The Ballad of Tom Dooley (31 page)

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.

ZEBULON VANCE

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.”

“One can hardly blame him for that.”

“No, I suppose not. That night the jailer took him his supper, and he ate heartily as if he had another twenty years to live instead of only that many hours. But as the jailer got up to leave, he noticed that one of the links on the prisoner’s shackles was loose. He called at once for another guard to help him, and together they examined the chain. When they saw that the link had been filed through, they knew that the prisoner had somehow got a weapon in his cell, so they began to search.”

“Did they find it?”

“A piece of window glass. He had concealed it in his bed. The jailer told me that he scowled fiercely at them when they found it, but by the time they started to remedy the damage to the chain, his mood had turned sardonic again. He told them the chain had been severed so for some weeks. But he must have realized that their finding the break had ended his last chance to escape before the execution the next day, and at last he accepted the fact that he was going to die. When at last the jailer turned to leave, Dula asked that I be summoned to meet with him as soon as possible.”

I considered that, momentarily stung that he had not asked for me instead. Pride is the besetting sin of the public man. “I suppose that was because he knew that you lived in Statesville? No doubt I would have been hard to locate, being down here in Charlotte, and time was short.”

“I expect that was the way of it, Governor,” said Captain Allison. “They sent a man to fetch me, and he found me at dinner, but I came away as soon as I could, and made my way to the jail. They led me to his cell—and they made sure to tell me about that filed chain, so that I’d be on my guard against any move he might make against me—but I think by then he had given up hope. He sat there on his cot, shoulders slumped, staring at the floor. He did not even look up when I came in. I hoped that he was praying.”

“I doubt it.”

“No. Perhaps not. I said, ‘Well, Tom. I have come. If there’s anything I can do to ease your mind, you can depend upon me to do it.’ He looked up at me then, and there was nothing of the joker about him anymore. His face was ashen and haggard with worry. I only hoped that he would recover his bravado before the execution. As a soldier, he would not wish to be dragged to the gallows begging for his life.”

I shuddered. “There are some things that put dying in the shade.”

“Yes. To die like a slaughtered hog would be no end for a brave soldier, no matter what his crimes were. But I was no minister, so I knew he had not called for me to hear tales about repentance and salvation. I warned him, ‘There is nothing more that I can do for you under the law. You would be better off making your peace with God, than by trying to struggle any more against the decree of the state.’

“He nodded. Then he picked up a length of the chain that shackled him to the wall, and let it fall again. ‘They told you about this, then? Well, I had to try. I reckon I am bound to die, Captain Allison. So there is something I need to leave with you. But first I must have your word—on your sacred honor—that you will keep secret what I am about to give you while there is still breath in my body.’

“I put my hand on his shoulder, to reassure him, I suppose, and I told him upon my obligation as his attorney that it was my duty to do his bidding, within the limits of the law. ‘And if it is your dying wish, then I am honor bound as a gentleman to do as you ask, so long as no other person is harmed by your request.’ He smiled then, and for an instant there, he seemed to get back a bit of his boldness. ‘It won’t harm nobody, Captain. Just the other way around. I aim to save a life.’

“He asked me if I had a bit of paper on me. I fished about in my jacket pockets and finally found a rumpled scrap of notepaper, and a stub of pencil, which I handed over to him. He slipped down off the cot and smoothed out the bit of paper on the floor. While I stood there watching, he grasped the pencil, curling all his fingers around the haft. He set his face in a frown of concentration, with the tip of his tongue tucked in to the corner of his mouth—for all the world, the way a child does when it is just learning penmanship. I felt a stab of pity for him then, for he wasn’t much more than a boy himself—or he might have been, if the War had not come.”

I had lost as much as anybody in that war—a seat in the United States Senate, and the chance to someday be President—but every time I passed a cemetery, or spied a woman in widow’s weeds, or met a one-legged man hobbling along on a crutch, I was humbled by the thought that my sacrifice was mere vanity compared to theirs. We lost so much in that infernal war. So much. “Do you think that the War made Tom Dula into a killer, Captain?”

Allison shook his head. “The man was a drummer in the 42nd North Carolina—just a music maker, nothing more. And the records say that he spent half the War on sick call. Indeed, I am still not convinced—well, you must let me finish my tale, Governor. Dula passed a few minutes laboriously carving words on to that scrap of paper, and when he had completed it to his satisfaction, he handed it up to me. ‘Not until I am dead, mind,’ he warned me as he gave it to me, and I had to promise once again to honor his wish. Only then would he allow me to read what he had written.

“It was the simplest of documents. Only a few short words, but it said everything. He had written:
‘Statement of Thomas C. Dula—I declare that I am the only person that had any hand in the murder of Laura Foster. April 30, 1868
.’ I read it through twice. My first feeling upon seeing those words was one of relief that we were not sending an innocent man to the gallows through any lack of skill as attorneys. But a moment later I found to my dismay that I did not believe him. I thought that statement was designed to set people’s minds at rest—but also to effect the release of the other defendant. He could not save his own life, but it was within his power to save hers.

“He had clambered back up on the cot now, straightening out the heavy chain that bound him fast. He was watching me closely as I read his confession. I slipped the document into my pocket, and fixed him with a stern gaze. ‘Is this the truth, Tom Dula? Do you swear to it?’

“He smiled up at me then, and I could see some of the old charm in his countenance. ‘The truth is that Laura Foster wasn’t worth the forfeit of two lives, and there seems to be no hope of saving mine.’

“‘But if you did not kill her, man…’

“He smiled up at me then, as if he were speaking to a child. ‘I did not care enough about her to kill her. But there is someone that I love enough to save. Let me do this. This confession will break my mother’s heart, but at least she will have a measure of peace, believing her questions answered. And I will go to my grave knowing that I did one last thing for the one person I would willingly die for.’