“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
IGUESS 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 theChronicle. 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.”
“Anyof 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 cho
ose that first prisoner very carefully-verypolitically. 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 likeredneck andhillbilly. 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.”
“Who?”
Martha shrugged. “It’s an old murder case. North Carolina. It must be unsolved. Anyhow, he’s looking into it.”
“Oh. He must be bored if he’s looking for crimes to investigate.” He paused for a moment before he said, “Did you tell him about the current investigation?”
“No,” said Martha. “He’s fine where he is. And I’ve been keeping the newspaper away from him, too. Let him keep his nose in the history books for at least another week. I don’t want him to come back before he’s well enough to handle it.”
“But the similarities between the two incidents…”
Martha shrugged. “Coincidence. Anyhow, he’s too ill to concern himself with criminal investigation. We can handle it. I’ll get him his books on Frankie Silver. They will keep him busy, and if it keeps his mind off the execution and out of the office, so much the better.”
Fate Harkryder. Spencer didn’t want to think about him right now. He didn’t want to relive those hours at the floodlit campsite, and he didn’t want to think about the inevitable conclusion to that chain of events set in motion so long ago.
He stood at the sliding glass doors of his cabin, looking out on the folds of hills stretching away to North Carolina. The sight of the mountains in the morning sunshine always brought to mind the 121st Psalm:I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. Usually he found that gazing out at the mountains soothed him and made the concerns of the day fade away into the haze of geologic time. It was a spiritual experience that he could not explain, except to say that the vista gave him perspective and made his problems seem insignificant when measured against the eternity of the land itself.
He found himself thinking instead about Frankie Silver.
It had been twenty years, but Spencer still remembered standing beside Nelse Miller at the grave in the mountain churchyard on that bright summer day and feeling a chill as the old man talked about the death of Charlie Silver. On the drive back to Hamelin, Nelse had rambled on for nearly an hour about the nineteenth-century murder case and the events that followed, making a tale of it as mountain storytellers instinctively do. Spencer had forgotten most of the details of the story-the names of the witnesses and the attorneys had passed from his mind almost as soon as Nelse uttered them. He had spoken fluently, from long familiarity with the case, with never a moment’s hesitation in his recital. What Spencer chiefly remembered was the passion of the sheriff’s interest in that one incident and the power of the spell woven by the tale on the long drive back over the mountain. Nelse Miller seldom talked about his own experiences in law enforcement, and he showed only a perfunctory interest in high-profile crimes reported in the national news. It was only this one obscure, seemingly insignificant case that held him in thrall.
Back then, Spencer Arrowood had thought the story of Frankie Silver was only a captivating folktale, entertaining enough to pass the time on the way home, but nothing that he ever needed to think about again. The story held no lessons about criminal investigation that he could see, since forensic detection was all but nonexistent in those days, and despite Nelse Miller’s obsession with the case, he saw no chance of resolving its mysteries after so many years had passed. Spencer had forgotten about Frankie Silver. Sheriff Nelse Miller, by then retired and crippled with arthritis, died in 1984, his book about Frankie Silver unwritten, his questions unanswered.
He could have forgotten all about that little-known murder case if it weren’t for one thing that Nelse Miller had said. “There’s only two cases of mountain justice that I’m not happy with. One is that fellow you put on death row, and the other is Frankie Silver.”
And now she haunted him. It was nothing he wanted to talk about with anybody-except Nelse Miller, who was long dead. He would have understood the fascination of the story.
Three graves in a mountain churchyard.
Spencer wondered if his sudden interest in the case was merely a product of the boredom of an active man forced to sit still for the first time in his adult life, or if it was a displacement of his own anxiety about the approaching death of Fate Harkryder. His great-aunt Til would have said, “You are called to solve the mystery,” and he smiled at the memory of an old mountain woman and her simple faith. He would look into the case, he told himself, and of all the whys he had to consider in the matter of Frankie Silver, the one he resolved not to look into was the why of his own interest in her story.
Dr. Alton Banner was checking up on his patient in an after-hours visit to the sheriff’s mountain cabin. “I don’t generally make house calls these days,” he remarked as he examined the stitches on the wound. “It frightens the younger members of my profession. I made an exception in your case, however, because any man who is fool enough to get himself shot for trespassing is probably fool enough to try to drive himself into town for his doctor’s appointment.”
Spencer did not reply. Useless to argue that in “trespassing” he had been in the line of duty, enforcing a court order, or to protest that he felt well enough to end his convalescence. The old man had his own opinions on everything, and he was unlikely to be deterred by the facts as his patient saw them.
“I don’t know why you live up here anyhow,” Banner went on, as he continued to poke and prod his patient. “The road up this mountain is a sheet of glass in the wintertime. I wouldn’t even try it in a four-wheel drive. It’s damned near vertical, that’s what it is. You’re like all the rest of these mountaineers. Moonstruck over these hills, and willing to sacrifice damn near anything to stay in them. It’s incurable, though. Forty years in an east Tennessee medical practice has taught me that right enough. Incurable.”
“Well, aside from that, how am I?” asked the sheriff.
Alton Banner peered at Spencer over the top of his glasses. “That depends,” he said. “If you were planning to take a couple of weeks off and go to Wrightsville Beach, then I’d say you were making satisfactory progress, considering your age and your indifferent attitude toward your own health, but if you’re angling to get back in that patrol car, I would be forced to downgrade your condition to critical. Now, which is it?”
“Neither one at the moment. It’s just that they want me in Nashville six weeks from now.”
“Six weeks! Well, then. If you continue to progress as you have been, I see no problem with that. You won’t be prancing around like Garth Brooks, mind you, but I’d say that if you just want to drive over to the state capital for a meeting with the bureaucrats sometime next month, I could in good conscience allow that.�
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“I see.”
The toneless reply made Banner look up. “What’s the matter?” he said, peering at his patient. “Did I give you the wrong answer? If you want to skip a budget hearing, just say the word.”
“It’s more than that.” Spencer handed him the letter from the Department of Corrections.
Alton Banner scanned the letter. “Summoned… execution… six weeks-my God! Fate Harkryder! Hearing that name is like a goose walking over my grave. I haven’t thought about him in years.”
The sheriff nodded. “You remember, though, don’t you? You were there.”
“I was. I never will forget it.”
They sat in silence for a few moments, thinking back on a night that they both would have preferred to forget.
“That was the night of Emily Stanton’s murder. Gone before I got there, poor thing. You had to break the news to her parents, but I saw them at the trial. I remember her father asking me,Did she suffer? -and God help me, I took a deep breath and I lied to that man, because I couldn’t stand to utter the truth any more than he could stand to hear it.”
Spencer nodded. “They drove over from Wilmington the next day. So did the Wilson boy’s mother, but I can’t remember her very well. Just the Stantons.”
The flash of headlights on the front window and the crunch of gravel indicated that another visitor had arrived at the sheriff’s ridgetop home.
Dr. Banner pushed aside the curtain and peered out. “You’ve got visitors. Looks like Martha’s car,” he grunted. “Shall I make myself scarce?”
“No,” said Spencer. “She’s probably just bringing up some more mail from the office.”
“She’s got some woman with her,” the doctor announced.
“My mother?”
The Ballad of Frankie Silver Page 5