The Ballad of Frankie Silver (12 page)

Here the witness faltered, as if dreading what was to come.

“Tell us about Frankie Silver,” Wilson prompted her. “Your sister-in-law.”

“She’s just two years older than me, but prettier—I’ll give her that. I turned sixteen last month. Not that much was made of that, either, except that my brothers Alfred and Milton teased me about being their old-maid sister, seeing as how my sister-in-law Frankie was already expecting a young ’un by the time she was my age, and I hadn’t so much as kissed a man yet. I wasn’t studying to be like Miss Frances Stewart, I told them.”

Margaret Silver blushed. “The truth is, sometimes I wished I was more like her. She was little and fair, and she worked hard, too. Of course, she had to. Being married to Charlie and all.”

Margaret Silver ignored the rumble of laughter from the back of the court, but the noise drew scowls from both magistrates.

“Go on,” said Burgner. “And I’ll have less noise from the gallery, gentlemen.”

“About Frankie. Well, she kept that cabin clean, saw to the baby, tended the cows and the chickens, and did the cooking and the washing and kept the fire going. There are three of us girls to help Mama do what Frankie did all by herself. That set me against marrying up early, too.”

The two prisoners sat up straight when they heard these words, and they looked as if they might be about to chime in, but the lawyer silenced them with a shake of his head, and Margaret Silver hurried on.

“Charlie wasn’t much to bestir himself around the place, no, but he was dashing. People took to him. He and Frankie made a likely pair. It’s no wonder they married so young, and, of course, Charlie always did have an eye for beauty.”

“A man of refined tastes,” murmured Wilson, and I heard no hint of irony in his voice.

Margaret Silver nodded. “I guess Charlie must have taken after his mother’s people. We liked him fine, but we weren’t like him. He was handsome, and he could charm squirrels out of a gum tree with that smile of his, and he never said no to a jug or a fiddle tune, but…”

The magistrates gave Thomas Wilson a look, and he leaned in close to the witness and said softly, “It’s time to tell us what happened to Charlie, Miss Margaret.”

She took a deep breath and blinked back tears. “We were working when Frankie showed up. Of course, we always are, with ten folks to be fed at mealtimes, and a fire to be kept going, and young ’uns to be tended—my brother William, the youngest, isn’t but two years old.

“It was early morning when Frankie came in. She stood there on the threshold, stomping snow off her shoes and shaking the ice flints out of her hair. She handed me the baby, and began to untie her wraps and rub her hands together to warm them. I took the little Nancy over by the fire, peeling off her blankets and checking her fingers and toes for frostbite. It isn’t more than a quarter mile over the hill to their place, but the wind was fierce.” Her voice softened as she spoke of the child. I had to lean forward to hear her.

“Charlie’s baby is just over a year old.”

“And what is the child’s name?”

Margaret Silver smiled. “Why, it’s Nancy. Maybe Charlie named her after our mother that raised him, or maybe the name came from one of Frankie’s people, or maybe they just liked the sound of it. I don’t know what Frankie thought about that, but maybe she didn’t like her own mother’s name—Barbara—or maybe Charlie didn’t give her any say in the matter. Charlie would have his own way: if he could charm you into doing his bidding, he would, but if not, he could get ugly about it. It’s a pretty name, though … Nancy Silver.… Folks said that if she got her mother’s looks and her father’s charm, she’d be a force to be reckoned with a dozen years hence.”

Talking about her young niece seemed to comfort the poor girl, but Wilson could not allow her prattle to take up the court’s time.

“You are dutiful to tell us so much, Miss Margaret,” said Wilson, and this time he was smiling gently. “But we do not require such detail, only the bare bones of the tale. Frankie turned up at your parents’ house that morning, then, with the baby, did she not?”

“She did.”

“And what did she say?”

“She was bragging. She said she had been working since sunup, chopping wood and scrubbing the cabin floor.…” She faltered a moment when the gasps from the spectators nearly drowned her out. Perhaps it was the first time the poor girl had realized the significance of those words.

“What else did she say?”

“She wanted one of the boys to feed the cattle. Said Charlie was gone from home. So we sent Alfred back with her.”

“Did she say where Charlie was supposed to have gone?”

“Over to George Young’s. Most of the men get their Christmas liquor over at George’s place.”

“So you had no reason to doubt her story?”

“No. It sounded like Charlie, all right.”

Thomas Wilson permitted himself a perfunctory smile. “Tell us what happened then, Miss Margaret.”

“Well, Frankie took herself off then, but the next morning she was back, saying Charlie still hadn’t turned up. After a couple of days we took to searching the woods, but we never did find no trace of him. Not ’til Mr. Collis went to the cabin, after Frankie went home to her people.”

“Did you see the Stewarts at any time during all this?”

Margaret Silver thought about it. “I never did,” she finally admitted. “They didn’t stop by to sit a spell with us, or to ask after Charlie, not one bit.”

“But they said nothing about his disappearance? They were not seen at Charlie and Frankie Silver’s cabin?”

“Don’t reckon they were.”

Beside me Colonel Erwin stirred in his seat. “There it is, Mr. Gaither,” he murmured. “Wilson has established that there is not one whit of evidence linking the Stewart woman or her boy to this case. They said nothing and no one saw them. They will have to be let go. Wilson has done his best for that poor family, no doubt, but at what a cost!”

“What do you mean?” I whispered back.

“He has put a rope around the neck of Frankie Silver.”

*   *   *

I am alone now, but I do not mind the solitude.

I have lived all my life in one-room cabins, first with Daddy and Mama and my brothers, and then with Charlie and the baby. It seemed strange at first to have so much space on my own, and so much quiet. I had Mama and Blackston to talk to for the first week or so, but they were afraid that someone was listening, and we found that apart from that one big thing, we had not much to say to one another. Fear is like a stone in your mouth. When you have it, you cannot talk of anything else. So we passed the days in near-perfect silence, with dread kicking in our bellies. Then there was the hearing, and Mama and Blackston got bond and were let go. After that it was only me, to sit here and wait ’til spring.

I think I would not mind the prison cell but for the idleness. I don’t know what to do with my hands. They move in my lap and will not stay still. I asked the jailer’s wife if I could help her do the chores so as to pass the time, but she said I mayn’t be let out, and that she could not let me have an iron or a needle, for fear that I would use them for mischief. Her name is Sarah. She has a baby, and I ache to hold it, for it reminds me of my Nancy, but of course she will not bring it near me. I watch her sometimes when she plays with it out in the garden. Its golden curls glint in the sunshine, but if she looks up and sees me watching them, she frowns and takes the baby away. Her man has told her that I am mad, and although she sees that I am as mild as milk and never angry, she is still afraid, and hangs back, well away from the door of my cell, whenever she has cause to speak to me. I am a killer.

“You can have a Bible,” she said.

I shook my head and she went away, thinking that this was proof of my wickedness, perhaps even a sign that I am a witch. I did not tell her that I refused the Good Book because I cannot read.

I pass the time at the barred window, looking down on the muddy road that passes through the center of the town. There are more people here than I have ever seen in my life. Some of the women have velvet cloaks and bonnets with white feathers. I wish I could see their shoes. Sometimes the people pause and look up toward my window, and I step back into the shadows because I don’t want them looking at me. I wonder where they are going, and what the fine houses look like on the inside, and what fancy goods are to be had over there in the store. I had me a store-bought china bowl up home. Someone gave it to us for a wedding gift—one of Charlie’s kinfolks, that was. It didn’t get broke, in spite of all that happened there in the cabin. I remember it sitting on the pine table when I went away, down to Mama’s, not knowing for sure that I was leaving that place for the last time, but thinking I probably wouldn’t want to sleep there ever again. When Daddy got home from Kentucky, I’d make him take me back there to get my things, I thought, but that wasn’t to be. I wonder what happened to that bowl. It was white with three marks like blue feathers painted on one side. I would like for the baby to have it when she is grown.

CHAPTER THREE

The manila folder lay on the wrought-iron table, untouched but not unnoticed by the invalid in the lawn chair. While he drank his morning coffee on the deck overlooking the mountains, Spencer Arrowood stared at the thick manila folder that Martha had brought him the night before. He had felt too tired to tackle it on the previous evening, but now his curiosity about it was almost overpowering. He had not touched that file in nearly twenty years. Its contents would be strange to him, even though he had written most of the entries himself—and yet he hadn’t. The author of those police reports had been a swaggering young deputy, sure of his place in the world and of his superiority over his prisoners. He was the white knight upholding honor and justice in a tarnished world; they were cartoon bad guys, without excuses or families or feelings. He remembered how that young deputy had looked at life. He saw a world inhabited by only two kinds of people: criminals and cop groupies. He had viewed both types with suspicious condescension. It had taken Spencer a long time to learn how narrow the range of his experience was. Most people’s lives never touched the orbit of a police officer: they went through an entire existence as neither victim, nor devotee, nor perpetrator, and so he had never seen these folk.

Spencer could remember thinking like that, but he could no longer summon up the arrogance of youth that made such belief possible. He had perspective now. He had arrested a wife beater and recognized him as the skinny kid from sixth grade who used to show up at school with a black eye and bruises and mumbled excuses about how he got them. He arrested a pretty young cheerleader for drunk driving, only now she wasn’t the pretty young cheerleader: she was blowsy and forty-four, and sometime in the intervening years since high school she had turned into her own mother. Although he would seldom admit this, especially to himself, Spencer had felt inside himself the same rages and impulses that got people arrested, and now he thought that most law-abiding citizens were as fortunate as they were virtuous. Any one bit of luck—loving parents, a knack for getting good grades, enough money, a faithful spouse—could derail the kind of tragedy that happened to people less blessed.

He knew that Fate Harkryder had not been an upstanding member of the community, but he had not been lucky, either. Spencer looked again at the manila folder containing the biography of a killer, wondering how it would read to him now that he was no longer the arrogant young deputy who thought that his gold shield made him a knight.

He half remembered typing the final reports, two-fingered, on an IBM electric typewriter that at the time had seemed to be the last word in technological wonders. The machine was probably still down in the basement of the sheriff’s office, along with the broken staplers, the rotary-dial telephones, the boxes of old paperwork, and all the other detritus of previous administrations which they had always meant to discard but never quite got around to carting off to the landfill.

The first item in the folder was a yellowed newspaper clipping from the
Hamelin Record
relating to the Harkryder case, with a photograph of the state’s key witness, a twenty-four-year-old deputy named Spencer Arrowood. Spencer stared at the picture of himself as an impossibly soft-faced kid. His cheeks were plump, his eyes unlined, and for all the air of menace he had tried to invoke, with his narrowed eyes and his mean-cop scowl, he looked like the rawboned adolescent he was, fresh out of the army but still looking for a fight. His sandy hair had brushed his collar in those days, fashionably long but a continual source of irritation for Nelse Miller, whose childhood impressions of masculinity had fixed on the close-cropped doughboys just back from the lice-ridden trenches of the First World War. Spencer had wasted many coffee breaks arguing the point of fashion and hygiene with the old sheriff, but it had been a waste of breath. A waste on both sides, he thought ruefully, for now he kept his graying hair as short as Nelse Miller could have wished for.

Had he ever been that young?

The thought worried him more than he would ever admit. That arrogant young deputy, the Spencer Arrowood of twenty years ago, had made decisions that would cost a man his life. What if he had been wrong?

He hadn’t thought so at the time, but back then he had been so angry, and so eager to see someone punished for what had happened to Emily Stanton, that he never paused to question his conclusions for an instant.

Her face smiled out at him from the faded newsprint. He had never seen her smile. The newspaper photo was a yearbook shot from her university. They couldn’t have used the crime scene photo in a family newspaper. No one would have wanted to remember her as she was when they found her. This was better. The picture was black and white, but Spencer remembered it in color: long red curls, clear green eyes. He remembered other colors, too, ones he would have liked to forget: streaks of mud across her left cheek, a purple bruise on her forehead, rivulets of blood, and a white splinter of bone poking through skin that should have been pink but wasn’t anymore.