Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

His lawyer had just left. This one was an earnest kid out of Nashville who was working pro bono because he claimed to hate the death penalty. He had offered his services when the state announced its intention of executing Fate Harkryder in six weeks’ time. Maybe he was a do-gooder, or maybe he wanted to get his name in the paper by representing an infamous man. It was all the same, though. Fate didn’t think there was much the kid could do, but for zero legal fees, he was welcome to try. What the hell.

Fate had lost count of the lawyers he’d gone through in twenty years. Some of them had only been voices on the phone, staying on the case just long enough to find some other sucker to take it off their hands. None of them stayed long. Fate wasn’t notorious enough to make a name for an ambitious litigator, and his family was too poor to make it worth anybody’s while to defend him. That had been the trouble to begin with. The court-appointed lawyer at his original trial went through the motions of defending him, but his efforts had been all but useless.

He sat on a concrete bench outside Pod Five and looked up at the hill beyond the river. The sun was warm against his skin, and he yawned and stretched, savoring the smell and feel of early summer. If he kept his eyes closed, he could picture the homestead back in east Tennessee. He wondered if it had changed much in the decades that he’d been gone. Probably not. The land had been farmed out two generations before he was born. Who’d want it now? He hadn’t even seen any pictures of the home place since he left, and what little news he had from the relatives at home never touched on the farm or the changing seasons, which they all took for granted, while he, deprived of it forever, would have traded them all for a hill and a meadow.

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 daydreams 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.