Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

With that, I pushed my way past them and on in to the store, while they were still standing there, rooted to the ground, speechless with shock. I made it all the way inside before I fell to laughing so hard I could not speak my order, but it is dangerous to jest with fools, for they are liable to believe anything.

After I had finished passing the time of day at the store, I figured I would give the Meltons the slip a while longer, as long as I was out. I could always claim later that I had been feeling poorly. I left the store and went south along the river road to the house of Mrs. Alexander don’t-you-never-call-her-Celia Scott. I had been there once that day already, early that morning, but somehow Ann had tracked me there, and she boxed my ears for leaving the house without her say-so. The government had put an end to slavery three years back, but I swear you would think the Meltons hadn’t heard about it, for they sure as hell acted like they owned me.

“What are you doing out visiting when your chores ain’t done?” Ann Melton had barged in to Miz Scott’s house so soon after I got there that she must have caught sight of me on the road. She grabbed hold of my arm, and shouted right in my face. “Nobody gave you leave to go off a-visiting! The cows want milking, and there is breakfast to be got, so you can just march yourself back home with me and get started on it.”

Having a witness to this coarse treatment emboldened me. “Why must I do both, Cousin Ann? Milk the cow and cook the breakfast? I’ve not seen you do a hand’s turn in many a day.”

She slapped me hard then, and, putting one hand on my arm and winding the other one around a hank of my hair, she half dragged me out the door and down the road. Treating me like a slave afore company just made me all the more determined to give her the slip, so after I’d been to the store, I headed back to the Scotts’ to finish my visit, and maybe to cadge a biscuit and honey, for before Ann hauled me away that morning, Miz Scott had told me she would be baking.

As soon as I had knocked, Miz Scott met me at the door, pale-faced, and peeking over my shoulder to see if Ann was following along behind me. Seeing nobody else in the road, she pulled me inside, barring the door behind me. Then she sat me down at the table and she poured me a dipper of cold water into a tin cup. Before I could even take a sip, she had put the plate of new-baked biscuits on the table next to a pot of honey, and she bade me help myself. She didn’t have to tell me twice, so I reached for a biscuit, and contrived to look like I had come a-visiting for the pleasure of her company.

“I was sorry to see that unpleasant scene that passed between you and Mrs. Melton this morning,” she said, pulling up the other chair, and pouring water for herself into a chipped china teacup. “Your cousin is quite a high-strung woman.”

I nodded, taking care to look sorrowful and a little afraid. “She has the temper of a penned-up bull, does Cousin Ann. You wouldn’t want to cross her, Miz Scott. It’s as much as your life is worth to make her angry.” I said that last bit slow and soft to give her time to catch my meaning.

Miz Scott turned pale, and she clapped her hand to her mouth. After a moment she whispered, “Have you ever known anybody to make her angry?”

“Besides me, you mean?” I took a sip of water and pretended to think on it. “There wasn’t any love lost between her and our other cousin, Laura Foster over to German’s Hill. I reckon you’d know the whys of that, same as everybody else around here. Ann and Tom Dula have been lovers ever since they were young’uns and figured out what sex was, and, even though she is married herself, Ann pitched a fit when he took up with Laura Foster. I heard her threaten Laura’s life.”

Miz Scott gasped and her eyes bugged out, froglike. “What are you saying, Pauline?”

I shook my head. “You must judge for yourself, Miz Scott. I must live with the Meltons, and it’s not my place to say anything.”

“But Laura has been gone these many weeks. And you say that Ann threatened her. Can you possibly mean… that Ann?”

I shook my head. “It’s as much as my life is worth to say any more, ma’am. You’ve seen her in a temper. Can you blame me for not speaking out?”

Miz Scott opened her mouth to argue with me, but then she shut it again, and I reckon she was remembering Ann pitching a fit in her house that very morning, and she saw the sense in what I said. After that, she tried to talk about the weather, and to tell me about a new dress she was fixing to make with a bolt of blue calico she had got from the store, but her eyes kept straying around the room, and she kept on repeating herself and losing the thread of her story, and I think her mind must have been somewhere else. I just kept smearing dollops of honey on those biscuits, and swallowing them as fast as I could, while I let her talk.

She was on her third cup of water, and she had just about run out of things to say, when a pounding on the door made her spill the contents of the cup all over the table. She tried to sop it up with her apron, while the pounding went on, louder and faster. She gave me a big-eyed stare, and whispered, “Is it her?”

I tried to remember what people do when they are afraid. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, and made as if to bite down on the side of my fist. The pounding shook the door, and Miz Scott kept glancing toward it, while she tried to mop up the water with the tail of her apron. At first I thought she was just going to sit there and hope the visitor would go away, but the knocking never let up, and finally a voice said, “Open this door or I’ll break it in!” and she had to get up and unbar it.

Ann Melton pushed past Miz Scott without so much as a how-de-do, and made straight for me with a look on her face that bespoke murder. “What are you doing here again?” She put her face up close to mine and screamed at me.

I didn’t bother to answer her, but just sat there, taking note of the way her eyes got all squinty when she shouted, and seeing little flecks of spit on her lower lip. I judged that Miz Scott would be too upset by Ann’s carrying on to notice whether or not I was cowering in fear.

“Pauline, you have no business to be out gossiping. You have got to come home!” Without waiting for me to speak, she grabbed my arm and jerked me up out of my chair. Then she gave me a great push in the small of my back and sent me stumbling toward the still-open door.

I grabbed on to the doorjamb and looked back at Miz Scott with pleading eyes, hoping she’d remember this scene if ever the time came. It is easy to get the better of high-tempered people like Ann. They get so caught up in their moment of rage that they lose sight of the consequences. But I don’t.

Ann turned me loose, but only so she could shake her fist in my face. “I heard what you told Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson, about how you and Tom killed Laura Foster. The story is all over the settlement by now. You have said enough to Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson to hang you and Tom Dula, if it was ever looked into.”

I shrugged. “You’re as deep in the mud as I am in the mire.”

She made as if to slap me, but she stayed her hand, and hissed in my face, “How could you tell such a lie as that?”

I hung my head and made my voice quaver. “I said it in jest, Cousin. I reckon I lose my head when I’ve been drinking.”

“If you don’t learn to hold your tongue, I will see to it that you lose the rest of your head as well. And if I catch you gossiping and telling lies again, Pauline, you’ll end up the same as Laura Foster.”

Miz Scott let out a little squeak when she heard that, and Ann, still blazing with wrath, rounded on her, and said, “You had better never tell what you heard here today, Celia Scott. Do you hear me?”