The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharyn McCrumb Page B

another potato skin. Tom Dula was lazy. I never saw him do a lick of work if he could help it. I thought that if Tom was to like you enough, then he might do some brave, quick thing—like risking his own skin to pull you out of a hole, or snatch you out of a burning house. Yes, he might do that. He was brave enough. But if that dog had been stuck in the hole for, say, a month, and Tom’d had to bring it food and water every single day without fail—why, I reckon that dog wouldn’t have lasted a week. He had a quick kind of courage, but not the slow, steady kind that would last you a lifetime.
    I dropped another potato skin in the pail for the hogs. “So that’s when you set your heart on Tom, then?”
    Ann shook her head. “He wasn’t more than eight when that happened. He was just one of the gaggle of young’uns to me for the longest time, and then one day—he wasn’t. I don’t know how he came to look different to me after all that time, but we had a long snowbound winter when I was fourteen, and I didn’t see him for a month or more, and then, come spring, when he turned up again, I just looked at him coming through the field, and I thought, There you are. Not like you’d think that about some neighbor who happened to drop by, but a stranger feeling, as if you had been looking all your life for a lost treasure, and suddenly you had stumbled upon it. I found him then, and I knew we were meant for one another.
    “He knew it, too.” She laughed. “We just came together like a compass needle points to north. I don’t even think we said much. Tom ain’t one for talking overmuch anyhow, but his eyes were so deep and blue when he looked at me, I liked to drown in them.”
    “You started young,” I said, for I knew that Tom was a year younger than Ann, so he’d have been thirteen.
    She laughed. “I showed him how. He weren’t my first. But being with him was like nothing else for me before or since. Oh, we were in rut that spring, him and me, worse than the rabbits. We’d sneak off together every chance we got. Mama even caught us one time in her bed, and she run Tom off with a broom, and then laid into me with a razor strap. We kept to the woods thereafter, Tom and me. Oh, that was a fine summer.”
    I understood the words to what she was saying, but not the tune. Never in my life had I felt much of anything for anybody. For me one person was the same as all the rest, and all of them let you down sooner or later. Trusting people was just asking for trouble. I tried to figure out what folk wanted, and I’d give it to them, as long as it got me what I needed, but I never put any feelings into it. It was just a way to get along in this world. Whenever I heard somebody talk about this deep feeling they had for someone they said they loved, I thought I must be missing something, but I didn’t know what it was. It never seemed to profit them that had it, though, so I reckoned I was better off without. And maybe they were only fooling themselves, anyhow, for I couldn’t see that love made any difference in how they acted—not in the long run.
    “But even though you are saying how much you loved Tom, you went and married James Melton,” I said to Ann. “Right soon after that rutting spring, and well before Tom went off to war. You were fifteen when you wed, didn’t you tell me?”
    She nodded. “It didn’t change anything, though. Tom knew that. I reckon James Melton knew it, too. But he would hang around me, looking like a starving dog in a smokehouse, wanting me so bad he could taste it. And I said no a time or two, but then I got to thinking about it. What else was there? James had a little land and a house of his own, and he made some money by being a cobbler and wagon-making. He works hard, and he’s good at making things, I’ll give him that. Tom never had anything, and I couldn’t see that he ever would. Tom doesn’t care to work, and he never seems to want much. If his belly is full, he is