The Ballad of Tom Dooley

PAULINE FOSTER

September 1,1866

I thought it would be just me and a couple of lawmen going back to Reedy Branch, but word had got out that I was fixing to tell them where to find the body of Laura Foster, so that by the time we rode out from Wilkesboro to the Stony Fork Road, we must have looked like Stoneman’s Cavalry paying a return visit to the county.

I was in exalted company, though they took little enough notice of me, except to follow my directions. Colonel Isbell himself was there on a fine blood horse. He had vowed to see the matter through to its grim conclusion, and he was true to his word. There was an older man with him-another one of the gentry, I judged, from the look of his mount and the cut of his clothes. J.W. Winkler, who had spent weeks searching the area and had found the mare’s broken rein back in June, met us as we proceeded up the Reedy Branch Road. I waved to him, but he looked right through me as if he didn’t know me at all. They all thought I should have gone running to the law a few weeks back, as soon as Ann led me to that clearing, but I had to think it over. What was to stop them from thinking that I had lied about Ann’s taking me to the grave site? It seemed to me that if I showed anyone where it was, that proved only that I knew its whereabouts-not that anyone else did. And I thought that the more unwilling I was to tell what I knew, the more likely they would be to believe me. So it proved, anyhow, for no one ever doubted my story-and, indeed, it was true as I told it, but the lawmen had no way of knowing that for sure. I was lucky that they took my word for it, but then people will often believe what you say if you are calm in the telling of it. They seem to think that people who are tearful or het up are telling lies, but sometimes it’s the other way around. I can lie till the cock crows and never turn a hair, while a truthful fool will weep and storm while he tells his tale, in an effort to be believed. I hoped Ann would wail and shout when they arrested her. That would seal her fate, for sure.

When we got to the spine of the ridge, well past the Dulas’ farm, heading toward Stony Fork Road, where the Meltons’, Lotty Foster’s, and the Bates’ place all sat within sight of one another, I signaled for the procession to stop, and, with my back to the creek, I pointed them toward the steep slope in front of us that led to the wooded crest of the ridge.

“She led me up there,” I said, stabbing with my finger upward toward the tall trees. “I waited on a fallen log, while she went and looked at the grave. But it lies up there on the ridge somewhere.”

They turned their horses toward the field, and picked their way along, studying the ground as they went, but they were well below where me and Ann went, so it weren’t no use, but I didn’t bother to say so. One of the riders stayed close to my mount as we climbed. All the way from town they had taken care that somebody stayed near me all the time, in case I took a notion to run, but I was staying put to see what happened. I sang out when we reached the dead log, and I climbed off that horse, and settled back down on it. As I watched, the men spread out, working in pairs, slipping this way and that, through the bushes and past the trees, always searching for broken branches and clabbered ground. One of the Wilkesboro men stood next to me with a pistol on his hip, watching the searchers go across the clearing and head farther up the slope, but he wasn’t interested in passing the time of day with me.

It was cool in the shade up there on the ridge, and I leaned back in a shaft of sunlight, smelling dead leaves and damp earth, and watching three gray pigeons flit about in the treetops. I could have done with a dipper of water and a hunk of bread and meat, because it had been a long time since my jailhouse breakfast, such as it was, but none of the searchers stopped to eat. I suppose that hunting for a body three months dead had put them off their feed.

They kept circling higher and higher up the ridge, going slow, and peering down at the ground as they went. Then a good ways above where I sat, I heard shouts, and the men came back out of the thickets and from the lower woods, and they all headed up at once in the direction of the yelling.

I reckoned they had found her.

Nobody bothered to tell me what was going on, but a few minutes later, someone ran back down and called out to my minder, “Mr. Horton’s horse shied like it smelled something foul, and the colonel got down and saw that new sod had been put on the ground there. We think it’s her down there. You can take the prisoner on up to the thicket to identify the remains. I’m off to fetch the doctor.”

With that, he nudged his mount, and began to pick his way around the logs and underbrush, heading down the slope toward the Reedy Branch Road. It was a good two miles from here to Cowle’s store and from the river road, two miles in the other direction to Elkville, so I judged it would be more than an hour before Dr. Carter would arrive to have his say about whatever the searchers unearthed.

I had seen dead folks before. They died often enough from want and wounds back in the War, and a time or two I had to help with the laying out, but I had never seen what was left of a corpse after three months underground. I wondered if they would be able to tell who it was if they did find anything.

When we reached the thicket where the searchers were gathered, I edged my way past a couple of men until I could see what they were doing at the grave site. Colonel Isbell and Mr. Horton had dismounted now, and they had scraped away the sod covering from the dug-out trench, and I could see that there was a cloth-covered lump lying there, not even two feet below the level of the ground: a shallow grave, indeed, but still deeper than I could picture Ann digging with her fine white hands.

The Colonel knelt beside the trench, and pointed to a mark on the side where the covering sod had been removed. “Look at that cut. The blade of a mattock made that, I’ll be bound.”

The other men looked at one another. Word had got around with the rest of the gossip that Martha Gilbert had seen Tom out skelping with a mattock near Lotty Foster’s place on the day before Laura went missing. But nobody said anything.

Then, with everybody still watching, he reached down and lifted the bundle of clothes out of the hole so that we could see what was underneath. What, not who. It didn’t look like a “who” anymore. What was left was a cloth-covered pile of skin and bones that put me in mind of a slaughtered hog-a skinny one that had run wild on the mountain and then died at the end of a harsh winter.

One of the lawmen motioned for me to come closer, and I stepped up to the very edge of the hole. “Is that Laura Foster?” he asked me.

The body was set in on its side, but faceup, and, although the hole was nearly two feet deep, it had been dug too short to accommodate even a body as small as that one. The legs were tucked up under the corpse, to make them fit. It was no proper grave. Just a place to dump a hunk of rotting meat.

I glanced around at the faces of the searchers. Some of them looked green around the gills, and the rest were ashen with anger and muttering amongst themselves. I looked back at the decaying lump of flesh that used to be my cousin. I knew her better than any of them did. But what was the use of taking on over her being dead? She was past hearing us now.

The skin on the face was mostly gone, but there was a hank of light brown hair still attached to the scalp. I knew that color. I could just see her feet, where they were tucked up behind her. She was wearing little leather shoes that I had seen James Melton making for her. They had held up better than the dress material in the damp earth.

I knew the dress, too: it was a checkered one, homemade. I had seen her cutting the cloth and stitching it. Over top of it she had put on a dark wool cape that was maybe too warm to wear on a May morning, but it was too good for her to leave behind, so she’d put it on anyhow. It was fastened around her shoulders with a pinchbeck brooch pin, the only finery she had. I wondered what would become of that with her dead.

It was her, all right.

The lips were drawn back in that skinless face, and I could get a clear look at her teeth. They were big teeth for her little face, and there was a space between the two front ones. Anybody who knew her would recognize those teeth.

“It is Laura Foster,” I said. “I’d know her by her teeth-that space in-between the front ones. And I was with her when she sewed that there dress she is wearing.”

Several of the others muttered in agreement. Most of them were acquainted with her-and it crossed my mind that some of them knew her maybe too well, though they’d never own up to that now. But even with the face mostly eaten away by the damp and the worms, we all could tell it was her.

One of the searchers said, “How did she die?” He wasn’t talking to me, though, so I didn’t answer.

“Doctor’s on his way,” the Colonel told him. “We ought not to touch the body overmuch till he can examine it.”

“You reckon she was carrying a child?”

I had to put my hand across my mouth to hide a grin. What would that have mattered-to Tom or anybody else? Why, Lotty Foster had five young’uns by as many fathers, and nobody had bothered to marry her. If Laura Foster had been the Colonel’s girl or the daughter of a lawyer or a doctor, then there’d have been a hue and cry if she fell pregnant, and the poor fellow courting her would have been hauled before the justice of the peace at the business end of a shotgun for a hasty wedding. But Laura’s good name was in the mud long before Tom Dula ever took up with her. She had no more notion of chastity than any of the other Foster women, which is to say: none at all. Were these graven fools really thinking that Tom had killed her to keep from having to marry her? Why if she had put such a notion to him, he’d have laughed in her face-or else told her to saddle that baby on one of her many other lovers.

I didn’t say any of that out loud, though. I could see that the sight of that bony little corpse was already making the searchers forget the real girl they had known all her life. By the time they had given her a proper funeral and commenced to heaping cabbage roses on her grave, every one of them would be remembering Laura Foster as a pure and beautiful maiden, a princess right out of a fairy story. T’would be no use trying to remind them what she was really like. She had been replaced by a changeling, and they had already forgotten the real girl.

“Wait for the doctor,” somebody said. “He’ll know.”

They left her there right where they found her, so as not to disturb her before Dr. Carter got to see her. One of the deputies untied the bundle of clothes, though. On the morning Laura went missing, Mrs. Scott had seen it slung over the bare back of that mare, and that was how she had come to ask where Laura was heading. Considering that the bundle was all that Laura Foster had in the world, it was a sorry little parcel, indeed. A few scraps of raggedy underclothes, a wooden fine-tooth comb, a yellowed cotton nightdress… it wasn’t much to show for twenty years of living on this earth, but I wasn’t sorry for her, for I had no more possessions to my name than she did, and maybe she had all that she deserved, at that.

The men stood around smoking or talking quietly to one another, and they all turned away from the sight of Laura’s body lying there in the hole. I suppose it seemed uncivil to them to be carrying on with the small pleasures of living in the presence of one who could no longer enjoy them. It wouldn’t have put me off my feed to look at her, but there were pleasanter sights in the wildwood, and nobody had anything to eat, so I walked a little ways away from the grave, and sat down in a patch of sunlight, thinking I might close my eyes and rest until the doctor came. It was only then that I remembered that I had not screamed when they showed me the corpse. I cannot weep, but I wished I had remembered to scream or make like I was going to faint. Somebody might remember that I did not act affrighted enough and hold it against me.

Finally we heard shouts from the field below that told us the lawman was back, bringing Dr. George Carter in tow. When they finally reached the laurel thicket where we were congregated, the doctor stood there alone for a moment, looking like a lord, sleek in his black cloth suit and string tie, and his shiny black boots, while the rest of the men were in ordinary work clothes, and muddy from a morning spent combing the woods. I raised my hand and gave the doctor a little wave, because, after all, I was his patient, and I had been seeing him regular these six months or so, but he looked right on past me as if I had been one of the hounds. Maybe he thought I was mixed up in the killing, or maybe he thought my pox made me not fitten to associate with, or maybe he just didn’t see me. I didn’t care much; he had other things on his mind.

Colonel Isbell went forward and shook Dr. Carter’s hand, and the rest of the crowd parted as if he was Moses, and he walked over to the open grave and knelt down beside it. He stared down at the sorry little heap of flesh for a minute or more, but all he said was, “Well, now…,” and he blinked his eyes a time or two real fast. I don’t reckon doctors cry, either.

Gently, without another word, he began to examine the body, and the rest of us edged forward again so we could watch what he was doing, but not so close as to be noticed and told to step back. I couldn’t see much, on account of the hole the body was in being so deep, and the doctor’s back being in my line of sight, but at least I could tell he had peeled back the material of that rotting checkered dress, and he was probing her chest with his fingers, trying to find some sign of what had killed her.

At last he stood up, drew a white linen handkerchief out of the pocket of his coat, swabbed his forehead, and then wiped his hands again and again on it. He addressed his remarks to the Colonel, but loud enough for the rest of us to hear. “Well, the body is that of Laura Foster, as I am sure you know already.”

They nodded, and somebody muttered, “Didn’t need a doctor to tell us that.”

Colonel Isbell’s expression didn’t change. “How long has she been dead?”

“Oh, since the last morning she was seen, I have no doubt. That body has been in the ground there a good three months.”

“Can you tell what killed her, then?”

The doctor nodded, and motioned for Colonel Isbell to kneel beside him at the grave. Then he reached down, and lifted a bit of the rotting cloth on the bodice of that checkered dress. “There’s a slit here. Do you see it?”

Those closest to the grave leaned over to get a look, and the rest of us hung back, listening. The smell from the open trench hung over us like a thundercloud, and few cared to get any closer to the source of the stench. Back in June when the laurels bloomed, the scent of their pink flowers might have covered the smell of decay, but now at summer’s end the odor of death had no rivals. I had seen all I wanted to, and smelled more than that, but I still wanted to hear what the doctor made of the matter.

“This cut was deliberately made. You can just see the corresponding wound in the flesh beneath it. Here, someone help me to remove these clothes so that I can get a better look.”

The Colonel stepped away, and let one of the farmers in the search party assist the doctor in his grim task. A few men looked away, from modesty, I suppose, but though there might have been a few among them that would have liked to see Laura Foster naked while she was living, the sight of her now roused in them nothing but disgust, or perhaps, in the weakest ones, a stirring of pity. One or two sodden old fools even wiped away a tear.

I had got accustomed to the smell now, so I edged past the squeamish ones for another look.

When her naked breast lay open to the air, the doctor put two fingers into the hole in her flesh, and poked around a bit. Then he put his face down close to the wound to peer inside. Nobody moved or spoke. We just waited to hear what he would say.

Finally he motioned for Colonel Isbell to take a look, and we heard him say quietly, “Something sharp-I should say a short-bladed knife-was thrust up through her breast, here between the third and fourth ribs.”

“Into her heart?” said the Colonel.

“Well… I cannot be sure. If the blade was thrust straight in, it would have missed her heart entirely. But if the knife had been held in a slightly elevated position, it would certainly have cut the heart. The body is so badly decomposed that I cannot tell which.”

“But that’s what killed her, then?”

“If the knife missed the heart, it need not have been a mortal wound, but if the heart were punctured, then it would have necessarily been fatal.”

“I hope she did not suffer.”

The doctor made no answer to this, which made me think that he knew very well that she had. Before anyone could ask again, someone called out, “Was she with child?”

Dr. Carter sighed, and shook his head. “Again, I cannot know for certain. If she was less than ten weeks into her term, then there would be no trace. You see the state of the body.” He shrugged. “If she were more than ten weeks gone, and if I opened her up, I might find foetal bones in her womb, but I cannot see that it matters, as we could not tell who the father was. And unless the sheriff or a judge instructs me to do this, I am inclined to leave her be. She was put through enough, poor child.”

Some of the searchers murmured agreement. They led me away then, as they were making preparations to bring the body up out of the hole and take her down the ridge to a more sanctified resting place. I thought she’d end up buried back in German’s Hill, probably on the land her father was sharecropping, and half the county would attend the funeral. That would be no tribute to Laura Foster, though. Most of the crowd would be curiosity seekers, and they’d go just to say they had been, without caring one whit more for Laura dead than they had for her when she was alive. She was a nine days’ wonder, nothing more.

They took me back to Cowle’s store then, where there’d be a meeting about what had transpired, and I was glad to go, because it had been a long, wearing day, and I was so hungry that I could feel my backbone against my belly button. I spent the whole ride there thinking about food, and hoping they’d offer me something stronger than water to wash it down with, but they didn’t seem much interested in me anymore, now that I had told what I knew. Here and there along the river road that went along to the store, people stood outside their houses or on the edge of their fields and stared at us as went past. I felt like a queen in a parade, and I raised my hand a time or two to wave at them, but they just stood stock-still and stared back with stony expressions. But I didn’t care. It was my day in the sun.

It took most of the afternoon, and there was a great to-do when the searchers brought the body in and laid it out on a counter in the store, with everybody outshouting everybody else to tell what happened, but finally they let me go, and I was glad to leave all the tale telling and the gawking to that horde of folks who crowded into the store so they could say they were part of the story.

The crowd was buzzing with tales about the case, with most of them telling more than they knew. I kept still and listened to what they were saying, and one time I heard the storekeeper’s wife telling one of the women that Ann Melton had been to the store a week or so back, and she asked her if she was afraid that the lawmen were going to arrest her over the death of Laura Foster. The storekeeper’s wife dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper, but I had edged close enough to hear her say, “And when I asked her that, Mrs. Melton just laughed at me-laughed, mind you!-and then she said, ‘They’ll not put a rope around this pretty little neck.’” Her listeners gasped at the brass of that remark, and the storekeeper’s wife nodded with grim satisfaction, but hearing it caused me to shiver, for Ann Melton is a beautiful woman. When people say that beautiful women get away with murder, maybe it is more true than they mean it to be.

Mr. Pickens Carter, the justice of the peace, heard everybody out, as if it were a court, except that no lawyers were present. The searchers told how I had helped them find the burial place, and that I had cooperated with them by telling all I knew.

He said to me, “You are free to go, Pauline Foster, but you may not leave this jurisdiction, for you will be called as the state’s chief witness in a few weeks’ time at court in Wilkesboro. You must swear an oath that you will testify.”

I don’t know why people set such a store by the swearing of oaths, for they don’t cost anybody a red cent, but I could see that the justice of the peace believed in them, so I stood up before him, big-eyed and solemn, and I faithfully promised that I would appear in court when they called me. I probably would, too, because I had started it all, and I wanted to see it end.

I waited around on the edge of the crowd at Cowle’s store until I heard Mr. Justice Carter say to the constables, “Go and arrest Ann Melton.”

I wasn’t there when they took her away, though I was sorely tempted to go and watch in case she fought and cried, and had to be dragged screaming from the house. I went back at dusk, though, to see about getting my clothes and what they owed me for my last days of work. James Melton was there alone, sitting at the table, making a pair of boots.

I stood there in the doorway, watching him work in the fading light, and looking for some sign of distress in a man whose wife has just been taken away on a charge of murder. But he looked just the same as ever, with his blond head bent over that boot, intent on sewing the leather, as if the only thing in the world that mattered was making that shoe.

I made a little noise to let him know that I was there, and finally he looked up. “I’ve come for my wages and my things, James.”

He nodded. “They have taken Ann away. I guess you’d know about that.”

“I was there. They found Laura’s body. She had showed me where it was a few weeks back. Did she take on when they came to get her?”

“Ann? No. She turned pale at first, but then she swept out of here like they were taking her off to a dance. She didn’t make a sound or shed a tear. She didn’t even look back.”

It crossed my mind that Ann and Tom were together at last. There was a wall between them in the Wilkesboro jail. I wondered if they could talk through it, or if they would try.

James set the shoe aside, and looked up at me. “Where are you headed, Pauline?”

“I don’t know. I’d go back to Watauga County if they’d let me, but they say I must stay here in Wilkes until the trial. I am to be a witness. I might see if other kinfolk will take me in, but they didn’t want to last March, and I don’t reckon they’ll think me any more of a bargain now.”

“You can stop on here.”

I stared at him for a minute, trying to tell from his face what he had in his mind, but you never could tell what James Melton was thinking by looking at him. “Stay here?”

“I still have the babies to be looked after, and with Ann gone, there’s no one to cook or tend to the house.” He almost smiled when he said it, because both of us knew that Ann wasn’t any more use than a chicken when it came to housekeeping, but that didn’t make what he said about needing help any less true. “I reckon I could still pay you just the same.”

“All right. I can stay on. But you know I’ll be called as a witness in the trial.”

“So will I.”

I had not thought of that. “What will you say, James?”

“I will tell the truth, whatever they ask me. It’s my duty.”

“Even if it gets Ann hanged?”

“I don’t know anything that could harm her. Or Tom, either, come to that. I was here that night. I saw people come and go. That’s all I can swear to.”

“Are you going to go see her in jail?”

He was silent for so long that I didn’t think he heard me. Finally he looked down at that boot again, and he barely whispered, “I don’t think I’ll have time. I don’t suppose she’ll be locked up for very long-one way or the other.” He went back to sewing the leather then, as if he had forgotten I was there.

I don’t know if James Melton ever went to see his wife in jail or not, or if she even wanted him to. I never went.

That was in September 1866, and the trial was set for the beginning of October, which is when they held Superior Court in the courthouse in Wilkesboro. I thought it would all be over quick. Trials only lasted a day or two at most, for the high court only met twice a year, and they had so many cases to settle that they could not dally over any of them, not even something as serious as a killing. I thought there would be more graves in Reedy Branch before the leaves fell.

I was wrong about that.

The court went and appointed Governor Vance, that was, to defend Tom and Ann, and they ordered him to do it for free. He got his teeth into that case like a terrier cornering a rat. First he moved the trial over to Statesville, so that all the witnesses had to travel forty miles or more to get to court, and nobody thanked him for that, but he managed to drag the proceedings out for another year and a half out of sheer contrariness.

None of us could read, so it’s no use asking me what the rights of it were, because I never did know. I just went when they told me to, and said my piece on the witness stand as many times as they asked me to.

One thing did worry me, though. I never understood all the legal twists and turns as the lawyers tried to sort out what a jury could hear, and what some clerk had got wrong in filling out the legal papers. I thought of it as a game of noughts and crosses, and I figured that everybody had just clean forgotten about Laura Foster, who was tucked away by now in a solitary grave on the Foster farm in German’s Hill. All she had wanted was to get away from there, and in death they took her right on back there, so now she must stay forever. Unless she went to heaven, if there is one. I never heard it said that anybody had ever seen her ghost lingering about the place.

The one thing that worried me was the one person who knew almost as much as I did. John Anderson. In the weeks leading up to that first day in court, the lawyers from both sides were scurrying around, collecting witnesses, until it seemed like most of Elkville would be congregated in that courtroom, telling what they knew.

I was afraid that someone would think of adding John Anderson to the list, or else that he would hunt them up himself and offer to testify. But when I said something to Wash Anderson about it, he just laughed at me.

“What would they want to talk to him for, Pauline?”

I wasn’t about to tell him, so I just hung my head and muttered, “I only wondered because I hear that you and your sister are on the witness list, and your house is right next to the Bates’ place. So maybe they think he saw something.”

Wash snickered. “You don’t know nothing, Pauline. John may be near as light as you are, but to the law he ain’t nothing but a darky. He can’t testify in court, not when the accused and the dead victim are all white folks. What would he know about it anyhow?”

“I just wondered,” I said.

It set my mind at ease somewhat to know that John Anderson could not be a witness in court, but I was still afraid he might go seek out one of the lawyers, and tell them the truth about Laura’s elopement. I had not seen him alone since Laura went missing. I think he knew how dangerous it would be for him if anyone guessed the truth. But if he ever got to the point where he didn’t care, he could ruin everything, for he could put me squarely back into the case. I didn’t want it known that I had lied to Ann. If everyone kept quiet about how it really happened, the law might hang them both.

I waited it out, though. Least said, soonest mended. I was right to do that. They found Tom guilty. The court ordered him to hang in Statesville on November 9, 1866, but the lawyer, Governor Vance, labored on Tom’s behalf as if he were being paid in gold instead of working for nothing. He fought and objected and quibbled about every little thing, fighting like he was back in the War again. He was an important man with half the quality folks in the state counting themselves as his friends, so he got his way.

By and by we heard there was to be a new trial for Tom, on account of they hadn’t got it right the first time around. I never understood the rights of it. Since the high court only met twice a year, spring and fall, that gave Tom another six months of life, or six more months to spend penned up in a cell, depending on how you looked at it. I remembered what he had said about that Union prison camp, and I reckoned he was burning to get out, one way or another.

Ann continued to bide in the jail, and months went by with nothing done about her. Since Governor Vance had arranged for them to be tried separately, she would have to wait until it was settled with Tom, once and for all, before they would consider her part in it.

The next time the court met, we all got ready to traipse down to Statesville to say our piece all over again, but then we heard that the defense wasn’t ready, on account of some of their witnesses not turning up. That was Mr. Vance, up to his old tricks again, we figured, so things got moved along to the fall of 1867. A year in jail for Tom, with that first death sentence hanging over his head. I thought that if I were the Iredell County jailer, I’d invest in a couple of extra guards.

I was back in Elkville in June, visiting folks, and mainly asking around to see what was transpiring in the court case. That’s when I heard that Governor Vance was trying to round up new witnesses for the second trial, and I began to worry that he might stumble on to somebody who knew more than he bargained for. He might use his fancy tricks to get Tom off on new evidence, and then turn around and get Ann freed based on her beauty and the Governor having friends in high places.

I decided to pay a call on someone while I was there. I went to see James Melton first, and found him well and working as hard as ever. He looked older than his years, perhaps from all the worry and from having to run the place all on his own now. The little girls were still too young to be much help.

“I just came by to say how-do,” I told him, sipping the tin cup of well water he had given me. “How is my cousin Ann faring in jail?”

He sighed and mopped his forehead with a rag. I thought that I could see strands of gray in his yellow hair. “You’d do better to ask her mother about her. It’s a long way to town, and I have no time to go.”

“Don’t you miss her?”

He thought about it. James never was one for making hasty replies. “She was beautiful, you know. Like having a fairy maiden out of an old ballad come to stay, but you know how those songs end. The fairy always goes back to where she came from. She never stays forever. And after a while it just seems like it was all a dream.”

I just looked at him, while I tried to picture lazy, foul-tempered Ann Melton as a fairy queen, but it sounded like pure foolishness to me. One thing was clear, though: as far as he was concerned, she was gone.

I left him soon after that, just as it was gathering dark, and I walked down the hill to the Andersons’ house, but I didn’t aim to pass the time with Wash or his sister Eliza. Wash was all right when he was sober, but that Eliza was a milk and water miss, and it near ’bout put me to sleep to try to talk to her.

Everything looked just the same as it always had. The Bates’ place was as desolate as ever, though I didn’t suppose anybody ever gave it a second thought anymore, if they had to look at it every day. Laura was dead and buried, and Tom and Ann were away in jail, so life went on. But there was one person that I thought would still remember, and it was him I had come to talk to.

I found him in the barn, milking the Andersons’ one old cow. I was surprised that he had stayed around after what happened, but then the government had set all the slaves free four years back, and he hadn’t gone off then, so maybe he was the staying kind. As soon as I thought that, though, it came to me that John Anderson had been wanting to run off with Laura Foster, and maybe he still wanted to get away-more than ever now that she was dead. But he had seen that when Tom Dula tried to run off, it just made everybody think he was guilty of killing Laura. John Anderson couldn’t afford to have people wondering things like that about him. Somebody might have seen something while they were keeping company together, and if folks put two and two together, he’d hang for sure.

He glanced up when he saw me, and I saw him startle for an instant. All he could see was a shadow against the bright light outside, and Laura and I were like enough in form and height-both of us little and scrawny-though many would say she was more fair of face. I didn’t care, though. Look where it got her. After a couple of heartbeats, he worked out who I was, but he had to finish the milking, so he just nodded how-do, and went back to what he was doing. I stood there just inside the barn until my eyes got accustomed to the light, and I watched him squirting jets of milk into the pail. I could smell it, the hot sweet smell mingling with the odor of fresh-cut hay and cow piles glistening with flies.

He was leaner than the last time I had seen him, and he seemed a little darker, maybe from working in the summer fields-or else the dim light in the cow byre made him seem so. He had a fine chiseled face, though, that put me in mind of a mountain back where I come from that they called The Grandfather. He was handsome enough, but I don’t reckon most people bothered to look at him. All they’d see was somebody’s slave, good for doing the farm work, and that’s all. It’s a wonder Laura ever saw more than that, but I reckon she did. He’d not find a woman like her again-and maybe he’d live longer for the fact of that.

When he finished the milking, he stood up and hoisted the pail out of reach of the cow’s hoof. He set it down near the door, and turned to look at me. “How do, Miss Foster,” he said, quiet and careful, in his white-folks voice.

I smiled. “You don’t have to bow and scrape to me, John Anderson. I know you of old.”

His face stayed as blank as the cow’s. “Was there something I could do for you, ma’am?”

“I kept your secret all this past year, John. Come sit a spell with me, and tell me how you are.”

“I can’t see how that concerns you, Miss Pauline.”

I settled myself on top of a pile of clean straw, and the cow wandered back outside, so after a minute of standing there with his fists clenched, he sat down an arm’s length away from me, eying me like I was part rattlesnake.

“You went away,” he said.

“I did. I have people up the mountain, and I went back to stay with them. I thought it might be perilous to stop on here for a while. I’ll bet you’d have left if you could have.”

He nodded. “I used to dream about it. Only in my dream, it would be me and Laura astraddle her daddy’s mare, heading up that mountain that looks like it rises up out of the woods behind the back pasture. Reckon I’ll never see those mountains up close now.”

I took a blade of straw and twirled it between my fingers. “People forget, John. A year has come and gone. Give it another one or two, and nobody will even mark your absence. You are a free man, ain’t you? Go as you please.”

He leaned back and pointed out the barn door and up at the sky, where a full golden moon was just coming up over the ridge. “See how big the moon looks when it rises? Looks like it’s almost touching the ground. When I was little, I used to think that if you climbed to the top of the mountain, you could touch it. But one night I climbed all the way up the ridge, and when I got there, the moon was as far away as ever. Now, I reckon freedom is like that. You think that if you just go someplace else you could touch it, but when you get there, it will still be a million miles away.”

“You and Laura might have made it, if you went far enough out west to where they don’t care about such things. Indian Territory, maybe.”

“Well, that is past praying for. Laura is dead and gone. And I am thinking that once the harvest is over and done with, I will get away from here. At least then I won’t have to look at that ridge where they found her buried. Maybe I could sleep better then.”

“Where would you go?”

“The Andersons have property over the county line, at German’s Hill. I thought I might do some sharecropping on my own over there, if Mr. Washington is willing to let me try. I think he will. It’s only Caldwell County-not over the mountain, not Indian Territory, but maybe I can start living again there. Find me another woman.”

I smiled at his foolishness. “Another gal like my cousin Laura?”

“No!” He hit the straw with his fist. “As little like her as ever was. I have done with that. I’ll find me a good steady woman of color, who can help me tend a farm, and make a life over there, where we don’t have to sneak around in fear of our lives.”

It was like listening to James Melton all over again. The Foster women seem to have the power to bewitch a man, like the fairy queen in the old ballads, but sooner or later, he wakes up on a cold hillside, with a handful of dust and ashes, and after that all he wants for the rest of his life is a plain ordinary woman who will share his burdens, instead of a moonshine maiden who gives you dreams and leaves you with nothing.

The moon had climbed higher than the ridge now, and it was so dark in the barn that we both looked like shadows. I leaned back in the straw, feeling drowsy and peaceful. Neither one of us said anything for a while. Then I heard John sigh, a heavy, weary sound like a tired old horse.

“What?”

He sighed again. “It’s just that you put me in mind of Laura, sitting there in the hay like that, all in shadow. You favor her.”

“Laura and me were blood cousins, so we ought to.”

“I’ll miss her until the day I die.”

I thought the day he died might have come sooner if she still walked the earth. I didn’t say that, though, because I was mindful of what I had come about. So I leaned close to him in the soft darkness of that summer evening, and I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned close. “She was mighty lucky that she had you to make her happy, John. I never had anybody.” I made my voice quaver, and it was too dark for him to see that I shed no tears. Before he knew what was happening, I was in his arms, and then I just let nature take its course. He called me “Laura,” and I never said a word, just went on kissing him and running my hands over his body. Never saw a man yet that didn’t take to rutting given half a chance. He wasn’t but twenty-two or so, and Laura had been dead a year and more. By the time he remembered himself, it was too late to matter.

He turned his back to me when he was done, and I thought I heard him crying softly in the dark. I left him be for a minute or two, while I righted my skirt, and picked straw out of my hair. Finally, I said, “Tom Dula is getting a new trial around harvest time. And then Ann will have her day in court. And I reckon you know more than anybody about what really went on that day.”

“I know Laura wasn’t running off with Tom Dula. It was me she came to meet. I never told anybody, though.”

“See that you don’t. I reckon you know what would happen to you if people knew about you and Laura.”

“I know. But they already sentenced Tom Dula to hang in that one trial. If the next court does the same thing, they’re going to kill him. And he’s an innocent man. He had no call to kill my Laura. None at all. I keep thinking I should tell somebody that.”

I leaned in close again, but there was no softness about me this time. “You won’t tell anybody anything, John Anderson, for if you do, it’s you that will hang.”

He tried to pull away, and I could hear the bewilderment in his voice. “But-but-I never harmed Laura.”

“No. But I can’t have you trying to save Tom. I want him to hang.”

“But why? Are you aiming to save your cousin-Miz James Melton?”

“Well, no, John. I want them both to hang. And if you try to stop it, I’ll see that they lynch you, no matter what. I’ll tell them you raped me.”

I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I heard him draw breath, and he shuddered like he’d touched a snake. “Somebody should have killed you,” he said.

I laughed. “Why, I’m just a servant girl here. People hardly notice me at all.”

When the fall term of 1867 rolled around, wouldn’t you know it, this time it was the prosecution that wasn’t ready. They claimed that some of their witnesses had not turned up. That there Colonel Grayson from Tennessee was one of the missing witnesses, and I wasn’t surprised. A whole year had passed, and by now he must have thought he had better things to do than to travel all the way to Statesville to watch a bunch of North Carolina attorneys waste everybody’s time with their legal shenanigans. I hear they fined him eighty dollars, though, for not attending. I wonder if they ever collected it.

They finally had that second trial on January 21, 1868, and mostly the same witnesses went all the way to Statesville to say their piece again. But there were a few changes. In the corridor outside the courtroom I saw Eliza Anderson, Wash Anderson’s younger sister, decked out in her Sunday best.

“What did they call you for?” I asked her.

She doesn’t care for me overmuch, and I reckon that’s because her brother has been tale-bearing, but she answered me civil enough, “Nothing very important, I’m sure. But we live next to the Bates’ place, and I suppose the prosecution called me on account of that.”

I thought it was odd, because her brother was already down as a witness, and could have answered any questions about that, but I didn’t think too much about it, for my mind was occupied with my own testimony, which was a deal more important than hers.

She went into the courtroom while I was still waiting in the hall, wondering if the court was planning to give us lunch. Presently Miss Eliza came storming out of the courtroom, looking like a wet hen.

“What happened to you?”

“Where is my brother?”

“Outside having a smoke. I said I’d fetch him if it was his time to go in. What’s the matter?”

There was a pink spot on each one of her cheeks, and her lips twitched. “That awful man who is defending Tom Dula asked me… actually, in public… asked me if I was kin to-as he put it-‘a man of color’ named John 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.