Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

“Mrs. Silver is quite delighted to hear of Governor Swain’s election to office,” Elizabeth remarked at breakfast one morning early in the new year of 1833. “My sister Mary tells me that she wept for joy when she was told.”

I replied that I had not realized that Mrs. Silver took such an interest in politics, particularly since she was not likely to live long enough to enjoy the governor’s performance.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “You are quite a bear this morning, Mr. Gaither,” she said. “Did last night’s rum punch not agree with you?”

“It is wearing out its welcome,” I admitted, “but that does not alter the fact that I am concerned about all the attention you ladies are paying Mrs. Silver. She is quite unused to the society to which you expose her in your visits, and I do not know what she makes of all of you. Still, she should be using this time wisely to prepare her soul for the Hereafter, and I think you ladies are at best a distraction from that purpose.”

Elizabeth laughed. “But she is not yet twenty! She has a long time to prepare for eternity.”

“She has until March, and perhaps six weeks thereafter, for preparations to be made, and the execution to be carried out. A sentencing hearing is merely a formality, Elizabeth. There will be no new evidence, no jury, no appeal. It is a matter of scheduling, nothing more. Her fate has already been decided.”

My wife favored me with a tolerant smile. “Her fate was decided before the new governor was appointed. Now, of course, everything has changed.”

“Nothing has changed.”

“But of course it has, dearest! David Swain of Asheville is now the governor of North Carolina. In short, he is one of us. And you must not forget that Mrs. Silver’s own attorney, Nicholas Woodfin, read law under Mr. Swain. A personal appeal can be made. That’s how these things are done.”

Elizabeth smiled at me, the gentle, condescending smile of an Erwin with four aces. Her grandfather Sharpe had been a member of the Continental Congress, and she counted generals, legislators, and wealthy planters in her bloodline. Who was I to tell her that she was mistaken? So I merely nodded and let it pass. I was thinking, though, that if Mistress Elizabeth Erwin Gaither took an ax to her husband, she could very well get herself pardoned by her father’s good friend the governor, but it was not so with Frankie Silver. All the influential supporters in the world could not make her a woman of substance. And the sheltering wing of the Erwin ladies might not be enough to save her.

SPENCER ARROWOOD had not been to church in many months, but this Sunday, despite his difficulty in getting around and the doctor’s misgivings about his leaving the house so soon, he had come. His family had belonged to the little white frame church for generations, and he felt that any thanks offered up for his continued existence should be said here. As usual, though, he came more with the intention of making additional requests than in thankfulness for mercies already bestowed.

The sight of so many people whom Spencer had known for most of his life was reassuring to him in his new awareness of mortality, as if their concern and good wishes could keep death at bay for a little while longer. He sat in the pew beside his mother, uncomfortably warm in his navy sport coat and tie, still pale and weak from his injuries, but trying to seem as if nothing were amiss. From time to time members of the congregation smiled and waved to him from neighboring pews, and he tried to smile back, but perhaps he had ventured out too soon. He felt light-headed, and impossibly tired from the short walk from the car to the sanctuary. It was as if old age had overtaken him in the course of an hour, but this time, when he was well again, he could go back to youth. He wondered what it would be like when he was old for good, past going back. Perhaps he would not live to find out.

When the service began, the comforting rhythm of the ritual washed over him without his being aware of the sense of the words. He stared up at the stained-glass window of the plump Victorian angel guiding a boy and girl over a bridge. As a child he had loved the radiant image, but its cloying sentimentality could not reach him now. He became distracted by the rhythms of his own body: the thud of heartbeat, the prickles of sweat on his forehead, the clump of bandage just above his waist which itched beneath his starched blue shirt. His body had become a clock ticking off the seconds of his allotted time until he reached the abyss, and the bridge that he would have to cross, angel or not.

He was thinking that in twelve more days Fate Harkryder would go to the electric chair. While the opening hymn was sung, Spencer was standing silent, oblivious to the words, working out the number of hours in twelve days. Another part of his mind was wondering if he ought to try to talk to the condemned man on the eve of the execution. What was there to say, though? Please tell me that you did it, so that I’ll feel better? Why should he be allowed to feel better when in 288 hours Fate Harkryder would feel nothing at all.

He felt regret at the thought of a man’s life being taken from him, and he forced an image of Emily Stanton’s body into his mind to remind him that this man deserved his death, but it did not lessen the uneasiness, and he realized that he was picturing the sullen adolescent that he had sent to prison years ago. Let him see the canting, frightened killer who had grown old and hardened in confinement, and perhaps he would resign himself to letting the man go. He would be able to watch it happen.

Spencer had been sitting there thinking about the Harkryder case for some time, while the voices of the other parishioners faded into a hum at the back of his mind, when he realized that he was no longer in the sanctuary of the white frame church. He was standing in the shadows on a trail in the deep woods, and a small blond girl in a white dress was squatting a few yards away from him in the stony shallows of a mountain stream. The creek, forever shaded by deep woods, would be more melted ice than water, and even in summer it would be so cold that wading more than a few feet along the streambed would make your legs ache and your feet tingle, then go numb.

The pale girl was washing a white cloth in the swift, silver water. Her hair was a faded gold, and she was small-boned, a white shadow in the filtered sunlight of the forest clearing. She was leaning over the stream, submerging the cloth in the bone-chilling water. She seemed not to feel the cold on her fingers. She scrubbed the stained cloth against a flat rock in the streambed, intent upon her work and indifferent to the observer. After a moment she looked up at him, without a smile or a flicker of expression, just a look that said he was there, and he knew that she was Frankie Silver.

He tried to move toward her, but he found that he could not. When he opened his mouth to call out to her, she looked straight at him with narrowed eyes and a cold smile. Then she lifted the white cloth out of the water, and he saw the bloodstains that she had been trying to wash away.

When he came to himself, he was standing with the rest of the congregation, and the last strains of a hymn were dying away into silence. Spencer saw that his hymnbook was open to “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” and his mother had placed her hand on his arm and was shaking him gently.

“I’m all right,” he murmured, rubbing his forehead to banish the last fragments of the dream. “I think I dozed off.”

“I told you it was too soon for you to be out!” she hissed back.

“No. I’m all right. I just have too much on my mind, that’s all.”

People were beginning to file out of the pews now, and he realized that the service was over. It seemed to him that only a few minutes had passed since he’d gone into the church. Several of his mother’s friends paused in the aisle to wish him well, and he shook white-gloved hands with a tentative smile. He hoped his mother had not invited company over for Sunday dinner. He was not equal to the small talk of village acquaintances.