The Ballad of Tom Dooley (22 page)

Not that I cared one whit about her, but if I could help it, people wouldn’t forget she was gone.

The week after Laura Foster disappeared, the month of June began, and every time folks got together they were still making guesses about what happened to her.

I couldn’t let on that I had a good idea about what had happened to Laura, and who she had been going to meet. I was saving all that. I was looking forward to watching Ann fall apart, waiting for the trap to be sprung. I planned to say as little as possible, and let the rumors take their course, unless people showed signs of losing interest in the story, and then I might chivvy them along a little to keep it going. I thought I would do more than my share of visiting in the days to come, just so I could listen to the tongues wagging.

It turns out that I needn’t have bothered, though. All it takes is for one person to keep worrying away at something, like a dog with a marrow bone, and then you can rest assured that sooner or later something will come to light. I thought I would have to be the person to keep prodding everyone to wonder about the fate of Laura Foster, but I reckoned without J.W. Winkler. He’s a young fellow with a farm near Elkville, and I don’t know what any of it had to do with him, for he wasn’t a magistrate or a lawman, or any kin to the Fosters that I knew about, but he took it into his head to take charge of the hunt for Laura, and he for one did not believe that she had gotten away to Tennessee.

At Cowle’s store I heard some of the neighbors talking about how groups of men had gone out in search of some sign of Laura. Most of them gave up after a day or two, for it was the busy time of year for farmers, and they had enough to do to take care of their livestock and their fields, but J.W. Winkler would not let the matter rest. After the others went home, he kept on combing the woods alone, starting at the old Bates’ place, where Laura had told Mrs. Scott she was headed, and he walked every path he could think of to get from there to the Dulas’ place.

“He is bound and determined to find her,” said the storekeeper, handing me the candy I had bought with the two pennies I had to spare.

“Why?” I asked her. “He wasn’t sweet on her, was he?”

“No, that’s not it. He said she deserves a Christian burial. And he said there’d be no peace for her family until she was found.”

Well, strictly speaking, I was part of Laura Foster’s family myself, and it didn’t make any difference to me whether he dug her up or not, but I simply nodded to the storekeeper, big-eyed and solemn, and told her what she expected to hear: what a fine and determined man Mr. Winkler was, and how I hoped there was nothing out there in the woods for him to find.

I think he gave up for a little while, because, after all, he had a farm to run same as the rest of them. The month of June dragged on, and we went ahead with the planting and the weeding, and the rest of the weary round of chores on a farm in summer. The searching may have eased up for a while, but the talking didn’t.

On Saturday the 23rd of June, after we had finished a long day’s work, Tom Dula stopped by the house, as he did most days. I was stewing up a mess of soup beans and corn pone for supper, and James was working on sewing the sole of a shoe, sitting on his bench in the doorway to catch the fading light. Ann was somewhere about the place, using the outhouse or taking a stroll to cool off likely as not. She wasn’t doing anything useful, that’s for certain.

Tom came up to the door, smiling and sniffing at the smell of supper cooking, but I didn’t speak to him, for whether or not he stayed to eat with us was not on my say-so. As he stood there on the threshold, James Melton put down his needle and looked up at him. I watched them there side by side in a shaft of sunlight—one blond and tall, with sharp features and hands never still, even in the evenings, as he worked his other trades to shore up his efforts at farming; the other dark-haired and handsome, as gracefully lazy as a cat on a hearth rug. I didn’t feel much of anything for either one of them, except maybe a little respect for Melton, because he earned his keep, and disgust at Dula, for lazing about, living off his mother and doing not a hand’s turn if he could help it. I always did like dogs better than cats. I wondered how those two felt about each other. They had been neighbors all their lives, even in that Union prison camp, and they shared a woman—whether one of them knew that or not. I wondered about that, too.

James Melton set down the shoe he was holding and looked up at Tom. “I didn’t expect to see you back here anytime soon.”

Tom squinted down at him—maybe from the glare of the sun. “Why is that?”

“Well, people are going around saying that you killed Laura Foster, so I thought you’d have lit out of here by now.”

Tom stood very still then, but his expression did not change. “Who has been saying that?”

“The Hendrickses, for one.”

There was such a long, taut silence between them that I was sure Tom wasn’t going to answer. I even thought he might haul off and hit James Melton without even letting him get up. But then Tom laughed and said, “Well, I reckon the Hendrickses will just have to prove that, and perhaps take a beating besides.”

Melton nodded, and I don’t know if that nod meant that he believed Tom or that he hadn’t expected him to say anything else. Anyhow, he picked up his shoe again and went back to work without saying another word. Tom came in and sat for a minute. He nibbled at a piece of corn pone, but then he got up and started pacing, and before too long he had barged back out the door and was gone.

ZEBULON VANCE

Tom Dula and Ann Melton … what a long time ago that was. A brief interlude in my life, really, when I practiced law in order to feed my family while I waited to be let back into politics. As soon as the government permitted Confederate officials to reenter the political fray, I went back into the election business, and ended up in the Senate, where I mean to die in harness. I have not represented a defendant in court in decades, and I never will again, but from time to time my memory summons up those two star-crossed clients of mine, and I see them as they were in 1866—young, handsome, and indifferent to the opinion of the world in general. I did not understand them at the time, and I believe I thought that when I had attained age and wisdom, I would come to know what it was that motivated them, what was in their hearts. But as I sit drowsing by this fire in a Washington parlor, I know that I am as far from comprehending them as ever.

We are bound for different heavens, those two rustic souls and I.

They loved each other, I suppose, or what passes for love with young and passionate people, whose impulses are not tempered by education or moral guidance. Their lives were without purpose or direction, and so perhaps they became each other’s purpose.

But Ann Melton was married to another. I recall that well enough, for that is the one thing in this matter that I do understand. She was born to a drunken slut of a mother, and by some wondrous chance she grew up to be a beauty—that was her one chance to escape the squalor of her mother’s life, and it is no wonder that she took it. A prosperous man with a house and land and the means to put food on the table offered her a home and marriage, and at the age of fifteen she took it. I find no wonder in that. It is the best thing I know of Ann Melton.

I would have done the same. Perhaps I did, in fact. I would like instead to think that in marrying my Harriette I was fortunate to have fallen in love with a gentlewoman whose breeding and social connections were so perfectly suited to advance my own ambitions. I hope I made her a good husband. I meant to, and she never uttered a word of complaint, bless her, but she was worth her weight in gold for a man with political and social aspirations well beyond his personal means. So in my youth I let my head rule my heart, so that my choice of a partner should further my ends, for I had much to accomplish.

How then to explain my second marriage? My dear Harriette, delicate soul that she was, passed away in 1878, and by then I was forty-eight years old, well past the giddiness of youth, and serving in the United States Senate. Having established myself as a respected and prosperous statesman, I no longer had need of anyone’s assistance to make my way in the world. I was never a ladies’ man, nor one who had any interest in dalliances with the fair sex. Like a plow horse with blinders on, I saw only the furrow that I must plod along, and no amiable distractions ever kept me from my duty.

I suppose when I became a widower, I could have indulged myself in sensuality at last: married some fair-haired beauty, and eased into my dotage with a pretty doll to amuse me as the fires of ambition burned low. Or I could have dispensed with matrimony altogether, and immersed myself in the neverending duties of a serving senator.

But I did neither of those things.

Ah, Flossie Martin. What will they say of you in the sonorous biographies that are sure to be written when I finally take leave of this world?

Precious little, I’ll warrant. My Harriette was beloved in my home state, for its aristocrats counted her as one of their own, and she stood by me through all the tribulations of the early years, braving the dangers of war in the Governor’s Palace, never leaving my side until I sent her away in those last frenzied weeks of the conflict. To the North Carolinians who elected me Governor twice over, and sent me back to Congress to represent them before the nation, Harriette Espy will forever be Mrs. Vance.

But in 1880 I married again.

Mrs. Florence Steele Martin was a prosperous widow from Kentucky, well past the bloom of youth, just as I was. There would be no second family of young Vances from this union—and the grown sons I already had were scrupulously polite to her, but they plainly thought the family would be better off without her. In their calculations, though, they reckoned without the War.

When I was hauled away to prison on my birthday, three weeks after Appomattox, Federal soldiers swarmed through our little house in Statesville and took all our belongings. We never got them back. After that, I earned little enough as a lawyer, because in those days of Reconstruction, no one had much money to spend on litigation. And the pay of a Senator is modest, because it is supposed that those who hold the office come from rich and powerful families, which, by and large, they do. But I did not. I was looking at the declining years of my life with precious little fortune to shore up the cares and vicissitudes of old age. Florence Martin was wealthy, and I was democracy’s answer to an earl: a United States Senator. It was a sensible and satisfactory alliance, and we were neither the poorer for it.

We summered in the mountains near Asheville in our stately mansion Gombroon—named for the Persian pottery of that name, for I was a cultured man of the world by that time, still close to Asheville in my heart, but in other ways very far from it indeed, and my last home was proof of my success. Gombroon was the most modern style of estate, three stories high, with a turret and sprawling porches, and all the accoutrements of a fiefdom: an orchard, a vineyard, a dairy, and formal gardens. I felt that I had earned such prosperity, but it was the wealth of Florence Martin that made it happen, and I was grateful for that.

But would I have died for her? Assuredly not. I never felt such reckless passion for any human being, and it was the thought of that devotion that brought Tom Dula and Ann Melton to my mind, even after so much time had passed. I tell myself that they were still caught up in the madness of youth—just past twenty, both of them, though war and hardship had made them old beyond their years. Whatever they felt for one another, that lust that made everything else in the world fade to insignificance: I never felt that. Never did. And I could never quite figure out whether I envied them their transports of sentiment or whether I pitied them, as one would a madman whose delusions blind him to the realities of life.

But they died young, and I lived on for decades, ending up revered and prosperous in a mountain mansion, safe from the riptides of emotion that sweep lesser men away to their deaths.

PAULINE FOSTER

June 26, 1866

The next day, J.W. Winkler and a host of his neighbors went out combing the woods again. They all spread out, one right next to the other, and walked forward in a straight line, same as people say the Redcoats used to do when they marched in to battle during the Revolution. Spread out like that, the searchers were sure not to miss a single foot of ground as they went along. They kept up that battle formation, walking in circles outward from the Bates’ place. Sure enough, when they got to a clearing just north of the abandoned farmstead, one of the searches noticed a broken bit of flax rope tied to a dogwood. They reckoned it matched the broken lead rein on the halter of Wilson Foster’s wayward mare.

That discovery fixed their attention on the clearing, and they all fanned out now within that small area, practically bumping into one another in their eagerness to examine every inch of ground. I wasn’t there, but afterward they would tell anybody who would listen about what happened out in that clearing. Before too long, one of the searchers, who had his eyes fixed upon the ground, spied a patch of red on the bare earth about a hundred yards from where the rope was found, and they reckoned it was a bloodstain, and that the killing had been done there.

When I heard about that a day or so later, I caught my breath, and scarcely dared to let it out again, for I thought that surely after finding blood and rope, they’d keep combing over the underbrush in that clearing until they discovered the burial. But I need not have worried about it, for I was wrong about Laura’s resting place. After the excitement of their discoveries had worn off, they all went back to the general store to boast of their adventures, and I suppose they might have had a few drinks to celebrate their success.

After that it would have been getting on toward suppertime, and the search party began to come apart. Before long they had all gone their separate ways, and with all the farm chores that needed doing this time of year, none of them could spare the time to come back another day to continue the hunt for more signs of Laura Foster. I was disgusted with them for quitting the hunt when I reckoned they were close enough to spit on the grave, but of course I had to keep quiet about it, and just as well that I did, for I had guessed wrong. When they didn’t stumble upon the grave, I resolved to find out the truth of the matter.