The Ballad of Tom Dooley (6 page)

The first time it happened, I lay there real still, wondering if somebody had come to cut our throats in the night—the War had not been over long enough for such fears as that to subside. But before a minute had passed, I heard a sigh and a giggle, and an answering grunt, and then the rustling of the bed covers, and I knew what was going on in the bed. Ann had banished me to a pallet on the floor, because she knew that Tom Dula would be paying her a visit.

I raised up a little, trying to peer through the darkness over at that other bed—the one where James Melton lay asleep. If Tom coming in had woke me up, how did he sleep through it? Did he really hear nothing in the bed a broom’s length from his, or did he not care what Ann did? I shook my head in the darkness. If he had been seventy, there might have been some sense to it, but James Melton hadn’t reached thirty yet. I puzzled over it a few minutes more, until the weariness of the day’s work pulled me under again, and when I woke up at cock crow, Ann was sleeping peacefully in her bed alone.

Now here she was, standing there red-cheeked and shivering in the yard, telling me that folk were beginning to talk about her and Tom Dula. So help me, I laughed in her face.

She got all squinty-eyed at me then, and her mouth cinched up. “You are forgetting yourself, Pauline,” she said, spitting out the words. She wobbled a little where she stood, and I could smell the whiskey on her breath. We had both had a drop or two of likker to keep out the cold that afternoon, and to make the hours pass quicker. “We are letting you stay here so you can keep going to the doctor. I’ll thank you not to laugh at me.”

I shrugged. “I ain’t said nothing to nobody. Folk can’t help seeing what’s put right in front of their noses.”
Excepting, maybe, your husband,
I thought. But I didn’t want her to turn me out in the cold, and I was not drunk enough to speak my mind, so I said, all sweetness and sympathy, “I reckon what you feel for Tom just shines through, and you can’t help people noticing it.”

She shook her head. “It ain’t that. People have been remarking on how much he comes by here.”

I couldn’t see what she was het up about. The people in Happy Valley said worse things about her than that. I hadn’t been here a month, and already I’d heard sneering whispers about Ann selling her favors to the passing cattle drovers, for a pint of spirits or a likely bit of cloth. And I didn’t see why she should care what people around here thought of her, anyhow. Ann Foster Melton was no fine lady with a reputation to protect. Her mother was the next thing to a harlot, and, if that drover story was true, the apple had not fallen far from the tree. But Ann was a beauty, and she already had her a husband, so what could she lose if they blackened her name? What could they take away from her? Hurt her feelings? I never cared what people said behind my back, and I couldn’t see why she should, either.

I went back to taking James Melton’s drawers off the line, moving slow and careful so as not to drop the clean clothes in the mud, for my head was spinning a little from the whiskey. “Well, it is true, Ann. So let them talk.”

“No.” She shook her head in that slow, deliberate way that folk do when they’re drunk. “Let them think he comes here for another reason.”

“Like what?”

She stepped back and looked at me, the way you’d size up a calf at market. “You’re a spinster, Pauline. I reckon he could come courting you.”

“Well, you can put that lie about, for all I care,” I said. “I won’t dispute it, if Tom was to say it’s so.”

“Tom is no good at telling lies. He’s too lazy to remember them. So it has to be true. I need you to sleep with Tom.”

PAULINE FOSTER

Mid-March 1866

All I know about love comes from watching them that is afflicted by it, but what Ann was asking of me did not square with what I’d seen of that ailment before now. I finished taking the clothes off the line, stuffed them in the basket, and headed for the barn, out of the rain-speckled wind, and out of earshot of James Melton, on the off chance that he would mind about any of this.

Ann followed me in, and sat herself down on a hay bale, patting it for me to sit down beside her.

“You are a-wanting me to bed down with Tom Dula,” I said, saying each word as slow as a Bible oath, and watching her face while I said it.

She looked away from me, shrugging a little, and she pulled a blade of straw out of the hay bale and began to twist it in her fingers. “People are talking,” she said, so soft that I could barely hear her.

“Those that aren’t deaf and blind, you mean. The way you two carry on, it’s a wonder the whole world hasn’t heard the tales about the pair of you.”

Ann giggled, and looked back at me, blinking real slow, and I wondered if she was going to throw up or pass out, but she took a few gulps of cold air, and seemed to steady herself. “I never could hide my feelings, Pauline.”

“Well, people may talk, but that won’t kill you. Why do you care? I ain’t heard your husband complaining.”

Ann shrugged. “He don’t care. But if people keep talking, he might.”

I said again. “You’re a-wanting me to do it with Tom?”

She nodded.

I laughed. “You’re drunker than I thought, then, Cousin. I thought you loved Tom Dula. Not that I can see why.”

She nodded again.

I stared at her, trying to see what the angle was in all this. I was ready to believe that love was only a fairy tale, like saying that the stork brought babies or that there was gold at the end of a rainbow, but Ann’s eyes glittered with unshed tears. She looked sorrowful enough to be suffering from something, and I couldn’t make sense of it. “You don’t talk like any lovestruck body that I ever heard tell of,” I told her. “Most women would scratch my eyes out if I was to lay with their man. So how come you’re so ready to foist him off on me? Like you’re throwing him away.”

Ann reached for another wisp of hay, not looking back at me. Her dark hair had come loose from its bindings, and it curtained off her face to where I couldn’t see her expression, but her voice was steady when she finally answered me. “Sex ain’t nothing. If you’re thirsty, it don’t matter which cup you drink out of, does it? What Tom does in the hay, that don’t change what we have, or what we are to one another. He loved me afore he went to war, and he came back loving me. He will always love me, no matter what. Nothing he does with you will change that. He’ll never quit me.”

None of that made a lick of sense to me. As far as I could tell, once a man bedded a new woman, he abandoned the old one. As often as men went looking for a new woman on their own, I thought it was foolish of her to encourage it. I could see her wanting to get rid of him, because he had no prospects and I didn’t see what use he was to her, anyhow, but if she did still want him, then she ought to be worried about losing him to the next girl in the straw. I wasn’t a believer in true love, but I’d take my oath that anger and envy were real enough. I had felt those things firsthand. If I did as she asked, then sooner or later jealousy would take hold of her, and I didn’t want to lose my place here when she thought better of what she wanted me to do.

I pretended to think it over. “How do you know Tom is willing?”

She laughed. “Oh, Tom don’t care. He’ll do anything I ask him to do. And bedding some woman is about as pleasant a chore as he could think of, especially if you get him likkered up first. You aren’t bad to look at, Pauline. You’re skin and bones, but he’ll be happy to oblige you all the same.”

“He won’t be doing me no favor,” I told her, and it made me sore that she might think so. “I don’t feel a thing for Mr. Tom Dula. I can’t see nothing special about him at all. But if you want him serviced, I’ll do it. Same as I milk the cow and slop the hogs. It’s all one to me.”

“Good. It’s better if you don’t like it too much.”

“But how is that supposed to keep folks from suspecting you and Tom?”

“Oh, he’ll brag about it afterward. Men always do. Word will get around, but I don’t reckon you care about that. I reckon you had your share of soldiers back up the mountain.”

“Not ’cause I liked it overmuch,” I said.

“But you’ll do it?”

I shrugged. “As long as you don’t regret it afterward and turn me out.”

“No. It has to be done.” She peered up at me, turning things over in her mind, and then she said. “I don’t expect you to do it for nothing. There’s a jug of whiskey in it for you.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll drink half of it first.”

I was still puzzling, though, over how she could bear to see him go off with another woman, if she loved him as much as she said she did. Now that her being with Tom was no secret from me, one night as I peeled potatoes for supper, I felt emboldened to ask her how it came about—her and Tom.

Ann smiled. “I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t there. The Dulas didn’t live any distance at all from my mama’s place, and we used to meet up—him and his brothers and some of us Fosters, and we’d all play Indian in the woods. He was a tough little boy, young as he was. He never cried or ran from anything.

“I remember one time this little dog of his had got to chasing a rabbit, and it went down a hole near the edge of the creek. I guess it got trapped in there, because we could hear it whimpering, but it wouldn’t come back out. That hole was so deep we couldn’t even see the pup, and I was crying thinking it would be dead for sure. It might have been a snake hole, even. When we knelt on the bank and looked down in it, we could see some broken tree roots, but the pup must have been eight feet down or more.

“Well, Tom told me to hush, and he dropped down on his knees beside that muddy hole in the creek bank, and listened for a minute. I was about to tell him that I’d run get his daddy and brothers to bring axes to help him widen the hole, but before I could say a word, Tom shot forward headfirst into that hole, shinnying down it until I couldn’t even see his feet anymore, and then I started to cry even louder. But a couple of minutes later, that dog clambered out of the hole, caked in red mud. And I looked down to see if Tom was following him, but the dog had made such a stir getting out that the hole was caving in. I started digging with my bare hands, and down at the bottom Tom was digging upward, and after what seemed like an hour, I saw his muddy hand clawing up through the dirt. I grabbed him and kept pulling until he was free. He looked like a gingerbread man, all caked with mud like he was, but he didn’t care. He kept saying, ‘I saved my dog. Done it all by myself.’”

Ann smiled, remembering that day on the creek bank. “He never did thank
me
for saving
him,
but I never forgot what happened. Tom loved that little no-account dog, and he was bound and determined to save it, no matter what. I knew then that if Tom Dula loved you, he’d do anything in the world for you.”

As long as it didn’t take too long, I thought, setting the paring knife at another potato skin. Tom Dula was lazy. I never saw him do a lick of work if he could help it. I thought that if Tom was to like you enough, then he might do some brave, quick thing—like risking his own skin to pull you out of a hole, or snatch you out of a burning house. Yes, he might do that. He was brave enough. But if that dog had been stuck in the hole for, say, a month, and Tom’d had to bring it food and water every single day without fail—why, I reckon that dog wouldn’t have lasted a week. He had a quick kind of courage, but not the slow, steady kind that would last you a lifetime.

I dropped another potato skin in the pail for the hogs. “So that’s when you set your heart on Tom, then?”

Ann shook her head. “He wasn’t more than eight when that happened. He was just one of the gaggle of young’uns to me for the longest time, and then one day—he wasn’t. I don’t know how he came to look different to me after all that time, but we had a long snowbound winter when I was fourteen, and I didn’t see him for a month or more, and then, come spring, when he turned up again, I just looked at him coming through the field, and I thought,
There you are.
Not like you’d think that about some neighbor who happened to drop by, but a stranger feeling, as if you had been looking all your life for a lost treasure, and suddenly you had stumbled upon it. I found him then, and I knew we were meant for one another.

“He knew it, too.” She laughed. “We just came together like a compass needle points to north. I don’t even think we said much. Tom ain’t one for talking overmuch anyhow, but his eyes were so deep and blue when he looked at me, I liked to drown in them.”

“You started young,” I said, for I knew that Tom was a year younger than Ann, so he’d have been thirteen.

She laughed. “I showed him how. He weren’t my first. But being with him was like nothing else for me before or since. Oh, we were in rut that spring, him and me, worse than the rabbits. We’d sneak off together every chance we got. Mama even caught us one time in her bed, and she run Tom off with a broom, and then laid into me with a razor strap. We kept to the woods thereafter, Tom and me. Oh, that was a fine summer.”

I understood the words to what she was saying, but not the tune. Never in my life had I felt much of anything for anybody. For me one person was the same as all the rest, and all of them let you down sooner or later. Trusting people was just asking for trouble. I tried to figure out what folk wanted, and I’d give it to them, as long as it got me what I needed, but I never put any feelings into it. It was just a way to get along in this world. Whenever I heard somebody talk about this deep feeling they had for someone they said they loved, I thought I must be missing something, but I didn’t know what it was. It never seemed to profit them that had it, though, so I reckoned I was better off without. And maybe they were only fooling themselves, anyhow, for I couldn’t see that love made any difference in how they acted—not in the long run.

“But even though you are saying how much you loved Tom, you went and married James Melton,” I said to Ann. “Right soon after that rutting spring, and well before Tom went off to war. You were fifteen when you wed, didn’t you tell me?”

She nodded. “It didn’t change anything, though. Tom knew that. I reckon James Melton knew it, too. But he would hang around me, looking like a starving dog in a smokehouse, wanting me so bad he could taste it. And I said no a time or two, but then I got to thinking about it. What else was there? James had a little land and a house of his own, and he made some money by being a cobbler and wagon-making. He works hard, and he’s good at making things, I’ll give him that. Tom never had anything, and I couldn’t see that he ever would. Tom doesn’t care to work, and he never seems to want much. If his belly is full, he is happy to pass the time doing whatever he takes a notion to, be it fishing or fiddling, or just walking in the woods. That’s fine for a lone boy, I reckon, but it’s no way to keep a wife. So I figured to marry James, so that I’d have a home, and mayhap if James was to die, why, then I could marry Tom, and he could live there on the farm with me. He’d never make a farmer, but I could take care of him, anyhow. That mama of his won’t live forever.”