The Ballad of Frankie Silver

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “More likely she’d have got all three of them hanged,” said Nora Bonesteel. “The law was in the hands of the townspeople, you know, but the Stewarts were frontier folk. They must have figured there was no telling what townspeople would do.”

  “There’s still some of that,” said Spencer. He stopped and listened. The woods were completely silent. No birds sang. No gnats swarmed above the damp earth. “She was brave, wasn’t she?” he said at last. “Frankie never told who cut up the body, and she never said who helped her escape. She died protecting her family.”

  “It must have been hard to die like that, wondering if the truth might have saved you.”

  “She tried to speak on the gallows. They asked her if she had any last words, and according to eyewitnesses-there was a lawyer named Burgess Gaither who told the story years later-they asked Frankie Silver if she had any last words, and she stepped forward and started to speak. But her father was in the crowd, and he yelled out:Die with it in you, Frankie! And she stepped back, and was hanged without saying a word.”

  “It wouldn’t have saved her then. He knew that.”

  “That’s what her father was saying to her then,” said Spencer. He pictured the grizzled old man, surrounded by shouting strangers, staring up at his daughter with the rope around her neck, and he’s ashamed that his sorrow is mixed with fear for what she might say.Die with it in you. Mr. Stewart was saying: “We can’t save you, Frankie. We did all we could. We tried to keep you from getting caught, but the blood would tell. Then we hired you a lawyer and paid for the appeal, but we lost the case. We even broke you out of jail. We can’t save you.Don’t take the rest of the family down with you. ”

  “Yes.”

  Die with it in you.Spencer shivered in the pale sunshine. “I have somewhere to go tomorrow,” he said softly.

  “Yes.”

  “I have to go to Nashville and watch a man die in the electric chair. I put him there.”

  The old woman nodded. Her face showed no trace of surprise or alarm. She began to retrace their steps back to the logging trail. It was time to go back.

  Spencer followed her back through the tall yellow-flowered weeds. He said, “I think I understand what bothered Nelse Miller about the case now. I know why Frankie Silver has been on my mind.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will I be able to save him?”

  Nora Bonesteel turned to look at the sheriff. “Knowing is one thing,” she said. “Changing is another.”

  It was nearly three o’clock when Spencer reached the sheriff’s office. “We’ve finished interrogating the suspect,” LeDonne told him. “He confessed. I think there’s some mental deficiency there, so he’ll probably end up in a treatment facility.”

  “Did you ask him about the Harkryder case?” asked Spencer.

  “Yeah. It happened before he was born. He never heard of it. There’s a press conference at four. Do you feel up to conducting it?”

  Spencer knew that he should. Elected officials have to stay visible to let their constituents know they’re on the job. He shook his head. “It was your case,” he said. “You and Martha handle it. I just came back to get the information you ran down for me on my case.”

  LeDonne handed him a folder. “You don’t have much time,” he said.

  “No. But at least I know who to ask.”

  His old desk felt strange to him now, after weeks away from duty. He saw that the plant in his window looked better, since he had not been around to pour cold coffee into it, and there was a tidiness to his desktop that made him uneasy. He read through the laser-printed sheets in the folder, making notes as he went. It was coming together now. Everything was beginning to make sense, but still he had no proof.

  He picked up the phone and dialed a number in Kentucky. He wished he had time to go in person, but there were only hours remaining. “Tom Harkryder, please,” he said when the ringing stopped. “Mr. Harkryder, this is Sheriff Arrowood from Wake County, Tennessee. I’d like to talk to you about your brother.”

  There was an intake of breath at the other end of the phone, and then a sigh. “I can’t help you with Ewell,” drawled the voice. “Bailing him out is a waste of money. Let him sleep it off.”

  “I meant your other brother, Tom. Lafayette. Remember him?”

  After another pause, Tom Harkryder said, “I can’t help him, either.”

  “I think you could,” said the sheriff. “I think you could save his life-if you told what really happened on the mountain that night twenty years back.”

  “Fate said he was innocent. The damned jury didn’t believe him.”

  “I believe him-now. He’s scheduled to die tomorrow night. If you meet me in Nashville, I can get us in to see the governor, and we can stop the execution.”

  “By telling them what?”

  “Tell them who killed Mike and Emily. It’s your brother’s only chance.” The silence dragged on so long that Spencer finally said, “Mr. Harkryder-Tom-are you there?”

  The voice whispered, “I don’t believe I can help you,” and the line went dead.

  Chapter Nine

  S O NOW WE KNEW.

  Spencer Arrowood wondered if Constable Charlie Baker had known the truth back in 1832, and if he had ever been tempted to use that knowledge to save Frankie Silver.

  Maybe the constable had known a lost cause when he saw one.

  The six-hour drive to Nashville had never seemed longer, but at least the sheriff knew where he was going. Someone from Riverbend had faxed him directions with his final instructions for attending the execution (“no cameras, no recording devices…”). The sheriff did not play the radio for fear that every country song would sound like an omen. Instead he tried to concentrate on I-40, rather than on the jangle of possibilities that crowded his mind. He had finally received the information he’d asked LeDonne to find for him, and he had spent much of the previous evening making telephone calls and assembling the paperwork on the case. He was already weak from his injury, and he got little enough rest, but he told himself that he would not have been able to sleep anyhow.

  It was 7A.M. By the time he reached Nashville, Spencer Arrowood would have nine hours to save a life.

  From I-40W, he took the Robertson Road exit, turning right onto Briley Parkway, and onto Centennial Boulevard. The exit from Centennial put him in sight of “The Walls,” Tennessee’s Gothic-looking old prison, a nightmare in red brick, which had closed its doors to real prisoners in 1989, when the new penitentiary was completed. Now only movie stars in shapeless prison garb walked its corridors while the cameras rolled. The state rented out the old facility on a regular basis to film producers, so that the old building spent its declining years in a grotesque parody of its former existence. Now people only pretended to die there.

  The real maximum-security prison of the state of Tennessee did not look like Hollywood’s idea of a penitentiary. The new prison, Riverbend, would never look the part.

  Centennial Boulevard led to Cockrill Bend Industrial Road, past the MTRC (Middle Tennessee Reclassification Center), where new prisoners were evaluated and assigned to various state facilities-and finally, on a wide bend in the Cumberland River, for which it was named, lay Riverbend itself. Riverbend Maximum Security Institution might have been a community college or a prosperous modern elementary school except for the high chain-link fences and the loops of razor wire surrounding the inner compound. Once past the repetitive, ironclad security of code words stamped on one’s hand and a succession of locked doors at short intervals, the place had a peaceful, rural look about it, as if the menace of the old days had been replaced by a brisk, impersonal efficiency. The one-story brick buildings were connected by concrete pathways set in a green lawn, and the view, glimpsed from between buildings, was of the bend in the river and the high wooded hill on the other side.

  Spencer parked in the lot outside the main entrance and sat for a few moments in his car, collecting his thoughts and wishing he’d stopped for coffee somew
here along the way. It was past one o’clock, and he still hadn’t eaten anything. He couldn’t spare the time, he thought. The execution was scheduled for eleven o’clock that night. He wondered how persuasive he would have to be to get them to let him in early. The badge should do it, though; badges opened a lot of doors.

  At the glass-covered reception booth, he had to give his name and show them the paperwork relating to his being summoned as a witness to the execution, but no one seemed to think it odd that he wanted to meet the warden. He told them that he was unarmed, and they gave him a clip-on red badge and told him to wait. After only a few minutes, he was taken down the left-hand hallway and ushered into the warden’s office, past an outer room containing a wall-sized aerial photo of Riverbend and its surroundings.

  “I’d like to speak to the prisoner,” he said, as soon as the preliminary greetings were out of the way.

  The warden raised his eyebrows. “You’re one of the witnesses, aren’t you, Sheriff?”

  Spencer Arrowood nodded. “Wake is Mr. Harkryder’s home county. In fact, I was the arresting officer.”

  “That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “And you want to see him today?”

  The sheriff nodded. “Today.” They both knew there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow for Fate Harkryder.

  In the long silence that followed, Spencer studied the walls of the warden’s office. The room might have belonged to a college president or an official in a small-town bank except for the two framed drawings on the wall, childlike renderings of the prison, with little stick-figure guards manning large, carefully drawn weapons from the rooftop. The sketches were signed “James Earl Ray.”

  “I see. You want to talk to Mr. Harkryder now.” The warden was watching him closely, waiting for the explanation to tumble out, but Spencer said nothing. Interrogation was an old game to him, easier than chess.

  “Fate Harkryder is going to die tonight, Sheriff,” the warden said at last. “And I want him to go peacefully. He’s been a good prisoner here. No trouble. Kept to himself. I owe him the courtesy of death with dignity. So if you have some old score to settle…”

  “No. I’d just like to talk to him.”

  “Well, it’s up to him. It’s his last day on earth, and a man ought to have a say in who he sees or doesn’t see at a time like this. You arrested him. You’ve come to watch him die. In his place, I don’t believe I’d relish the sight of you, Sheriff. But I’ll tell you what: I’ll send one of the guards in to ask Mr. Harkryder if he wants to see you or not, and we will both abide by his decision. Agreed?”

  Spencer nodded. “Can I send a message with the guard?”

  “All right,” said the warden. “A verbal one. Make it short. What do you want us to say to Mr. Harkryder?”

  “Tell him I’ve been talking to Frankie Silver.”

  The forty acres of Riverbend were nestled into the curve of the Cumberland River: fourteen buildings, encircled by a road and surrounded by two twelve-foot fences whose separate electronic systems for detection of movement and vibration secured the area. The fences were separated by a no-man’s-land of gravel and razor wire. There were no guard towers at the facility, but a twenty-four-hour mobile unit patrolled the perimeter. Only Building Seven, the administration building, lay outside the fences, but its sally port, the one entrance to the prison itself, was the focus of intense security.

  A guard checked Spencer’s name badge and stamped his hand with the fluorescent code word of the day. No one was permitted in or out of the prison grounds without the code word on the back of his hand, illuminated by a sensor gun pointed at the spot by yet another guard.

  The code words were short. They changed every day. Today’s code word wasowl. Very appropriate, Spencer thought, studying the three glowing letters on his hand. The call of a hoot owl was considered a sign of death by the old-timers up home. The hoot owls should be calling tonight. There was death in the air.

  A pleasant-looking man, who might have been the vice principal of an elementary school for all his lack of menace, accompanied the sheriff through the metal detector, past the checkpoint, through the two electric gates that opened consecutively, and into the compound.

  Fate Harkryder had sent back word that he would see Sheriff Arrowood of Wake County. Spencer wondered if the name meant anything to him after all these years.

  “How many inmates are here?” asked Spencer, who was tired of the silence.

  “Six hundred and sixty-eight,” his guide answered. “Ninety-nine on death row. There are six units housing prisoners. That small building to your far left as we passed through the gates is the industry building, Two-A. There the inmates who are qualified to work put in their hours at assigned jobs.”

  “Like what?”

  “Printing. Data entry. Decals. If you buy a car in the state of Tennessee, the registration is sent to you by an inmate on death row. To your right is Building Nine: Food Services and Laundry.” They had reached the one-story brick building beyond the second electronic gate. “Building Eight,” said the guide. “We’ll check in again here.”

  “What is Building Eight?”

  “Security, and visitation. It looks like an airport waiting room.”

  Spencer nodded. “I’ll see him in there?”

  “No. The execution chambers are just behind the back wall of the visiting room.”

  Spencer held up his hand to the electronic sensor.Owl flashed green in the light, and then vanished.Owls, thought Spencer. Once, when he was nine, Spencer and his older brother Cal had talked an old mountain man named Rattler into taking them owling, because they were still too young to hunt. Rattler walked the Arrowood boys across every ridge over the holler, teaching them to look for the sweep of wings above the tall grass in a field and to listen for the sound of the waking owl, ready to track his prey by the slightest rustle, the shade of movement. He taught them how to make owl calls, and they became so good at it that they could not tell if an owl was calling to them out of the forest or one of their own.Look out, Rattler had told them.When the owl calls your name, it means death.

  Later on we became owls,Spencer thought. Cal went to Vietnam and died in a jungle of screeching birds, and Spencer grew up to be a lawman, hunting prey of his own by the slightest sound or by one false move. A lot of people had heard him call their name.

  He stared at the tile floor, the institutional cinder-block walls, and at the display case of carved ship models made by inmate craftsmen. “I thought Mr. Harkryder would be on death row.”

  “He was housed in Unit Two. It’s directly behind this building. But in the days before his execution, a prisoner is moved to a holding cell in the back of Building Eight. We’ve never done an execution before at Riverbend, but the procedures have all been outlined so that we would be ready.”

  They walked through the door and into the empty visitation hall, past a series of functional sofas and chairs of plastic and steel arranged in conversational groupings so that twenty or thirty sets of visitors could have a few feet of privacy with the inmate they came to see. They stopped at another metal door on the back wall. The guide unlocked it. “There’s another way in,” he said, “but I thought we’d go this way, since Mr. Harkryder is already in his cell. This is where you’ll be tonight.”

  The witness room. Rows of metal conference-room chairs facing a plate-glass window covered by blinds. Straight in front of them was another door. The pleasant-looking man pushed it open. “You might as well see it now, Sheriff.” He stepped over the threshold and stood aside so that Spencer could look into the bright, empty room.

  Almost empty.

  A plain wooden chair sat in the center of the room.

  The guide motioned him to the door on the left wall. “This leads to the hallway,” he said. “You know: the last mile. The other way is the control room, where the machinery is located, and there’s also a room there for the equipment of the prison telephone system. Would you lik
e to see it?”

  The guide had given this tour many times before, and an execution had never happened yet, so perhaps the air of unreality about this place still lingered for him. Spencer declined the invitation to see the other rooms. There was too little time.

  They emerged in a tiled corridor that reminded Spencer of the Sunday school building of a modern church. The open door on the left revealed a small kitchen. You could have had a wedding reception or a Scout meeting in the bright empty room beyond-except for the wooden chair in the center.

  A few paces past the kitchen doorway, Spencer saw the only three barred cells in Riverbend. The ordinary prisoners’ rooms had blue metal doors that they could lock with their own keys. Building Four, where the troublemakers were kept, had solid cell doors with pie flaps for food to be taken to the prisoner, and bars enclosing the various areas of that building as a security precaution, but no cells like these. These were jail cells, much more familiar to a county sheriff than to a modern prison guard.

  Inside the last barred cell, a man in jeans and a blue cotton work shirt sat on the metal bunk, writing on a yellow legal pad. An armed guard sat on a folding chair in the hall, watching the cell with an air of uneasy boredom.

  Spencer stepped up to the bars. “Thank you for seeing me,” he said.

  Fate Harkryder looked up. His hair was gray now, and there were lines in his face, but his eyes were unchanged. He set aside the legal pad and walked over to the bars.

  The guide touched Spencer’s arm. “I’ll be at the end of the hall,” he said. “Don’t be long.” The guard in the metal folding chair contrived to look as if he were oblivious to the scene in front of him.

  “I needed to talk with you,” said Spencer.

  The prisoner nodded. “Frankie Silver,” he said. “I hadn’t thought about her in years. My daddy’s sister married a man from over in Mitchell County. My Uncle Steve. He used to sing that old song sometimes when he wasn’t too drunk to remember the words.This dreadful, dark and dismal day/ Has swept my glories all away… ” Fate Harkryder smiled bitterly. “Sure fits the mood for today, don’t it?”