Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

Everybody looked interested in the other Mrs. Scott’s news about Tom. She said, “My neighbor Hezekiah Kendall says he saw Tom on Friday morning, too, just before I did. Around eight o’clock. Mr. Kendall asked Tom if he had been ‘ after the women,’ and Tom answered, ‘No. I have quit that.’ When he stopped at my place, I didn’t ask his business, and he didn’t tell me. But he was headed toward the Meltons’ place.”

They all looked at me then, so I said, “Well, he got there, all right. I was just bringing in the milk pail Friday morning when Tom showed up.”

They looked at one another then and got all quiet for a minute. Then they all started talking at once about something else.

Anyhow, a day or so later, I heard that Wilson Foster had got his mare back on Saturday evening, although it wasn’t on account of me, and I never did collect that quart of whiskey from him, which is all I cared about the matter. The day after Laura stole the mare, it just showed up back in the yard outside the barn, still bridled, but with the lead rein snapped in two, as if it had been tied to a tree branch, and broke the rein, pulling itself loose when being tied up had made it hungry and scared enough to break free. The mare may have wandered around for a while, but it wasn’t far enough from home to be lost, so after a couple of hours it went on back to German’s Hill where it belonged. When I heard that, I thought: Wilson Foster got his wish. He got his horse back, but not his daughter. And it looked as if I had got my wish, too.

I was down at Cowle’s store when I heard about that, a day or so afterward, and at the time I had made no effort to join in the conversation, but later on, back at the farm when I was alone with Ann, I had plenty to say about it. “Did you hear Wilson Foster has got his horse back?” I asked her, that evening, as I was making the chicken and dumplings for supper.

Ann nodded, but she wouldn’t look at me. She had been mighty quiet herself those past few days. She didn’t seem to care if she ate or not, and she had spent most of last Friday in bed. Now, Ann was bone lazy at the best of times, but that was unusual, even for her.

“Well, I reckon they’ll be sending out the searchers by tomorrow, then.”

“Searchers?” She froze. “Why would you say that?”

“Stands to reason, don’t it? Last week Laura ran away on her daddy’s mare, and now she has not been seen for days. Then the horse shows up with a broken lead rein, and there’s still no sign of its rider. Since the mare found its way home, people will figure that where it was tethered couldn’t have been very far from home. Seems to me like Wilson Foster ought to be hollering for men and hunting dogs to start combing the woods to see if they can find Laura. She can’t be far off, not now that she’s on foot. The horse proved that.” I said all this as calmly as I could, but I was watching Ann’s every move while I was saying it, and it was all I could do not to laugh. She looked scared to death and her hands were trembling.

Ann glanced at me, and then she looked toward the cabin door, as if she expected a search party to break in on us at any moment, but all was quiet. James Melton was outside somewhere, still tending to his chores, and we’d had no visitors all day. Still she spoke so softly I had to strain to hear. “They’ll not find her.”

I shook my head. “The dogs might.”

I was wrong about the searchers, though. They didn’t use dogs, so it took them a lot longer to find her than it ought to have. In fact the whole thing began to look like a nine days’ wonder that would die down in a few more weeks until people completely forgot that a girl had gone missing.

Not that I cared one whit about her, but if I could help it, people wouldn’t forget she was gone.

The week after Laura Foster disappeared, the month of June began, and every time folks got together they were still making guesses about what happened to her.

I couldn’t let on that I had a good idea about what had happened to Laura, and who she had been going to meet. I was saving all that. I was looking forward to watching Ann fall apart, waiting for the trap to be sprung. I planned to say as little as possible, and let the rumors take their course, unless people showed signs of losing interest in the story, and then I might chivvy them along a little to keep it going. I thought I would do more than my share of visiting in the days to come, just so I could listen to the tongues wagging.

It turns out that I needn’t have bothered, though. All it takes is for one person to keep worrying away at something, like a dog with a marrow bone, and then you can rest assured that sooner or later something will come to light. I thought I would have to be the person to keep prodding everyone to wonder about the fate of Laura Foster, but I reckoned without J.W. Winkler. He’s a young fellow with a farm near Elkville, and I don’t know what any of it had to do with him, for he wasn’t a magistrate or a lawman, or any kin to the Fosters that I knew about, but he took it into his head to take charge of the hunt for Laura, and he for one did not believe that she had gotten away to Tennessee.

At Cowle’s store I heard some of the neighbors talking about how groups of men had gone out in search of some sign of Laura. Most of them gave up after a day or two, for it was the busy time of year for farmers, and they had enough to do to take care of their livestock and their fields, but J.W. Winkler would not let the matter rest. After the others went home, he kept on combing the woods alone, starting at the old Bates’ place, where Laura had told Mrs. Scott she was headed, and he walked every path he could think of to get from there to the Dulas’ place.

“He is bound and determined to find her,” said the storekeeper, handing me the candy I had bought with the two pennies I had to spare.

“Why?” I asked her. “He wasn’t sweet on her, was he?”

“No, that’s not it. He said she deserves a Christian burial. And he said there’d be no peace for her family until she was found.”

Well, strictly speaking, I was part of Laura Foster’s family myself, and it didn’t make any difference to me whether he dug her up or not, but I simply nodded to the storekeeper, big-eyed and solemn, and told her what she expected to hear: what a fine and determined man Mr. Winkler was, and how I hoped there was nothing out there in the woods for him to find.

I think he gave up for a little while, because, after all, he had a farm to run same as the rest of them. The month of June dragged on, and we went ahead with the planting and the weeding, and the rest of the weary round of chores on a farm in summer. The searching may have eased up for a while, but the talking didn’t.

On Saturday the 23rd of June, after we had finished a long day’s work, Tom Dula stopped by the house, as he did most days. I was stewing up a mess of soup beans and corn pone for supper, and James was working on sewing the sole of a shoe, sitting on his bench in the doorway to catch the fading light. Ann was somewhere about the place, using the outhouse or taking a stroll to cool off likely as not. She wasn’t doing anything useful, that’s for certain.

Tom came up to the door, smiling and sniffing at the smell of supper cooking, but I didn’t speak to him, for whether or not he stayed to eat with us was not on my say-so. As he stood there on the threshold, James Melton put down his needle and looked up at him. I watched them there side by side in a shaft of sunlight-one blond and tall, with sharp features and hands never still, even in the evenings, as he worked his other trades to shore up his efforts at farming; the other dark-haired and handsome, as gracefully lazy as a cat on a hearth rug. I didn’t feel much of anything for either one of them, except maybe a little respect for Melton, because he earned his keep, and disgust at Dula, for lazing about, living off his mother and doing not a hand’s turn if he could help it. I always did like dogs better than cats. I wondered how those two felt about each other. They had been neighbors all their lives, even in that Union prison camp, and they shared a woman-whether one of them knew that or not. I wondered about that, too.