Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

All right, then. If she felt that fierce about Tom Dula, why was she still with James Melton at all? It isn’t as if James Melton had any money or position to speak of, and Ann had little enough reputation to ruin, so what kept her bound?

There was some sense in her stopping there as long as the War lasted, for Tom was away in the fighting, and where else could she go? But next month would mark a year’s time since the War had ended, and Tom had finally got shut of the army, and walked home from that prison camp in Maryland last summer. They had told me all that themselves. And yet, here was Ann, nine months after Tom came home, still being wife to another man, still “Mrs. Melton,” to all the world. What kept her there? Those babies might have tied another woman to hearth and home, but I never saw Ann pay any mind to hers.

To see her and Tom together, you’d think that as soon as she saw him walking down the road, she’d have thrown her clothes in a flour sack, and took off after him, no matter what.

The fiddlers swung into a new tune just then, as if they were reading my mind.

If I had a needle,

As fine as I could sew;

I’d sew that gal to my coattails,

And down the road I’d go.

I tapped my foot in time to Shady Grove, thinking I might get up and dance after another cup or two of whiskey. “Why didn’t she go off with Tom when he came back from the War?” I wondered aloud.

“Like as not, she wasn’t asked,” said Mrs. Scott.

I puzzled over that riddle for a good many days afterward, but I knew the answer would come to me. The Bible says that not a sparrow falls but what the Lord knows about it. In Happy Valley the fate of sparrows might go unremarked, but every human being in the settlement was watched and judged and commented upon on a daily basis, it seemed to me, and not out of Christian concern, either. There was little else to talk about, I reckon. Once you have done with the weather, and who was sick, how the crops were faring, and all the birthing and dying news, then what was left, except to tabulate the sins and follies of your neighbors?

I was a nine days’ wonder back when I first arrived. Every old cat in the settlement was itching to find out what business I had in Wilkes County, and, when they learned that I was here to see Dr. Carter, they tried even harder to nose up the reason for it. The first thing that leaps to any old biddy’s mind when a single woman turns up in the settlement is: “Is she in the family way?” Though a moment’s thought would tell them that pregnancy was hardly a reason to consult a doctor. An unwed girl might well leave her own community to birth her baby elsewhere, but she’d not trouble a doctor to help her do it when there were midwives a-plenty to be had. What would a man doctor know about bringing babies into the world anyhow?

They used every neighborly visit and settlement social as a chance to look me over, but there was no telltale bulge beneath my apron, and the rest of me was as scrawny as ever.

Finally, though I’m sure it pained those gossips to do it, they gave up all hope that I might be a wayward woman saddled with a bastard child. Well, I was a wayward woman, if they but knew, and I wish they had been right in their first guess. I’d rather have paid for my sins with a brat than with the pox. It would be a deal easier to get rid of a babe, for one thing. A dose of pennyroyal tea, or a corset cinched as tight as it will go-and if that fails, you can smother the newborn with a cloth and tell folk that it died in the night. There’s plenty that do. I’d fall pregnant a dozen times if it would rid me of this pox.

Is it not a wonder that the human race goes on at all? All men give you is pain and sorrow, and I cannot see why any woman would have aught to do with them. Young girls prate enough about love, but that doesn’t seem to last as long as pox, either. I suppose they do it for their keep, for when you are turned out of your mama’s house, it is better to go and be someone’s wife than to hire out as a servant. And for the rest, the girls who cannot or will not make a match with some fellow, then laying with men is an easy way to get money: selling yourself for a few minutes to some randy young lout, who is foolish enough to waste good drinking money on a roll in the hay. I make eleven cents a day laboring hours in the fields; servicing strangers pays better than that. Anyhow, a girl must live.

Since all that is true, I could not see what it was that Ann wanted with Tom Dula. She had her house and her keep, thanks to that husband of hers, and I reckon Tom Dula wasn’t paying her nothing for her favors, for I never saw that he had a penny to bless himself with. He was living at home with his mama, and doing less work than anybody I ever saw, and I don’t think he ever figured on doing anything else. The future to him was just going to be a succession of days as similar to one another as glass beads on a string. Ann couldn’t go off with Tom, because Tom wasn’t studying on going anywhere- ever. So I didn’t see that she had any call to shine like a candle flame whenever he came in sight. As far as I could tell he was just another poor, no-account ex-Rebel, and if he wasn’t bad to look at, time would take care of that soon enough. Maybe my cousin was love-smitten with Tom Dula, but that was one pox I did not get.

“People are talking about Tom and me.”

It was near dusk, a few days after the party, and Ann had followed me out to the yard, so she could talk to me while I went on with my chores. The days were getting milder now, as March wore on, but I knew that that only meant there was more work ahead on the farm. I was taking the dry clothes off the line, and setting them in the woven basket to bring in. Those that were not all the way dry yet could hang up by the fireplace. It had been a gray day, always threatening to spit rain, but never quite doing it.

I stopped, holding one of her petticoats in midair. “Talking about the pair of you?” I started to laugh. “I don’t reckon they’re resorting to telling lies, Cousin Ann. I know what goes on the nights you turn me out of the bed.”

A couple of nights a week, Ann would make up a pallet on the floor, and tell me to sleep there. I crawled under the quilts, but I did not sleep. I lay awake there in the dark, listening to the raspy snores of James Melton, alone as always in his bed, and in the dead of night, I’d feel the cold draft from the door as someone came in, walking slow and quiet, trying not to make a sound. Then the soft footfalls would stop on the side of Ann’s bed, and I could hear a sigh and a moan, and then the sound of the covers being drawn back, and the soft thump of boots hitting the floor.

The first time it happened, I lay there real still, wondering if somebody had come to cut our throats in the night-the War had not been over long enough for such fears as that to subside. But before a minute had passed, I heard a sigh and a giggle, and an answering grunt, and then the rustling of the bed covers, and I knew what was going on in the bed. Ann had banished me to a pallet on the floor, because she knew that Tom Dula would be paying her a visit.

I raised up a little, trying to peer through the darkness over at that other bed-the one where James Melton lay asleep. If Tom coming in had woke me up, how did he sleep through it? Did he really hear nothing in the bed a broom’s length from his, or did he not care what Ann did? I shook my head in the darkness. If he had been seventy, there might have been some sense to it, but James Melton hadn’t reached thirty yet. I puzzled over it a few minutes more, until the weariness of the day’s work pulled me under again, and when I woke up at cock crow, Ann was sleeping peacefully in her bed alone.