The Ballad of Tom Dooley

PAULINE FOSTER

Late April 1866





Listening to Miz Ann Melton blackening the name of her cousin Laura would have made a cat laugh, but, since I had my bed and board to think of, I just kept quiet and let her rave.

“Why, Laura Foster has got no more morals than a mare in heat!” she declared, as if such a thing would disgrace our fine family of Fosters. I had to turn away then, and bite my lip to keep from laughing in her face. Here was Ann with a lover still coming to her bed a couple of nights a week, while her husband slept nearby, and her own mother Lotty, having lost count of the fathers of her young’uns. Then there was me, with a battalion of lovers and a war wound beneath my skirts to prove it. We were fine ones to talk about the sins of little Laura Foster. She couldn’t hold a candle to the rest of the family sinners, but you would never catch me saying so to Mistress Ann, to whom I was beholden for my keep. Nor would I be sharing with her the news that drab little Laura claimed to have unearthed another sweetheart besides Ann’s beloved Tom. I don’t reckon Ann would have believed me anyhow on that score, for nothing would ever convince her that Tom Dula was not the finest, handsomest fellow in all creation.

One man is the same as another to me, except some of them stink more than others, but from the way other women act around this man or that, I can see that they have preferences in the matter of coupling, and, for Ann, the sun rose and set upon Thomas Dula, though I cannot say why this should be so. To my mind, he was no better looking than her husband, and he was a deal less steady and dependable. If you looked at the two of them the way you’d study a horse you were planning to buy, then only a fool would pick Tom.

I used to wonder what she saw when she looked at him. Not what the rest of us saw, which was a lazy, no-account boy with an easy smile and an inclination to go through life like a raft on a river, taking the easiest course as it flowed. If I was to tell Cousin Ann that Laura found some man she liked better than Tom, like as not she would call me a bare-faced liar. Well, I am a liar, but people seldom catch me at it, and, though I had no intention of sharing the news with Ann, I did believe that Laura’s affections lay elsewhere.

There are a deal of things a woman might want more than a sunny smile and a strong back in bed: land, money, dependability, honor, the respect of the neighbors. James Melton had all of that. Tom had none of it, and never would. Picking some other man in place of Melton struck me as a foolish choice, whether Ann believed it or not. I resolved to take a close look at the men hereabouts to see if I could tell which one had taken my cousin Laura’s fancy. But I would not tell Ann. Let her jealousy simmer a while longer, while I watched the pot boil, and when the time was right, I would let it scald the lot of them.

* * *

Spring’s cold rains brought the first green shoots of grass, and then deep in the bare woods the redbud trees swelled up like sores that crowned a rosy pink, and then went away, same as mine had. A week or so after the redbud bloomed and withered, Ann was washing herself and found some rosy sores of her own. They were between her legs, where it didn’t show, so she was as beautiful as ever, but the affliction took its toll on her temper, which was ragged at the best of times.

She slammed the tin washbowl on to the table, and thrust her face up close into mine, so I could feel the heat of her breath and smell her body, still unwashed, for she had come upon the sores and quit. “I am sick!” she screamed in my face. “And I reckon it is your fault!”

I have one gift from fortune. It is not grace, or beauty, or a fine singing voice, or breeding, but it is a blessing nonetheless. I cannot be moved. Being shouted at does not make me tremble, and neither panic nor insult can tempt me into a display of temper. Inside my head, I am as cold as a creek of snow-melt. Sometimes I wonder what other people feel when they weep or storm, for whatever it is I am not touched by it. While she sobbed and swore, I stood there looking at her, thinking as clearly as if she were humming hymn tunes, and I felt nothing at all.

“Why, Ann, I am sorry you have taken poorly, but it can’t have nothing to do with my sickness, can it? I reckon all the world knows how you catch the pox—from laying in sin with them that has it. But whatever else we ever did, you and I, we never did that, Cousin.”

She stared at me for a moment, letting my words sink in, and perhaps she was too frightened to reason it out, as I had been here a good while before she even took sick. I had no doubt that Ann was poxed, because, though she had not lain with me, I had been tupped by Tom, and so had she, which amounted to the same thing. I was sure of that. I had taken a roundabout way to share my affliction with her, but I had managed it in the end, and it was all I could do not to gloat over my victory. But I generally take the wiser course, and that called for me to force tears into my eyes, and clasp her hand, and say, “Oh, it cannot be my condition that ails you, Cousin! Perhaps you are just liverish.”

She shook her head. “I felt the sore just now, when I was washing myself.”

“All manner of things can cause a lump upon the body. Mayhap it will go away of its own accord.” I tried to sound as if I believed that, for it would do no good for her to know what ailed her. It was enough that I knew.

I reckon that if you are born beautiful, then the outside of your head is so important that you don’t have to worry overmuch about what there is on the inside. Leastways, I never could see any sign that Ann ever wasted any time trying to think out anything. While she was brushing her black hair into a glossy sheen, or when she rubbed lampblack on her eyelids to make her dark eyes big and calf-like, those eyes would go soft and vacant, like two puddles of spilled ink, and she rarely spoke when she was tending to her rites of beauty. Those things ought not to take up so much space in your head as to crowd out other thoughts altogether, but she never seemed bored, though she did little enough of anything. Whereas, me—why, it seems like I cannot stop myself from thinking, even when I want to. Even when I am bone-weary and trying to drift off to sleep, notions keep buzzing around behind my eyes until I wish I could swat them away like gnats. Sometimes in the back of my imaginings there is that shadow of my bodily sickness and an ugly picture of what the end will be like for me, but mostly I am able to keep away from that abyss by playing a never-ending game of draughts with everybody who crosses my path.

Do I need to repay anybody for some slight or injury, and, if so, how can I safely do them a bad turn? — Is there someone standing in the way of something I want, and, if so, what lie can I tell to push them aside? — Who is vexing me by being too rich, or too smug, or too happy? How can I put a damper on that?

I never ran out of scores to settle, and little seedlings of mischief to tend to. But Ann and Tom just seemed to roll along through life on a cart of new-mown hay and cabbage roses—never worrying about slights or rivals, never trying to come out ahead or fearing being left behind. They just … lived. Why, calves walk into the butchering shed with as much forethought as those two had about where life would lead them.—It must be restful to be able to live like that, floating, instead of fighting back against the current, but I take no pleasure in idleness.

I am always trying to win a game that no one else knows we are playing.

I figured that Ann’s habit of not bothering to think was the reason she had not worked out what was ailing her and how she had come to catch it. She knew full well that I had lain with Tom Dula, same as she had, and surely by now she knew that I had the pox. It stands to reason that I’d give it to him, and he would pass it right along to whoever he took a notion to bed down with. Funny that she didn’t see it coming, that she didn’t even recognize it when it caught up with her, while I had laid awake nights planning for just such a calamity to overtake her. Maybe for an instant or two it irked me that she could not see my cleverness behind the trap that had sprung on her, but then I remembered that I needed the Meltons’ bed and board, so I held my peace, and went back to acting like a concerned and devoted cousin.

“I reckon you caught it from Tom,” I said. “You said yourself that Laura Foster was the talk of the settlement for all her goings-on with men. I reckon poor Tom paid the price for her loose ways.” I held my breath then, to keep from laughing at this bare-faced flimflam, but Ann was nodding her head like I was telling her something she already knew. It is easy enough to lead a mule in the direction it already wants to go, and Ann had the wind up something fierce over our drab little cousin Laura. She would believe that Tom might be stolen away by that little mud hen, as if that were anything worth worrying about.

If I hated anybody in the world more than I hated everybody in general, I believe I’d wish Tom Dula on them. But Ann thought that the sun rose over his left shoulder, and it suited her to blame her troubles on Laura Foster, for she was already dead set against her.

The next time Tom darkened the door, she lit into him like a scalded cat. He had come in smiling, probably hoping for a pleasant spell by the hearth, and a plate of corn muffins, if I had made any, for he’d wait until doomsday to get anything baked by the fair hands of Ann Melton. But he got more warmth than he bargained for that day: Ann’s wrath could have melted an anvil.

She ran at him, same as she often did to fling herself into his embrace, but, though he stood open-armed to meet her, she pulled up short, and thrust her face up in to his, and screamed out her words as if he was still on the other side of the gate. “I am poxed, Tom Dula! Bound to die! And it is on account of you.”

I stood off in the corner, watching this, and holding my breath so as not to laugh. But it was interesting to watch the pair of them. I spend a lot of time watching people, seeing when they smile or frown, and what they say to good news or bad tidings, and I try to remember to do the same, for if I did not make myself remember to smile or frown, all I would ever show the world is an empty stare. I was born past caring about anything.

When Ann flew at him, Tom Dula froze, and turned ashy pale, letting her wrath break over him like a bucket of cold water. If he could have turned and run, I believe he would have. “You have killed me, Tom!” she wailed, beating her little fists against his chest, and letting loose a storm of heavy weeping.

He held her close to him, with an empty stare upon his own face, but he stroked her hair and murmured soft words to her, the way I have seen people talk to a child that has fallen down and cut itself, or to a horse that is fixing to bolt. Finally, when the nerve storm looked to be about over, he tilted her chin up so that he could look into her face, which was blotched and streaky with her tears, but she didn’t look as unsightly as she ought to have done after such a flood of temper. If I had let loose a tantrum such as that, I’d have looked like a withered winter apple dug out of the root cellar. But not Ann. She looked like a rose in a shower of warm rain. Ann had too much of everything, which was hard lines on the rest of us, and that set me to thinking again on what I might do to change that.

“What has sot you to wailing?” Tom asked her, with an edge to his voice, but he was smiling a little, too, for Ann’s tempers are legion, and most of the time they are of no more consequence than a summer squall.

This time, though, she was not to be comforted with smiles and embraces, even from her beloved Tom. She glared up, cutting him with those dark eyes. “I am poxed, Tom,” she said, not screaming any longer, but in a quiet, shaky voice that was holding back a flood of tears. “You give me the soldiers’ ailment, and since you never had it when you come home from the War, I reckon I know where you came by it lately.”

He was looking over her shoulder straight at me, but before he could say anything, Ann stamped her foot and said, “From Laura Foster! That’s where!”

I was holding my breath then, wondering if Tom was sober enough to have worked out where he picked up the pox in the first place, before he went and passed it on to our drab cousin Laura, but I need not have worried. If Tom had sense enough to work it out, he didn’t say so. He and James Melton were alike in that respect: right or wrong, they generally let Ann have her own way about things. All she had to do was weep and storm, and shout at whoever displeased her, and the men generally stepped aside and let her have her way.

I did, too, sometimes, but not on account of her carrying-on. I could watch her rave and scream from sun-up to midnight without batting an eye, but I thought it best not to let on that I was not afraid of her, nor that I cared so little for her contentment. I had my bed and board to think of, after all. I found the easiest way to deal with Miss Ann was to let her think she was getting her way, and if I could do that, and still go about my business on the sly, so much the better. I’ll take peace and quiet, if it comes cheap enough.

I was watching her, though, all the time. Looking to see where that little spot of weakness lay within her. If you intend to hurt someone, it’s best to find out where hitting them will do the most good. I studied her posture, checking for a sign of tautness in her neck that would show she was fixing to set at Tom again, once she got her second wind, but she was slumped against him with her face pressed against his chest, making little kitten noises, while he stroked her hair.

They didn’t take any more notice of me after that, so I went away to see to the chickens.

Later on I heard that Tom had gone off to see Dr. Carter to get treatment for his ailment, same as Ann did. R.D. Hall said that Tom was in a bate about his affliction, and claiming he would “put through” whoever gave it to him. But he never did any more than just complain about it. As far as I could tell, Tom’s tempers were like summer storms: quick and hard, but gone in a flash, leaving no trace they’d ever been. Women’s anger is different. We burn long and slow, and you may never see the flames, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.

* * *

Wilson Foster’s place is a five-mile walk from the Melton farm, over in German’s Hill, just past the Caldwell County line. Ann swears that Tom Dula makes the journey every few nights, leastways she’s afraid he does, so I reckon all that marching in the infantry got him used to the exercise. Or maybe he’s just like a sorry old dog that will travel clear across the county to find a bitch in heat. Making that five-mile walk afforded me a deal less pleasure than it would Tom, but I set my mind on doing it every week or so anyhow, taking care to arrive in the early evening so as to be gone by the time Tom made his rounds.

It’s a good thing that James Melton is an able shoemaker as well as a farmer, for I must have worn out half a deer hide in shoe leather, walking those muddy paths in the April mists to reach German’s Hill before full dark. The damp cold seeped all the way to my bones, and plastered my hair against my cheeks, but I was set on going, not for the joy I’d find at journey’s end, but for another kind of joy altogether.

When I could get my chores done, I’d set out at earliest twilight, and count on reaching the Fosters’ place in time to help Cousin Laura get supper on the table, which meant, of course, that I would be asked to help them eat it. I didn’t mind peeling potatoes and frying up apples, because if I had stayed to eat with the Meltons, I would have had to do all the cooking, instead of just helping out by doing half of it. Besides, I judged that Cousin Laura was more apt to talk when she was too busy fixing supper to think overmuch about what she was saying to me. I hoped she would get to talking and all but forget that I was there, and then I would learn what secret it was she was fluffed up over, like a broody hen.

If I put my mind to it, I can gentle people the same as I’ve seen some drovers do to horses. Soft words, no quick movements, and never a hint of judging them or being riled. People in these parts are not, by and large, trusting souls, and the War has made them even more leery of strangers. When we came of age, Laura, Ann, and I, strangers—in uniform or not—meant trouble. We saw barns burned and livestock stolen. Ordinary farmers got bushwhacked and left on the road with their throats cut, murdered by one side or the other, as if which side had done it would have counted for anything. I reckon all of us learned to give as good as we got, and to take whatever we could from them that had more than we did. But the War was over now, and maybe some folks were letting themselves forget what they had learned about the danger of trusting people. Anyhow, I wasn’t a stranger to Laura Foster, for all that we didn’t grow up together. I was kin. And if you can’t trust your kinfolks, who can you trust?

Why, nobody.

I wouldn’t forget that lesson, and I figured I’d give her cause to remember it as well.

So I told her how lucky she was to be so thin and pretty. Scrawny passes for pretty while you are young, and it puts people in a good mood to be warmed with praise; though you would be wasting your time to try it on me, for I can always see the truth through the whitewash.

I let her talk by the hour, it seemed like, about how life was passing her by while she was stuck in her daddy’s house, taking care of his young’uns like a hired girl.

I sat beside her at the table, peeling puckered winter apples, and nodding my head in agreement every time she stopped to draw breath. I remembered to pat her hand and pull a sorrowful face when her tears spilled over on to her sallow cheeks. Laura was making stew for dinner, same as she did most nights, because watery flour and potatoes is the best way to make a smidgeon of meat feed a slew of people. Two skinned rabbits lay on the table beside the flour bowl, looking to me like stillborn babies, but that was a comment I kept to myself.

“T’ain’t fair.” Laura’s voice was shaking, and I saw tears plop in to the stew pot.

“It is hard lines on you, Laura,” I told her, for it was plain what she wanted to hear. “You have put in enough of your youth taking your mama’s place in this house, and it’s only right that you should have a chance to make a family of your own.”

“Well, it is,” she said, wiping her wet face with the back of her hand. “And I mean to do just that before too long. You wait and see.”

“I’m sure Mrs. Dula would welcome another daughter about the farm, though she already has one of her own. But Tom’s sister is a grown girl now, and she’ll be out and gone before too long, I’ll warrant.”

It had been a stab in the dark, and when Laura stopped stirring the stew and turned to stare at me, open-mouthed, I saw that I had guessed wrong, and I hastened to set it to rights before she remembered herself and stopped confiding. “Of course, I don’t know what anybody would want with Tom Dula, for all that our cousin Ann sets such a store by him. I guess you could hope to live long enough for him to inherit that land, if the taxes don’t claim it first, but if it’s up to him to run the place, it will fall to ruin about his ears one of these days.”

She tossed her head. “I ain’t studying about Tom Dula, Pauline. He’s all right to pass the time with, ’cause Lord knows there ain’t nothin’ else to do around here, but going over to the Dulas wouldn’t hardly be a change from where I am now. Just swapping one dirt farm for another, and waiting for hard work and childbed to take me off, like it did my mama.”

It seemed to me that she had just ruled out mankind in general with those true words, but I judged she was not bright enough to work this out for herself. It was only Tom she was set against, and not the male sex in general. Laura thought she was going somewhere, and I wanted to know where.

I tried again. “Anyone can see how good you are at taking care of young’uns. There’s more than one widower in these parts with motherless babes to raise, and a tidy little farm in need of a helpmeet. Any of them would be glad to take you to wed.”

Laura shook her head. “I have had enough of other people’s children. And enough of hill farming, too. I want to get clean away from here.”

I couldn’t afford to make any more wrong guesses about what was in her mind. We were near to the secret now, and she would be like a broody hen a-guarding it. I cast my thoughts about, trying to light on some man who would be able take care of her without having a farm to rely on. The local gentry did not figure in my calculations. There were rich men enough, even in Wilkes County, but Laura’s soiled reputation had spread in whispers about the settlement, and I knew that no doctor or landowner would bother with a penniless girl who was damaged goods. Even if she had been beautiful, they’d not have troubled to marry her, and beautiful she was not. But I doubt she had ever been five miles from home, so there was no use thinking of anybody farther afield than the settlement.

I don’t know what made me light on an answer just then, unless it was thinking about fallen women, and remembering how folks had said that Ann had gone and lain with the drovers for a yard of cloth or a sack full of beans.

The drovers run cattle from over the mountains in Tennessee right through here on their way to the bigger Carolina cities farther east. If a girl wanted to get shut of her home county, that would be the way out, for they were only passing through. Like as not, Laura would have met them the same way Ann did, by bartering what she had beneath her skirts for whatever they would give her for a few minutes of pleasuring behind a tree somewhere. The wonder of it was that any of them would want more of her than that. I couldn’t see why.

“You found you a drover,” I said, soft as I could, for I knew she’d be in mortal fear of being overheard.

Laura got big-eyed and put one skinny finger to her lips, and shook her head.

I thought surely I had got to the truth at last, but I could tell by the way her cheeks turned red that there was more to it than that. “Well, whoever he may be, I am happy for you, Cousin,” I said, pushing my mouth into a smile. “And you have my word that I will not breathe a word to your father.” Which was true, as I had other plans for the news.

She nodded. “I know I can trust you, Pauline. You know how unhappy I am, and you know what it’s like to be a servant. So does he.”

I nodded, and squeezed her hand to give her encouragement, and I was careful not to show how she had riled me with those easy words. No, I did not know what it was like to be a servant, really. I never felt like those that took me in and paid me wages were my betters. I was getting room and board for my doctor visits, and working when I had to, so that I could keep the Meltons’ roof over my head, but I never felt tied to anything or anybody.

What did either one of the Meltons have to make them better than me? A few acres of scrub land on a hill in the middle of nowhere? Why, they neither one of them could read or write any more than I could, and there wasn’t one dish in that house that wasn’t made of tin. And, as for being clever, I’d show them who outranked who before all was said and done. Whenever I took a notion, I could walk out on Cousin Ann, and, when I did, I’d pay her back for all the ordering I took from her, and all the times I worked while she laid around, queening it over me, because she had married a man with land. One of these days I would show the whole sorry bunch who was master here, and when I had done calling the tune, they would be a deal worse off than they ever thought I was.

Now, though, I was lacking in stones for my sling, so I had to take care to sweet-talk Cousin Laura so that she would confide in me. She had poured me a tin mug of chicory coffee, and I took a sip of it, wishing I had a dollop of honey to cover up the bitter taste, or, even better, a big slug of whiskey. Still, drinking it kept me warm, while I tried to think what women wanted to hear when they reckoned themselves in love.

“So he’s not a drover, then? But a drover is a fine figure of a man. Strong, too.”

Laura wasn’t paying any mind to my prattle, which was just as well, for I had no idea how to praise nasty, smelly cow men, who hardly saw the indoors from one season to the next, and who looked to the rain for their bathing. I had been with drovers a time or two up home, and it was all I could do to hold my breath until they were done with me.

“He is no drover by trade, but he sure is a fine figure of a man.” Laura leaned close and whispered to me, and her tears had stopped. “I’ve known him all my life, but of course we didn’t see each other any more once we stopped being little children. We just lost track of each other, I reckon, for our paths would never cross in the ordinary way of things.”

I was toting up all she said, trying to work out what she was getting at. “Surely you’d see him at church, Laura.”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. If he went to church, he would go with his own people.”

I had it now, but I was so thunderstruck by the news that I could not even speak to interrupt her.

She got all moony-eyed, remembering meeting up with him again. “I had gone to see Cousin Ann, and he was out on the road, chasing a brindled calf that had got loose from the pen, and it near took my breath away to look at him. I didn’t even recognize him at first. His black hair was spilling out from underneath his hat, and his skin was the color of a buckeye nut, and, though it was September, I reckoned he had a touch of the sun.”

“It sounds like you did,” I said, but I remembered to smile to take the sting out of the words, and I went on without thinking, “Sounds like he’s at least a half breed.”

She nodded. “He says his granddaddy was a Shawnee. But of course, the coloreds mostly do say that around here. They seem to think it is shameful to be kin to the people that owned them, though I can’t see why. It’s no fault of theirs.”

“And who were the people that owned him?”

She leaned even closer, barely whispering it to me, as well she might. “His people were slaves of Wash Anderson’s family over on the Stony Fork Road. Johnny is free now, of course, but he still lives with the Andersons, and works on that farm of theirs, between the Meltons and the old Bates Place. But he says he’s wanting to go west, where life is easier for such as him.”

I sifted through this piece of news. A freed slave. Even if it were true, him claiming to be Indian would hardly have mattered alongside of that. It did make one thing clear, though: how it was that a handsome young man could want Laura Foster. I reckoned that no man but a colored one would think her worth having, for if my mud hen cousin outranked anybody in this world, it would be the likes of him.

She was too caught up to see the sneer on my face, and I took care to wipe it away quick, before she did spy it. “He’s a-wanting to go west real soon, and he says he’ll take me with him.”

“How do you come to be with him?” I said quickly, to stop myself from asking why any man bent on heading west would want to be saddled with my drab and penniless little cousin.

“Well, when I met him a-chasing that calf in the road, I stood in front of the beast and flapped my apron to make it run back toward him. He put the rope around its neck, and stopped to thank me for my help. Then I took a more careful look at him, and I remembered who he was, so I smiled back. He asked me how I was, and said he was sorry to hear that my mama had died. I walked on back to the Andersons’ barn with him while he put the calf back in its pen, and we talked about how we all used to play together as young’uns. I remember that he was always good to me in those days. He’d skin up a tree to bring me an apple, or pick berries for me, even in the briars, and when we all took cane poles down to the river to fish, he’d put the slimy old worm on the hook for me. Then we got to talking about how everything has changed since we were young, on account of the War and all.”

I didn’t suppose he was sorry that the War had changed things, for it had given him his freedom. I wondered what they found to talk about beyond that. They ought to have been worried about somebody seeing them passing the time of day together. Plenty of folks around would take exception to that, and if they had a mind to teach him a lesson, he’d be lucky to escape with his life. But Laura was too far gone to be reached with common sense. “After that, I started walking that way most every week on purpose, and we got to be friends again. His name is John, and he treats me better than Tom Dula ever thought about.”

Well, he would, I thought, for one harsh word or a slap from him, and his fine white lady-love could let out a squawk that would get him strung up from the nearest tree. “So he is called John. What’s his other name?”

She shrugged. “Still calling himself Anderson. As light as he is, I guess he may have more right to the family name than most slaves do.”

“And the other—you know—his neighbors? Do they know?”

“There aren’t many colored folks in Reedy Branch, and if there were, they wouldn’t care what Johnny and me do together. We lost so many young men in the War that a woman is lucky to find any kind of man at all. It’s him or a fat old widower, I reckon, for Tom Dula ain’t the marrying kind. The freed slaves mind their own business, same as we do. And maybe they think it serves the white folks right for him to take up with one. Like winning a little battle for all of them. But we don’t care about that. We’re the same as we were as children—just … kind to each other.”

I thought John Anderson was playing conkers with the devil to be risking his neck for the likes of Laura, but that was his lookout. I just wished he had picked Ann, is all. I wonder how that would have set with Tom Dula. And I wondered if James Melton could be bothered to care if his wife took up with him instead of Tom.

I looked at Laura, trying to figure out what she was planning to do. “So you have sworn off Tom now?”

She shrugged. “He comes by now and again, and I don’t say no. No point in it, is there? Locking the barn door on Tom after he’s already had it? I can’t undo that.”

She would get no argument from me, because I never could see the sense of what folks call “faithfulness,” nor why they would want it. The chicken don’t care if you eat her egg or another hen’s for your breakfast, and I didn’t see that there was much more to it than that, but I do know that, for some reason, most people do mind about such things.

“And, anyway, people in the settlement know about me and Tom. It keeps them from looking for anybody else taking up with me.”

The stew would have boiled away if I had not got up to stir it, for Laura was sitting at the table, twisting a plait of her rabbitty brown hair, and looking calf-eyed into the fire. “I do miss Johnny something fierce, but we can’t meet too often, for fear we’ll be seen together. Once people got to talking, there’d be no shutting them up, so I keep having to do with Tom, and seeing Johnny only now and then. I feel like a bear in a cage. There ain’t nothing else to do around here, except chores. If I didn’t have something to do besides washing and cooking, I’d take leave of my senses. Tom is as good as anything else. Us being together is nothing to either one of us, but just a way to pass the time that don’t feel like working.”

It always felt like work to me, but I nodded like I understood her nonsense. “So your heart is set on your nut brown boy—if he keeps his word about taking you away with him?”

She slapped the table with her open hand, and the stirring spoon clattered off on to the floor. “Not if! When! He swore it. Johnny says he plans to light out of here when the weather gets warm—near the end of May. I’ve made up my mind that when he comes through here, I’m packing up my clothes, and going with him.”

I laughed. “Well, you’d best not let word get around that you are fixing to run off with a freed slave, Cousin. Else he won’t get any farther than the end of a rope.”

She so far forgot herself as to shout at me. “Don’t you think I know that? I ain’t told nobody but you, Pauline. I’m counting on you not to give us away.” Right away, she clapped her hand over her mouth, and looked around, fearful that somebody had come in and overheard her, but nobody was there except the baby, asleep in its pallet on the floor. It stirred and moaned at the sound of its big sister raising her voice, but Laura cast a fearful look at the baby and quieted down at once. It tossed a time or two, and rolled over so its back lay to the fire, and went on sleeping.

“Oh, please, Pauline,” she said, whispering again, and grabbing at my sleeve with her fingers. “You have to keep my secret. Don’t let on to nobody that I told you. It’s only for a couple more weeks, and then I’ll be shut of here for good.”

I shrugged. “It’s nothing to me, Laura. I just hope your man realizes the chance he is taking. If he gets killed for messing around with you, it’ll be on your head, not mine.”

“But you promise you won’t give me away?”

“I will not tell anybody that you have any lover other than Tom Dula. I swear.” It makes me smile when I can tell someone the absolute truth, and still be planning their destruction. None of them could see more than a yard in front of their noses. But I could. I had everything I needed now to bait my trap, and so long as it ensnared Ann Melton, I did not care a damn who else got hurt. That was their lookout.