Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

They took me back to Cowle’s store then, where there’d be a meeting about what had transpired, and I was glad to go, because it had been a long, wearing day, and I was so hungry that I could feel my backbone against my belly button. I spent the whole ride there thinking about food, and hoping they’d offer me something stronger than water to wash it down with, but they didn’t seem much interested in me anymore, now that I had told what I knew. Here and there along the river road that went along to the store, people stood outside their houses or on the edge of their fields and stared at us as went past. I felt like a queen in a parade, and I raised my hand a time or two to wave at them, but they just stood stock-still and stared back with stony expressions. But I didn’t care. It was my day in the sun.

It took most of the afternoon, and there was a great to-do when the searchers brought the body in and laid it out on a counter in the store, with everybody outshouting everybody else to tell what happened, but finally they let me go, and I was glad to leave all the tale telling and the gawking to that horde of folks who crowded into the store so they could say they were part of the story.

The crowd was buzzing with tales about the case, with most of them telling more than they knew. I kept still and listened to what they were saying, and one time I heard the storekeeper’s wife telling one of the women that Ann Melton had been to the store a week or so back, and she asked her if she was afraid that the lawmen were going to arrest her over the death of Laura Foster. The storekeeper’s wife dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper, but I had edged close enough to hear her say, “And when I asked her that, Mrs. Melton just laughed at me- laughed , mind you!-and then she said, ‘They’ll not put a rope around this pretty little neck.’” Her listeners gasped at the brass of that remark, and the storekeeper’s wife nodded with grim satisfaction, but hearing it caused me to shiver, for Ann Melton is a beautiful woman. When people say that beautiful women get away with murder, maybe it is more true than they mean it to be.

Mr. Pickens Carter, the justice of the peace, heard everybody out, as if it were a court, except that no lawyers were present. The searchers told how I had helped them find the burial place, and that I had cooperated with them by telling all I knew.

He said to me, “You are free to go, Pauline Foster, but you may not leave this jurisdiction, for you will be called as the state’s chief witness in a few weeks’ time at court in Wilkesboro. You must swear an oath that you will testify.”

I don’t know why people set such a store by the swearing of oaths, for they don’t cost anybody a red cent, but I could see that the justice of the peace believed in them, so I stood up before him, big-eyed and solemn, and I faithfully promised that I would appear in court when they called me. I probably would, too, because I had started it all, and I wanted to see it end.

I waited around on the edge of the crowd at Cowle’s store until I heard Mr. Justice Carter say to the constables, “Go and arrest Ann Melton.”

I wasn’t there when they took her away, though I was sorely tempted to go and watch in case she fought and cried, and had to be dragged screaming from the house. I went back at dusk, though, to see about getting my clothes and what they owed me for my last days of work. James Melton was there alone, sitting at the table, making a pair of boots.

I stood there in the doorway, watching him work in the fading light, and looking for some sign of distress in a man whose wife has just been taken away on a charge of murder. But he looked just the same as ever, with his blond head bent over that boot, intent on sewing the leather, as if the only thing in the world that mattered was making that shoe.

I made a little noise to let him know that I was there, and finally he looked up. “I’ve come for my wages and my things, James.”

He nodded. “They have taken Ann away. I guess you’d know about that.”

“I was there. They found Laura’s body. She had showed me where it was a few weeks back. Did she take on when they came to get her?”

“Ann? No. She turned pale at first, but then she swept out of here like they were taking her off to a dance. She didn’t make a sound or shed a tear. She didn’t even look back.”

It crossed my mind that Ann and Tom were together at last. There was a wall between them in the Wilkesboro jail. I wondered if they could talk through it, or if they would try.

James set the shoe aside, and looked up at me. “Where are you headed, Pauline?”

“I don’t know. I’d go back to Watauga County if they’d let me, but they say I must stay here in Wilkes until the trial. I am to be a witness. I might see if other kinfolk will take me in, but they didn’t want to last March, and I don’t reckon they’ll think me any more of a bargain now.”

“You can stop on here.”

I stared at him for a minute, trying to tell from his face what he had in his mind, but you never could tell what James Melton was thinking by looking at him. “Stay here?”

“I still have the babies to be looked after, and with Ann gone, there’s no one to cook or tend to the house.” He almost smiled when he said it, because both of us knew that Ann wasn’t any more use than a chicken when it came to housekeeping, but that didn’t make what he said about needing help any less true. “I reckon I could still pay you just the same.”

“All right. I can stay on. But you know I’ll be called as a witness in the trial.”

“So will I.”

I had not thought of that. “What will you say, James?”

“I will tell the truth, whatever they ask me. It’s my duty.”

“Even if it gets Ann hanged?”

“I don’t know anything that could harm her. Or Tom, either, come to that. I was here that night. I saw people come and go. That’s all I can swear to.”

“Are you going to go see her in jail?”

He was silent for so long that I didn’t think he heard me. Finally he looked down at that boot again, and he barely whispered, “I don’t think I’ll have time. I don’t suppose she’ll be locked up for very long-one way or the other.” He went back to sewing the leather then, as if he had forgotten I was there.

I don’t know if James Melton ever went to see his wife in jail or not, or if she even wanted him to. I never went.

That was in September 1866, and the trial was set for the beginning of October, which is when they held Superior Court in the courthouse in Wilkesboro. I thought it would all be over quick. Trials only lasted a day or two at most, for the high court only met twice a year, and they had so many cases to settle that they could not dally over any of them, not even something as serious as a killing. I thought there would be more graves in Reedy Branch before the leaves fell.

I was wrong about that.

The court went and appointed Governor Vance, that was, to defend Tom and Ann, and they ordered him to do it for free. He got his teeth into that case like a terrier cornering a rat. First he moved the trial over to Statesville, so that all the witnesses had to travel forty miles or more to get to court, and nobody thanked him for that, but he managed to drag the proceedings out for another year and a half out of sheer contrariness.

None of us could read, so it’s no use asking me what the rights of it were, because I never did know. I just went when they told me to, and said my piece on the witness stand as many times as they asked me to.

One thing did worry me, though. I never understood all the legal twists and turns as the lawyers tried to sort out what a jury could hear, and what some clerk had got wrong in filling out the legal papers. I thought of it as a game of noughts and crosses, and I figured that everybody had just clean forgotten about Laura Foster, who was tucked away by now in a solitary grave on the Foster farm in German’s Hill. All she had wanted was to get away from there, and in death they took her right on back there, so now she must stay forever. Unless she went to heaven, if there is one. I never heard it said that anybody had ever seen her ghost lingering about the place.