The Ballad of Tom Dooley

Tom wasn’t studying on going anywhere-ever. So I didn’t see that she had any call to shine like a candle flame whenever he came in sight. As far as I could tell he was just another poor, no-account ex-Rebel, and if he wasn’t bad to look at, time would take care of that soon enough. Maybe my cousin was love- smitten with Tom Dula, but that was one pox I did not get.

***

“People are talking about Tom and me.”

It was near dusk, a few days after the party, and Ann had followed me out to the yard, so she could talk to me while I went on with my chores. The days were getting milder now, as March wore on, but I knew that that only meant there was more work ahead on the farm. I was taking the dry clothes off the line, and setting them in the woven basket to bring in. Those that were not all the way dry yet could hang up by the fireplace. It had been a gray day, always threatening to spit rain, but never quite doing it.

I stopped, holding one of her petticoats in midair. “Talking about the pair of you?” I started to laugh. “I don’t reckon they’re resorting to telling lies, Cousin Ann. I know what goes on the nights you turn me out of the bed.”

A couple of nights a week, Ann would make up a pallet on the floor, and tell me to sleep there. I crawled under the quilts, but I did not sleep. I lay awake there in the dark, listening to the raspy snores of James Melton, alone as always in his bed, and in the dead of night, I’d feel the cold draft from the door as someone came in, walking slow and quiet, trying not to make a sound. Then the soft footfalls would stop on the side of Ann’s bed, and I could hear a sigh and a moan, and then the sound of the covers being drawn back, and the soft thump of boots hitting the floor.

The first time it happened, I lay there real still, wondering if somebody had come to cut our throats in the night-the War had not been over long enough for such fears as that to subside. But before a minute had passed, I heard a sigh and a giggle, and an answering grunt, and then the rustling of the bed covers, and I knew what was going on in the bed. Ann had banished me to a pallet on the floor, because she knew that Tom Dula would be paying her a visit.

I raised up a little, trying to peer through the darkness over at that other bed-the one where James Melton lay asleep. If Tom coming in had woke me up, how did he sleep through it? Did he really hear nothing in the bed a broom’s length from his, or did he not care what Ann did? I shook my head in the darkness. If he had been seventy, there might have been some sense to it, but James Melton hadn’t reached thirty yet. I puzzled over it a few minutes more, until the weariness of the day’s work pulled me under again, and when I woke up at cock crow, Ann was sleeping peacefully in her bed alone.

Now here she was, standing there red-cheeked and shivering in the yard, telling me that folk were beginning to talk about her and Tom Dula. So help me, I laughed in her face.

She got all squinty-eyed at me then, and her mouth cinched up. “You are forgetting yourself, Pauline,” she said, spitting out the words. She wobbled a little where she stood, and I could smell the whiskey on her breath. We had both had a drop or two of likker to keep out the cold that afternoon, and to make the hours pass quicker. “We are letting you stay here so you can keep going to the doctor. I’ll thank you not to laugh at me.”

I shrugged. “I ain’t said nothing to nobody. Folk can’t help seeing what’s put right in front of their noses.” Excepting, maybe, your husband, I thought. But I didn’t want her to turn me out in the cold, and I was not drunk enough to speak my mind, so I said, all sweetness and sympathy, “I reckon what you feel for Tom just shines through, and you can’t help people noticing it.”

She shook her head. “It ain’t that. People have been remarking on how much he comes by here.”

I couldn’t see what she was het up about. The people in Happy Valley said worse things about her than that. I hadn’t been here a month, and already I’d heard sneering whispers about Ann selling her favors to the passing cattle drovers, for a pint of spirits or a likely bit of cloth. And I didn’t see why she should care what people around here thought of her, anyhow. Ann Foster Melton was no fine lady with a reputation to protect. Her mother was the next thing to a harlot, and, if that drover story was true, the apple had not fallen far from the tree. But Ann was a beauty, and she already had her a husband, so what could she lose if they blackened her name? What could they take away from her? Hurt her feelings? I never cared what people said behind my back, and I couldn’t see why she should, either.

I went back to taking James Melton’s drawers off the line, moving slow and careful so as not to drop the clean clothes in the mud, for my head was spinning a little from the whiskey. “Well, it is true, Ann. So let them talk.”

“No.” She shook her head in that slow, deliberate way that folk do when they’re drunk. “Let them think he comes here for another reason.”

“Like what?”

She stepped back and looked at me, the way you’d size up a calf at market. “You’re a spinster, Pauline. I reckon he could come courting you.”

“Well, you can put that lie about, for all I care,” I said. “I won’t dispute it, if Tom was to say it’s so.”

“Tom is no good at telling lies. He’s too lazy to remember them. So it has to be true. I need you to sleep with Tom.”

PAULINE FOSTER

Mid-March 1866

All I know about love comes from watching them that is afflicted by it, but what Ann was asking of me did not square with what I’d seen of that ailment before now. I finished taking the clothes off the line, stuffed them in the basket, and headed for the barn, out of the rain-speckled wind, and out of earshot of James Melton, on the off chance that he would mind about any of this.

Ann followed me in, and sat herself down on a hay bale, patting it for me to sit down beside her.

“You are a-wanting me to bed down with Tom Dula,” I said, saying each word as slow as a Bible oath, and watching her face while I said it.

She looked away from me, shrugging a little, and she pulled a blade of straw out of the hay bale and began to twist it in her fingers. “People are talking,” she said, so soft that I could barely hear her.

“Those that aren’t deaf and blind, you mean. The way you two carry on, it’s a wonder the whole world hasn’t heard the tales about the pair of you.”

Ann giggled, and looked back at me, blinking real slow, and I wondered if she was going to throw up or pass out, but she took a few gulps of cold air, and seemed to steady herself. “I never could hide my feelings, Pauline.”

“Well, people may talk, but that won’t kill you. Why do you care? I ain’t heard your husband complaining.”

Ann shrugged. “He don’t care. But if people keep talking, he might.”

I said again. “You’re a-wanting me to do it with Tom?”

She nodded.

I laughed. “You’re drunker than I thought, then, Cousin. I thought you loved Tom Dula. Not that I can see why.”

She nodded again.

I stared at her, trying to see what the angle was in all this. I was ready to believe that love was only a fairy tale, like saying that the stork brought babies or that there was gold at the end of a rainbow, but Ann’s eyes glittered with unshed tears. She looked sorrowful enough to be suffering from something, and I couldn’t make sense of it. “You don’t talk like any lovestruck body that I ever heard tell of,” I told her. “Most women would scratch my eyes out if I was to lay with their man. So how come you’re so ready to foist him off on me? Like you’re throwing him away.”

Ann reached for another wisp of hay, not looking back at me. Her dark hair had come loose from its bindings, and it curtained off her face to where I couldn’t see her expression, but her voice was steady when she finally answered me. “Sex ain’t nothing. If you’re thirsty, it don’t matter which cup you drink out of, does it? What Tom does in the hay, that don’t change what we have, or what we are to one another. He loved me afore he went to