Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

“And, anyway, people in the settlement know about me and Tom. It keeps them from looking for anybody else taking up with me.”

The stew would have boiled away if I had not got up to stir it, for Laura was sitting at the table, twisting a plait of her rabbitty brown hair, and looking calf-eyed into the fire. “I do miss Johnny something fierce, but we can’t meet too often, for fear we’ll be seen together. Once people got to talking, there’d be no shutting them up, so I keep having to do with Tom, and seeing Johnny only now and then. I feel like a bear in a cage. There ain’t nothing else to do around here, except chores. If I didn’t have something to do besides washing and cooking, I’d take leave of my senses. Tom is as good as anything else. Us being together is nothing to either one of us, but just a way to pass the time that don’t feel like working.”

It always felt like work to me, but I nodded like I understood her nonsense. “So your heart is set on your nut brown boy-if he keeps his word about taking you away with him?”

She slapped the table with her open hand, and the stirring spoon clattered off on to the floor. “Not if! When! He swore it. Johnny says he plans to light out of here when the weather gets warm-near the end of May. I’ve made up my mind that when he comes through here, I’m packing up my clothes, and going with him.”

I laughed. “Well, you’d best not let word get around that you are fixing to run off with a freed slave, Cousin. Else he won’t get any farther than the end of a rope.”

She so far forgot herself as to shout at me. “Don’t you think I know that? I ain’t told nobody but you, Pauline. I’m counting on you not to give us away.” Right away, she clapped her hand over her mouth, and looked around, fearful that somebody had come in and overheard her, but nobody was there except the baby, asleep in its pallet on the floor. It stirred and moaned at the sound of its big sister raising her voice, but Laura cast a fearful look at the baby and quieted down at once. It tossed a time or two, and rolled over so its back lay to the fire, and went on sleeping.

“Oh, please, Pauline,” she said, whispering again, and grabbing at my sleeve with her fingers. “You have to keep my secret. Don’t let on to nobody that I told you. It’s only for a couple more weeks, and then I’ll be shut of here for good.”

I shrugged. “It’s nothing to me, Laura. I just hope your man realizes the chance he is taking. If he gets killed for messing around with you, it’ll be on your head, not mine.”

“But you promise you won’t give me away?”

“I will not tell anybody that you have any lover other than Tom Dula. I swear.” It makes me smile when I can tell someone the absolute truth, and still be planning their destruction. None of them could see more than a yard in front of their noses. But I could. I had everything I needed now to bait my trap, and so long as it ensnared Ann Melton, I did not care a damn who else got hurt. That was their lookout.

How did I come to be mixed up in the trial of Tom Dula in the first place?

He was a stranger to me, and his part of the Carolina mountains lay a hundred miles from the part in which I grew up. In my explanation I will attempt to be truthful, but I am sure there are those among my opponents who will deem my honesty arrogance . Honesty has very little to recommend it. Mostly, it gets you into trouble, even faster than liquor; and, though I have no personal weakness for the latter, I do find the former well-nigh irresistible.

“Tell the truth and shame the devil,” people say. Well, I’m not entirely sure that it would. I think Old Scratch might positively delight in watching us engineer our own downfall by practicing a trait universally acclaimed to be a virtue.

So let me tempt fate with the truth: I needed the work, and those Wilkes County lawyers who asked the judge to appoint me to spearhead the defense wanted to be spared the local notoriety of having championed an unpopular defendant. It is required that lawyers accept a certain number of cases pro bono in order to keep their license to practice, and since I had been politicking for most of the previous decade, I had some catching up to do with my legal obligations. A paying case would have been an even greater kindness, but I cannot pretend that I did not need the pro bono credit even more. I also needed a much-talked-about trial to bring my name before the public-favorably I hoped. At least in Charlotte, where I had set up shop with Clement Dowd, public sentiment would not run so high against my client as in Wilkes County.

That’s why the two local attorneys, Allison and Armfield, were willing to let me lead the defense. They were both able men, with more trial experience that I had, but Wilkes is a sparsely populated place, and practically everybody there was kin to either the accused killers or the victim. There can’t be any joy for a local lawyer in bearing the brunt of the strong feelings such a case was bound to stir up. But since I lived far away, in Charlotte, they reasoned that I could represent an unpopular defendant and come out unscathed, because nobody where I’m from knew or cared about the particulars in this little backcountry case. I don’t suppose anybody even much cared if I won or lost it, so long as the letter of the law had been carried out to the satisfaction of the court. And I needed the practice in front of a jury-how better to accomplish that than by taking an obscure case among strangers?

I don’t suppose anybody gave much thought to the poor accused man when they were making these plans for their own convenience and for my professional advancement.

Hard lines on him.

Those fine upstanding gentlemen who had undertaken the defense of Thomas P. Dula were conscientious attorneys, and they made every effort to be cordial to me, but I do not think they were overly concerned about the outcome of the trial, which they seemed to think was a foregone conclusion anyhow, as they believed him to be guilty. The accused man could not afford to pay them to think otherwise, so their thoughts turned on observing the rituals of justice, rather than on justice itself. They kept meticulous records, with particular attention to their own expense forms, and they passed the time at trial courteously amongst their fellows in the law, and for both sides the defendant was simply a “situation,” the reason for the ritual they all observed, but otherwise not a part of it. Such a procedural charade is easier to bear if the wretch is guilty. You tell yourself that a loss in court may be the means by which true justice will be served, and, if you should happen to win, why then it sweetens the victory to know that the credit is all yours and not owing to any virtue or merit on the part of the defendant.

I did not take capital cases in my youth, in the little stint in the circuit court up around Asheville. Always for me, the law was a means to an end, an apprenticeship through which I must pass in order to reach public office. It worked, too: Congressman, Governor… I had gone far in three short decades of life, but I was honest enough not to risk some poor devil’s life while I was putting in my time as a practicing attorney. Let me get some horse thief acquitted or take sides in a land squabble-that was momentous enough for my blood.

Times had changed for me though. I had applied for parole from the United States government, for my part in the lately defeated Confederate government. They ought to have taken into consideration how long and hard I argued to dissuade my home state from seceding in the first place, but of course that carried no weight with them.

One of the attorneys assigned (just as well) to sit second chair to me for the trial was Captain Richard M. Allison, who was a cavalry officer in the War before he was invalided out in ’64, and then, like the rest of us, he had gone back to the tamer business of fighting battles with fine words and stacks of paper. I suppose that Allison will be called “captain” for the rest of his life, even if he lives half a century past that four-year madness of a war, but I aim to leave off the courtesy title of “governor,” just as soon as I am allowed to get myself elected to some new office again-“senator” would be favorite.