The Ballad of Frankie Silver (9 page)

His father’s sister was the family correspondent. Her spelling was as haphazard as her narrative skills, but at least she made the effort two or three times a year, which is more than the rest of them did. Scrawled pencil notes on lined paper informed him of the birth of a child to cousins he dimly remembered as infants themselves, or the smudged pages wished him a merry Christmas, with a spidery postscript enumerating the Harkryders’ car troubles, job losses, and the illnesses of aging relatives. As if he cared. They were all like characters in a movie he had seen once and only vaguely recalled, without any real certainty about the names or their function in the story. In his memory, time in east Tennessee stood still. Hamelin was a sleepy little seventies community still peopled by folks who were old when he was seventeen and his brothers were still young men in their twenties, with unlined faces and thick dark hair. He knew that they had grown older, as he had in the years since he had seen them. They were as old now as his father had been back then, but somehow his mind would not adjust his memories to accommodate the aging process. He could not picture Tom’s cold steel eyes looking out of their daddy’s furrowed face, or Ewell with Mama’s aging dumpling chins and graying hair. His brothers still grinned out at him from Technicolor day-dreams as swaggering youths on the brink of manhood.

Tom and Ewell.

Tom was the oldest, a dark-haired banty rooster with a look of sleepy indifference that masked his intensity. That vacant stare had stood him well in poker games and bar fights. His opponents thought that he would be easy pickings, and by the time they cottoned on to their mistake, it was usually too late.

Ewell … Mama’s side of the family. Bigger, soft-bodied, with heavy-lidded eyes and fleshy lips, and always that look of
wanting
something. He had looked at girls in church, cars on the highway, and deep-fried drumsticks on other people’s plates with that same naked hungry stare.

Tom and Ewell. How long had it been since he’d heard from them? There had been a few letters at first. Just after Fate had been sent away to prison, Ewell sent him a couple of postcards that said things like
Cheer up, kid! The lawyers won’t give up. They’re bound to get you out.
Eventually. Ewell didn’t seem to mind about “eventually,” since it was not his life trickling away behind cinder-block walls. Fate wondered, sometimes, who Ewell had turned out to be, but he didn’t much care about it one way or the other. Not enough to try to find out. Ewell had drifted away from home, and the family had lost touch with him—not that any particular effort was made by the Harkryders or Ewell to maintain the ties. Maybe he had done well and wanted no reminders of his hillbilly relatives. Maybe he finally had enough money to buy all the things he lusted after in the catalogues and the mall displays. Or maybe he was already dead. It was all the same to Fate. Ewell wasn’t real anymore.

After the trial Tom did a stint in the army, and ended up with an infantry company in Korea.
I reckon we must be in about the same boat
, Tom had written him.
Both of us government prisoners, only they
want
me to kill people. It rains here all the time. Rains ’til your feet rot in your socks. You probably eat better than I do.…
Fate couldn’t remember if he’d bothered to answer.

At first he had thought a lot about his brothers. During the first months of his imprisonment, rage had been his warmth, his comforter, and his friend. He would look at the wall, trying to shut out the ceaseless noise of the cell block, and he would imagine his brothers eating hamburgers at the Dixie Grill, or walking the October woods with rifles in search of deer, or burying their faces in the breasts of sweet-smelling doe-eyed girls. In his imaginings they were always laughing, always free. Fate wanted to destroy them. He would escape from prison, he thought, and he would put a gun barrel into Tom’s grinning mouth, and he would make the laughter stop. Or he would recant. Break the silence. Tell what happened that night, but tell it a different way, so that they, not he, would be shut away here until they faded away into nothingness. Except that no one would believe him this time. Nobody cared about the truth anymore—if, in fact, they had ever cared at all. The trial was finished, the sentence was passed, and now it was all over but the waiting.

His brothers were beyond his reach now. Gradually he had come to accept that. Eventually the rage flickered out, to be replaced for a while by sweeter memories of home and family. Fate lived for a while on scenes from his boyhood. There hadn’t been many happy memories of home, but the few that could be lit with the softer light of reflection he replayed over and over again in his mind until they became a tapestry of warmth and laughter, and the other, darker truths lay discarded and forgotten in the bottom of his mind. He subsisted for months on snapshot recollections: he was six, wobbling down the blacktop on a homemade bike, built by Tom from scraps and scrounged (perhaps stolen) parts.… He was eight, in overalls and barefoot on a cold, wet rock, fishing in the creek with Tom and Ewell, the spring woods ablaze with redbud.… Ten, chugging his first beer in the cool darkness of the smokehouse, Ewell laughing while he choked and sputtered on the bitterness. Tom stood by with his sleepy-eyed smile, looking as if he were somewhere else.

After a year or so, those memories wore out. They became so tattered with replaying that the magic leeched out of them, and they no longer had the power to take him away from The Walls. Sometimes other, harsher memories crept in to taunt him with glimpses of Tom and Ewell that he would rather not recall. Little by little he let go of the other life, as the voices faded and the faces dimmed.

Only here was real.

He knew every arch of the land and every tree by now. The hill was forested with elms and pine—not the oak, and ash, and hickory trees of home. In the springtime the elm pollen turned the prison into a wheezing nest of watery-eyed allergy sufferers, but Fate didn’t mind. He had no adverse reaction to the elms, only a mild resentment that they were not the familiar trees of home. He had been staring at that puny middle Tennessee ridge for years now, ever since he was moved from The Walls to Tennessee’s new maximum-security prison, Riverbend. At first he had welcomed the change of scenery, and he had stared at the hill on the curve of the river like a starving man, trying to will the ridge to transform itself into one of the mist-shrouded mountains back home.

Prison is a village, and now it was his hometown. He had lived here for twenty years, and soon now he would die here.

BURGESS GAITHER

Habeas Corpus

Frankie Silver and her mother and brother were under lock and key in the wooden house that served as Morganton’s jail, and all the town was talking about the dreadful crimes that had happened in the wild land beyond the mountains. The old folks harked back to the time of the Indian raids forty years ago, and those of a religious turn of mind quoted Scripture verses about demons in mortal form. It would be two months before that fair-haired girl and her kinfolk would answer for the crime, and I wondered where an impartial jury could be found in all of Burke County, and who among my colleagues would be fool enough to defend them. Surely he would never draw up a deed or will for an upstanding client again after linking his name with the infamous one of Frankie Silver. I was well out of it, I thought, for having taken the clerkship instead of establishing a private law practice.

The morning after Constable Charlie Baker brought his prisoners down the mountain to Morganton, he headed home again, back past Celo Mountain and into the valley of the Toe River, named for the legendary Cherokee maiden Estatoe, a star-crossed Juliet of the Indian nation. It was a good day’s ride up the Yellow Mountain Road even in high summer. Now, with a foot of snow on the trail, and winds like knife blades whipping through the passes, it was bound to be a bitter journey, but at least the constable could travel faster and easier in his mind without three dangerous prisoners in tow.

Before he left Morganton, though, Charlie Baker must have spent some time in Mr. McEntire’s tavern—fortifying himself for the long ride back over the mountains. No doubt an innkeeper’s bill for lodging, food, and drink (mostly the latter) would be submitted to the county treasurer with the constable’s record of expenses for bringing in the prisoners. Charlie must have told his tale many times before the innkeeper’s fire, and I’ll wager that he bought very few of his own whiskeys. By the time Baker and his companion had set their horses westward on the Yellow Mountain Road, the town was humming with the news of the gruesome murder in the west county.

With all the conviction of eyewitnesses, the tavern gossips recounted the grim tale of the finding of poor young Charlie Silver: bits of his bones and skin in the fireplace ashes, and sundry limbs and body parts scattered about the woods near the cabin. They never did find all of him. The snow was still deep, and general opinion was that bits of the corpse would continue to turn up well into the April thaw, when the last of the spring snowmelt revealed the most deeply covered pieces.

“They buried what they found,” one traveler remarked. “But there’ll be more come spring.”

“Reckon they’ll have to start over,” said another.

Even greater than the unseemly interest in the gory details of the tragedy was Morganton’s fascination with the widow—and accused slayer—of the murdered man. The jailer’s wife had done her share of gossiping as well, letting all and sundry know that a handsome young woman was locked away in the upstairs jail cell. News of Frankie Silver overshadowed talk of the other unfortunates, her kinfolk, for a mature woman and a youth were less interesting subjects for speculation.

Even my Elizabeth pressed me for details about the case, but I was able to tell her only what I had heard from the constable, and even that I softened for the ears of a gentlewoman.

“They say that she cruelly murdered her young husband and chopped his body to bits,” said Elizabeth. She had met Constable Presnell’s wife Sarah on the street and had stopped to “pass the time of day,” the term used by our womenfolk for the giving and receiving of local gossip. “Can this be true, Burgess?”

“That is for a jury to decide,” I said, hoping to deflect her attention from the matter. “There are two other souls in custody for the crime.”

“But the body was found in pieces?”

“Constable Baker said that it was,” I said grudgingly. My efforts to protect my wife from the unpleasantness of this case were proving futile, thanks to the incessant curiosity of the town folk.

Elizabeth leaned forward, her eyes shining, eager for news. “And you have met this creature, Burgess? What was she like?”

“She is small and fair. No more than eighteen years of age. She spoke but little. I saw no hint of madness in her.” I shrugged. “She seemed like any backwoods girl.”

“So she is not mad.” Elizabeth considered this. “That makes the story all the more strange. Whyever can she have done it, then? Or do you think her brother did it to protect her honor?”

“I have heard nothing to implicate the boy,” I admitted. “He is but fifteen, I think.”

“And the mother?”

“Little has been said about her. It is the young widow Silver who was caught in a lie, saying that her husband was gone from home when in fact he lay in pieces within the cabin.”

Elizabeth had obviously heard these details before, for she evinced no dismay upon hearing the particulars from me. “Perhaps her husband was paying court to another woman? That is the only reason I can think of to take an ax to him.”

“I shall take your warning to heart, madam,” I said, smiling.

“See that you do, Burgess Gaither,” said Elizabeth, and she laughed at my expression of mock alarm. But the levity left her almost at once. “It is a terrible crime. Do you know what her motive was?”

“The trial is two months away, Elizabeth,” I said. “Let us not convict her or her family just yet. You are a lawyer’s daughter. Must I remind you that it is the job of the prosecution—not the town gossips or the clerk of court—to fix upon a motive?”

“I think it must have been jealousy,” said my wife, as if I had not spoken. “Men are too cruel. Perhaps he was unfaithful to her. And I have heard that the unfortunate couple has a child. Was anything said about that?”

“The prisoner has a baby girl, according to Constable Baker.”

“Poor child! Is it imprisoned with its mother, then? Have you seen it?”

“No. Frankie Silver had no child with her. I suppose it is with its father’s family.”

“How cruel for both mother and infant!” cried Elizabeth. I knew that she was thinking of our own child William, who was not much older than the Silver baby, and it made me shiver to think that any fellow feeling could exist between my wellborn wife and that ignorant girl in Will Butler’s jail. I could not imagine William deprived of his parents and left with a legacy of shame, and I wondered what would become of the child of the murderess.

“Do not forget the fate of the baby’s poor young father,” I said. “Charlie Silver was nineteen, and his family grieves for him, you may be sure.”

“A pretty young woman with a baby daughter,” said Elizabeth. “How could she have committed such a crime?”

“They live in a savage wilderness. They are not like the gentlefolk in your society, my dear. How can we hope to understand their ways?”

*   *   *

Two days later I was back in my office, working once more on county legal business. As clerk of court, I had deeds and wills to record, and a thousand points of law to commit to memory, for I was expected to advise the judge and members of counsel in the coming term of the circuit court. My father-in-law had forty-four years in which to make himself an authority on the law and the affairs of the county, while I had only a few months’ time to prepare to succeed him in a competent fashion that would reflect well upon his choice of a successor.

Once more my labors were interrupted by more pressing business.

I heard the outer door of the courthouse open and slam shut again, and then the sound of hobnailed boots clattering across the oak floor of the courtroom. I sighed and put down my pen. “Come in!” I called out. My office door was ajar, and presently I saw it pushed open, and a man red-faced in furs and buckskin glared in at me.