The Ballad of Tom Dooley

time she caught Tom Dula buck naked in Ann’s bed. She said she run him off with a broom.”

The two old ladies looked at each other across me, and I could hear them thinking, “Lotty Foster is a fine one to be upholding chastity,” for it was common knowledge in the settlement that Lotty herself could be had for the price of a drink. I had been thinking that Ann married young to get away from the sight of that at home, but now I thought I might have been wrong about that.

The ladies were still reminiscing about the long and close acquaintance of Tom Dula and Ann Foster. “When Lotty caught them in bed… that would have been before the War, wouldn’t it, Betsy? Yes, I thought as much. So Tom he couldn’t have been much more than fourteen.”

As the talk flowed around me, I watched the two of them, Tom and Ann, laughing, as they clasped hands and skittered down the row of dancers to take their place at the end of the line. Ann’s face was alight with the heat of dancing, or perhaps with the joy of being partnered with Tom. I had never seen such a look about her in the vicinity of James Melton.

“Why didn’t she marry up with him, then?” I wondered aloud.

Mrs. Scott shook her head. “Marry a boy of fifteen? Why, it was not to be thought of. James Melton had land and a roof over his head. At fifteen Tom Dula had none of that, and lo these seven years later, I am bound to say he still doesn’t.”

“And never will,” said her companion in scandal.

Mrs. Scott nodded. “Like as not. Ann wanted to get shut of her mother’s house, with all of those young’uns underfoot. If she had married Tom, she might still be stuck living with her mama-or with his’n, and where’s the escape in that?”

The white-haired woman laughed. “Anyhow, I don’t reckon Ann Melton would have to marry Tom Dula to get what he’s good for. Any woman in these parts can have that for the asking. And there have been enough of them ready to ask-including Ann herself, to this day.”

I kept staring at the dancers. The fiddlers had taken up another tune, and Tom and Ann, still hand in hand, had set off dancing again. I looked around the room, trying to spot Ann’s husband in the crowd, and, by and by, I placed him over in the corner, sitting with the older men who favored drinking over dancing.

I nudged Mrs. Scott, and nodded my head toward James Melton. “He doesn’t mind?”

“Does he mind?” Mrs. Scott turned to stare at me, as if I was a mule she was looking to buy. “You’d know that as well as anybody, wouldn’t you, Pauline? Aren’t you working over to their place these days? How does it strike you?”

I shrugged. “Like he hardly knows what’s going on around him,” I said. “I got to wondering if he had ever got kicked in the head by a mule.”

Betsy Scott laughed. “Better if he had been. He is so far under the spell of your pretty cousin Ann that some folks around here are saying she’s a witch.”

She got up to fill her cup just then, but I kept turning her question over in my mind. Ann and James Melton. They got along well enough, as married people do-like two yoked mules, obliged to plow the field together. They get along by getting on with the work, and not worrying about what their feelings may be toward one another. But, as far as I could see, that’s all there was between them-two yoked people getting on with the work of living. Keeping body and soul together on a scraggly hill farm in the aftermath of that war was enough to keep anybody’s mind set on the furrow straight ahead, for neither food nor money was easy to come by these days. I’d have thought no more about it, if I hadn’t seen the way Ann looked at Tom-a look that said being cold and starving were trifling matters compared to the fever of wanting him.

All right, then. If she felt that fierce about Tom Dula, why was she still with James Melton at all? It isn’t as if James Melton had any money or position to speak of, and Ann had little enough reputation to ruin, so what kept her bound?

There was some sense in her stopping there as long as the War lasted, for Tom was away in the fighting, and where else could she go? But next month would mark a year’s time since the War had ended, and Tom had finally got shut of the army, and walked home from that prison camp in Maryland last summer. They had told me all that themselves. And yet, here was Ann, nine months after Tom came home, still being wife to another man, still “Mrs. Melton,” to all the world. What kept her there? Those babies might have tied another woman to hearth and home, but I never saw Ann pay any mind to hers.

To see her and Tom together, you’d think that as soon as she saw him walking down the road, she’d have thrown her clothes in a flour sack, and took off after him, no matter what.

The fiddlers swung into a new tune just then, as if they were reading my mind.

If I had a needle,

As fine as I could sew;

I’d sew that gal to my coattails,

And down the road I’d go.

I tapped my foot in time to Shady Grove, thinking I might get up and dance after another cup or two of whiskey. “Why didn’t she go off with Tom when he came back from the War?” I wondered aloud.

“Like as not, she wasn’t asked,” said Mrs. Scott.

***

I puzzled over that riddle for a good many days afterward, but I knew the answer would come to me. The Bible says that not a sparrow falls but what the Lord knows about it. In Happy Valley the fate of sparrows might go unremarked, but every human being in the settlement was watched and judged and commented upon on a daily basis, it seemed to me, and not out of Christian concern, either. There was little else to talk about, I reckon. Once you have done with the weather, and who was sick, how the crops were faring, and all the birthing and dying news, then what was left, except to tabulate the sins and follies of your neighbors?

I was a nine days’ wonder back when I first arrived. Every old cat in the settlement was itching to find out what business I had in Wilkes County, and, when they learned that I was here to see Dr. Carter, they tried even harder to nose up the reason for it. The first thing that leaps to any old biddy’s mind when a single woman turns up in the settlement is: “Is she in the family way?” Though a moment’s thought would tell them that pregnancy was hardly a reason to consult a doctor. An unwed girl might well leave her own community to birth her baby elsewhere, but she’d not trouble a doctor to help her do it when there were midwives a-plenty to be had. What would a man doctor know about bringing babies into the world anyhow?

They used every neighborly visit and settlement social as a chance to look me over, but there was no telltale bulge beneath my apron, and the rest of me was as scrawny as ever.

Finally, though I’m sure it pained those gossips to do it, they gave up all hope that I might be a wayward woman saddled with a bastard child. Well, I was a wayward woman, if they but knew, and I wish they had been right in their first guess. I’d rather have paid for my sins with a brat than with the pox. It would be a deal easier to get rid of a babe, for one thing. A dose of pennyroyal tea, or a corset cinched as tight as it will go-and if that fails, you can smother the newborn with a cloth and tell folk that it died in the night. There’s plenty that do. I’d fall pregnant a dozen times if it would rid me of this pox.

Is it not a wonder that the human race goes on at all? All men give you is pain and sorrow, and I cannot see why any woman would have aught to do with them. Young girls prate enough about love, but that doesn’t seem to last as long as pox, either. I suppose they do it for their keep, for when you are turned out of your mama’s house, it is better to go and be someone’s wife than to hire out as a servant. And for the rest, the girls who cannot or will not make a match with some fellow, then laying with men is an easy way to get money: selling yourself for a few minutes to some randy young lout, who is foolish enough to waste good drinking money on a roll in the hay. I make eleven cents a day laboring hours in the fields; servicing strangers pays better than that. Anyhow, a girl must live.

Since all that is true, I could not see what it was that Ann wanted with Tom Dula. She had her house and her keep, thanks to that husband of hers, and I reckon Tom Dula wasn’t paying her nothing for her favors, for I never saw that he had a penny to bless himself with. He was living at home with his mama, and doing less work than anybody I ever saw, and I don’t think he ever figured on doing anything else. The future to him was just going to be a succession of days as similar to one another as glass beads on a string. Ann couldn’t go off with Tom, because