The Ballad of Frankie Silver (29 page)

I did not speak much about the Silver case, for in truth there was nothing to do but wait upon the pleasure of the Supreme Court in Raleigh, but my reticence about the case did not banish it from the thoughts of the ladies.

One breathless afternoon as I sat in the library at Belvidere reading over a packet of new books just arrived from England by way of Wilmington, Miss Mary Erwin appeared in the doorway, clad in a white morning dress trimmed with lace, and carrying a cloth-covered basket, but she looked no less formidable for this maidenly affectation. She is a spinster of six and thirty years, ten more than my wife, her sister Elizabeth. Some of the awful seniority of an elder sibling must have transferred itself to Miss Mary’s attitude toward me, for I always felt like a sweating, lumbering oaf in her presence, and I’ll swear that my tongue grew too big for my mouth at times when I had to speak with her.

I covered my confusion, of course, with bluff heartiness. “Good morning, Miss Mary!” I said gaily. “Are you off on a summer picnic to the wildwood?”

She looked at me as a cat might look at a worm. “No, Mr. Gaither,” she said. “I hope I have better things to do than waste my days in idleness.” She looked pointedly at the illustrated paper that I was reading, and I fought down the urge to stuff it under my coat. “May I trouble you for a few moments of your time?”

Her tone suggested that since I had nothing better to do than to read frivolous tripe, I might at least make myself useful by doing her bidding. I put the paper aside and rose to my feet with a heavy heart. “I am your servant, of course, Miss Mary.”

“Thank you.” She drew on her gloves with an air of brisk authority. “Catherine and I wish to go and see the prisoner, and we would like the escort of a gentleman to town, and to wait for us at the jail. You will suit the purpose admirably. You need not accompany us upstairs to the poor creature’s cell.”

“You wish to see … the prisoner? Mrs. Silver?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I would consider it a privilege as well as my duty to accompany you,” I said, inclining my head to suggest a courteous bow. I had been dreading this gambit for weeks, and now that it had finally come, I felt an odd mixture of apprehension and relief. I wondered what the squire would say about his daughters going to visit a murderess, and whether I should have to shoulder the blame for their excursion. Still, I thought I had better go to keep an eye on them. “Is the
other
Mrs. Gaither not to be of the party?”

I meant my wife, of course. Miss Mary’s sister Catherine is also Mrs. Gaither, as she is the widow of my late brother Alfred, and so she is doubly my sister-in-law, but my wife was apparently not included in the outing with her older sisters.

“Elizabeth has a dress fitting,” Miss Mary informed me. “She may go at another time. We have promised to report the details of our visit to the rest of the household.”

We sent for the open carriage, as the day was fine, and we trotted along the few miles to Morganton with little conversation passing among us. Catherine is a meek and gentle lady, almost midway between the ages of her sisters Mary and Elizabeth, but after a few remarks about the weather and other inconsequential topics, I find myself with nothing to say to her. I am always afraid that some chance remark of mine will remind her of poor Alfred, and I live in fear that I will induce a flood of tears whose tide I will be powerless to stem. I contented myself with smiling at poor colorless Catherine, swathed in her purple dress of late mourning. I hoped that my resemblance to Alfred would not make her weep, but she seemed to bear the sight of me calmly enough.

As we drew closer to town, I felt that it was necessary to issue a few words of instruction to my sisters-in-law about prison visitation. “Mrs. Silver may not wish to see you at all,” I cautioned them. “And if she does, the jailer will not want you to stay with her long, or to say anything that may upset her.”

“Quite the contrary,” Miss Mary called out above the clatter of the wheels. “We will set her mind at rest by telling her that petitions are being drawn up to secure her pardon from the gallows.”

“Now, you must not give the prisoner false hope, either,” I cautioned her. “It is cruel to make her believe that she will be saved from her punishment.”

“I hope I never say anything that I do not believe to be true,” she said reprovingly.

I saw that she really believed this, and so I did not smile, but I was thinking that no one could exist for even a day in our carefully polite society by telling the unvarnished truth. I kept silent for the remainder of the ride, which was itself a lie, for she thought that I agreed with her.

*   *   *

The Morganton jail was a two-story white house set in a well-kept lawn only a short distance from the courthouse. It was not the foul pit that one imagines for prisoners in Philadelphia or Boston—or even Raleigh, for that matter, but despite that, I suspected that it would seem terrible enough to my sisters-in-law. I wondered if I should prepare them for the scenes to come, but the set of Miss Mary’s jaw persuaded me to keep silent. The more unpleasant the experience, the more satisfaction the ladies would derive from having done their duty.

The carriage stopped in front of the jail, and after I had assisted my companions in dismounting, I went to advise the jailer of his distinguished afternoon visitors. “Miss Mary has brought a basket of food to the prisoner,” I told Mr. Presnell. “You may, of course, search the contents, but I assure you that it contains only bread and cheese, and, I believe, a slab of blackberry pie. I smelled it baking this morning at Belvidere.”

“Good wages for murder,” muttered Presnell, but I knew that he would not voice any complaints to the Erwin sisters, so I thanked him for allowing the visit and went back to fetch my sisters-in-law.

Miss Mary marched into the jail like a wolf on the fold and advanced toward the staircase with a fearless and deliberate tread, but Catherine shrank back at the doorway, and I saw that she had gone pale.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said, touching her elbow. “Frankie Silver is no older than your nephew Waightstill, and she is neither coarse nor mad. It will be all right. I shall go with you upstairs.”

Catherine whispered her thanks. “I thought…” she said. She took a deep breath and began again. “I came because I thought it might be a comfort to her to meet another woman who has lost her husband.”

I nodded, for I did not trust myself to speak. She is a kind woman, and she deserved more happiness in this life than Providence has seen fit to give her.

I indicated to Catherine that she should follow her elder sister up the narrow stairs, and that I would go last and carry the basket.

Mr. Presnell, who had gone up ahead of us, was waiting at the prisoner’s cell. He unlocked the door, which was an ordinary wooden door made of stout oak, with a square of bars set at eye level in the middle of it, so that the prisoner could be observed by the guard. “Don’t be long in there,” he said softly to me as I went past him. “Lice.”

We peered in at the straw-covered interior, which contained only a straw-filled mattress on a camp bed and two oaken buckets: a clean one for water and a foul-smelling one for waste. The prisoner was standing at the barred window looking out at the village, or perhaps at the mountains beyond.

“She stands there hour after hour,” Presnell remarked. “Just staring out through the bars.”

“So should I if I were forced to stay in this place,” said Miss Mary, who had overheard him. “At least the air from the window is fresher than the stench in here, and there is something to occupy the mind in the ever-changing view.”

Presnell nodded. “Visitors for you, Mrs. Silver,” he said, adding as an aside, “I’ll be downstairs when you’re ready, Mr. Gaither.”

Frankie Silver turned to face us, and I saw that she had been weeping. Her eyes were red and swollen, but she dabbed at her cheek with the back of one hand and stood there submissively, wondering, no doubt, what further tribulations she was to endure.

I smiled, hoping to reassure her of the benign intentions of our visit. “Mrs. Silver, I am Burgess Gaither, the county clerk of Superior Court,” I said with careful politeness. “You may recall seeing me at your trial. My visit is not an official one, however. I am here as the escort to my wife’s sisters, who have come in Christian charity to visit you. May I present Miss Erwin and Mrs. Alfred Gaither? Ladies, this is Mrs. Charles Silver.”

She turned her gaze from me to the two Erwin sisters standing uncertainly in the doorway. Her eyes widened, and she nodded, more to indicate that she understood than to convey a greeting. Miss Mary, as always, took charge. She strode forward and inclined her head, as courteously as she would have greeted a gentlewoman in a church pew.

“Good day, Mrs. Silver. We have come to visit you,” she said briskly. “And to satisfy ourselves that you are well treated and in good health.”

Frankie Silver nodded shyly. Her hair was lank and hung about her shoulders, for she had no means of binding it up, lest she should use a hairpin to pick the lock. She was not wearing the blue court dress, but a plain brown one that looked ancient and none too clean. She put her hands to her hair, as if to smooth it into a semblance of presentability, and as she edged forward a bit toward her visitors, we heard a clattering sound from the floor.

Miss Mary peered down at the straw. “What was that noise?”

“Chain,” said the prisoner softly.

“I beg your pardon?”

Frankie Silver lifted the hem of her skirt a few inches from the straw, revealing thick links of chain. She wriggled one small white foot and the chain rattled.

I intervened with a discreet cough. “Mrs. Silver is in restraints. There is an iron shackle around her ankle, which is chained to a ring in the center of the floor.”

Miss Mary rounded on me with a look of outrage suggesting that I was personally responsible for this indignity. I think she was on the verge of banishing me from the room when the prisoner spoke up softly, “It’s all right. I’m used to it. You can’t go too far in this cell anyhow.”

Catherine left my side and went to put her hand on the prisoner’s arm. “We are very sorry to see a woman in such straits,” she said. “Are you well?”

Frankie Silver shrugged. “Reckon I’ll live ’til September,” she said. September is the time of the next sitting of Superior Court, at which time the judge will set the date for her hanging.
She is unlettered, but she is not stupid
, I thought. Her answer had a pleasing irony that spoke well of her wits.

“Is there anything we can do for you?”

She hesitated for a moment before she whispered, “Can I see my baby?”

They all turned to look at me, and I was forced to play the villain once again. “That is not within our power,” I said as gently as I could. “Your child is back up the mountain with her grandparents.”

“Am I ever going to see her again?”

“It is a long journey for a young child,” said Catherine gently. “I have a little daughter myself, and I would not care to have her travel so far in the summer heat.”

“Let us hope that someday you will go home to her,” said Miss Mary.

“She’ll forget me.”

“Your family will not allow that,” I said, although I had no idea if this was true or not. I did not want to torment the wretched woman with false hopes, but neither did I want to add to her misery with agonizing thoughts of home.

We stood there awkwardly, trying to think of something else to say to this poor creature. She could hardly know or care about politics or the fashions of the day, and her concerns for her home and family in the wilderness were equally foreign to ourselves.

At last Miss Mary remembered the basket on my arm. “We have brought you some food,” she said, motioning for me to set it down on the straw mattress. “Are you hungry?”

Frankie Silver looked away, and I fancied that her pride was struggling with her hunger. The mountain people are shy about accepting favors from anyone; they do not care to be
beholden
, as they call it. A curious attitude, I have always thought, whereas we gentlefolk of the lowlands take care that everyone in our circle of acquaintances should owe us a debt of gratitude for something, be it a dinner party given for a traveling gentleman, or a political appointment arranged for the son of a prominent neighbor. We take care to see that these loans of influence and hospitality are repaid in kind and issued again to a widening circle of acquaintances, for such is the currency of polite society. Frankie Silver would not understand the mechanics of a system of interlacing benevolences. But she was hungry.

“I’m afraid you will have to eat it now,” I told her. “Mr. Presnell will not want us to leave the basket or its contents here when we leave.”

“Please don’t worry about us,” said Catherine. “We have had our dinner.”

We stepped away from the camp bed to let her approach it, much as one might leave scraps for a stray dog who was shy of people. Mrs. Silver sat down on the straw mattress and began to look through the contents of the basket. “Thank you,” she said softly, looking away from us. “You’re right kind to do this.” She balanced a chicken leg between her fingers and began to tear chunks out of its brown flesh. We fidgeted in silence, not wanting to stare but finding little else to do.

“Do they feed you well in here?” asked Miss Mary.

The prisoner gulped down a morsel of chicken before she answered. “Tolerable,” she said. “A deal of corn mush, and sometimes a little meat in a stew. Hardly nothing fresh, though.” She sighed. “I dream about tomatoes and onions. I used to tend the tomato vines up home, and keep the deer out by pelting rocks at ’em, and pick the bugs off the tomato leaves, and I’d watch the little green bobs get bigger every day, until finally they’d get red and soft and you could eat them. I reckon I could eat a bushel of them now. Eat ’til I foundered and my sides swole up with gas, like an old horse in a corncrib.”

My sisters-in-law exchanged glances. This was not the sort of discourse they expected to have with a condemned prisoner, and since they had never been hungry in their lives, I am sure that they could find little to add to the conversation. I had been hungry, though, a few times after my father died, and I remembered well that feeling of emptiness that crowded all other thoughts out of one’s head.