Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

It’s a good thing that James Melton is an able shoemaker as well as a farmer, for I must have worn out half a deer hide in shoe leather, walking those muddy paths in the April mists to reach German’s Hill before full dark. The damp cold seeped all the way to my bones, and plastered my hair against my cheeks, but I was set on going, not for the joy I’d find at journey’s end, but for another kind of joy altogether.

When I could get my chores done, I’d set out at earliest twilight, and count on reaching the Fosters’ place in time to help Cousin Laura get supper on the table, which meant, of course, that I would be asked to help them eat it. I didn’t mind peeling potatoes and frying up apples, because if I had stayed to eat with the Meltons, I would have had to do all the cooking, instead of just helping out by doing half of it. Besides, I judged that Cousin Laura was more apt to talk when she was too busy fixing supper to think overmuch about what she was saying to me. I hoped she would get to talking and all but forget that I was there, and then I would learn what secret it was she was fluffed up over, like a broody hen.

If I put my mind to it, I can gentle people the same as I’ve seen some drovers do to horses. Soft words, no quick movements, and never a hint of judging them or being riled. People in these parts are not, by and large, trusting souls, and the War has made them even more leery of strangers. When we came of age, Laura, Ann, and I, strangers-in uniform or not-meant trouble. We saw barns burned and livestock stolen. Ordinary farmers got bushwhacked and left on the road with their throats cut, murdered by one side or the other, as if which side had done it would have counted for anything. I reckon all of us learned to give as good as we got, and to take whatever we could from them that had more than we did. But the War was over now, and maybe some folks were letting themselves forget what they had learned about the danger of trusting people. Anyhow, I wasn’t a stranger to Laura Foster, for all that we didn’t grow up together. I was kin. And if you can’t trust your kinfolks, who can you trust?

Why, nobody.

I wouldn’t forget that lesson, and I figured I’d give her cause to remember it as well.

So I told her how lucky she was to be so thin and pretty. Scrawny passes for pretty while you are young, and it puts people in a good mood to be warmed with praise; though you would be wasting your time to try it on me, for I can always see the truth through the whitewash.

I let her talk by the hour, it seemed like, about how life was passing her by while she was stuck in her daddy’s house, taking care of his young’uns like a hired girl.

I sat beside her at the table, peeling puckered winter apples, and nodding my head in agreement every time she stopped to draw breath. I remembered to pat her hand and pull a sorrowful face when her tears spilled over on to her sallow cheeks. Laura was making stew for dinner, same as she did most nights, because watery flour and potatoes is the best way to make a smidgeon of meat feed a slew of people. Two skinned rabbits lay on the table beside the flour bowl, looking to me like stillborn babies, but that was a comment I kept to myself.

“T’ain’t fair.” Laura’s voice was shaking, and I saw tears plop in to the stew pot.

“It is hard lines on you, Laura,” I told her, for it was plain what she wanted to hear. “You have put in enough of your youth taking your mama’s place in this house, and it’s only right that you should have a chance to make a family of your own.”

“Well, it is,” she said, wiping her wet face with the back of her hand. “And I mean to do just that before too long. You wait and see.”

“I’m sure Mrs. Dula would welcome another daughter about the farm, though she already has one of her own. But Tom’s sister is a grown girl now, and she’ll be out and gone before too long, I’ll warrant.”

It had been a stab in the dark, and when Laura stopped stirring the stew and turned to stare at me, open-mouthed, I saw that I had guessed wrong, and I hastened to set it to rights before she remembered herself and stopped confiding. “Of course, I don’t know what anybody would want with Tom Dula, for all that our cousin Ann sets such a store by him. I guess you could hope to live long enough for him to inherit that land, if the taxes don’t claim it first, but if it’s up to him to run the place, it will fall to ruin about his ears one of these days.”

She tossed her head. “I ain’t studying about Tom Dula, Pauline. He’s all right to pass the time with, ’cause Lord knows there ain’t nothin’ else to do around here, but going over to the Dulas wouldn’t hardly be a change from where I am now. Just swapping one dirt farm for another, and waiting for hard work and childbed to take me off, like it did my mama.”

It seemed to me that she had just ruled out mankind in general with those true words, but I judged she was not bright enough to work this out for herself. It was only Tom she was set against, and not the male sex in general. Laura thought she was going somewhere, and I wanted to know where.

I tried again. “Anyone can see how good you are at taking care of young’uns. There’s more than one widower in these parts with motherless babes to raise, and a tidy little farm in need of a helpmeet. Any of them would be glad to take you to wed.”

Laura shook her head. “I have had enough of other people’s children. And enough of hill farming, too. I want to get clean away from here.”

I couldn’t afford to make any more wrong guesses about what was in her mind. We were near to the secret now, and she would be like a broody hen a-guarding it. I cast my thoughts about, trying to light on some man who would be able take care of her without having a farm to rely on. The local gentry did not figure in my calculations. There were rich men enough, even in Wilkes County, but Laura’s soiled reputation had spread in whispers about the settlement, and I knew that no doctor or landowner would bother with a penniless girl who was damaged goods. Even if she had been beautiful, they’d not have troubled to marry her, and beautiful she was not. But I doubt she had ever been five miles from home, so there was no use thinking of anybody farther afield than the settlement.

I don’t know what made me light on an answer just then, unless it was thinking about fallen women, and remembering how folks had said that Ann had gone and lain with the drovers for a yard of cloth or a sack full of beans.

The drovers run cattle from over the mountains in Tennessee right through here on their way to the bigger Carolina cities farther east. If a girl wanted to get shut of her home county, that would be the way out, for they were only passing through. Like as not, Laura would have met them the same way Ann did, by bartering what she had beneath her skirts for whatever they would give her for a few minutes of pleasuring behind a tree somewhere. The wonder of it was that any of them would want more of her than that. I couldn’t see why.

“You found you a drover,” I said, soft as I could, for I knew she’d be in mortal fear of being overheard.

Laura got big-eyed and put one skinny finger to her lips, and shook her head.

I thought surely I had got to the truth at last, but I could tell by the way her cheeks turned red that there was more to it than that. “Well, whoever he may be, I am happy for you, Cousin,” I said, pushing my mouth into a smile. “And you have my word that I will not breathe a word to your father.” Which was true, as I had other plans for the news.

She nodded. “I know I can trust you, Pauline. You know how unhappy I am, and you know what it’s like to be a servant. So does he.”

I nodded, and squeezed her hand to give her encouragement, and I was careful not to show how she had riled me with those easy words. No, I did not know what it was like to be a servant, really. I never felt like those that took me in and paid me wages were my betters. I was getting room and board for my doctor visits, and working when I had to, so that I could keep the Meltons’ roof over my head, but I never felt tied to anything or anybody.