The Ballad of Frankie Silver (6 page)

“The name is probably Frances,” I murmured to Butler, who nodded in agreement.

“That’s right,” said Baker. “Miss Frances Stewart she was before she married into the Silver clan. The other two prisoners, Barbara Stewart and youngest boy Blackston, live on the other side of the Toe River, about two miles downstream from the Jacob Silver homestead. It’s Isaiah Stewart’s place. He’s from Anson County, and he and his wife Barbara—”

“Tell us about the murder,” said Will, losing patience at last. “We can sort out their bloodlines later.”

“First sign of trouble was on December 23. That morning Frankie Silver went to her in-laws’ cabin, with the baby on her hip, and she told them that Charlie had lit out from home a couple of days back, and he hadn’t returned. She was wanting somebody to come feed the cows.”

“Why didn’t she ask her own kinfolk to do it?”

“The menfolk were gone. At least her father was away from home. She has an older brother, Jackson, who’s married to a Howell girl, but he was off with his father. I heard they were on a long hunt over in Kentucky. They weren’t back when I left there yesterday. I reckon the younger boy, Blackston, could have helped her. He’s about fifteen. But like I said, the Stewarts live two miles from Frankie, and over on the other side of the river, while the Silvers’ cabin is just a quarter mile down the hill from Frankie and Charlie’s place. The snow was knee-deep and the river was frozen. I reckon she didn’t want to chance crossing it, with the baby and all. Anyhow, she showed up at Charlie’s parents’ house, cool as snowmelt, saying he was gone getting his Christmas liquor. She said he had gone to George Young’s house with his jug and his fiddle. Boasted about how she’d been busy since sunup doing her washing and redding the cabin. She didn’t seem to mind much that her husband was gone, only she wanted somebody to feed the stock. So the Silvers sent over Alfred, their next oldest boy, to see to the cattle, and Frankie went back home.

“Every day after that, Frankie would stop by, still more peevish than affrighted, saying Charlie wasn’t back yet, and the Silvers were growing more anxious by the minute. Charlie was a sunny fellow; always a smile and a song; everybody liked him. Finally Frankie said she didn’t care if her no-account husband came back or not, she was going to stay at her mother’s house, and she was taking the baby with her.

“By then the Silvers were all-fired worried about Charlie, it being the dead of winter and all. Since Charlie Silver was a great one for drinking and fiddling, they thought it was just possible that he had found a party too good to leave and was holed up drunk somewhere, but it had been more than ten days by then, and it wasn’t like him to be gone that long. They sent over to George Young’s place, looking to find him, and George said that Charlie had come for that Christmas liquor right enough, and he had got it, but he said that Charlie had come and gone many days ago. The Youngs hadn’t seen him since.

“By then the Silvers were hunting the woods for him, and all the trails that led to George’s cabin, in case Charlie had fallen or come to harm while he was on his way home from the Youngs’ place, and maybe the worse for drink. The Silvers and some of their neighbors and kinfolk even went down to examine the river, but it was frozen solid and covered with unbroken snow. There was no sign that anybody had fallen in. After that, some of the neighbors—my people, Elijah Green, the Youngs, the Howells, the Hutchinses, and old Jack Collis—kept up the search, and Jacob—he was beside himself by this time—he … well, he went over into Tennessee.”

Whatever we had been expecting, it was not this. “Went to Tennessee?” said Butler. “What did he do that for?”

Baker shrugged. “Advice, I reckon you’d call it. He had heard tell of a Guinea Negro there, over Jonesborough way, that people say has the conjure power.”

I smiled at this touching bit of superstition, but then I recalled the tragic nature of this tale, and it sobered me at once. Parents who have lost a child will reach out for whatever comfort they can find. I was interested in this development. Guinea Negroes were said to have occult powers that they brought with them as a vestige of paganism from their own lands, but I had seldom heard of anyone asking them for more than simple fortune-telling: benign promises of a rosy future. This urgent task of finding a lost youth would prove a challenge indeed for such a conjure man. “And what did the African tell Mr. Silver?”

“He asked Silver to draw him a map of the valley where Charlie went missing, to mark the cabins, the river, the ridges, the fields—everything. Then that old conjure man took up a pendant, strung on a leather thong, and he swung it around in a circle over the map. To hear Jacob Silver tell it, that ball swung around and around over the map, getting slower and slower, until it came to a full stop and just hovered there—right over Charlie’s own cabin. And the conjure man, he looked up and said, ‘That boy never left his own house.’”

Butler and I looked at each other. Surely the prisoner was here on more evidence than a trick of ball and string over a map? “They searched the cabin then?”

“Already had!” said Charlie Baker, grinning triumphantly. While Mr. Jacob Silver was gone over the mountain into Tennessee, and Frankie had quit the place to go home to the Stewarts, that old bear hunter Jack Collis decided to look a little closer to home. He never did put much stock in what Frankie had told him, ’cause he couldn’t find no tracks in the woods, despite the deep snow, and he couldn’t think where Charlie could have got to without leaving some kind of a trail. While everybody else was out combing the deep woods and the land over by the Youngs’ place, Jack Collis snuck back to that cabin of Frankie and Charlie’s, and he poked around. There was a goodly pile of ashes in the fireplace, as if somebody had burned a whole cord of wood without cleaning out the fireplace, he said. Jack studied about that for a while, and then he put some of those ashes in clean water in the kettle over the fire, and what do you think he found?” Baker beamed at us expectantly.

We waited politely, for it was obvious that he was bursting to tell us.

“Grease bubbles!”

When my expression did not change, the constable must have realized that such rustic deductions were wasted upon gentlemen, for we lacked the requisite frontier skills to recognize the significance of that discovery. After a flash of disappointment, Baker explained. “There shouldn’t be any grease in fireplace ashes. The meat is cooked inside the pot, don’t you see? So when Jack found grease in the grate itself, he knew that a quantity of—of flesh—had been burned directly in that fire.”

This time our expressions were all he could have wished.

“Then Jack Collis took a candle and went to checking that cabin like a dog on point. He found bits of bone and a shoe buckle in the fireplace, and blood drops in the cracks of the puncheon floor. He raised the alarm to the rest of the men, and we began to direct our search closer in, near the spring, right there around the cabin.”

“Did you find him?” I asked. “Did you find Charlie Silver?”

Constable Baker swallowed hard. “Most of him.”

*   *   *

They have brought me down from my beautiful mountain in the white silence of winter, my wrists bound with hemp rope, my legs tied beneath the pony’s belly as if I were a yearling doe taken on the long hunt. And perhaps I am, for I am as defenseless as a deer, and as silent. They say that deer, who live out their lives in silence, scream when they are being killed. Well, perhaps I will be permitted that.

The horses are almost swallowed by the snow drifts in the pass. They push forward against the white tide, plunging and pushing with their chests, as if they were fording a swollen spring river instead of threading their way down a cold mountain.

No one sings or whistles as we make our way down the trail toward town, and I have only the wind to listen to. Sometimes I think I can hear voices in the torrent, indistinguishable words singing close harmony, and I strain to make out the words, but their sense escapes me. Charlie used to sing when he was coming home from George Young’s place, but that was never a pleasant sound for me, though I once thought that he had as fine a voice as ever I’d heard. When we were courting, he used to sing me “Barbary Ellen” and “The False Knight in the Road.”

No one sings to me now.

The two lawmen are scared of what I have done, what I might do—a crazy woman, a man-killer. What if I worked free of my ropes, and what if I had a knife hidden beneath my skirts? My brother is sullen as always, and I think my mother is afraid of me, too, but for a different reason. She wishes my father were not gone from home, for he would be able to tell us what to do now. He always knows what to do, but he was not there to ask. I look at her: her hands are clenched over the saddle horn until the knuckles show white, and she takes deep breaths every now and then, as if a scream keeps rising up to the top of her throat and she has to keep swallowing it back. She will not look at me.

I wish my daddy were here. I wish he had not gone to Kentucky in search of the elk herds. If he had been home on those days before Christmas, we would not be here now, cloud-breathed and shivering, our horses breasting the snow drifts as we plough our way through the pass, heading for jail in Morganton.

Hemp rope shrinks when it is wet, and its grip numbs my wrists even more than the cold already has, but I do not complain, because if I began to speak I might never stop.

I see you looking at me, Constable Charlie Baker. I know you of old. Your daddy fought in the Revolution, and your brother is the justice of the peace, so you have land and position, but for all that you are a runty fellow with never a smile for ary soul. Constables get to thinking they are better than other folks. You used to come to dances at George Young’s, but you never did dance. You came to the cabin raisings in Hollow Poplar and Grassy Creek, and you’d work as hard as any man there, but when the toil was over and the eating and the dancing began, you’d hang back, bashful to speak to the girls. You weren’t as handsome as my Charlie, and though I saw you looking at me a time or two, you never asked me to sit supper with you. You never asked me to dance. Maybe you figured you’d never cut out a young buck like Charlie Silver, and maybe you were right. Now you are wondering what would have happened if you had. If I had chosen Charlie Baker instead of Charlie Silver? Would you have saved me, or would you be laying in three graves in a mountain churchyard, wishing you had never seen my face?

CHAPTER TWO

“I guess he’s all right.” Martha Ayers was on duty break, eating a quick supper at the diner with Deputy Joe LeDonne, who was scheduled to work until eleven. “He’s not as bony-looking as he was, and his color’s good. He’s going to start raring to come back to work any day now.”

“Let him,” said LeDonne. “It would probably help him take his mind off himself. Besides, we could use the help.”

“His mind isn’t on himself, Joe. Spencer is brooding about this upcoming execution. They’ve asked him to be one of the witnesses—sheriff of the prisoner’s home county—and he says he has to go, but you can tell that he’s just making himself sick about it.” She looked with disfavor at the lump of mashed potatoes and the congealing brown gravy that seeped down toward the green beans and meat loaf. She pushed the plate away with a sigh.
I feel as tired as Joe looks,
she thought.

“Fate Harkryder,” LeDonne was saying. “I read about the scheduled execution in the
Chronicle.
Paper said he was local. I didn’t realize that Spencer knew him, though. He’s been on the row a long time.”

“Spencer was Nelse Miller’s deputy, remember? He’s the one who arrested this guy. I think he had all but forgotten about him—and now this. It couldn’t come at a worse time. Spencer’s just out of the hospital, trying to recover from a wound that almost killed him, and now the state comes up with this business. He’ll worry himself sick over it. You know how he is.” She reached for her coffee cup, saw that it was empty, and set it down again. Without a word, LeDonne handed her his. Martha smiled her thanks. “It’s just bad luck, is all,” she said, sighing. “Out of all the men Tennessee has got on death row, they have to pick this guy to go first.”

“It didn’t surprise me much that it’d be him, though,” said LeDonne.

“Why not? There are about a hundred men on death row. It could have been any of them.”

“
Any
of them?” There was no amusement in Joe LeDonne’s smile. “Hardly that. This will be Tennessee’s first execution in more than thirty years. They’re going to choose that first prisoner very carefully—very
politically.
It’s not going to be a woman, even if there’s one eligible to be executed.
Ladies first
does not apply to the electric chair. It can’t be any of the new guys, because the public will say it’s unfair to execute one of them ahead of fellows who have been there for decades. And it’s not going to be a black man, because the death penalty is a sticky enough issue as it is, without leaving yourself open for a charge of racism. You don’t want to enrage any special-interest groups if you can help it. So you check the list of condemned prisoners and you find a poor white mountain boy with no money and no political influence, and there’s your pigeon. Nobody’s going to kick up a fuss when he’s put to death. Nobody cares what happens to poor Southern whites. Nobody gets fired or takes a beating in the press for using words like
redneck
and
hillbilly.
When you think about it, Fate Harkryder was the perfect choice for the electric chair. A nobody without a cause.”

“You won’t make me feel sorry for him,” said Martha. “No matter why they picked him to go first, he killed somebody, and the jury said to execute him. Some people might say that Fate Harkryder got twenty more years of life than he was entitled to.”

LeDonne nodded. “You’ll get no argument from me. I was just pointing out the logic of it to you.”

“All right then.” The silence stretched on longer than Martha could stand it, so she said, “Spencer asked me to bring him some books on Frankie Silver.”