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
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
