindful of what I had come about. So I leaned close to him in the soft darkness of that summer evening, and I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned close. “She was mighty lucky that she had you to make her happy, John. I never had anybody.” I made my voice quaver, and it was too dark for him to see that I shed no tears. Before he knew what was happening, I was in his arms, and then I just let nature take its course. He called me “Laura,” and I never said a word, just went on kissing him and running my hands over his body. Never saw a man yet that didn’t take to rutting given half a chance. He wasn’t but twenty-two or so, and Laura had been dead a year and more. By the time he remembered himself, it was too late to matter.

He turned his back to me when he was done, and I thought I heard him crying softly in the dark. I left him be for a minute or two, while I righted my skirt, and picked straw out of my hair. Finally, I said, “Tom Dula is getting a new trial around harvest time. And then Ann will have her day in court. And I reckon you know more than anybody about what really went on that day.”

“I know Laura wasn’t running off with Tom Dula. It was me she came to meet. I never told anybody, though.”

“See that you don’t. I reckon you know what would happen to you if people knew about you and Laura.”

“I know. But they already sentenced Tom Dula to hang in that one trial. If the next court does the same thing, they’re going to kill him. And he’s an innocent man. He had no call to kill my Laura. None at all. I keep thinking I should tell somebody that.”

I leaned in close again, but there was no softness about me this time. “You won’t tell anybody anything, John Anderson, for if you do, it’s you that will hang.”

He tried to pull away, and I could hear the bewilderment in his voice. “But—but—I never harmed Laura.”

“No. But I can’t have you trying to save Tom. I want him to hang.”

“But why? Are you aiming to save your cousin—Miz James Melton?”

“Well, no, John. I want them both to hang. And if you try to stop it, I’ll see that they lynch you, no matter what. I’ll tell them you raped me.”

I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I heard him draw breath, and he shuddered like he’d touched a snake. “Somebody should have killed you,” he said.

I laughed. “Why, I’m just a servant girl here. People hardly notice me at all.”

*   *   *

When the fall term of 1867 rolled around, wouldn’t you know it, this time it was the prosecution that wasn’t ready. They claimed that some of their witnesses had not turned up. That there Colonel Grayson from Tennessee was one of the missing witnesses, and I wasn’t surprised. A whole year had passed, and by now he must have thought he had better things to do than to travel all the way to Statesville to watch a bunch of North Carolina attorneys waste everybody’s time with their legal shenanigans. I hear they fined him eighty dollars, though, for not attending. I wonder if they ever collected it.

They finally had that second trial on January 21, 1868, and mostly the same witnesses went all the way to Statesville to say their piece again. But there were a few changes. In the corridor outside the courtroom I saw Eliza Anderson, Wash Anderson’s younger sister, decked out in her Sunday best.

“What did they call you for?” I asked her.

She doesn’t care for me overmuch, and I reckon that’s because her brother has been tale-bearing, but she answered me civil enough, “Nothing very important, I’m sure. But we live next to the Bates’ place, and I suppose the prosecution called me on account of that.”