The Ballad of Tom Dooley

A frail girl was stabbed to death in the foothills of Wilkes County, and nigh on everybody there knows who did it. Well, I didn’t know. I was practicing law in Charlotte, some ninety miles away, and I was only called in to defend the man they had arrested, a complete stranger to me, despite what people have said to the contrary over the years. He was a Confederate veteran, as was I, but we never served together, and would not have been acquainted even if we had, for I began and ended my military service as a colonel, and he stayed a sickly private and a drummer boy. We were worlds apart, except perhaps to people who looked at our lives on paper.

This twenty-two-year-old former soldier got himself arrested, and I in my infinite wisdom got the trial moved to the next county, where nobody knew any more about it than I did. My intentions were good. And I suppose I could not have done otherwise, even if I had been more in possession of the facts. In the end, a lawyer must do his client’s bidding, and I did that.

God help us both. I did that.

***

I expect that in years to come there will be more people wondering why I took this case than there will be wondering if he did it.

Oh, why did I agree to represent a man, generally accorded by my learned colleagues in the legal profession to be guilty, who could not have paid for a shot of whiskey, much less an attorney for his defense? An idle, amoral Confederate veteran, accused of stabbing a young girl to death and burying her body in the woods.

Well, somebody had to represent him. Any country lawyer will tell you that. If we managed to get Satan himself into a courtroom, it would be some lawyer’s lot to defend him, and to argue, no doubt, that he is a hard-working fellow.

But why me?

I don’t know that I had any choice in the matter. The Wilkes County judge appointed me, and ordered me to defend this young man pro bono. It is a fine sentiment, pro bono. For the public good and in the interest of justice, a lawyer can be assigned to an indigent defendant, and he must represent his client completely without charge. This ensures that the poor are accorded a defense, but it can be hard lines on a struggling attorney, and I expect that the temptation would be great to rush through the case, and move on to more lucrative matters. A man’s life is at stake, though; if I shirked my duty in so grave a matter as this, I would never sleep again.

I don’t suppose the judge pulled my name out of a hat. He could have found lawyers a-plenty in the surrounding counties without reaching all the way to Charlotte to fetch one. Perhaps he intended the appointment as a favor. Here was I forced to practice law, but lacking in experience, and perhaps he thought that a notorious murder trial would set my name before the general public, so that people would queue up to retain my services for their legal requirements.

I am sensible of the honor, but I could scarcely afford the opportunity. There I was, former Governor of the state of North Carolina, and before that a U.S. Congressman, and, in-between, for a few ill-considered months, a colonel in the Army of the Confederacy, and, only incidentally, an attorney licensed to practice law in my home state. I never thought I’d be called upon to do so again after all the loftier honors I had achieved. Indeed, I hoped not, but our fortunes shift like the tides, and the fall of the Confederacy had left me high and dry, penniless, jobless, and free only on the sufferance of the United States President. In those days I was rich only in friends.

From the corridors of power to a stuffy little courtroom in a town in Iredell County that is only on the map two days a week. When I charted the course of my life, that was an unforeseen development, but there I was.

If I should ever have the ear of posterity, it would take me a good many words to talk my way out of that one. But I am both a lawyer and a politician. Words are my stock in trade. This story, though, will be omitted from my memoirs. After all, for all the protracted nature of the legal proceedings, the case only took up a few days of my time, and its outcome did me no credit. It is a mere footnote in the long and illustrious history of a dedicated public servant. I shall not speak of it.

From time to time, though, that poor wretch crosses my mind, and before I force my thoughts on to other things, I repress a shudder, and think, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”

***

I was born beyond the pale of gentrified civilization, as was that young man in the dock on trial for his life. You might think that coincidence of circumstance would have made for common ground between him and me, but the truth is that we could not have been farther apart had one of us been born on the moon. My childhood poverty was only in material want, but in heritage, intellect, learning, and morality, my family had wealth beyond avarice.

For reasons I am at a loss to explain, this Wilkes County case became a cause celebre among the national press, and I fear that whenever people read about the sordid circumstances of these wretched people, they will attempt to tar all the inhabitants of the Carolina mountains with the same brush, which is hard lines on the honest and educated people who choose to live in those mountains. In defense of my fellow countrymen, I offer up the example of my own life.

PAULINE FOSTER

March 1866

Wilkes County, North Carolina. Why, I wouldn’t go back there again to save my life.

That’s why I went in the first place, though.

On account of Dr. George Carter being there, and him being a real doctor, and not just some old besom practicing root medicine and faith healing. I had tried the other kind, and I wasn’t getting any better, and folk kept saying that maybe Dr. Carter down in the foothills could cure what ailed me with a bluestone or maybe a salve of lard and quicksilver.

I had kin over there in Wilkes, which is how I heard tell of him in the first place, and that was what set me on going, even if I had to walk the forty miles to get there.

Nobody up home seemed to know the cure for what I had, but they all knew how I got it right enough.

The old woman I went to was the one who birthed the babies hereabouts, and she made poultices and tonics for them as took sick, so at the end of February, 1866, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I went along to her. Not at first, when I found the sore, because when you’re young and strong, you just ignore little aches and pains, figuring that soon enough they will go away by themselves. Only this one didn’t.

By and by, when my throat got sore and my head commenced to ache, I wrapped up some butter I had churned fresh that morning, so as not to be beholden for the favor I was asking, and I walked across the brown grass streaked with rime until I reached her forlorn little cabin at the edge of the woods, same as everybody around here did when they hurt bad enough.

Nobody knew how old she was, but the old folks remembered her as a widow woman, and she was still spry as any of them, so it was thought that her potions must work, else how would she still be quick and well after so many years. I would not have gone to her for beauty treatments, though, for her face was as brown and wrinkled as snits, which is what she called pieces of dried apple, so she was not from these parts to begin with. Nobody from here said that word. I think she may have come over from Tennessee, and there are those that would tell you that she had the Sight, but I never set much store by talk such as that. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, not that I take much stock of the Bible neither, but I did agree with St. Matthew about that. We all of us have the same fate coming by and by, and I was never inclined to rush out to meet it. But she talked like she knew things, and people fought shy of her on that account, for fear of what she might tell them that they’d rather not know.

I had no need of her fortune-telling, and not much for her beauty salves, neither, I’d judge. Despite my sickness, I am a likely-looking woman, mostly because I am young. At least I am little and needle thin, which makes my eyes look big as a calf’s. I have a good hank of coarse dark hair, a short straight nose, and a pale heart-shaped