Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

Do not misunderstand me. I was no fortune hunter in search of an heiress, nor did I marry one. Birth and breeding were what mattered to me. My Harriette was the orphaned daughter of a Presbyterian preacher-but she was raised by a gilt-edged family of the plantation aristocracy in Morganton. It was not money that I was after. I needed a well-born young woman, cultured and socially acceptable to the frontier Brahmin. She would see my potential to make something of myself, and I would honor her for her gentility, and aspire to live up to her standards. She would be my guide and my mentor among those “quality folks,” whose ranks I had been determined to join since my days as a clerk at the resort hotel in Warm Springs.

I came from a good family myself-it was only the poverty caused by father’s early death that put me at a disadvantage. But my mother meant for her seven children to succeed in life, and so when I was nearly twenty, she sold our drovers’ inn in Lapland, and moved us to a modest frame house in Asheville. The town of Asheville had been built upon land purchased from Mother’s family, the Bairds, and from my paternal grandfather David Vance, who had fought in the Revolution. In Asheville, if nowhere else on earth, I could count myself a prince.

I think John Woodfin took me on as a pupil to read law on account of that pedigree. I do not know what else he could have seen in a raw-boned youth from the hills. In addition to the Bairds and Grandfather Vance, the war hero, I was kin to the Erwins of Morganton through my mother’s mother Hannah Erwin. Woodfin set a store by that, because he and his brother Nicholas had married two McDowell sisters from Morganton, and kinship with the Erwins and the McDowells connected you to everybody who was anybody west of Raleigh. I knew that my association with the Woodfin family would give me an entrée into that frontier aristocracy, and it was there that I proposed to seek a wife. Morganton is forty miles east of Asheville and outside the mountains. Like water, money and power seem to flow downhill, so the closer one gets to the flatlands, the more of it there is.

Presentable young men with prospects are at a premium in the Carolina backcountry, and so a few months after I began my association with the Woodfins, I was invited to a formal party at Quaker Meadows, the McDowells’ elegant home in Morganton. It was there that my fellow law student Augustus Merrimon introduced me to the McDowells’ ward, Miss Harriette Espy, orphaned in infancy, and raised by the McDowells, so that, while she was not an heiress, her social connections were like threads of spun gold. The tiny young lady standing by the punch bowl, silver ladle in hand, was auburn-haired with earnest gray eyes and a kind face.

“You are reading the law?” she said, after the introductions had been effected. “Oh, what a noble calling!”

“Well, that doesn’t relieve the tedium too awful much,” I said, trying to balance a plate in one hand and a cup of punch in the other. I felt like a mule in a choir loft.

She ignored the jest. “I do so admire a learned man, sir. My own dear, departed father studied at the Princeton Theological Seminary. I shall pray for your success, Mr. Vance.”

I had recently decided to leave the Woodfins’ tutelage and attend the University of North Carolina, and so I played on the heartstrings of this pious young lady, telling her that I should soon be far from home and friendless, and assuring her that entering into a correspondence with my unworthy self would be an act of Christian charity.

The courtship wasn’t all smooth sailing, for Miss Espy ran a tight ship when it came to piety, decorum, and, most especially, absolute fidelity. Why, before we had exchanged no more than a handshake and a sheaf of letters, I nearly lost her, when that infernal stick-insect Merrimon told her that I had been paying addresses to another young lady-an incident that occurred months before I even met Miss Espy, mind you, but she wrote me a letter that would have frozen a bonfire, telling me that our association was at an end, but that she would pray for me. Well, I deserved a law degree just for being able to talk my way out of that one, for it was the hardest case for the defense I ever had. (At least until the matter of Thomas Dula.) But in the end I carried the day with Miss Harriette, and on August 2, 1853, in the Presbyterian Church in Morganton, Miss Espy became Mrs. Zebulon Baird Vance, before God and a host of frontier gentry, whose approval at last I had won.

Forever after, folks said that Harriette was the apple of my eye, and so she was, for like that apple in the Garden of Eden that imparted wisdom to our first parents, so my Harriette bestowed the wisdom of civilization upon me-the gift of powerful friends and the wit to use our connections to advance my career. Indeed I treasured her-but to return to the metaphor of Eden, I am mindful that any apple from that fabled tree would have conferred those self-same gifts.

So I sat there on a porch in Wilkesboro, peeling an unmetaphorical apple, and listening to Captain Allison stammer through an explanation of the behavior of our client. I was not shocked, though I would have never repeated a word of our conversation to my sainted wife. She would have been horrified beyond the power of speech. She’d have expected me to give up the case on the spot, I suppose, and since I was not being paid a red cent to conduct the defense, it would be hard to argue to the contrary. But, after all, somebody had to defend the poor boy.

I put down the apple. “So you are telling me that this Dula fellow had seduced the victim, Laura Foster, and promised to marry her, but that he was also in an adulterous relationship with his codefendant, Mrs. Ann Melton? And the state’s witness, the servant girl, Pauline Foster… she also claims that the accused has had-”

Allison nodded unhappily. “Carnal knowledge. Yes. So she alleges.”

I let out my breath in a long whistle. “I see what you mean about requiring that all ladies be barred from the court when all this testimony goes into the record.”

I was thinking what a waste his life had been, if he had chosen only to spend it on idle pleasures that led nowhere. Life is a gold coin-but you can only spend it once. How sad that a likely-looking fellow should throw away his one chance for so little of lasting value. I hoped he enjoyed himself, though. How sad if it had all been for nothing.

“I spoke with him briefly, you know,” I told Captain Allison. “He did not strike me as a dissolute fellow.”

My colleague ventured a tight smile. “Well, sir, they keep him sober in the jail, you know.”

“Even so…” I shook my head. “He is quite young… I perceive weakness… laziness covered by a facile charm, perhaps… He struck me as the sort of amiable fellow who would go along with anything a comrade suggested, provided the task was not too onerous, or if agreeing was less troublesome than saying no.”

“That may be, sir, but it won’t save him.”

“No. I hadn’t got to the point of thinking about ways to get him off, Allison. I was just indulging in a bit of speculation. I always want to know why people do things.”

He shook his head. “You know, Mr. Vance, I’ll bet you that sometimes they wish they knew.”

After a moment of companionable silence, I said, “Well, you know, I also met the other defendant today.”

Perhaps it was a trick of the sunlight, but I could swear that Captain Allison was blushing again. “Oh-er-did you?”

My mind was still on biblical metaphors. I remembered an apocryphal story that-as the husband of a rock-ribbed Presbyterian-I was not encouraged to believe in: the tale of Lilith, Adam’s “other woman.” They say she wasn’t human-a demon, perhaps, or one of the fairy folk they talk of in the old country. Dula’s codefendant Ann Melton brought that old story to mind.