Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

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.”

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.”