Ballad 09 The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharyn McCrumb

Author:Sharyn McCrumb [McCrumb, Sharyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312558178
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-09-12T03:00:00+00:00

PAULINE FOSTER

May 24, 1866

For once I didn’t mind the long, muddy walk back from German’s Hill, for I needed every mile of the journey to think out what to do next. It was like trying to piece together squares on a quilt to make a pattern, only sewing is stupid and tedious work, and I had always hated it—but this cutting and piecing together of people’s lives makes my heart quicken with excitement.

I walked back along the trace, following the fading sun, which was just about to sink below the blue mountains in the distance, where I’d come from back in March. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the clouds stopped and the mountains began; they had that same blue hazy look against the sky, as if one was no more solid than the other.

I didn’t meet anybody on the road, and I’d scarcely have taken note of it if I had, for my mind was running faster than a snow-melt creek, thinking on what I would say and who I needed to talk to before morning.

I could have ended Laura’s fine plans for an elopement then and there, I think, if I’d told her secrets in the right ears. If I’d warned her daddy that he was about to lose both his mare and his daughter, I reckon he’d have put a stop to it. Or if I’d told some of the neighbors—or that high and mighty Colonel Isbell, who thinks he is the lord and master of everybody in the valley—that Laura Foster was fixing to run away with a colored man, they’d have stepped in. And if I had just told that nut brown boy of hers that Laura was afflicted with the pox—I doubt if even her white skin would have made her a prize to him then. Being hanged for running off with her or catching the deadly pox from her—it was all the same in the end. Death. And more than she was worth.

But I had no particular score to settle with Laura Foster, except for the fact that somebody loved her. She was making foolish choices, and she would bring about her own ruin without any help from me. I reckoned that I had more wrongs to repay in other quarters, and I meant to see those debts of cruelty paid in kind, hurt for hurt. It would take a careful piecing together, though, this blood quilt in my head. One dropped stitch and all would come undone.

When I neared the Melton place that evening, it was already gathering dark and the wind had picked up some, making a tedious journey of the last mile, but I would have walked barefoot in the snow to deliver the news I brought back with me.

I was almost to the house when out of the dark, a white hand grabbed my arm and jerked it hard. “What are you doing back so late? James will be wanting his supper!”

I could just make out Ann’s pale face in the moonlight, but I had known it was her already.

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