Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

“Well, now we know where we are,” said Mr. Alexander cheerfully. “Let us proceed. Are you acquainted with the defendant Frances Silver?”

“I am,” she said in a low voice. “She was married to a kinsman of mine. My mother is the sister of Charlie’s father.”

“Did you hear Mrs. Silver speak of the disappearance of her husband?”

“I did.” An emphatic nod. “Last December I was visiting at Uncle Jacob’s cabin when Frankie came in to say that Charlie had not yet come home.”

“Did she say where he had gone?”

“She had already told the family that Charlie was gone the day before. She just came to say he wasn’t back yet. A day or so earlier he had gone over to George Young’s place. To get his Christmas liquor, according to her. Which was a lie.” Her tone spoke volumes about the insolence of one who could foully murder a man and then besmirch his memory with cruel falsehood. I saw the jurors glance at one another, though, and their expressions convinced me that all the men in the courtroom had thought in unison, “Maybe Charlie Silver didn’t go to George Young’s for liquor this time, but he had been on that errand often enough before.” After all, the family had accepted Frankie’s story without question. The neighbors had spent days searching the paths between the Silvers’ land and the Youngs’ homestead. It rang true. Charlie Silver was by all accounts a handsome, high-spirited young man, and it had been Christmastime, a season especially conducive to the imbibing of spirits. Going off to a local distiller for a jug of whiskey would have been a likely custom for an idle youth, but because Charlie Silver was dead, Nancy Wilson must stand up before God and Burke County and deny the possibility of such a thing. Saints had to be dead, according to the tradition of the ancient Church; now ordinary folk have gone them one better, and deem that all dead people have to be saints. It makes for considerable confusion in the courts of law, trying to sort out all the transgressors when no one will admit to any sinning.

“Did Mrs. Silver seem concerned about her missing husband?”

“I suppose she was. She looked like she had been crying.” Young Miss Wilson tossed her head. “She kept saying that she wished he’d come back, and then she would cry some more.”

“Did Mrs. Silver suggest that the family begin a search for her husband?”

Nancy Wilson nodded. “She said she was worried about him being out in the snowdrifts. She was afraid he’d catch his death, and said would we please ask the men to go and look for him.”

“Who was present when Mrs. Silver appeared to report her husband’s absence?”

Nancy Wilson ticked them off on her fingers. “Charlie’s stepmother and sisters, his brother Alfred and the rest of the young ’uns, and me.”

This testimony had been covered at the previous hearing by Miss Margaret Silver, the young sister of the murdered man. I wondered why she had not been called upon to repeat it at the trial. Mr. Alexander had not excused her in deference to her youth, because her cousin was not much older. More probably the prosecutor thought that Margaret would be cowed by the proceedings, and that she would not make a good witness. She might waver upon cross-examination. I remembered her rambling testimony at the earlier hearing, and the frightened look on her face as she stared out at the sea of strangers. Nancy Wilson, the iron maiden who took her place today, was a stronger witness, so armed with self-righteous indignation was she that the devil himself could not have made her falter.

“Did Mrs. Silver ask any of the women to accompany her back to her own cabin, since she was now alone?”

“Well, she may have asked Margaret and me, but we said the snow was too deep. We told her to bide a while with us, but she went on back.”

I stole a glance at Nicholas Woodfin, who must have known as well as I did that this was the chain of words that would hang his client, unless he could somehow dispel the power of this testimony. Frankie Silver had lied about her husband’s whereabouts, and the testimony of this young woman bore witness to that lie. I barely listened to the rest of the interrogation, so occupied was I in second-guessing Mr. Woodfin’s next move. I had not long to wait.

Nicholas Woodfin was courtesy itself to the state’s witness, but he stood perhaps a shade farther from her than he had from the old woodsman Jack Collis, and something in his expression conveyed the faintest distaste for the lady before him, as if he found her anger vulgar. “You were related to Charles Silver, I believe you said?”

She nodded.

“And no doubt you were quite attached to your handsome kinsman.” Something silky in his tone conjured up images of laughing adolescents chasing each other through blackberry patches and stealing kisses beneath a thicket of laurel. One could almost see young Nancy Wilson’s ardor turn to bitterness when Charlie’s roving eye fell upon the pale loveliness of little Frances Stewart. But Nicholas Woodfin said none of this in plain words, and what had not been spoken could not be denied.

Nancy Wilson looked away from the lawyer’s mask of respectful attention. “He was a good boy,” she said. “Too good for her . She was nobody.”

“And had you ever quarreled with Frankie Silver?”

The witness hesitated. “Not to say quarreled, ” she said at last. “Frankie Stewart thought a deal too much of herself, that’s all.”

“Was she hardworking?”

“And didn’t she let everybody know it, too? As if we’d feel sorry for her.”

“Was she a good mother?”

An impatient sigh. “She was tolerable.”

“And she was a faithful wife?”

A long pause. “I never heard different.”

Unlike Charlie. The unspoken words hung in the air, suggested only by a clever lawyer’s knowing smile. Nicholas Woodfin let the silence echo long enough to get inside everybody’s head, and then he dismissed the witness with a casual wave, indicating that he had no more use for her than Charlie ever did.

Had they been lovers? This dark, proud woman and the handsome, careless Silver boy? Perhaps, perhaps not. We would never know. Mr. Woodfin had no interest in letting us know. It was the seed of doubt he had meant to plant, and he was satisfied that he had done so to his client’s advantage. Still, I thought, the fact that Nancy Wilson had a metaphorical ax to grind did not mean that Frankie Silver had not used one in a more literal sense.

One of our own Morganton physicians, Dr. William Caldwell Tate, was the last witness before the recess. He is an affable young man, only just graduated from the South Carolina Medical College in Charleston, and back in Morganton to practice medicine alongside his older brother, Dr. Samuel Tate, who is not the Sam Tate that had served as foreman of the grand jury last week. The two Sam Tates are first cousins, and to the eternal vexation of future genealogists, no doubt, one Sam has married the sister of the other. (Anyone who can keep Morganton bloodlines straight can do square roots in his head.) Of young Dr. William Tate, suffice it to say: his mother was an Erwin.

In the cheerful, impersonal tone of all his kind (as if he did not have a skull, or brains to leak out, or a life that would be all too brief), Tate commented on the injuries as they were reported to him by Constable Baker. The young doctor had been chosen to make that arduous two-day journey over the mountains to examine the corpse because the more established physicians could not have been spared from the care of their own patients in the vicinity of Morganton. “We cannot neglect the living in order to see to the dead,” his brother had once remarked in another court case.