Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

I did not speak much about the Silver case, for in truth there was nothing to do but wait upon the pleasure of the Supreme Court in Raleigh, but my reticence about the case did not banish it from the thoughts of the ladies.

One breathless afternoon as I sat in the library at Belvidere reading over a packet of new books just arrived from England by way of Wilmington, Miss Mary Erwin appeared in the doorway, clad in a white morning dress trimmed with lace, and carrying a cloth-covered basket, but she looked no less formidable for this maidenly affectation. She is a spinster of six and thirty years, ten more than my wife, her sister Elizabeth. Some of the awful seniority of an elder sibling must have transferred itself to Miss Mary’s attitude toward me, for I always felt like a sweating, lumbering oaf in her presence, and I’ll swear that my tongue grew too big for my mouth at times when I had to speak with her.

I covered my confusion, of course, with bluff heartiness. “Good morning, Miss Mary!” I said gaily. “Are you off on a summer picnic to the wildwood?”

She looked at me as a cat might look at a worm. “No, Mr. Gaither,” she said. “I hope I have better things to do than waste my days in idleness.” She looked pointedly at the illustrated paper that I was reading, and I fought down the urge to stuff it under my coat. “May I trouble you for a few moments of your time?”

Her tone suggested that since I had nothing better to do than to read frivolous tripe, I might at least make myself useful by doing her bidding. I put the paper aside and rose to my feet with a heavy heart. “I am your servant, of course, Miss Mary.”

“Thank you.” She drew on her gloves with an air of brisk authority. “Catherine and I wish to go and see the prisoner, and we would like the escort of a gentleman to town, and to wait for us at the jail. You will suit the purpose admirably. You need not accompany us upstairs to the poor creature’s cell.”

“You wish to see… the prisoner? Mrs. Silver?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I would consider it a privilege as well as my duty to accompany you,” I said, inclining my head to suggest a courteous bow. I had been dreading this gambit for weeks, and now that it had finally come, I felt an odd mixture of apprehension and relief. I wondered what the squire would say about his daughters going to visit a murderess, and whether I should have to shoulder the blame for their excursion. Still, I thought I had better go to keep an eye on them. “Is the other Mrs. Gaither not to be of the party?”

I meant my wife, of course. Miss Mary’s sister Catherine is also Mrs. Gaither, as she is the widow of my late brother Alfred, and so she is doubly my sister-in-law, but my wife was apparently not included in the outing with her older sisters.

“Elizabeth has a dress fitting,” Miss Mary informed me. “She may go at another time. We have promised to report the details of our visit to the rest of the household.”

We sent for the open carriage, as the day was fine, and we trotted along the few miles to Morganton with little conversation passing among us. Catherine is a meek and gentle lady, almost midway between the ages of her sisters Mary and Elizabeth, but after a few remarks about the weather and other inconsequential topics, I find myself with nothing to say to her. I am always afraid that some chance remark of mine will remind her of poor Alfred, and I live in fear that I will induce a flood of tears whose tide I will be powerless to stem. I contented myself with smiling at poor colorless Catherine, swathed in her purple dress of late mourning. I hoped that my resemblance to Alfred would not make her weep, but she seemed to bear the sight of me calmly enough.

As we drew closer to town, I felt that it was necessary to issue a few words of instruction to my sisters-in-law about prison visitation. “Mrs. Silver may not wish to see you at all,” I cautioned them. “And if she does, the jailer will not want you to stay with her long, or to say anything that may upset her.”

“Quite the contrary,” Miss Mary called out above the clatter of the wheels. “We will set her mind at rest by telling her that petitions are being drawn up to secure her pardon from the gallows.”

“Now, you must not give the prisoner false hope, either,” I cautioned her. “It is cruel to make her believe that she will be saved from her punishment.”

“I hope I never say anything that I do not believe to be true,” she said reprovingly.

I saw that she really believed this, and so I did not smile, but I was thinking that no one could exist for even a day in our carefully polite society by telling the unvarnished truth. I kept silent for the remainder of the ride, which was itself a lie, for she thought that I agreed with her.

The Morganton jail was a two-story white house set in a well-kept lawn only a short distance from the courthouse. It was not the foul pit that one imagines for prisoners in Philadelphia or Boston-or even Raleigh, for that matter, but despite that, I suspected that it would seem terrible enough to my sisters-in-law. I wondered if I should prepare them for the scenes to come, but the set of Miss Mary’s jaw persuaded me to keep silent. The more unpleasant the experience, the more satisfaction the ladies would derive from having done their duty.

The carriage stopped in front of the jail, and after I had assisted my companions in dismounting, I went to advise the jailer of his distinguished afternoon visitors. “Miss Mary has brought a basket of food to the prisoner,” I told Mr. Presnell. “You may, of course, search the contents, but I assure you that it contains only bread and cheese, and, I believe, a slab of blackberry pie. I smelled it baking this morning at Belvidere.”

“Good wages for murder,” muttered Presnell, but I knew that he would not voice any complaints to the Erwin sisters, so I thanked him for allowing the visit and went back to fetch my sisters-in-law.

Miss Mary marched into the jail like a wolf on the fold and advanced toward the staircase with a fearless and deliberate tread, but Catherine shrank back at the doorway, and I saw that she had gone pale.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said, touching her elbow. “Frankie Silver is no older than your nephew Waightstill, and she is neither coarse nor mad. It will be all right. I shall go with you upstairs.”

Catherine whispered her thanks. “I thought…” she said. She took a deep breath and began again. “I came because I thought it might be a comfort to her to meet another woman who has lost her husband.”

I nodded, for I did not trust myself to speak. She is a kind woman, and she deserved more happiness in this life than Providence has seen fit to give her.

I indicated to Catherine that she should follow her elder sister up the narrow stairs, and that I would go last and carry the basket.

Mr. Presnell, who had gone up ahead of us, was waiting at the prisoner’s cell. He unlocked the door, which was an ordinary wooden door made of stout oak, with a square of bars set at eye level in the middle of it, so that the prisoner could be observed by the guard. “Don’t be long in there,” he said softly to me as I went past him. “Lice.”

We peered in at the straw-covered interior, which contained only a straw-filled mattress on a camp bed and two oaken buckets: a clean one for water and a foul-smelling one for waste. The prisoner was standing at the barred window looking out at the village, or perhaps at the mountains beyond.

“She stands there hour after hour,” Presnell remarked. “Just staring out through the bars.”

“So should I if I were forced to stay in this place,” said Miss Mary, who had overheard him. “At least the air from the window is fresher than the stench in here, and there is something to occupy the mind in the ever-changing view.”