Free The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharyn McCrumb Page B

it.” He was keeping his voice light, as if the conversation was of no consequence at all, but the air felt the way it does when the leaves turn over on the trees, about an hour ahead of the thunderstorm, and there was that same quiet that comes right before all hell breaks loose.
    “Well, you must be fixing to go visit somebody,” said Ann, still speaking so softly that you could have heard a snake rattle in the log pile.
    Tom shrugged, and, from the look on his face, I judged he was wishing he had thought up a lie when she asked him, but anybody who had fought his way through Petersburg and lived through a Yankee prison camp does not run from a fight—and maybe that was what Ann liked best about him: that she couldn’t run roughshod over him, like she did over most everybody else. I never saw James Melton cross her once. I worked beside him every day in the fields for months, but I think I knew him less than I ever knew anybody.
    Tom was smiling down at Ann, like he was daring her to keep hectoring him, and presently he said, “Why, I didn’t know I had to answer to anybody about where I go and what I do.”
    “You don’t need to tell me. I know. You’re going to see my own cousin Laura Foster,” said Ann.
    He laughed. “Well, now, she wouldn’t be the first of your cousins that I was acquainted with, would she now, Pauline?”
    I glanced up from my sewing and met his eyes with a blank stare. There was a mocking glint to them, and although he was smiling, I didn’t think he was happy about anything.
    That flicked Ann raw, though, for she could hardly object to him seeing Laura Foster when she had foisted him off on me not even a month ago.
    “After all, Ann, it ain’t like Laura is married or anything, is it?” He was looking over at James Melton, who was still in his chair, awake now, and intent upon mending a harness, and paying us no mind. “It ain’t like we care who beds with who?”
    From the way Ann’s eyes glittered, I thought she was going to break out into a storm of weeping, but she just kept staring up at Tom, taking his measure, and finally she shrugged and turned back to the fire. “Please yourself, Tom. I doubt you’ll get much joy out of that stringy little mud hen.”
    Tom stood up and set his tin plate on his stool. He patted Ann on the head and winked at me, like I shared a joke with him, “Well, Ann,” he said, heading for the door, “maybe I can teach her a thing or two.”
    That night I slept in a pallet on the floor, because Ann’s bed shook with her sobbing.

 
    PAULINE FOSTER
    Late March 1866
    So we hunkered down and waited on spring, and it seemed a long time in coming, and nothing much happened in the meantime. When the weather was foul, James Melton occupied himself with mending shoes. I did the cooking and the washing, and what farm chores there were to be done while the weather held cold.
    Once a week, I would plod up the muddy road to the place where the doctor saw his Elkville patients, and I took the bluestone medicine what he give me, but I felt little better for it. Some days I was tolerable and some days worse, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to it. Ann mostly slept the days away under her pile of quilts, or else she paced that cabin like a penned-up bull.
    “It would take your mind off your troubles if you was to help me make the biscuits,” I told her one afternoon, when I judged she would wear a path in the plank floor if she was to keep pacing.
    She shot me a scorching look with those black eyes of her. “I don’t want to take my mind off it. I want to feel every second of misery I’m having so that I can give it back to Tom with interest when I see him.”
    “I thought you said it didn’t mean nothing—him being with anybody else. And, anyhow, it means folk aren’t gossiping about the two of you anymore.”
    She snatched up an unmended shoe and shied it in my direction, but she was so wide of the mark that I just stood there and watched it thump