Free The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharyn McCrumb Page A

hair and dark, flashing eyes. By being more alive than anybody else, she squeezed your heart until you never forgot her for an instant. I didn’t say you would love her, though I reckon there was more than one man that did. Wanted her, anyhow. But no woman I ever knew could stand her. She made no pretense of caring a fig for anybody but herself, not even troubling to ask after anybody’s health or family, and when an older woman tried to converse with her, she was bored and she showed it, tapping her foot or gazing about the room, looking for some man to charm or something better to do than be talked at. The women all knew her reputation, too. None of them liked Ann enough to protect her from the scandalmongers, who were only telling the truth, after all. A woman who makes free with any man she pleases has no friends among her own sex, but Ann never cared about that, either. Tom Dula was all the society she ever wanted, and the rest of us she barely tolerated, if she noticed us at all.
    I had no more use for the settlement’s old biddies than Ann did, but I took care to keep in with them, because it seemed foolish to make enemies when you didn’t have to. Those respectable old women might be useful one day, though I never tried to make Ann see that. You couldn’t reason with Ann.
    She was like pokeberries, Ann was—bright and tempting to look at, but pure poison through and through. I suppose jealousy was part of the reason women hated her so much, but then Ann never took the trouble to make anybody like her. I guess she figured that the sight of her was all she ever needed to give. You never knew which way the wind would be blowing with her. One day she might be all smiles and sweetness, asking after your health and wanting to hold your new baby, and the next day she’d breeze past you on the road, taking no more notice of you than she would a stray guinea fowl.
    Since I had to stay in the same house with her, I used to watch her, trying to figure out the rhythm of her moods, for my peace of mind depended upon keeping on her good side. But if there was ever any rhyme or reason to the weather of Ann Melton’s humors, I never found it. I ended up thinking that she was doing it simply to keep folks off balance around her, trying to guess at her mood, as if she was calling the tune. It gave her the upper hand—I worked that out—but I soon decided that I did not care to dance to her fiddling. I began to act just the same whether she behaved fair or foul, and pretty soon I began to see less of her moodiness, though she gave it in full force to everyone else. Except Tom Dula, of course. He always saw the sunny side of Ann.
    Or at least, he did until he took up with Laura Foster, come spring.
    It wasn’t as if she found out in some underhanded way. Tom never troubled to lie. I always thought he was too lazy to exert himself by trying to remember some falsehood. Besides, he cared as little as she did what anybody thought of him. He was young and handsome, and people seem to find it easy to forgive a man like that.
    Tom came over to the house one evening in late March, in time to cadge a bite of supper with us. He sat there by the fire, spooning rabbit stew into his mouth, and, for once, Ann was not all smiles and sweetness. She sat huddled up on the floor next to his stool, holding his cup of water for him, and leaning her body against his leg, smiling into the firelight like a satisfied cat. I had the sewing in my lap, and I was seated in the cane chair, a ways back from the hearth, pretending not to listen to what they were saying.
    “Are you coming back later?” she murmured softly to Tom, glancing over at James Melton, who was at the table, nodding in his chair.
    Tom sat very still. “Not tonight, darlin’. I’m headed over to German’s Hill in a little bit.”
    Ann stiffened, and turned to look up at him. “That’s a long walk on a dark night. What do you want to go over there for?”
    “I just feel like