The Ballad of Tom Dooley (9 page)

The music didn’t cut any ice with Wash Anderson, though. Maybe he was already too drunk to notice. He staggered right on past me and plopped down on the log next to Tom, jostling his elbow with his shoulder, and, even though Tom was playing a sad, slow tune, Wash stamped his feet and let out a “
Woo-eee!”
to spur himself into a reveling frame of mind, I reckon.

Tom opened his eyes, looked from one of us to the other, and then he sighed and set the fiddle down behind the log, well away from Wash and his muddy boots. I sat down on the other side of Tom, almost shy at seeing this new side of him. “That was fine playing you was doing just now,” I told him.

Wash whooped again. “Didn’t you know, Pauline? Why, that was Tom’s job during the War. He was a musician for the mighty Confederacy. We was in it together.”

“What regiment were you in, then?” I said, hoping to take a long turn at the jug while they went maudlin with memories of the War.

“Company K, 42nd North Carolina,” Tom muttered, looking none too pleased to have the matter brought up. I never had heard him talk much about soldiering.

I turned to look at him. “They had a fiddler in the army? What for? Did you play for the officer’s dances?”

His frown deepened to a furrow. “I was a drummer, that’s all. It wasn’t music they wanted; it was somebody to mark time for the marching. When the army wasn’t getting itself shot to pieces at Petersburg and Cold Harbor, they liked to pass the time in camp by making us do drills. They had us beating out the cadence for that. And during a battle we’d beat out the regiment’s commands—charge or retreat. Like a code. There wasn’t much music to it. Just keeping time.”

Wash had spread out the blanket in the clearing in front of the log, and he began to tap a cadence on the side of the whiskey jug, but nobody paid him any mind. I nodded my head toward him. “Was he a musician, too?”

Tom shook his head. “Naw, he was just another warm body put out there to get shot at, same as everybody else.”

“I hear you got took prisoner.”

I felt Tom shiver when I said that. “Yeah, but it didn’t spare me much. I lasted until a month before the armistice, and after that I was just waiting until it got to be my turn to go home. They let us out by state—in the order that our states had left the union. First one to secede was the last to get to go home. Hard luck on those South Carolina boys.”

“So you made it right up to the end of the War before you got captured?”

“Yeah. March of ’65. That was only last year, wasn’t it? Seems like a lifetime ago. I got took at Kinston, when we went up against General Cox’s Federals. They got more than a thousand of us in one fell swoop. I shouldn’t have been there at all. I was sick with the fever off and on through my whole enlistment. I’d go to the hospital and start to get better, and they’d send me back to the line again, and the fever would come right back. If I’d a-been a Federal soldier, they’d have sent me home for good, but the Confederates would have kept the dead in the ranks if they could have figured out a way to keep them standing up.”

“And they wouldn’t have smelled any worse than the rest of us,” said Wash, hooting and slapping his thigh. Then he scooted down off the log, and sprawled out flat on his back, with his arm curled up around the jug. He lay there, peering up at us from the blanket, and the sight of his whiskery face, upside-down in the fading light, put me in mind of a goblin, except he didn’t scare me none. Drunks and fools—I was used to both by now.

I leaned down and wrenched the jug out from under his arm, and then I knocked back a long, burning draught of whiskey. It was raw and strong, and burned my throat all the way down to my stomach. I had tasted better stuff. This was rotgut—good for nothing except getting a body drunk, but that was all right with me, because that’s all I required. I figured that if I kept the two of them talking, they wouldn’t take their turn on the jug too often, and I couldn’t think of anything worth hearing from Wash, drunk as he was, so I said to Tom, “I never met anybody who had been in a prison camp before.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, you have.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I reckon you know James Melton, since you’re living at his place. He was there.”

I could barely see his face in the fading light, and I wondered if he was making a joke, but his voice was quiet and steady, like he meant every word.

“I never knew that. He never talks about the War. Did he serve with you?”

“Same war, same army—that’s about all. He joined up early, in the summer of ’61, the 26th North Carolina, same as Ann’s brother Pinkney. Wash and I went into the 42nd, in the spring of ’62. He had a hard war, did James. He was tomfool brave, too.”

I resolved to find out more about that, for it didn’t square with what I had seen of him. “Funny to think of you and James Melton being neighbors both here and there. Did the two of you stick together there in the prison camp?”

He shook his head. “I never saw him at all. We were in different regiments, and him being wounded might have made a difference in where they put him. I don’t know. We have talked about it since, him and me, and we reckon that I was already in there a month before he got taken prisoner in Richmond—early April, that was. And he didn’t reach Point Lookout until early May. They let me out a couple of weeks before him, too. I was already home three weeks before he got back.”

“What was it like, then, being a prisoner?”

He was quiet there in the darkness for so long, I didn’t think he was going to answer me at all, but finally he said, “I saw the ocean.”

I never had, of course, being born up the mountain two hundred miles from the Carolina coast. “The ocean. Well! What’s it like?”

Tom nodded toward Wash, sprawled out on his back and trying to keep a leaf in the air with his breath. “It’s like that there blanket, only wet.”

“The Federals kept you penned up by the seashore? That sounds all right. I have heard tell that rich folk go to the shore for pleasure, of a summer.”

“Not like this they don’t.” He was fairly spitting out the words. “I never want to smell salt in the air again as long as I live. The Federals packed a thousand of us in like cord wood on a train to Maryland, and when we got there they stuck us on a godforsaken spit of land caught between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. We were penned in like hogs on a stretch of dirty sand, crammed into tents that gave us no relief at all from the weather. Like
hogs.”

“I reckon it was crowded then?”

“More people than you’ve ever seen in your life, Pauline. Maybe twenty thousand, I heard somebody say. We had no firewood, and damn little of anything else. The water was so filthy, we could taste the shit in it. All we ever thought about was food.”

“I thought the Yankees had plenty of food.”

“Maybe they did. But they didn’t feel like giving us any of it. When they heard that Yankee prisoners down south were doing without something, they’d take it away from us to get even. They’d turn us loose on a stretch of shore sometimes to wash, and while we were there we’d snatch up what we could find—seaweed or clams and such. But there were thousands of us Rebs and damn few shellfish. I learned how to catch rats, though.”

I took another pull from the jug to wash that thought out of my head. “Naw, I couldn’t eat rat.”

Tom wasn’t looking at me. He was staring off into the woods, like he was somewhere other than here. “I reckon we had some boys who couldn’t bring themselves to eat rat neither. Most of them didn’t make it out of there.”

“How long were you shut in there?”

“Long enough. Three months, more or less—March to June. I lost track of the days, but I was spared the bitter winter and the late summer storm season. It was bad, though. When they turned me loose to walk home, my clothes hung off me like I was a scarecrow. Hand over the jug.”

I passed him the whiskey and didn’t much begrudge it to him. I could see he needed it. “What do you reckon then, Tom? Was that there camp worse than the War itself?”

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and looked down at Wash, who was laying there with his eyes shut. “The War was different for everybody. Anybody who wasn’t there can’t be told what it was like. Sometimes it was so dull, I felt like I was sleep walking, and then again sometimes a minute seemed to last most of a day. We saw things that all the whiskey in the world won’t wash out of my head. I was sick half the time, too.”

“So you said.”

“Well, I was.” He scowled at me, not liking that I’d said that, making light of his troubles, but men always make a song and dance about the least little bit of suffering. They can’t tolerate half of what a woman endures as a matter of course.

“I thought I’d never get enough to eat again,” he said. “Even now—and I have been home ten months—my mama lets me have a hunk of corn bread to put by my bed in the night. I dream sometimes that I am back there in the War, or penned up in that infernal camp, and I wake in a cold sweat. The bread laying there within reach reminds me that I’m home safe again.”

“Well, it’s over now,” I said briskly, for his voice was shaking a little, and I was scared I might laugh at the thought of this big strapping soldier crying out in the night for his mama. Maybe Ann would have felt like comforting him, but I didn’t. Besides, I had not come out here to take on any more sorrow. I had enough troubles of my own without having to listen to other people’s laments. “Best not to think on it, Tom. It don’t seem to be troubling Wash there none. The best way to heal any wound is to pour whiskey on it.”

He took another pull on the jug. “I’ll tell you this—once I got shut of that war, I decided that I had done all the hard work and doing without that I intended to do in this lifetime. From now on, I’m going to take it easy, and play my fiddle, and take orders from no man.”

“Sounds like a fine life,” I said. “If you can keep clear of working.”

“And another thing. I’ll never let them put me in prison again. No more being penned up like a hog. I’druther be dead.”

Wash Anderson had been dozing while we talked, but he sat up all of a sudden, and made a grab for the whiskey. “Play another tune, Tom! All that war talk will just bring you low and spoil the evening for all of us.”

Tom gave him a faint smile, and reached back behind the log for his fiddle and bow. After a minute of twiddling with the strings, he began sawing away on a spritely tune, and when he was done, I asked him what it was.

“Soldier’s Joy,”
he said softly. “I always wondered what that might be.”

He played a few more tunes that evening, but mostly we passed the jug from hand to hand, and by and by they got tired of music, and reached for me instead of the whiskey, but by then they had both got so drunk they couldn’t do it but one time each, so I told myself that I got off cheap on that occasion. I got no pleasure from rolling on the cold ground and being pawed at by the likes of them.

I endured it, but when Tom tried to jump me a second time and couldn’t manage it, he rolled over beside me and peered at my face in the pale moonlight. He rubbed the back of his hand along my cheek, which was sallow and rough, from the harsh winter. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “Damn, Pauline, it’s too bad you ain’t pretty like your cousins. That would make it easier to do you. But for plain girls, once is my limit.”

I never forgave him for that. From then on, anything that happened to him, I figured he had it coming.

ZEBULON VANCE

“Our client’s husband served with you in the 26th,” Captain Allison told me.

“Melton … Melton…” I shook my head. “I cannot place him. There were so many.…”

I joined the army early in the War—on May 4, 1861, only weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter—when there was a carnival atmosphere to the enterprise, with much flag-waving and cheering crowds, gold braid and shining swords, but I did not stay in the ranks to the bitter end. As a man of substance in Asheville, I was expected to raise a company of soldiers and to lead those men off to war in defense of our home state. I had no more military experience than a blind mule, but in those heady days in 1861, that was a commonplace. Suddenly a country that had one well-trained army split into two countries, with much of that original army going over to the newly formed Confederacy. This schism left vacancies on both sides of the conflict, and so the officers’ ranks were filled with amateurs—like myself.

In order to become a colonel, you needed to round up five hundred men who would agree to serve in your command, and you needed the means to buy yourself a horse, a sword, and an officer’s uniform. That was considered qualification enough for command. For the sake of the common soldier, I can only hope that Providence parceled out the fools equally to both sides—and I hope I was not one of those fools. I do not think I was. Anyhow, I was seldom anywhere important enough to do much harm.

I suppose I could have wrangled a desk job for myself if I had tried. My Harriette would have been overjoyed had I done so, but I wasn’t much past thirty, and I had no desire to sit at a desk in Raleigh, firing paper salvos and dodging requisition forms while the War whirled on without me. That was in 1861—early days. We were all fools back then.

They assigned us to the 14th Regiment of North Carolina to begin with, and by the middle of June we had settled in at Camp Bragg, some two and a half miles from the town of Suffolk, Virginia. Twenty-six miles away, in Newport News, the enemy had landed a large force, and, since Camp Bragg straddled the junction of two railroad lines (the Petersburg & Norfolk and the Roanoke & Seaboard), we thought ourselves in some danger of attack. Every night pickets were posted a mile and a half from camp, and the rest of us slept with our weapons at hand. The battle passed us by, though, that time, in favor of another railroad town: Manassas Junction, in proximity to Washington.

A few weeks after that, the government mustered new regiments, some of them comprising troops from the mountain counties. I was gratified, but not entirely surprised, to receive a letter from the Adjutant General of North Carolina’s troops, saying that I had been elected colonel of the 26th Regiment, and would I accept the commission?