Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

Tom stopped in his tracks and looked at me like I was foaming at the mouth. Then he laughed, and helped himself to a dipper of milk out of the pail. “What use do you suppose I have for Laura Foster?”

I shrugged. “You’ve been sniffing around Wilson Foster’s place for weeks now, so everybody reckoned you’d gone away with her.”

He finished the milk, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Well, I’m here and she ain’t, so that settles that, doesn’t it?” He gave me a hard stare as he said it, daring me to say one more word on the subject.

I just nodded, and tried to look like I was scared of him. Maybe he didn’t know where Laura Foster had gone, but I was certain that she wasn’t coming back.

The settlement talked about Laura Foster and precious little else all the way until Sunday. After all, Laura was a young, unmarried girl, and nobody knew what had become of her. Her disappearance was a nine days’ wonder. There isn’t much to talk about in a little farming settlement, especially with the War being over. For nigh onto a year, no news certainly had meant good news-no more death rosters sent back from the battlefields to break people’s hearts; no more bad news about shortages or rationing to drive folks to the brink of starvation; no more terrifying reports of armies headed this way to steal the food or requisition the livestock or burn the barn. The War had given everybody enough excitement to last a lifetime, and they weren’t sorry to see it end.

Now, though, human nature being what it is, people were beginning to tire of the sameness of peacetime in the backwoods. They craved a little excitement again. Not more war and death, to be sure, but just a tidbit of scandalous news to spice up the endless talk about crops and weather.

All the people I met at the store and on the way there-well, the women, anyhow; I don’t know what the men talked about-ruminated over Laura’s disappearance like so many cows chewing cud. A few of the timid old ladies would have it that she had been set upon by bushwhackers and carried away, but most of the rest, who knew about Laura’s soiled reputation, figured that she had gone off of her own accord, probably run off with some man fool enough to want her. I did more than my share of visiting the neighbors that week, but mostly I just listened to the talk, and held my peace.

There was a group of ladies at the store on Saturday, eager to swap stories about Laura’s disappearance. Mrs. Betsy Scott was chief among those who held that she had run away on purpose. Now the other Mrs. Scott was adding her pennyworth of information about seeing Laura on the morning she left-the last time anybody ever saw her. Maybe Mrs. Scott figured that enough time had passed now for Laura to get clean away from here, and over into Tennessee if that’s where she was headed. If that was so, then it wouldn’t do any harm if she told what she knew. Anyhow, she gave herself airs about it until I wanted to shake her like a terrier with a rat. When you know something for a fact, and other people act like they know it all when they are just guessing, it is hard not to shout at them. My smile felt like it was tacked on with ten-penny nails, but nobody seemed to notice.

“I know for certain that she was leaving for good,” Miz Scott said to anyone who would listen. “When I saw her on Friday morning, she had a bundle of clothes slung over the saddle, and she said she was going to meet somebody at the Bates’ place. Well, it must have been Tom Dula she was meeting. Everybody knows that Laura and Tom were… sweethearts.”

When she said that, not a one of us could look at anybody else for fear we’d bust out laughing. Sweethearts. Well, then, I reckon every hen in the barnyard is sweethearts with the rooster. But in a little settlement, nearly everybody is kin to everybody else, so you don’t go slinging mud at anybody if you can help it, or else you’ll start a kinfolk squabble that would last longer than the War.

I was tempted to tell her the truth just to see the look on her face, but that would have run contrary to my purposes. I bit my lip, and kept still, letting her run on.

“When I saw Laura that morning, I even asked her had Tom come to her place-for I was surprised at hearing that Tom Dula was willing to run away with any girl at all, especially if it would end with him having a wife to support…”

There were murmurs of agreement all around at this point. Nobody could quite picture Tom Dula choosing to work for a living, and he never seemed overly fond of Laura-not enough to make the sacrifice of his freedom, anyhow. Nobody came out and said, “You don’t buy a cow when the milk is free,” but I’ll wager I wasn’t the only one thinking it.

“She said that they were going to run away to Tennessee.”

I bit back a smile. So Laura had told the nosey biddy that she was running off with Tom. That might buy the pair of them some time, because nobody would have cared if she eloped with Tom. Let them worry that trifling scandal to death while she made away with her nut brown boy. That’s what I would have done. Let Miz Scott think that, then.

A stout old widow woman, who was no fool, spoke up. “The Bates’ place is north of you, ain’t it, Miz Scott? Why, I reckon it would take that Laura Foster the rest of her life to reach Tennessee if she was a-riding north instead of west.”

There used to be a blacksmith’s forge at the Bates’ place, but it was long gone now, and the place had fallen to ruin and the yard was choked with weeds. The only reason that anybody would go there would be to meet somebody they didn’t want to be seen with.

Miz Scott pursed her lips. “I am only repeating what I was told. Maybe the two of them met somewhere, and then turned around and headed west from there. There’s more than one road that will get you over the mountain to Tennessee. But I recall that I did tell her that if it were me, I’d have been farther along on the road by that time of morning. She said she had started as soon as she could, and that they were meeting at the Bates’ place.” She kept nodding her head, like she was daring any of us to contradict her. Nobody wanted to argue with her, for she looked on the verge of a temper, and that would have broken up the gossip party. Somebody said they hoped that Laura made it to wherever she was going.

“But it seems strange, all the same,” one of the younger wives said thoughtfully. “If Tom came to her place at sun-up, like she said, why didn’t she just go off with him then? Why would she wait and meet him a couple of hours later at the Bates’ place?”

“And Tom Dula doesn’t have a horse. Were the two of them fixing to try to get to Tennessee on that one mare?”

“But she did not go off with Tom Dula,” the stout old widow reminded them, nodding hard to drive home her point. “Because Laura Foster may be gone, but he’s still here.”

Mrs. James Scott touched her arm to show she agreed with her. “I thought of that myself.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice to just above a whisper. “Now I saw him on that Friday morning. I had finished breakfast by then, and I spied him walking up the road. I asked him did he want to come in, but he said he wanted to meet up with my brother.”

Washington Anderson, that would be. And I knew where Wash had been the night before: at the Meltons’ place. There was a whole crowd of us in that little cabin-but not Ann and not Tom, for she had gone to her mother’s, and he was off somewhere-his mother’s house, for all I know. But that Thursday night, Wash Anderson was with me at the Meltons’. And he still would have been there Friday morning, like as not, as much as we all had to drink the night before.