But in 1880 I married again.
Mrs. Florence Steele Martin was a prosperous widow from Kentucky, well past the bloom of youth, just as I was. There would be no second family of young Vances from this union-and the grown sons I already had were scrupulously polite to her, but they plainly thought the family would be better off without her. In their calculations, though, they reckoned without the War.
When I was hauled away to prison on my birthday, three weeks after Appomattox, Federal soldiers swarmed through our little house in Statesville and took all our belongings. We never got them back. After that, I earned little enough as a lawyer, because in those days of Reconstruction, no one had much money to spend on litigation. And the pay of a Senator is modest, because it is supposed that those who hold the office come from rich and powerful families, which, by and large, they do. But I did not. I was looking at the declining years of my life with precious little fortune to shore up the cares and vicissitudes of old age. Florence Martin was wealthy, and I was democracy’s answer to an earl: a United States Senator. It was a sensible and satisfactory alliance, and we were neither the poorer for it.
We summered in the mountains near Asheville in our stately mansion Gombroon-named for the Persian pottery of that name, for I was a cultured man of the world by that time, still close to Asheville in my heart, but in other ways very far from it indeed, and my last home was proof of my success. Gombroon was the most modern style of estate, three stories high, with a turret and sprawling porches, and all the accoutrements of a fiefdom: an orchard, a vineyard, a dairy, and formal gardens. I felt that I had earned such prosperity, but it was the wealth of Florence Martin that made it happen, and I was grateful for that.
But would I have died for her? Assuredly not. I never felt such reckless passion for any human being, and it was the thought of that devotion that brought Tom Dula and Ann Melton to my mind, even after so much time had passed. I tell myself that they were still caught up in the madness of youth-just past twenty, both of them, though war and hardship had made them old beyond their years. Whatever they felt for one another, that lust that made everything else in the world fade to insignificance: I never felt that. Never did. And I could never quite figure out whether I envied them their transports of sentiment or whether I pitied them, as one would a madman whose delusions blind him to the realities of life.
But they died young, and I lived on for decades, ending up revered and prosperous in a mountain mansion, safe from the riptides of emotion that sweep lesser men away to their deaths.
PAULINE FOSTER
The next day, J.W. Winkler and a host of his neighbors went out combing the woods again. They all spread out, one right next to the other, and walked forward in a straight line, same as people say the Redcoats used to do when they marched in to battle during the Revolution. Spread out like that, the searchers were sure not to miss a single foot of ground as they went along. They kept up that battle formation, walking in circles outward from the Bates’ place. Sure enough, when they got to a clearing just north of the abandoned farmstead, one of the searches noticed a broken bit of flax rope tied to a dogwood. They reckoned it matched the broken lead rein on the halter of Wilson Foster’s wayward mare.
That discovery fixed their attention on the clearing, and they all fanned out now within that small area, practically bumping into one another in their eagerness to examine every inch of ground. I wasn’t there, but afterward they would tell anybody who would listen about what happened out in that clearing. Before too long, one of the searchers, who had his eyes fixed upon the ground, spied a patch of red on the bare earth about a hundred yards from where the rope was found, and they reckoned it was a bloodstain, and that the killing had been done there.
When I heard about that a day or so later, I caught my breath, and scarcely dared to let it out again, for I thought that surely after finding blood and rope, they’d keep combing over the underbrush in that clearing until they discovered the burial. But I need not have worried about it, for I was wrong about Laura’s resting place. After the excitement of their discoveries had worn off, they all went back to the general store to boast of their adventures, and I suppose they might have had a few drinks to celebrate their success.
After that it would have been getting on toward suppertime, and the search party began to come apart. Before long they had all gone their separate ways, and with all the farm chores that needed doing this time of year, none of them could spare the time to come back another day to continue the hunt for more signs of Laura Foster. I was disgusted with them for quitting the hunt when I reckoned they were close enough to spit on the grave, but of course I had to keep quiet about it, and just as well that I did, for I had guessed wrong. When they didn’t stumble upon the grave, I resolved to find out the truth of the matter.
It was the end of June by then, and they had no real proof that Laura was dead, but the rope and the bloodstain gave folks in the settlement plenty to talk about, and, in the evenings and on Sundays after preaching, they yammered loud and long over what they reckoned the rights of the case to be. By now nobody really doubted that Wilson Foster’s daughter was dead. The horse had found its way home, and its rider could not have got far without it, not without being seen, anyhow, for all of Wilkes County and Watauga County besides were looking out for her.
The lack of a corpse did not stop the settlement from declaring that murder was done, and generating a lot of hot air trying to get to the bottom of it. Most of the speculating centered on Tom Dula, because he was known to be carrying on with her, and most people thought she had been intending to elope with him. You wouldn’t catch me disputing their conclusions. Tom Dula was not the marrying kind; he did not care a fig for Laura Foster; and he had no reason to elope with her if he did want to marry her-but if the citizens of Elkville were too slow to work that out for themselves, they’d get no help from me. I just wish they had pitched on Ann as the culprit.
She heard all the scandal mongering, though, and it gave her fits. She wept and stormed and told anybody who would listen that Tom was innocent-which was true enough, but not a soul believed her. When he came to the house now, they huddled in corners and talked in whispers. I contrived to listen, when I could.
Finally, when the whispers grew louder than a swarm of bees, Tom made up his mind, and all Ann’s tears could not deter him.
It was the last Monday in June, two days after Winkler and his searchers had found the flaxen rope and the bloodstain in the clearing, that Tom called on the Hendricks family, trying to convince them to stop telling all and sundry that he was guilty. He got no joy from that meeting, though.
“We won’t quit till we’ve found her and hanged her killer,” they told him. “The farmers may have to quit searching and go back to tending their fields, but Colonel Isbell vows that he won’t stop searching until he finds that poor girl, and a prosperous gentleman like him has all the time in the world.”
Tom laughed at that. “
Since Colonel Isbell is about the richest man there is in Happy Valley, that remark of Tom’s probably shocked the Hendrickses about as much as the thought of murder. Anyhow, Tom said he could see it was no use trying to talk sense into them, so at last he came away, and that evening he showed up at the Meltons’, as downcast as I’ve ever seen anybody.
Even before that Ann must have known that the situation was grim. That afternoon while James was out in the field, and I was supposed to be weeding the garden, I went inside to rest awhile with a cup of water, and I found Ann kneeling on her bed, and tearing a piece of clapboard off the log wall behind it, so that the logs and mud chinking showed through. Then she took a long nail and poked a hole through the chinking between the logs, and she was trying to pass a piece of string through the hole.
I had seldom seen her so industrious, and I stood there in the doorway for a minute or two watching her go at it. Finally I wearied of seeing her wrangling that string, and I spoke up. “What are you doing now, Ann?”
The nail clattered to the floor, and she turned on me with stricken eyes. “Don’t you never sneak up on me like that, Pauline!”
