Free The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharyn McCrumb

of the barn loomed before me.
    I shivered a little from the wind, but I wasn’t scared. What we was fixing to do—why, I had done it a hundred times before, and Tom Dula didn’t look like the best or the worst of them. I didn’t feel much of anything. Good or bad, I didn’t figure it would last long, and it wouldn’t mean any more to either of us than partnering for a reel at a settlement dance. Less, in fact, for there’d be no one watching us.
    I could see him standing just inside the barn, leaning against the wall, and watching me, with a funny half-smile on his face. I wondered if he was happy about getting a roll in the hay, or if it pleased him that I didn’t want to. Some men are like that. I didn’t know what Tom Dula was like, behind that handsome face and the easy smile.
    He tried to take my arm, but I shook him off. “Let’s get this over with.”
    *   *   *
    He held the ladder while I climbed up into the hayloft, but I didn’t bother to thank him for it. If I was to fall and break my neck, it would have done him out of his fun, that was all. He didn’t kiss me, but I could still smell the whiskey on his breath, and I knew that he had been making a night of it somewhere else, before he ever came here. Not a word passed between us. Tom didn’t talk much anyhow, and I didn’t care to make things any more pleasant for him than I had to, so I just hitched up my skirts and lay back in the straw and let him get on with it, hoping the whiskey in my belly would keep me from minding too much.
    I spent the few minutes it took him to get done with it wondering what Ann Melton saw in Tom Dula that I never did. Well, I’ve had worse. He wasn’t old or fat or toothless, but the others had given me something for my trouble—a few coins or a drop of whiskey. I reckon he thought he was doing me a favor, being as young and likely-looking as he was. I didn’t get nothing at all from Tom Dula that night, not even so much as a kind word or a thank you. But I smiled and hugged myself in the cold darkness of that hayloft, knowing that I sure as hell gave him something that night.
    *   *   *
    I am trying to think back on when I first encountered my other cousin, Laura Foster, but it’s not the kind of thing I’d be likely to remember. Laura Foster wasn’t the sort of girl who sticks in your mind. Had I met her once when we were children, long before the War? Maybe. I remember Ann from those days, running around like a wild Indian, with her black hair flying loose and not a stitch on under her dress, but if one of that horde of barefoot young’uns had been six-year-old Cousin Laura, it had slipped from my memory. I think of her now in the faded colors of early fall, when the green leaves are going yellowish and the fields of goldenrod fade to a muddy brown. That was Laura Foster … small and sallow-skinned, with broom-sedge hair and witch-hazel eyes, so quiet and colorless that if you blinked she might disappear.
    She was old Wilson Foster’s oldest girl. We were kin somehow or other, but since I was not a legal child, I never bothered to learn the rights of it. Her daddy tenant-farmed over at German’s Hill, maybe five miles from the Meltons’ and the Dulas’ farms. Laura’s mother took sick and died sometime before the War ended, leaving Laura to look after her three brothers and a baby sister. Well, they didn’t any of them starve to death or die of cholera, and that’s the best that can be said of the care she took of them. Mostly, she went her own way, same as Ann did, except that Ann married young to get out of having to tend to her mama’s brood, while Laura went on living at home in German’s Hill, likely because there was no other place for her to go.
    She and Ann, both cousins to me, were chalk and cheese. Where Laura whispered and wavered, Ann carried herself like the Queen of Sheba—all fire and rolling thunder. She burned you where you stood with her bright beauty of tumbling black