The Ballad of Tom Dooley (8 page)

She and Ann, both cousins to me, were chalk and cheese. Where Laura whispered and wavered, Ann carried herself like the Queen of Sheba—all fire and rolling thunder. She burned you where you stood with her bright beauty of tumbling black hair and dark, flashing eyes. By being more alive than anybody else, she squeezed your heart until you never forgot her for an instant. I didn’t say you would love her, though I reckon there was more than one man that did. Wanted her, anyhow. But no woman I ever knew could stand her. She made no pretense of caring a fig for anybody but herself, not even troubling to ask after anybody’s health or family, and when an older woman tried to converse with her, she was bored and she showed it, tapping her foot or gazing about the room, looking for some man to charm or something better to do than be talked at. The women all knew her reputation, too. None of them liked Ann enough to protect her from the scandalmongers, who were only telling the truth, after all. A woman who makes free with any man she pleases has no friends among her own sex, but Ann never cared about that, either. Tom Dula was all the society she ever wanted, and the rest of us she barely tolerated, if she noticed us at all.

I had no more use for the settlement’s old biddies than Ann did, but I took care to keep in with them, because it seemed foolish to make enemies when you didn’t have to. Those respectable old women might be useful one day, though I never tried to make Ann see that. You couldn’t reason with Ann.

She was like pokeberries, Ann was—bright and tempting to look at, but pure poison through and through. I suppose jealousy was part of the reason women hated her so much, but then Ann never took the trouble to make anybody like her. I guess she figured that the sight of her was all she ever needed to give. You never knew which way the wind would be blowing with her. One day she might be all smiles and sweetness, asking after your health and wanting to hold your new baby, and the next day she’d breeze past you on the road, taking no more notice of you than she would a stray guinea fowl.

Since I had to stay in the same house with her, I used to watch her, trying to figure out the rhythm of her moods, for my peace of mind depended upon keeping on her good side. But if there was ever any rhyme or reason to the weather of Ann Melton’s humors, I never found it. I ended up thinking that she was doing it simply to keep folks off balance around her, trying to guess at her mood, as if she was calling the tune. It gave her the upper hand—I worked that out—but I soon decided that I did not care to dance to her fiddling. I began to act just the same whether she behaved fair or foul, and pretty soon I began to see less of her moodiness, though she gave it in full force to everyone else. Except Tom Dula, of course. He always saw the sunny side of Ann.

Or at least, he did until he took up with Laura Foster, come spring.

It wasn’t as if she found out in some underhanded way. Tom never troubled to lie. I always thought he was too lazy to exert himself by trying to remember some falsehood. Besides, he cared as little as she did what anybody thought of him. He was young and handsome, and people seem to find it easy to forgive a man like that.

Tom came over to the house one evening in late March, in time to cadge a bite of supper with us. He sat there by the fire, spooning rabbit stew into his mouth, and, for once, Ann was not all smiles and sweetness. She sat huddled up on the floor next to his stool, holding his cup of water for him, and leaning her body against his leg, smiling into the firelight like a satisfied cat. I had the sewing in my lap, and I was seated in the cane chair, a ways back from the hearth, pretending not to listen to what they were saying.

“Are you coming back later?” she murmured softly to Tom, glancing over at James Melton, who was at the table, nodding in his chair.

Tom sat very still. “Not tonight, darlin’. I’m headed over to German’s Hill in a little bit.”

Ann stiffened, and turned to look up at him. “That’s a long walk on a dark night. What do you want to go over there for?”

“I just feel like it.” He was keeping his voice light, as if the conversation was of no consequence at all, but the air felt the way it does when the leaves turn over on the trees, about an hour ahead of the thunderstorm, and there was that same quiet that comes right before all hell breaks loose.

“Well, you must be fixing to go visit somebody,” said Ann, still speaking so softly that you could have heard a snake rattle in the log pile.

Tom shrugged, and, from the look on his face, I judged he was wishing he had thought up a lie when she asked him, but anybody who had fought his way through Petersburg and lived through a Yankee prison camp does not run from a fight—and maybe that was what Ann liked best about him: that she couldn’t run roughshod over him, like she did over most everybody else. I never saw James Melton cross her once. I worked beside him every day in the fields for months, but I think I knew him less than I ever knew anybody.

Tom was smiling down at Ann, like he was daring her to keep hectoring him, and presently he said, “Why, I didn’t know I had to answer to anybody about where I go and what I do.”

“You don’t need to tell me. I know. You’re going to see my own cousin Laura Foster,” said Ann.

He laughed. “Well, now, she wouldn’t be the first of your cousins that I was acquainted with, would she now, Pauline?”

I glanced up from my sewing and met his eyes with a blank stare. There was a mocking glint to them, and although he was smiling, I didn’t think he was happy about anything.

That flicked Ann raw, though, for she could hardly object to him seeing Laura Foster when she had foisted him off on me not even a month ago.

“After all, Ann, it ain’t like Laura is married or anything, is it?” He was looking over at James Melton, who was still in his chair, awake now, and intent upon mending a harness, and paying us no mind. “It ain’t like we care who beds with who?”

From the way Ann’s eyes glittered, I thought she was going to break out into a storm of weeping, but she just kept staring up at Tom, taking his measure, and finally she shrugged and turned back to the fire. “Please yourself, Tom. I doubt you’ll get much joy out of that stringy little mud hen.”

Tom stood up and set his tin plate on his stool. He patted Ann on the head and winked at me, like I shared a joke with him, “Well, Ann,” he said, heading for the door, “maybe I can teach her a thing or two.”

That night I slept in a pallet on the floor, because Ann’s bed shook with her sobbing.

PAULINE FOSTER

Late March 1866

So we hunkered down and waited on spring, and it seemed a long time in coming, and nothing much happened in the meantime. When the weather was foul, James Melton occupied himself with mending shoes. I did the cooking and the washing, and what farm chores there were to be done while the weather held cold.

Once a week, I would plod up the muddy road to the place where the doctor saw his Elkville patients, and I took the bluestone medicine what he give me, but I felt little better for it. Some days I was tolerable and some days worse, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to it. Ann mostly slept the days away under her pile of quilts, or else she paced that cabin like a penned-up bull.

“It would take your mind off your troubles if you was to help me make the biscuits,” I told her one afternoon, when I judged she would wear a path in the plank floor if she was to keep pacing.

She shot me a scorching look with those black eyes of her. “I don’t want to take my mind off it. I want to feel every second of misery I’m having so that I can give it back to Tom with interest when I see him.”

“I thought you said it didn’t mean nothing—him being with anybody else. And, anyhow, it means folk aren’t gossiping about the two of you anymore.”

She snatched up an unmended shoe and shied it in my direction, but she was so wide of the mark that I just stood there and watched it thump against the wall, and fall to the floor.

“I reckon you heard the new gossip,” I said, fixing to hurt her a lot more than that slipper would have hurt me. “They do say that old Wilson Foster caught Tom in bed with Laura the other week, but he’s not so particular as your mama was. The word is that he let them be. Of course, Laura is twenty-one, not fourteen like you was.”

“Tom don’t care,” said Ann, plopping down with her elbows in the flour where I was kneading dough. “Nobody thinks less of a man for doing what comes naturally. More fool the woman that lets him. If Laura thinks he’s going to marry her on account of it, she has another think coming.”

“Unless there’s a baby on the way.”

Ann shrugged. “No telling whose it would be, though. Tom wasn’t her first, not by a long chalk. If you haven’t heard the other tales told about our cousin Laura, then let me tell you I have.”

“Must run in the family,” I said, laughing, because name-calling never bothered me none. “And there are stories a-plenty about you, too, Ann. You and the cattle drovers. They say you’d sell your favors for a jug of whiskey or a scrap of cloth.”

She gave me one of her black looks. “I lived through the War, didn’t I?”

*   *   *

As the days grew longer and the wind quit howling, and the world slowly began to turn green again, I found I was feeling better, and I thought that perhaps Dr. Carter had cured me after all. My rash and my fever went away, and I began to feel less miserable than I had in many a month. I was still a forlorn hired girl, with no prospects and no one to look out for me, but at least I was still young and spry, and the fine weather made it easier to go calling on folk. I didn’t like any of them much, but listening to them talk was better than fetching and carrying for Ann every waking minute. Besides, you never know when some little nugget of scandal will repay you the trouble of listening for it.

One afternoon in late March I was walking up the road in search of something to do besides farm chores, when Wash Anderson hailed me from the edge of the woods. He had a blanket slung across his shoulder, and he was whooping and waving an earthenware jug up over his head, like a damned fool.

I hitched up my skirts, and plowed through the tall grass over to where he was standing. Wash Anderson is another young buck who lives with his widowed mama and his sister Eliza, just down the hill from the Meltons’ place. He hangs around the settlement without being good for much, same as Tom. It’s a wonder these fellows don’t miss the War, as bored as they all seem to be with peacetime, and them never doing any work if they can help it. If I was a man and I had my health again, I believe I’d amount to more than they did. He is an amiable enough fellow, is Wash. Always good for a tune or a jest, and good enough company if you’ve nothing better to do, but he wasn’t a patch on his buddy Tom for looks: round-faced and tow-headed, with a foolish grin, and though he wasn’t yet thirty, he had a gut on him that spoke to his fondness for likker and food. I had no use for Wash Anderson in the ordinary way of things, but I take care never to get on the outs with anybody, and, besides, Wash Anderson brandishing a full jug of whiskey was a tolerable sight.

“What do you want?” I asked him, hands on my hips, and showing him that I wouldn’t put up with any sass from the likes of him.

“How do, Pauline,” he said, making a mock bow, as if I was a fine lady, but the smirk on his face put a sting to it. “Me and Tom Dula are fixing to lay out in the woods this evening with this here jug, and another one just like it, and make us a party of it. We would be right glad if you was to join us.”

I could smell his breath from two feet away, and I flapped my hand to stir the stench away from my nose. “Seems like you have already started in on that jug without us.”

He gave me a wobbly grin and reached for my arm. “Just feeling the spirit move us, Pauline. Come on.”

I let him lead me into the woods then, keeping my eye on the whiskey jug to make sure he didn’t trip over a log and spill it out on the ground. I didn’t care if Wash Anderson broke his fool neck, but it would be a shame to waste good whiskey. Anyhow, I had nothing better to do that evening. I had much rather call on Wash’s sister, Mrs. Scott, or walk over to Miz Gilbert’s to spend the evening and maybe cadge a bite of supper, but if either of them had any gossip it would keep, and I’d just as soon pass the time with a jug as eat, even if it meant putting up with the likes of Wash and Tom Dula. I could suffer them well enough, for the sake of their whiskey. I reckoned they might try to make me pay for my share by letting them lay with me, but if I could put it off long enough, they might be too drunk to manage.

As soon as we had gone a ways into the woods, where the evening light was green, a-shining slant-wise through the leaves, I began to hear faint, shrill sounds, and I stopped in my tracks, thinking at first that it was the cry of a bobcat. But as I stood and listened, the screeching stopped, and then the sounds came together and made a tune, and then I knew that Tom Dula had already beat us to the meeting place, and that he was amusing himself on his fiddle while he waited.

I am not much of a music lover, though I suppose I like a lively dance as well as the next girl. It’s just that the tunes all sound more or less the same to me, and if the fiddler is an indifferent player, they all sound like scalded cats. I started forward again, following the sound, and it was a likely melody, though I did not know its name. I judged that he played it well, for the sound of it did not set my teeth on edge. I decided that Tom was a better fiddler than most I’d heard. I suppose he ought to be, though. It ain’t like he ever let work get in the way of his practicing.

We found him sitting on a fallen log with his back up against an oak tree, eyes closed and wrapped up in the tune he was playing. I held back for a moment watching him, because the way he moved with that bow in his hand showed more grace than I had ever seen in him before. A shock of hair slipped down across his forehead, and he glowed with the fever of his playing. For a moment there I thought I could see how Ann could be so taken with him. He was so handsome sitting there, lost in his fiddling, that he could have been one of those magic creatures they tell about in fairy tales, sitting there in the woods in twilight, conjuring up music. Funny, I felt closer to him then than I had back there in the barn when he had his pants down.