Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

I thought it was odd, because her brother was already down as a witness, and could have answered any questions about that, but I didn’t think too much about it, for my mind was occupied with my own testimony, which was a deal more important than hers.

She went into the courtroom while I was still waiting in the hall, wondering if the court was planning to give us lunch. Presently Miss Eliza came storming out of the courtroom, looking like a wet hen.

“What happened to you?”

“Where is my brother?”

“Outside having a smoke. I said I’d fetch him if it was his time to go in. What’s the matter?”

There was a pink spot on each one of her cheeks, and her lips twitched. “That awful man who is defending Tom Dula asked me… actually, in public… asked me if I was kin to-as he put it-‘a man of color’ named John Anderson.”

I sat very still on the bench. “Strange question for a lawyer to ask. What does that have to do with Tom?”

“I haven’t the least idea. I did not respond, and in fact before I could, the other lawyers objected, and the judge told me I need not answer.”

“Well, as light as John is, I should think there might be a blood tie there somewhere.”

Eliza Anderson gave me a cold stare. “Well, it’s nothing to do with me!” And she stalked off to complain to Wash about that godless lawyer from Charlotte.

I wondered what prompted Tom’s lawyers to ask that. Had he figured out the truth of Laura’s disappearance and tipped them off? Well, it didn’t matter. John Anderson could not tell what he knew, and I had no intention of telling it, either.

I don’t think Tom ever worked it out. I reckon when Ann finally found him on the Friday that Laura went missing, she had said to him something like, “Well, you’ll not be running away with Laura Foster now, Tom Dula, for I have killed her.”

And poor easygoing Tom must have stared back at her, and said, “What are you talking about?”

But it was too late then, for by that time, Laura was lying dead in the weeds at the Bates’ place with a knife wound in her heart.

And what could he do then? Let her hang for a crime she committed for love of him? He loved her too much for that. So he buried that body, and then he was as guilty as she was.

They found Tom guilty in the second trial, same as the first, and although his lawyers succeeded in getting the execution postponed from February until May, they could not delay it forever.

By then I knew that Ann would likely go free whenever she came to trial, but that didn’t matter. However long she walked the earth thereafter, the truth is that she would die the day they hanged Tom Dula.

I don’t know why, though. I never did understand what it was that made people prefer one man over another.

I went back to Watauga between the trials, and found me an old man to marry, but that was a matter of business: getting a roof over my head and enough to eat. Besides, I had a baby on the way by then, and I needed to marry before it arrived. I reckon I come as close to caring about that baby as I ever have to loving anybody. Not because of its father-he is the least of it-but because the child is a part of me, and for that reason alone, I value it. But if it is born poxed, I will stifle it.

So I shall get away from Wilkes County for good, and I will take care to steer clear of tragedies, so no one will ever think to ask what became of me. The people who live happily ever after-they don’t appear in the history books. They just fade away. I reckon that’s what happiness is.

Doctors, as a rule, do not attend their patients’ funerals, and it is for similar reasons that lawyers absent themselves from public executions: it is daunting to have to face one’s professional failure squarely in the cold light of day. In addition to that, I could argue that I was by no means out of the financial mire that the War had left me in, and I had my living to get at my law office in Charlotte, a good fifty miles from Statesville, where my erstwhile client would pay with his life for his crime-or possibly for mine: the arrogance of thinking my rusty legal skills adequate to mount a criminal defense in so serious a matter. I hoped him guilty, and I did not see what good it would do to go and try to offer comfort, when I had none to give. I got him a second chance before a jury, and, when that failed, his consolation could only come from a clergyman, in the hope of heaven.

He had been a soldier, and I hoped he would die like one.

In any case, my duties lay elsewhere, for I appeared before the court not only in Charlotte, but in Salisbury, Lexington, Lincolnton, Concord, Monroe, and even farther afield. I expect to be remembered for my political career, but if I am remembered for any legal case I ever took part in, I expect it will be the Johnston Will case, tried in February 1867, in Superior Court in Chowan County. It was a legal tangle involving a legacy, and no one’s life was at stake, Mr. Johnston having already gone on to meet his maker. My chief contribution to that case was an impassioned speech, somewhat off the subject of the case at hand. I’m good at that. If I can entrance a jury with a diverting yarn, or make them laugh, I can often make them like me enough to find in favor of my client. It is sentiment, rather than logic, and the opposing lawyers do not esteem me for it, but it is the best way I know to practice a trade that I was taking up again after a hiatus of a dozen years. As I said, I won that case, and I hope it will suffice to sum up my career before the bar.

But in the Dula case, a young unmarried girl was dead. She was no angel of virtue, to be sure, but people were sorry for her, and that rather cramped my style in the way of misdirecting the jury with tall tales and humorous rhetoric.

Though I am committing my memories to paper, this case will not make it into my memoirs, if I have anything to say about it. It was not a shining hour in my career.

I was not there at the end, and I expected to know no more about it than what was reported in the Salisbury Watchman a week thereafter. But some time later I chanced to run in to my former co-counsel, the Iredell County attorney Captain Richard Allison, in the courthouse in Charlotte. He was there on another matter, but, upon seeing me, he delayed his departure for home in order to spend an hour with me, so that I might hear how it all ended in the Dula case, for he had indeed been there.

We repaired to a quiet corner, where we could sit undisturbed and talk without being overheard. After we got the initial pleasantries out of the way, Allison turned somber. “I was there, Governor,” he said. “The man died bravely. I thought it my duty to see it through.”

I sighed. “I wish we could have saved him. Did you speak to him before the end?”

“I did, yes. He sent for me. I never thought he would, for the jailers were saying how indifferent he was to his impending execution. He laughed and joked about the fact that he was to die the next day, and he refused the offers of ministers who would have offered him spiritual solace. His sister Eliza and her new husband made the journey from Wilkes County to Statesville with a wagon, in order to take the body back home for burial after the hanging. She brought him a note from their mother, imploring him to confess the truth of what happened, so that she could cease to be tormented by doubts and questions, but his only response to this was to ask that his sister and brother-in-law be allowed to see him.”

“I don’t suppose the jailers agreed to that?”

Captain Allison shook his head. “They had every reason not to trust Tom Dula. Even when he was locked in his cell, they kept him shackled to the wall on a length of chain. He did not mean to die if he could help it.”