Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

I hung my head and tried to look shame-faced. “I get to joking when I’ve been drinking, Ben. That’s all it was.”

He just stood there looking at me, as blank-faced as a sheep, and then he turned away without saying a word, and shut the door behind him. I heard the key turn in the lock, and then the sound of his boots clattering down the stairs. I figured they’d be back soon enough with the high sheriff, but until then I was on my own. I started wondering where Tom was. There was a downstairs cell across the hall from the jailer’s quarters, but the door had been open, so I knew he wasn’t in there. The upstairs room they had put me in was at the back of the building, and I knew that on the other side of that back wall, there’d be another room beside this one, facing the front. I walked over next to the empty fireplace and tapped on the wall.

“Tom?”

I put my ear to the wall, but I couldn’t hear anything. I tried again: “Tom, it’s Pauline!”

Maybe the walls were too thick for him to hear me, for all I got back was silence.

The sun was making long shadows on the lawn out my window before I heard footsteps on the stairs again. I had sat down on the cot to wait, but now I got up and stood in the middle of the room and waited for them to open the door.

The first man through the door was a lean middle-aged man in a black suit coat with a stern expression that told you he was the one in charge. Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson flanked him like lap dogs. The sheriff sized me up through narrowed eyes. “So you are Perline Foster.” He fairly spat the words, and I decided to let him say my name any way he felt like.

I hoped he was one of those older men who looked at any young girl as a daughter, because then if I stayed all polite and big-eyed he might think me an innocent fool and let me go. I wished I knew how to cry, because that would really make him pity me, but I never did learn how to do it. The best I could do was to take deep breaths and make my voice all quavery, and dab at my eyes as if there were tears about to fall.

“I didn’t do nothing, sir. I was just joshing with Ben and Jack here so’s they would take notice of me.”

“Oh, they noticed, all right. We have Tom Dula locked up here for the murder of Miss Laura Foster, and you claimed that you helped him. When these peace officers testify to that in a court of law, I reckon you’ll hang right alongside Dula.”

I saw then that there was room for only one big-eyed, innocent girl in this matter, and that was Laura Foster, who garnered all the pity by being dead. What’s more I was mindful that when the sheriff talked about hanging me, it was no empty threat. When President Lincoln was shot at the end of the War last year, folk said they rounded up everybody who was anywhere near the actor that did the shooting and strung them all up together in Washington. One of them was a woman-the landlady who ran the boardinghouse where the actor stayed, and they hung her same as the others. I wasn’t scared, but I saw that I might have stepped in to more of a trap than I had bargained for. These lawmen were hell-bent to make somebody pay for the killing of Laura, and they didn’t much care who, as long as it was solved quick. I thought I had better get myself out of trouble, before they decided to make me the scapegoat alongside of Tom Dula.

I hung my head. “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

They ended up keeping me in that cell all night, but I didn’t mind, because after everything I told them, I knew I could never go back to the Meltons’ house anyhow. Leastways, not while Ann was still there-but after all I had told them, I didn’t think that would be much longer. They kept asking me the same things over and over, until the light faded from that barred window, and they had to light the oil lamp to keep going. Right around full dark, the jailer brought me some beans and corn bread, and they waited while I wolfed it down, and then they went right back to peppering me with questions.

I told them why I had come down the mountain in the first place, and what I was ailing from. Sheriff Hix got even more squinty-eyed then, and looked like he had stepped in something, but it ain’t a crime to be sick, and he didn’t have to like me, as long as he believed me.

So I told about how it was at the Meltons’ farm, with Ann doing no work and not even sharing a bed with James. I allowed as how many’s the night I had seen Tom Dula and Ann Melton rutting together in her bed with James asleep an arm’s length away. I said that Ann had made me have to do with Tom Dula out in the barn one time, so that people would think he was coming to the farm to see me instead of her. And when Tom took up with our cousin Laura Foster? Yes, Ann surely did mind that Tom was going over there. They had set-tos over it more than once. And the night that Tom ran off to Tennessee, I saw her take a knife out from underneath her bed and give it to him.

The Sheriff leaned in close and stared me in the eyes. “Do you think the pair of them killed Laura Foster together?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “I never seen it happen. But Ann showed me the grave.”

You’d have thought they’d been struck by lightning when I said that. They looked at one another and then back at me, but I met their gaze as steady as a rock to show I wasn’t lying. Finally Mr. Hix said, “Where is it?”

“On the ridge beside the Stony Fork Road. Across from the Bates’ place.”

He nodded. “We’ll ride out to Reedy Branch in the morning, and you can take us there. Is there anything else you care to say?”

I thought about it for a minute or two before I shook my head. They would never hear one word about John Anderson’s part in the story if I could prevent it. Not that I cared one whit about saving Cousin Laura’s nut brown boy, but if the lawmen were to find out about him, they’d hang him for sure and seek no further for culprits. That would let Ann off the hook, which was no part of my plans.

“That’s all I can tell you,” I said.

I thought it was just as well that Tom Dula couldn’t hear through that wall between our cells, for if he had known what I was telling the lawmen about Ann, I think he would have torn that wall apart with his bare hands to get to me. As it was, I slept well, with the cool night breeze blowing in from the window, and no snores or thrashing bedfellows to disturb my rest. I could sleep past daybreak, and whatever they gave me for breakfast, I would not be the one who had to cook it. Then when the sun had burned the mist away from the hills, I’d go back to Reedy Branch, but not walking and begging favors, like I had back in March. This time I would ride like a queen down Stony Fork Road, and they would all be sorry that they had treated me with scorn.

I hoped it would be a pale horse. That would be fittin’.

September 1,1866

I thought it would be just me and a couple of lawmen going back to Reedy Branch, but word had got out that I was fixing to tell them where to find the body of Laura Foster, so that by the time we rode out from Wilkesboro to the Stony Fork Road, we must have looked like Stoneman’s Cavalry paying a return visit to the county.

I was in exalted company, though they took little enough notice of me, except to follow my directions. Colonel Isbell himself was there on a fine blood horse. He had vowed to see the matter through to its grim conclusion, and he was true to his word. There was an older man with him-another one of the gentry, I judged, from the look of his mount and the cut of his clothes. J.W. Winkler, who had spent weeks searching the area and had found the mare’s broken rein back in June, met us as we proceeded up the Reedy Branch Road. I waved to him, but he looked right through me as if he didn’t know me at all. They all thought I should have gone running to the law a few weeks back, as soon as Ann led me to that clearing, but I had to think it over. What was to stop them from thinking that I had lied about Ann’s taking me to the grave site? It seemed to me that if I showed anyone where it was, that proved only that I knew its whereabouts-not that anyone else did. And I thought that the more unwilling I was to tell what I knew, the more likely they would be to believe me. So it proved, anyhow, for no one ever doubted my story-and, indeed, it was true as I told it, but the lawmen had no way of knowing that for sure. I was lucky that they took my word for it, but then people will often believe what you say if you are calm in the telling of it. They seem to think that people who are tearful or het up are telling lies, but sometimes it’s the other way around. I can lie till the cock crows and never turn a hair, while a truthful fool will weep and storm while he tells his tale, in an effort to be believed. I hoped Ann would wail and shout when they arrested her. That would seal her fate, for sure.