Sharyn McCrumb: The Ballad of Tom Dooley

“I reckon there’s a doctor down the mountain in Wilkes County,” I said. “I have people down there, and I believe I will go to them.”

The fire blazed up just then as a new bit of dry wood caught alight atop the logs. The old woman’s eyes lit up as well, and she fixed me with a narrow gaze. “If you up and go to Wilkes County, nothing will come of it but sorrow.”

I shrugged. “I don’t see how it could be any worse down there than where I’m at right now.”

She shook her head. “There’s no hope for you anywhere. Better if you was to die here, without troubling anybody. It’s you that carries the sorrow within you, and if you venture down into Wilkes County, you will take death and dishonor right along with you, and you’ll spread them like the pox that brands you.”

“On other people, you mean?” I laughed. “Why, that ain’t nothing to me. I’d see the whole world pole-axed in one blow if it would make me well and happy. Or even if it wouldn’t.”

“Nothing will make you well. The death you will bring to others may gladden your heart, though. That is a greater sickness than the pox, and it, too, is beyond my power to cure.”

“Oh, I don’t want cured of that,” I told her as I wrapped up in my shawls and made for the cabin door. “If my body has to hurt, I think it is a blessing that my heart never will. It don’t even the score, but it helps.”

For the next day or two, whenever I had occasion to speak with anyone, I led the conversation around to doctors, hoping for one that I could get to without much travel or money, and I asked in particular about Wilkes County. By and by somebody mentioned that there was indeed a good one by the name of Carter down the mountain in Wilkes. As soon as I heard that, I made up my mind to choose that doctor, on account of the kinfolk I had there, not that I thought they’d be overmuch glad to see me. My father came from Wilkes, and he had left a brother and cousins back there when he moved the forty miles west up to the ridgetops near Blowing Rock, but he had never married my mother, so they took no notice of me, those Fosters, for all that I called myself one.

The Fosters are not a close family, nor a clan that can be counted upon to rush to one another’s aid in time of trouble, any more than I’d have bestirred myself to help them. I would not be welcomed with open arms by my Wilkes County cousins. But I reckoned if I made it worth their while, and added a dollop of guilt into the brew, then one of them would be bound to take me in. Best not to tell them I was coming, though, or they’d put me off for certain.

When the end of February came and the wind let up a little, I packed my clothes in a canvas poke, and, come sun-up, without so much as a good-bye to anybody, I set off along the trace that led east and down the mountain.

It takes most of a week to get over to Wilkes County, following the old buffalo trace, first along Lewis Fork Creek, and then down into flatter country along the Elk Creek Road that leads to Wilkes County, where my people had come from before the War. Walking from Watauga County to Wilkes is a long, bitter journey to make in the tail end of winter, but miserable ain’t the same as important, so there’s no use making a tale of my six-day walk back to the family seat. The war years brought so much suffering to the folks in these mountains that for me to complain about any hardships on my journey would be like spitting in a well. I’ve known worse. Everybody around here has.

Back in a cold winter of the War, when times were hard and food was scarce, my daddy took sick of the fever and inside of a week, he was dead. Didn’t none of his people come up for the funeral. Maybe the message never reached them, and with bushwhackers prowling the roads, such a perilous journey wasn’t to be thought of anyhow, but I don’t believe they would have come even in the best of times. They don’t exactly consider us kin. We didn’t grieve for him ourselves, and maybe his Wilkes relatives mourned him even less. The Fosters keep to themselves, but just because we didn’t live in one another’s pockets didn’t mean I couldn’t find them when I needed them. They all lived in some proximity to Dr. George Carter, and that was all they were good for.

But I had to go somewhere. My daddy was dead, and Mama had no use for me. Times was hard, and I was past eighteen and on my own. But for the War, I might have had a husband and two young’uns by now, but the Confederacy turned most of our young men into worm food, and I didn’t care to make a match of it with the old men and the maimed veterans who were left.

My grandfather’s niece, Lotty Foster, had herself a cabin and some scrub land alongside of a creek called Reedy Branch, maybe a mile before it empties into the Yadkin River. I reckon she might have taken me in: any woman that has borne five bastards hasn’t had much practice saying no to anybody, but the family all said that Lotty was bad to drink, and, despite having that grown-up daughter Ann, the family beauty, out and gone, she had four other young’uns still at home. No use putting myself there, I thought. I would end up tending children as well as doing all the chores and, like as not, spending my evenings being expected to nursemaid the old sot herself. I wasn’t feeling well enough for such a burden as that, and I was by no means sure her little cabin would have room for me nohow. Best seek an easier place to begin with, and leave Lotty’s cabin for a last resort.

I didn’t have far to go to seek other lodging. Across the road from Lotty’s cabin was a steep hill with a little house and some outbuilding on the top of it: James Melton’s land. My handsome cousin Ann had married him before the War, and the chores there were likely to be fewer, though not because Ann was doing a hand’s turn of work, for it was gospel in the family that she never had and never would. We were near to the same age, but I had not set eyes on her since we were children, and she was pretty enough then, but proud and bossy with it, too. I did not expect to find her much improved.

They call that part of Wilkes County “Happy Valley,” though I couldn’t see that the folks there were any better off than the rest of us. There were fine houses scattered here and there, same as anywhere else, but between the showplaces were ramshackle cabins and ordinary houses-again, same as anywhere else.

The one thing I did notice when I got there on the first day of March: it was warmer down there than it was up on the mountain. Though the hillside forests were still bare, new leaves with a yellow tint to the green were budding on the valley oaks and chestnuts, so I judged that Wilkes County was a week closer to spring than where I had just left. The road was muddier, though, and the wind was still sharp. I’d be glad to get shut of the foul weather, and sit down by somebody’s fireside, for my cheeks felt like snowballs.

I asked the way a time or two of the farm folk who gave me shelter in the course of my journey, not wanting to spend any more time in the wind than I had to, mindful that I was sick, but since the road followed the Elk Creek, it was simple enough to find my way to the Stony Fork Road. By late afternoon I was standing on the dirt track, looking up that long hill toward the farmhouse where my cousin Ann lived now. I had heard tell that there were fine plantations down in the bottom land around the Yadkin, and that may be so, but I had not fetched up on the doorstep of one of them. The Elkville community could boast of no river mansions with colored servants to wait on you hand and foot, though I heard tell there were such places in Wilkes, owned by the likes of the Isbells and the Carters. Not my Foster kin, though, and not the Meltons, either, from the look of this place. Ann’s husband’s property was a shabby hill farm that would be hard-pressed to feed the owner’s family, much less anybody else around the place. I was used to such as that, though. Thanks to the War, we were all schooled in doing without.