Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

“Charlie’s parents, you mean? Yes. Some of the family still live there. You see that brownish cut in the hillside across the road, leading to the cabin? Mr. Silver said that was the path that Frankie took when she went to tell her in-laws that Charlie hadn’t come home. It’s still there after a hundred and sixty-five years.”

Nora Bonesteel did not turn to look at the worn path in the hillside. “It would be,” she said.

“I hoped that we could go to the cabin site. Mr. Silver said to walk on past the old church, around the curve in the paved road, and take the first logging road to the right.” Spencer looked doubtfully at the old woman. “It’s a bit of a hike, though.”

“I’m accustomed to walking.”

They threaded their way past the modern gravestones of latter-day Silvers and their kinfolk, and walked the few hundred yards along Route 80 to the dirt trail that led off into deep woods. “Mr. Silver said to follow that logging road into the woods about half a mile, but from there the way to the cabin site isn’t marked…”

Nora Bonesteel sighed. “I’ll know when to leave the road,” she told the sheriff.

Spencer looked at the thicket of trees lining the old logging road. The underbrush beneath the beech and oak groves was so thick that the ground was completely hidden. Walking through such a tangle of brush would be slow-going. He thought about Barbara Stewart, who had died from snakebite while she was out berry picking in these woods or near them, and he reminded himself to stay close to Nora Bonesteel, and to watch the ground. He had not brought his weapon along, but he thought that the noise of their walking would keep snakes out of their way.

“Strange to think that there was once a farmstead here,” he said. “You wouldn’t think this had ever been cleared land. I guess a lot can change in a hundred and sixty years.”

“Some things don’t.”

They walked for another ten minutes or more, with only the sound of their feet against the rocks on the road to break the silence. It was cool under the canopy of leaves, and the air had the moist, loamy smell of a forest after a rainstorm. The dirt was soft from the recent rains, and they had to make their way around puddles, occasionally pausing to scrape the mud from their shoes. At last Nora Bonesteel stopped. She shut her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and nodded. “Here,” she said to the sheriff, pointing down a small, steep slope.

Spencer could see nothing to distinguish this spot from any other point along the road through the woods. He could see no footpath leading from it, no break in the foliage, no remnants of an abandoned building. It seemed a random choice. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, Lord,” the old woman whispered. “Can’t you feel it?” She was standing stock-still on the red clay road, staring at the underbrush, one blue-veined fist pressed against her mouth as if she were holding back a cry.

Spencer stopped and listened. He heard the trill of a bird far off in the branches of the distant trees, but otherwise he had no sense of being anywhere except in a moist, cool forest on a summer morning. “Can we get to it?” he asked his companion. “If I help you down, would you be willing to take me there?”

“If you are bound and determined to go,” said Nora Bonesteel, sighing. “We’ve come this far. We might as well see it through.”

He eased his way down the embankment of the logging road, a three-foot slope of mud and weeds. Bracing his foot against a bush at the bottom, he reached up and took the old woman by the hand, helping her gently down the muddy bank. “Will you be able to find it in all this underbrush?” he asked her, looking at the unbroken tangle of woods. No remnant of a farmstead remained.

She nodded. “It will be near the creek. I’ll know.”

He stepped aside to let her pass, and then fell in behind her as she made her way through the woods as if she were following a path. She deviated from a straight line only to make her way around a bush or to skirt a fallen log. Spencer scanned the ground around them for snakes and wondered if they would ever find the site. He could have asked Mr. Silver to come with them, but he hadn’t wanted to share the experience with a stranger. Either he would feel foolish embarking on this journey with Nora Bonesteel or else he would learn what he came to find out by a means that would not bear explanation. Either way, he knew that he would never talk about this journey to anyone else.

They were just beyond sight of the road in a clump of beech trees interspersed with tall yellow-flowered weeds when Nora Bonesteel turned to him and put her hand on his arm. “Here,” she said.

The canopy of leaves was so thick that it seemed to be twilight where they stood, but Spencer’s eyes were accustomed to the dimness now, and he began to pace slowly through the weeds, looking for some sign that Nora Bonesteel was right. He had not ventured more than a few yards away from her when he found the rocks. “It’s here!” he called, motioning for her to come.

A wide, flat rock lay half buried in the black earth, nearly covered by the branches of a shrub growing beside it. “This must be the hearthstone,” said Spencer, kneeling down to examine it. “There are no logs or traces of wood that I can see. I had heard that the cabin burned.”

Nora Bonesteel nodded. “What else could they do?” she said. “The blood had soaked into the logs, into the earth. No one would have lived there.”

It was a crime scene, Spencer told himself. In twenty years, he had seen hundreds of them. You approached each crime scene in the same way. Picture the scene on the night the incident occurred, and try to work out what had to have happened. “December 21, 1831,” he murmured, thinking aloud. “The snow was knee-deep. The river was frozen. According to Frankie Silver, her husband Charlie had been to George Young’s place to get his Christmas liquor. But he came home. Yes. We know he came home.”

Spencer paused, expecting Nora Bonesteel to say something, but she did not, so he went back to his musings. “Christmas liquor… Everybody said that Charlie liked a good time. Liked music. Liked to dance… He’s only nineteen. He’s had quite a lot of George Young’s brew before he gets home. Of course he has. He comes home stinking drunk, and Frankie gives him hell about it. He hasn’t done his chores, and he’s been out partying, leaving her home alone with the baby. They get into a shouting match.”

“They were children themselves,” murmured Nora.

Spencer barely heard her. He was reenacting the crime now, as he had learned to do over the years in his own cases. “Why doesn’t Charlie storm out when the quarrel begins? Because it’s a bitter cold winter night. Deep snow. Frozen river. Nowhere to go. They’re trapped in that tiny, cold cabin. Two angry, shouting adolescents. Maybe the baby is crying. Maybe she’s sick, or colicky, or just plain hungry, and she won’t hush up.” The dark shape of a cabin had begun to appear in his mind, but he knew he wasn’t seeing it in the sense that Nora Bonesteel saw. The old woman had the Sight, but the picture in the sheriff’s mind was constructed out of cold reason. Cops did it at every crime scene. Medical examiners did it when faced with the map of injuries on the body of a victim. Cast your mind out into the possibility of what might have happened, and search with your educated instinct until you can determine what must have happened.

He plunged on into the narrative. “They’re teenagers. Not much self-control.” Trapped. Miserable. If you don’t shut that kid up, I will. He had seen it before. Often. This might as well have been a run-down trailer in a shabby backcountry park. A drunken good old boy, an angry young wife, a screaming baby. Nowadays they pick up the phone and call 911, and then he or LeDonne or Martha would have to go out and try to talk sense into them. Sometimes, to end the danger, they would have to take the raging husband away in handcuffs in the back of the patrol car. But the night that the Silvers fought it out-December 22, 1831-there was no one to call. No time. No time.