The Ballad of Tom Dooley (13 page)

After my tutelage at Uncle Miah’s, I was sent over to Tennessee to Washington College, which was little more than a grammar school, but it was a beacon of culture on the frontier, I suppose, and it smoothed away the rough edges of my primitive state, so that my penchant for arguing became a talent for debate, and my natural loquacity passed for oratory.

My father died when I was eleven, which dampened the family’s prosperity, and ended my formal schooling, but by then I had got the gist of education well enough to keep at it on my own, and by then I also had the determination to make myself a successful and prosperous man.

Later in life I learned that the daughters of the well-to-do are sent off to finishing school so that they may learn the proper way to move in polite society: which fork to use, how to make polite conversation, and those arcane passwords of speech and deportment by which the gentry are able to recognize one another as being “the right sort.” Without knowing anything of that custom, I set myself on that course at sixteen, when I took a job as a desk clerk at the Warm Springs Hotel, a resort and spa, built to take advantage of the natural mineral springs there in Madison County. The Warm Springs Hotel catered to the Eastern Seaboard gentry, who fled the fevers and miasmas of a southern summer in favor of the cool and bracing mountain air of the Carolina mountains. The guests barely noticed me, of course, for they thought that the denizens of the mountains were ill-bred and savage folk, and to them I was no more than a servant. But to me those rich folks from the flatland were exhibits in my private zoo, and I studied them with the care of a naturalist.

By the time I had finished my sojourn as an employee of the Warm Springs Hotel, I could tell Charleston from Richmond, planter’s wife from lawyer’s daughter with a glance at their apparel. In that school for society, I learned to speak and dress in a way that would make the gentry accept me as one of their own. I never felt myself to be one of them, though, for there was always an unreconstructed part of my soul that sided with the common man, and understood the pleasures of the jug and fiddle more than that of the decanter and the opera.

Not many of the well-bred Charlotte lawyers of my acquaintance would have taken the case of a penniless illiterate from the hill country, but fighting for the underdog came as naturally to me as breathing. I just hoped for both our sakes that this Dula fellow was innocent, for after the War and the Governor’s Mansion I was rusty at the practice of law.

PAULINE FOSTER

Late April 1866

Listening to Miz Ann Melton blackening the name of her cousin Laura would have made a cat laugh, but, since I had my bed and board to think of, I just kept quiet and let her rave.

“Why, Laura Foster has got no more morals than a mare in heat!” she declared, as if such a thing would disgrace our fine family of Fosters. I had to turn away then, and bite my lip to keep from laughing in her face. Here was Ann with a lover still coming to her bed a couple of nights a week, while her husband slept nearby, and her own mother Lotty, having lost count of the fathers of her young’uns. Then there was me, with a battalion of lovers and a war wound beneath my skirts to prove it. We were fine ones to talk about the sins of little Laura Foster. She couldn’t hold a candle to the rest of the family sinners, but you would never catch me saying so to Mistress Ann, to whom I was beholden for my keep. Nor would I be sharing with her the news that drab little Laura claimed to have unearthed another sweetheart besides Ann’s beloved Tom. I don’t reckon Ann would have believed me anyhow on that score, for nothing would ever convince her that Tom Dula was not the finest, handsomest fellow in all creation.

One man is the same as another to me, except some of them stink more than others, but from the way other women act around this man or that, I can see that they have preferences in the matter of coupling, and, for Ann, the sun rose and set upon Thomas Dula, though I cannot say why this should be so. To my mind, he was no better looking than her husband, and he was a deal less steady and dependable. If you looked at the two of them the way you’d study a horse you were planning to buy, then only a fool would pick Tom.

I used to wonder what she saw when she looked at him. Not what the rest of us saw, which was a lazy, no-account boy with an easy smile and an inclination to go through life like a raft on a river, taking the easiest course as it flowed. If I was to tell Cousin Ann that Laura found some man she liked better than Tom, like as not she would call me a bare-faced liar. Well, I am a liar, but people seldom catch me at it, and, though I had no intention of sharing the news with Ann, I did believe that Laura’s affections lay elsewhere.

There are a deal of things a woman might want more than a sunny smile and a strong back in bed: land, money, dependability, honor, the respect of the neighbors. James Melton had all of that. Tom had none of it, and never would. Picking some other man in place of Melton struck me as a foolish choice, whether Ann believed it or not. I resolved to take a close look at the men hereabouts to see if I could tell which one had taken my cousin Laura’s fancy. But I would not tell Ann. Let her jealousy simmer a while longer, while I watched the pot boil, and when the time was right, I would let it scald the lot of them.

*   *   *

Spring’s cold rains brought the first green shoots of grass, and then deep in the bare woods the redbud trees swelled up like sores that crowned a rosy pink, and then went away, same as mine had. A week or so after the redbud bloomed and withered, Ann was washing herself and found some rosy sores of her own. They were between her legs, where it didn’t show, so she was as beautiful as ever, but the affliction took its toll on her temper, which was ragged at the best of times.

She slammed the tin washbowl on to the table, and thrust her face up close into mine, so I could feel the heat of her breath and smell her body, still unwashed, for she had come upon the sores and quit. “I am sick!” she screamed in my face. “And I reckon it is your fault!”

I have one gift from fortune. It is not grace, or beauty, or a fine singing voice, or breeding, but it is a blessing nonetheless. I cannot be moved. Being shouted at does not make me tremble, and neither panic nor insult can tempt me into a display of temper. Inside my head, I am as cold as a creek of snow-melt. Sometimes I wonder what other people feel when they weep or storm, for whatever it is I am not touched by it. While she sobbed and swore, I stood there looking at her, thinking as clearly as if she were humming hymn tunes, and I felt nothing at all.

“Why, Ann, I am sorry you have taken poorly, but it can’t have nothing to do with my sickness, can it? I reckon all the world knows how you catch the pox—from laying in sin with them that has it. But whatever else we ever did, you and I, we never did
that,
Cousin.”

She stared at me for a moment, letting my words sink in, and perhaps she was too frightened to reason it out, as I had been here a good while before she even took sick. I had no doubt that Ann was poxed, because, though she had not lain with me, I had been tupped by Tom, and so had she, which amounted to the same thing. I was sure of that. I had taken a roundabout way to share my affliction with her, but I had managed it in the end, and it was all I could do not to gloat over my victory. But I generally take the wiser course, and that called for me to force tears into my eyes, and clasp her hand, and say, “Oh, it cannot be my condition that ails you, Cousin! Perhaps you are just liverish.”

She shook her head. “I felt the sore just now, when I was washing myself.”

“All manner of things can cause a lump upon the body. Mayhap it will go away of its own accord.” I tried to sound as if I believed that, for it would do no good for her to know what ailed her. It was enough that I knew.

I reckon that if you are born beautiful, then the outside of your head is so important that you don’t have to worry overmuch about what there is on the inside. Leastways, I never could see any sign that Ann ever wasted any time trying to think out anything. While she was brushing her black hair into a glossy sheen, or when she rubbed lampblack on her eyelids to make her dark eyes big and calf-like, those eyes would go soft and vacant, like two puddles of spilled ink, and she rarely spoke when she was tending to her rites of beauty. Those things ought not to take up so much space in your head as to crowd out other thoughts altogether, but she never seemed bored, though she did little enough of anything. Whereas, me—why, it seems like I cannot stop myself from thinking, even when I want to. Even when I am bone-weary and trying to drift off to sleep, notions keep buzzing around behind my eyes until I wish I could swat them away like gnats. Sometimes in the back of my imaginings there is that shadow of my bodily sickness and an ugly picture of what the end will be like for me, but mostly I am able to keep away from that abyss by playing a never-ending game of draughts with everybody who crosses my path.

Do I need to repay anybody for some slight or injury, and, if so, how can I safely do them a bad turn? — Is there someone standing in the way of something I want, and, if so, what lie can I tell to push them aside? — Who is vexing me by being too rich, or too smug, or too happy? How can I put a damper on that?

I never ran out of scores to settle, and little seedlings of mischief to tend to. But Ann and Tom just seemed to roll along through life on a cart of new-mown hay and cabbage roses—never worrying about slights or rivals, never trying to come out ahead or fearing being left behind. They just …
lived.
Why, calves walk into the butchering shed with as much forethought as those two had about where life would lead them.—It must be restful to be able to live like that, floating, instead of fighting back against the current, but I take no pleasure in idleness.

I am always trying to win a game that no one else knows we are playing.

I figured that Ann’s habit of not bothering to think was the reason she had not worked out what was ailing her and how she had come to catch it. She knew full well that I had lain with Tom Dula, same as she had, and surely by now she knew that I had the pox. It stands to reason that I’d give it to him, and he would pass it right along to whoever he took a notion to bed down with. Funny that she didn’t see it coming, that she didn’t even recognize it when it caught up with her, while I had laid awake nights planning for just such a calamity to overtake her. Maybe for an instant or two it irked me that she could not see my cleverness behind the trap that had sprung on her, but then I remembered that I needed the Meltons’ bed and board, so I held my peace, and went back to acting like a concerned and devoted cousin.

“I reckon you caught it from Tom,” I said. “You said yourself that Laura Foster was the talk of the settlement for all her goings-on with men. I reckon poor Tom paid the price for her loose ways.” I held my breath then, to keep from laughing at this bare-faced flimflam, but Ann was nodding her head like I was telling her something she already knew. It is easy enough to lead a mule in the direction it already wants to go, and Ann had the wind up something fierce over our drab little cousin Laura. She
would
believe that Tom might be stolen away by that little mud hen, as if that were anything worth worrying about.

If I hated anybody in the world more than I hated everybody in general, I believe I’d wish Tom Dula on them. But Ann thought that the sun rose over his left shoulder, and it suited her to blame her troubles on Laura Foster, for she was already dead set against her.

The next time Tom darkened the door, she lit into him like a scalded cat. He had come in smiling, probably hoping for a pleasant spell by the hearth, and a plate of corn muffins, if I had made any, for he’d wait until doomsday to get anything baked by the fair hands of Ann Melton. But he got more warmth than he bargained for that day: Ann’s wrath could have melted an anvil.

She ran at him, same as she often did to fling herself into his embrace, but, though he stood open-armed to meet her, she pulled up short, and thrust her face up in to his, and screamed out her words as if he was still on the other side of the gate. “I am poxed, Tom Dula! Bound to die! And it is on account of
you.
”

I stood off in the corner, watching this, and holding my breath so as not to laugh. But it was interesting to watch the pair of them. I spend a lot of time watching people, seeing when they smile or frown, and what they say to good news or bad tidings, and I try to remember to do the same, for if I did not make myself remember to smile or frown, all I would ever show the world is an empty stare. I was born past caring about anything.

When Ann flew at him, Tom Dula froze, and turned ashy pale, letting her wrath break over him like a bucket of cold water. If he could have turned and run, I believe he would have. “You have killed me, Tom!” she wailed, beating her little fists against his chest, and letting loose a storm of heavy weeping.

He held her close to him, with an empty stare upon his own face, but he stroked her hair and murmured soft words to her, the way I have seen people talk to a child that has fallen down and cut itself, or to a horse that is fixing to bolt. Finally, when the nerve storm looked to be about over, he tilted her chin up so that he could look into her face, which was blotched and streaky with her tears, but she didn’t look as unsightly as she ought to have done after such a flood of temper. If I had let loose a tantrum such as that, I’d have looked like a withered winter apple dug out of the root cellar. But not Ann. She looked like a rose in a shower of warm rain. Ann had too much of everything, which was hard lines on the rest of us, and that set me to thinking again on what I might do to change that.

“What has sot you to wailing?” Tom asked her, with an edge to his voice, but he was smiling a little, too, for Ann’s tempers are legion, and most of the time they are of no more consequence than a summer squall.

This time, though, she was not to be comforted with smiles and embraces, even from her beloved Tom. She glared up, cutting him with those dark eyes. “I am poxed, Tom,” she said, not screaming any longer, but in a quiet, shaky voice that was holding back a flood of tears. “You give me the soldiers’ ailment, and since you never had it when you come home from the War, I reckon I know where you came by it lately.”