Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

After a moment, she put her hand on his arm and said, “You don’t have to go, Tom. They’ll not prove anything against you. It’s only talk, is all.”

“They’ve hanged men for less. I’d be better off away from here. Once I’m gone, it will all blow over. Let them think I did it, as long as they don’t come after me. I’ve been a prisoner once, thanks to the Yankees. I don’t ever mean to let it happen again.”

Tom Dula left that night, taking one of the westward trails up the mountain, through Watauga County, the same direction I’d come from, and his leaving was the very thing that Ann had tried so hard to prevent. Her despair was no secret to anybody, for she never could conceal her thoughts, such as they were, nor her feelings. She moped about the cabin, giving way to floods of tears, and she ate so little that it was a shame to waste the food by putting it on her plate. Since she could not read or sew, and she would not seek solace in the society of her neighbors nor in prayer, she honed her misery on her husband and me, nagging about the least little thing, or shouting, or giving way to another storm of weeping, as the spirit moved her. I mostly ignored her sallies, but every now and again, when my patience wore thin, I would flare back.

James Melton never did, though. He bore her grief and her tempers with the same calm forbearance with which he had endured everything else. I wondered how he stood it, for as beautiful as she was, one can get used to beauty the same as anything else, and what was left wasn’t worth a tinker’s dam, as far as I could see. So once when James and me had the place to ourselves, Ann having gone down the hill and across the road to mope at her mama’s house, I put the question to him. “How do you stand it?” I said. “If she were my wife, I believe I’d beat her like a drum.”

He allowed himself a faint smile. “I watched her grow up, there over the road. She was like a flower back then… so perfect. But so skinny and shabby, too. They didn’t have anything. I couldn’t even be sure she got enough to eat. And one day I made her a pair of shoes, for it saddened me to see her go barefoot so far into the fall of the year. She looked at me then like I had given her a golden crown, and she smiled up at me, looking so shy and grateful. Well, I would have given her the world right then. All I wanted then was to protect her, to keep her from ending up like that no-account mother of hers.” He sighed and turned away for a moment, but not before I saw the glistening in his eyes. “I reckon all the shoes and fresh meat in the world can’t make an angel out of a sow’s spawn. Though I did try. Maybe if the War had not come. She was still so young, then. Sixteen, when I went away in ’61. And when I came back, I found a cold-eyed woman with no more generosity of spirit than a barn cat. I knew then that I had made a bad bargain, but we had our babies by then, and I was honor bound to stay and do what I could. I’d not leave them to her.”

“But you know then… about her and Tom?”

He nodded. “Yes. Sometimes I think he is the only thing that ever touched her heart. They were together when they were little more than children. I would blame him for that, except that I know how willful she is. And she’s older than Tom, so like as not, it was her idea. I can’t fault him for being so taken with her. I wish I could feel that way, even now.”

I didn’t know what to say, for all that was in my mind was the thought that he was a graven fool, and I knew better than to say that.

“She married me for a home and enough to eat, I reckon. And maybe she’d have been glad if the War had taken me and set her free. The War made so many widows-what would one more have mattered? Lord knows, I tried hard enough to die. I carried the colors of the 26th at Gettysburg, and I thought, surely, with men dying by the hundred there, stacked on the field like cordwood… surely, one man armed only with a flag would never live through it. But I did. I took bullets in an arm and a leg, and I was a year recuperating from those wounds, but I lived to go back to the army. They shot me again at Hatcher’s Run in ’65, and I ended up in the prison camp.”

“I know. I heard what it was like up there at Point Lookout. Seems to me it would have been easy for you to die then. There’s plenty that did.”

He nodded. “But, you see, Tom was there. And men were dying like mayflies, so I thought, ‘Well, the both of us will never make it out of here, so let the survivor go home and take care of Ann.’ It is a jest of Providence that we should both be spared, while better men, less willing to die, were taken.”

I nodded. “It was Ann’s luck, not yours. She never loses anything, as far as I can tell.”

“Now I can only hope that she will run away with Tom Dula, if that will make her happy. It would make me happy to get shut of her without costing me my honor.”

“What would you do then?” I asked him.

He thought for a moment. “My young’uns need a mother. I believe I’d find me a plain-faced, good-hearted, hardworking woman, and I’d count myself mighty lucky to have her. Ann was like a shooting star in my life, so beautiful it takes your breath away, but I reckon what you really need to find your way in the dark is just a good steady lantern. I am cured of hankering after beauty.”

I noticed that he wasn’t so cured of chasing beauty as to show any interest in me, but I let that pass, and we got on with the business at hand. I had nothing against James Melton, and no particular yen for him, either. I thought he might soon get his chance to be rid of Ann, and I wished him joy of it.

“He’ll be back come Christmas,” Ann would declare, saying it over and over the way granny women speak a charm to stop a nosebleed or take out fire from a burn.

I never answered back, but I thought to myself that Tom Dula would be a fool if he did come back for her. If once he got himself safely over the mountains, he had best stay gone if he wanted to outrun the rope.

He might have had sense enough to see that if he’d had months to think on it, but he didn’t. The very fact that Tom had lit out for the hills just fanned the flames of suspicion in the settlement. On the Thursday after Tom left, Wilson Foster went to the Elkville Justice of the Peace, and told him that his daughter Laura was missing, and that he reckoned she had been done to death by “certain persons under suspicion.” Then the old man reeled off the names of the folk that he suspected, and he got Mr. Carter to draw up a warrant, ordering the county sheriff to round them up for a hearing the next day at Cowle’s store.

Tom Dula topped the list, of course, and then came Ann, but after that he listed Tom’s first cousins Granville and Ann Pauline Dula. I don’t know what they had to do with anything, for we didn’t have much truck with them, but I wondered if the fact that Miss Dula is named “Ann Pauline” had something to do with it, as that is Ann’s given name, too. Well, it is also my name, if it comes to that. There are a few too many “Ann Paulines” for a place as small as this, if you ask me.

Well, I’ll bet Granville Dula and his sister were mighty surprised to find themselves in custody and bound over for a hearing on a charge of murder. They were close in age to Tom, and their daddy was Tom’s uncle Bennett, on his father’s side. They had more land and social standing than Tom and his widowed mother, and they were probably mortified to be dragged into the troubles of their no-account cousin Tom.

The next day, Friday the 29th of June, the lawmen and the local busybodies commenced a hearing at Cowle’s store, and Mr. Pickens Carter heard evidence in the matter of Laura’s disappearance. It didn’t take him long to realize that Granville and Ann Dula had been scooped up by mistake, on account of their names, and he turned them loose in short order. They hurried out of there without a backward glance, looking both scared and horrified, as if they thought we all had cholera.