Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

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 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.”

“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.