Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

A guard checked Spencer’s name badge and stamped his hand with the fluorescent code word of the day. No one was permitted in or out of the prison grounds without the code word on the back of his hand, illuminated by a sensor gun pointed at the spot by yet another guard.

The code words were short. They changed every day. Today’s code word was owl . Very appropriate, Spencer thought, studying the three glowing letters on his hand. The call of a hoot owl was considered a sign of death by the old-timers up home. The hoot owls should be calling tonight. There was death in the air.

A pleasant-looking man, who might have been the vice principal of an elementary school for all his lack of menace, accompanied the sheriff through the metal detector, past the checkpoint, through the two electric gates that opened consecutively, and into the compound.

Fate Harkryder had sent back word that he would see Sheriff Arrowood of Wake County. Spencer wondered if the name meant anything to him after all these years.

“How many inmates are here?” asked Spencer, who was tired of the silence.

“Six hundred and sixty-eight,” his guide answered. “Ninety-nine on death row. There are six units housing prisoners. That small building to your far left as we passed through the gates is the industry building, Two-A. There the inmates who are qualified to work put in their hours at assigned jobs.”

“Like what?”

“Printing. Data entry. Decals. If you buy a car in the state of Tennessee, the registration is sent to you by an inmate on death row. To your right is Building Nine: Food Services and Laundry.” They had reached the one-story brick building beyond the second electronic gate. “Building Eight,” said the guide. “We’ll check in again here.”

“What is Building Eight?”

“Security, and visitation. It looks like an airport waiting room.”

Spencer nodded. “I’ll see him in there?”

“No. The execution chambers are just behind the back wall of the visiting room.”

Spencer held up his hand to the electronic sensor. Owl flashed green in the light, and then vanished. Owls, thought Spencer. Once, when he was nine, Spencer and his older brother Cal had talked an old mountain man named Rattler into taking them owling, because they were still too young to hunt. Rattler walked the Arrowood boys across every ridge over the holler, teaching them to look for the sweep of wings above the tall grass in a field and to listen for the sound of the waking owl, ready to track his prey by the slightest rustle, the shade of movement. He taught them how to make owl calls, and they became so good at it that they could not tell if an owl was calling to them out of the forest or one of their own. Look out, Rattler had told them. When the owl calls your name, it means death.

Later on we became owls, Spencer thought. Cal went to Vietnam and died in a jungle of screeching birds, and Spencer grew up to be a lawman, hunting prey of his own by the slightest sound or by one false move. A lot of people had heard him call their name.

He stared at the tile floor, the institutional cinder-block walls, and at the display case of carved ship models made by inmate craftsmen. “I thought Mr. Harkryder would be on death row.”

“He was housed in Unit Two. It’s directly behind this building. But in the days before his execution, a prisoner is moved to a holding cell in the back of Building Eight. We’ve never done an execution before at Riverbend, but the procedures have all been outlined so that we would be ready.”

They walked through the door and into the empty visitation hall, past a series of functional sofas and chairs of plastic and steel arranged in conversational groupings so that twenty or thirty sets of visitors could have a few feet of privacy with the inmate they came to see. They stopped at another metal door on the back wall. The guide unlocked it. “There’s another way in,” he said, “but I thought we’d go this way, since Mr. Harkryder is already in his cell. This is where you’ll be tonight.”

The witness room. Rows of metal conference-room chairs facing a plate-glass window covered by blinds. Straight in front of them was another door. The pleasant-looking man pushed it open. “You might as well see it now, Sheriff.” He stepped over the threshold and stood aside so that Spencer could look into the bright, empty room.

Almost empty.

A plain wooden chair sat in the center of the room.

The guide motioned him to the door on the left wall. “This leads to the hallway,” he said. “You know: the last mile. The other way is the control room, where the machinery is located, and there’s also a room there for the equipment of the prison telephone system. Would you like to see it?”

The guide had given this tour many times before, and an execution had never happened yet, so perhaps the air of unreality about this place still lingered for him. Spencer declined the invitation to see the other rooms. There was too little time.

They emerged in a tiled corridor that reminded Spencer of the Sunday school building of a modern church. The open door on the left revealed a small kitchen. You could have had a wedding reception or a Scout meeting in the bright empty room beyond-except for the wooden chair in the center.

A few paces past the kitchen doorway, Spencer saw the only three barred cells in Riverbend. The ordinary prisoners’ rooms had blue metal doors that they could lock with their own keys. Building Four, where the troublemakers were kept, had solid cell doors with pie flaps for food to be taken to the prisoner, and bars enclosing the various areas of that building as a security precaution, but no cells like these. These were jail cells, much more familiar to a county sheriff than to a modern prison guard.

Inside the last barred cell, a man in jeans and a blue cotton work shirt sat on the metal bunk, writing on a yellow legal pad. An armed guard sat on a folding chair in the hall, watching the cell with an air of uneasy boredom.

Spencer stepped up to the bars. “Thank you for seeing me,” he said.

Fate Harkryder looked up. His hair was gray now, and there were lines in his face, but his eyes were unchanged. He set aside the legal pad and walked over to the bars.

The guide touched Spencer’s arm. “I’ll be at the end of the hall,” he said. “Don’t be long.” The guard in the metal folding chair contrived to look as if he were oblivious to the scene in front of him.

“I needed to talk with you,” said Spencer.

The prisoner nodded. “Frankie Silver,” he said. “I hadn’t thought about her in years. My daddy’s sister married a man from over in Mitchell County. My Uncle Steve. He used to sing that old song sometimes when he wasn’t too drunk to remember the words. This dreadful, dark and dismal day/ Has swept my glories all away… ” Fate Harkryder smiled bitterly. “Sure fits the mood for today, don’t it?”

“I think so,” said the sheriff.

“And then they can play ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home.’ That’s a real tearjerker.”

“I didn’t really come here to talk about music.”

“Yeah, I know. You came for the show, didn’t you? You want to make sure they kill me. You’re the one who put me here. You think I don’t remember that? A man don’t forget much in twenty years if there’s nothing to look at but cinder block.”

“I came because I finally figured out the Harkryder case,” said Spencer. “Thanks to Frankie Silver. For a hundred and sixty-four years, people have been wondering what Frankie’s father meant when he stopped her gallows speech by saying: Die with it in you, Frankie. When I figured that out, I knew what was bothering me about your situation.”