Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

“It was bound to occur to them,” said Nora Bonesteel. “They were desperate.”

Spencer sighed. “I wonder if they knew how useless it was to try to burn him. Probably not. People think of fire as all-consuming. They wouldn’t have known that a body is mostly water.”

“They ran out of fuel, I expect,” said Nora.

“I think so. Yes. One of the legends is that shortly after Charlie disappeared, Frankie asked her brother-in-law Alfred to chop some wood for her, and Alfred replied that he’d seen a whole cord of firewood stacked by her cabin a day or so earlier. The Stewarts used up that cord of wood trying to burn the body, but they ran out of wood before-”

“Before they ran out of Charlie.” Nora Bonesteel permitted herself a grim smile.

“That’s why the body was cut up. It wouldn’t all fit into the fireplace in one piece.” Spencer stepped away from the hearthstone and closed his eyes for a moment. There. They cut him up there. And fed him into the fire piece by piece. Who did? He turned to his companion. “You know, there has never been a case-not one that I can find- anywhere -of a woman younger than thirty, working alone, dismembering a human body postmortem. Not one case.”

“Including this one,” said Nora, “don’t you reckon?”

“Well, I can’t imagine Frankie cutting up her husband’s body. She’s only eighteen. He’s her husband, for God’s sake! The baby is there.”

“Someone else then?”

“Barbara Stewart!” whispered Spencer. “Frankie’s mother!” He tried to picture a tiny, faded blond woman, old at forty, staring down at the lifeless body of the man who had beaten her daughter. “She is without pity. It is the living who matter now. Go stall the Silvers. Your brother and I will take care of this. Yes. She must have said that. Frankie couldn’t do it. She was nearly in shock, and besides, there was the baby to tend to. The mother and brother know that if they make Frankie cut up that body, she will become hysterical, and then all is lost. So come sunup, they send her to the Silvers’ cabin to visit. Pretend like nothing is wrong, they tell her. Say that Charlie went over to the Youngs’place and he’s not back yet. Give us time to take care of this. ”

“That poor girl, having to sit there and make small talk with her husband’s relatives, knowing what she’s left back there in the cabin.” Nora Bonesteel sighed. “No wonder they thought she was a monster, later, when they found out. But by now she had her mother and brother mixed up in it, too, so she had no choice. She was fighting for all their lives.”

“Barbara cut up that body. She must have butchered deer before. Her husband was a hunter. She had the ax and a hunting knife, at least. She had time, I guess. The search for Charlie went on for nine days.”

“Yes, but she had to get it done a lot quicker than that,” said Nora. “Someone must have dropped into the cabin before then. They had to figure that somebody would stop by as soon as Frankie went back home from visiting. Maybe nobody did come to see her, but the Stewarts couldn’t chance it. They had to be ready for company by the afternoon of the first day. They’d have disposed of the body that first night, best they could, and cleaned the blood off the cabin floor.” She shrugged. “Leastways, I would have.”

“You’re right,” said Spencer. “Of course you are. Close family-there were a dozen Silvers, give or take a child-living less than half a mile away. Someone could have walked in on them at any time. Besides, Barbara and Blackston Stewart couldn’t risk being gone from their own cabin for too long, either. If they were missed, someone might wonder later what they were up to.”

“People did wonder,” said Nora Bonesteel. “Didn’t you tell me that they were arrested at the same time that Frankie was?”

“Yes, but they were never tried. There was no evidence against them. Frankie saw to that. She never implicated them at all. But the cutting up of the body is what got her hanged. That’s what shocked people so. I wonder if she could have saved herself by telling what really happened.”

“More likely she’d have got all three of them hanged,” said Nora Bonesteel. “The law was in the hands of the townspeople, you know, but the Stewarts were frontier folk. They must have figured there was no telling what townspeople would do.”

“There’s still some of that,” said Spencer. He stopped and listened. The woods were completely silent. No birds sang. No gnats swarmed above the damp earth. “She was brave, wasn’t she?” he said at last. “Frankie never told who cut up the body, and she never said who helped her escape. She died protecting her family.”

“It must have been hard to die like that, wondering if the truth might have saved you.”

“She tried to speak on the gallows. They asked her if she had any last words, and according to eyewitnesses-there was a lawyer named Burgess Gaither who told the story years later-they asked Frankie Silver if she had any last words, and she stepped forward and started to speak. But her father was in the crowd, and he yelled out: Die with it in you, Frankie! And she stepped back, and was hanged without saying a word.”

“It wouldn’t have saved her then. He knew that.”

“That’s what her father was saying to her then,” said Spencer. He pictured the grizzled old man, surrounded by shouting strangers, staring up at his daughter with the rope around her neck, and he’s ashamed that his sorrow is mixed with fear for what she might say. Die with it in you. Mr. Stewart was saying: “We can’t save you, Frankie. We did all we could. We tried to keep you from getting caught, but the blood would tell. Then we hired you a lawyer and paid for the appeal, but we lost the case. We even broke you out of jail. We can’t save you. Don’t take the rest of the family down with you. ”

“Yes.”

Die with it in you. Spencer shivered in the pale sunshine. “I have somewhere to go tomorrow,” he said softly.

“Yes.”

“I have to go to Nashville and watch a man die in the electric chair. I put him there.”

The old woman nodded. Her face showed no trace of surprise or alarm. She began to retrace their steps back to the logging trail. It was time to go back.

Spencer followed her back through the tall yellow-flowered weeds. He said, “I think I understand what bothered Nelse Miller about the case now. I know why Frankie Silver has been on my mind.”

“Yes.”

“Will I be able to save him?”

Nora Bonesteel turned to look at the sheriff. “Knowing is one thing,” she said. “Changing is another.”

It was nearly three o’clock when Spencer reached the sheriff’s office. “We’ve finished interrogating the suspect,” LeDonne told him. “He confessed. I think there’s some mental deficiency there, so he’ll probably end up in a treatment facility.”

“Did you ask him about the Harkryder case?” asked Spencer.

“Yeah. It happened before he was born. He never heard of it. There’s a press conference at four. Do you feel up to conducting it?”

Spencer knew that he should. Elected officials have to stay visible to let their constituents know they’re on the job. He shook his head. “It was your case,” he said. “You and Martha handle it. I just came back to get the information you ran down for me on my case.”

LeDonne handed him a folder. “You don’t have much time,” he said.

“No. But at least I know who to ask.”

His old desk felt strange to him now, after weeks away from duty. He saw that the plant in his window looked better, since he had not been around to pour cold coffee into it, and there was a tidiness to his desktop that made him uneasy. He read through the laser-printed sheets in the folder, making notes as he went. It was coming together now. Everything was beginning to make sense, but still he had no proof.