Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

The other witnesses filed out of the building and into the parking lot full of lights and cameras. Spencer was told to wait.

After a few minutes, an assistant warden came out and shook his hand. “I’m glad it’s over,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve agreed to take Mr. Harkryder’s remains back to the mountains?”

Spencer nodded. “He asked me to. He said he didn’t have anybody else.”

The assistant warden looked away. “The family was contacted. They expressed a desire not to be involved.” He sighed. “A sad life, Mr. Arrowood. A waste.” After a moment of silence, he went on, “The body has been taken for autopsy now. A strange formality, I always thought.” He shrugged.

Spencer did not reply.

“Anyhow, then we have arranged for the crematorium to receive the body and to process it at once. If you could come back here tomorrow morning… Around ten?”

The sheriff looked uneasy. “Are you sure I should do this? Maybe his family-”

The assistant warden shook his head.

“Or one of his lawyers-”

“Well, we asked them. They hadn’t been on the case very long, you know. One of them is stuck in Washington, and the other has to be in court tomorrow. They said as long as it isn’t out of your way…”

Spencer nodded. “Tomorrow. Ten o’clock.”

He went out into the starless dark of a city night, walking past the waiting reporters without sparing them a glance, and sat for long minutes in the parking lot, his head resting on the steering wheel. It was midnight. He had made reservations at a Nashville motel, so that he could rest before he began the long drive back to east Tennessee, but now he wished that he did not have to spend another hour in the breathless heat of a Nashville summer. If he drove all night, he could be back in the mountains by sunrise. But he had promised to come back tomorrow, and so he would. He would take Fate Harkryder home. He could have wished for other company on his long drive back to the mountains.

The summer haze lay across the distant mountains like a pall of white smoke, but the nearer hills were tangled skeins of green-the oaks and maples holding their own. The locust trees had already given way to the rusty brown of autumn, the first tinge of death on the wind. Soon the nights would turn cold, and summer would be gone.

In crisp October on this hill, facing eastward, Spencer could see Celo Mountain and beneath it the ridges and valleys of North Carolina. But not today. The humid summer air shrouded the distant peaks now, so that turning toward them was more of an act of faith than a fulfillment of a vision.

Through a glass darkly…

He wondered if he ought to say words before he began the task.

The pain in his gut reminded him that he ought not to be climbing hills yet, and he shouldn’t have come alone, but he wanted to be released from his promise, so that it would not loom over him in the idleness of his convalescence. He looked down at the small wooden box, not as heavy as it ought to have been to contain the mortal remains of a man, but Fate Harkryder had burned twice, he thought, once alive to satisfy the law, and once by the fires of an impersonal crematorium. The little that was left inspired in him neither anger nor pity, only a vague regret that a life had been spent to so little purpose, and that no one had cared to mourn his passing. Spencer wondered if anything besides duty would take people to his own graveside one day. He put the thought out of his mind.

He would do what had been asked of him, no more. No hymn, no prayer, not even a word of valediction for the dead. He hoped, though, that this would be an ending, that all of the victims of that long-ago night of violence-Charles Stanton, Mike and Emily, and Fate Harkryder himself-could rest in peace. It was not justice, perhaps not even mercy, but at least it was over.

He set the box on the ground and opened it. Then he carried it gently to the side of the hill and emptied its contents into the wind.

The story of Frankie Silver is true, and the account of it given in this novel is as accurate as I was able to make it at a remove of 164 years from the events themselves. Burgess Gaither, the young clerk of court, and all the other persons mentioned in the narrative were real people. Their actual names are used, and the circumstances of their lives and kinships are faithfully recorded.

My research on Frankie Silver really began when I was a child. In 1790 my ancestors settled what is now Mitchell County, home of the Silvers and the Stewarts. My great-great-grandmother’s first cousin Sarah Honeycutt married Swinfield Howell, who was the brother-in-law of Jackson Stewart, the older brother of Frankie Silver. I say that Frankie and I are “connected”; to call us related would be overdoing it.

I became interested in the case as a topic for a novel in 1992, when I went to Mitchell County to research She Walks These Hills. Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese, two fellow writers who live near Bakersville, took me all over the county. We went up to Kona and saw Charlie Silver’s three graves, and I photographed it. I referred to the case of Frankie Silver in that novel (on page 438 of the paperback edition [Dutton, 1995] of She Walks These Hills, Nora Bonesteel says to Jeremy, “The next time you come down the trail, you want to go to Kona…”). This reference to Kona in She Walks These Hills was understood by a number of North Carolina readers who were familiar with the story. Carolyn Sakowski, president of Blair Press and a native of Morganton, wrote to me quoting the line about Kona. “So you’re going to do Frankie, are you?” she said. I owe a great debt of thanks to Carolyn, who was enormously helpful in the research into the case. She accompanied me to Morganton, and we visited the hill where the hanging took place; we interviewed a descendant of Sheriff Boone, who hanged Frankie; and we found the grave of Frankie Silver near the site of the old Buckhorn Tavern (long gone). I am deeply grateful to attorney Robert Byrd of Morganton for making his files on the case available to me, and for all his insight into the Morganton side of the story.

I have made several visits to Mitchell County, talking to Wayne Silver, who is the Silver family curator, visiting the cabin site, and discussing the case at the Silver family reunion and with various acquaintances/cousins in the area. My cousin Professor Lloyd Bailey of Duke University has been arguing back and forth with me about the legal aspects of the case in letters for years. (We each remain unconverted by the other’s logic.)

My research into the documents of the case led me to old census records, microfilm copies of old newspapers, collections of the private papers of North Carolina statesmen, and written accounts of the case by people like Manly Wade Wellman, Muriel Early Sheppard, and Perry Deane Young. Mr. Young did much of the research into the documents in the case, and he sent me a copy of his recent efforts to secure a posthumous pardon for Frankie Silver. Filmmaker Tom Davenport and Professor Daniel Patterson of the University of North Carolina recently completed a documentary on the legend of Frankie Silver, and they very kindly sent me a copy.

Dean Williams, the Appalachian Studies Collection librarian at Appalachian State University in Boone, was very generous with his time, and most helpful in locating census records and biographical information about the lawyers and governors concerned in the case. Rob Neufeld, of the Pack Library in Asheville, was my source for much of the information on Nicholas Woodfin. Tonia Moxley, of Virginia Tech’s University Library (Newman), borrowed microfilm and documents from the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, from the University of Alabama law library, and from repositories of documents in half a dozen other states. Dr. Frank Steely, a law professor at Northern Kentucky University, diligently searched Kentucky’s Supreme Court records in an attempt to verify the hanging of Blackston Stewart. We were unable to document his hanging, but given the incomplete nature of nineteenth-century Kentucky court records, we are not prepared to say that the story is false. The search goes on.