Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

“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?