The Ballad of Frankie Silver (4 page)

“You’d best come in.”

They sat down in Nora Bonesteel’s parlor with its big glass window overlooking the river valley and the green hills beyond, but Pauline Harkryder had no time to spare for the glories of a mountain summer. She had seen more than fifty of them, and they had not given her much. Each summer reminded her that the world stayed young, while she wore herself out doing the same old thing year after year, with nothing to show for it. She handed the letter to Nora Bonesteel.

She waited, twisting her hands in her lap, while the old woman read the few typed lines announcing the scheduled execution of Lafayette Harkryder in a few weeks’ time.

When Nora Bonesteel had finished reading the letter, she set it down on the table. “You’d better have some tea,” she said.

Pauline Harkryder shrugged. It was all one to her. She couldn’t remember whether she’d eaten anything today or not. “They say they’re going to kill Lafayette,” she called out. Nora Bonesteel was in the kitchen now, setting the copper kettle on to boil. It made her easier to talk to, Pauline thought, if you didn’t have to look at those blue eyes staring through you.

A few moments passed, and there was no answer from the kitchen. Pauline tried again. “Do you think they will? Kill him, I mean.”

Nora Bonesteel appeared in the doorway. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll pray about it.”

“But—what I came to ask … If I could just know for sure … Miz Bonesteel—
is he guilty?
”

They stared at each other in silence. At last Nora Bonesteel said, “Do you need me to tell you that?”

Pauline Harkryder covered her mouth with her hand. “I’ve never said anything,” she whispered. “In all these years I never did. Is it too late?”

Nora Bonesteel sighed. “Do you have any kind of proof that would convince a judge?”

“No.”

“Then let it be.” Behind her the teakettle screeched and rumbled, breaking the silence.

“It’s hard to know what’s best to do,” said Pauline. “He was a sweet young ’un, but he growed up wild, same as the other two. I did what I could for those boys after their mama was gone.”

“You can write to him,” said Nora Bonesteel. “Ask him what he wants you to do. Aside from that, all you can do is pray and wait, because only one person can save him, and that isn’t you.”

*   *   *

A plain wooden chair sits on the tiled floor of an otherwise empty room. The chair is dark oak, with wide, flat arms. Its back is a solid plank, except for the three rectangular openings on either side, positioned to accommodate two pairs of blue nylon restraining straps ending in metal seat-belt buckles. Behind the chair a round wall clock familiar to schoolrooms hangs high on the pale cinder-block wall. The chair faces a large glass window covered by blinds, concealing a viewing room with space for perhaps twenty chairs. The only ornament in the observation room is a wall plaque, approximately one foot in diameter: a circle with the words “The Great Seal of the State of Tennessee 1796” encircling a drawing of a plow with “Agriculture” written beneath it, and below that a sailing ship designated “Commerce.” The walls to the left and right of the chair are fitted with ordinary doors. One leads to the corridor of holding cells and a kitchen such as one might find adjoining the reception hall of a modern country church. The other door opens into another plain, bright room, containing a small metal cabinet with lights and dials fitted on the gray surface. Beside it a power-supply box containing a transformer converts the standard 220-volt current coming into the room into a charge of 2,640 volts at the proper time. A wall telephone hangs a few feet away.

The chair was made for the state of Tennessee by the firm of Fred A. Leuchter Associates in Boston in 1989, but in style and composition, it looks much older. Parts of it are. The state sent the Leuchter company wood from the first Old Sparky, built in 1916, to be used in the construction of the new one, a ritual that was not without precedent. Some of the wood from the 1916 electric chair had been salvaged from Tennessee’s old gallows and used to construct its replacement when hanging went out of fashion. Now its successor contains the wood of both, so that more than a century of tradition has been incorporated into the new device. The new chair cost the state $50,000, and it, too, was called “Old Sparky.”

It has never been used.

Once a month, though, it is tested.

Once a month a jar of salt water—a much more accurate representation of a man than the biblical image of dust—is placed on the flat wooden seat; electrodes are inserted into the water; someone presses a button on the gray machine, and current surges through the water, proving that all is in readiness.

At least that is how the prisoners believe the chair is tested. They recount the story to one another in bull sessions, and engage in private speculations about who among them will be the first to go. Who will christen the new chair with his bodily fluids? But the prisoners also say that there are claw marks in the wide arms of the wooden chair, a chair that was built in 1989 and has never been used.

Even when the power is not turned on, the electric chair generates its own current of legend.

BURGESS GAITHER

Arrest

I remember the first time I ever heard of Frankie Silver.

Constable Charlie Baker was pounding on the door of the courthouse in snow-caked boots, bawling like a branded calf, “Sheriff! Where’s Sheriff Butler? There’s been murder done!”

It was January 10, 1832, the Tuesday morning after Twelfth Night. I was shivering in my office, still worn out from Saturday’s Old Christmas revels at Belvidere, but determined that a headache and a touch of fever should claim no more of this fine new year, my twenty-fifth year of life and the third year of my profession of law.

I was trying to write legibly in the Burke County record book without removing my gloves. The fire burned bravely in the grate behind me, but it was no match for the wind that knifed through the cracks in the wooden walls, and I could see my breath hanging in the air above the candle flame. This sight inspired in me waves of self-pity as I imagined elegant velvet-curtained offices in the great stone edifices of Raleigh: roaring fires blazing beneath marble mantelpieces and crystal decanters of brandywine on mahogany sideboards. In such palatial quarters, more prosperous young lawyers, those who had read law with statesmen and judges, and who were not eighth sons in genteel but modest families, would practice their calling with an exalted clientele, while I, who had read law with my poor older brother, rest his soul, sat freezing in a frontier courthouse, far from the corridors of power, and likely to remain so.

“Where’s Mr. Butler? There’s been murder done!”

The shouting roused me from my morning lethargy, and I flung open the door of my office and stalked through the courtroom to see who was disturbing my peace. As I pushed open the outer door, I nearly collided with a hulking figure who seemed composed entirely of snow, fur, and buckskin.

“What’s all this noise?” I demanded. In truth, I thought that the man was a drunkard whose Christmas revels had gone on well past New Year’s. I grabbed hold of his sodden coat sleeve and he spun around, shaking the muffler from his wind-reddened face. I saw that he was sober enough, but his eyes were wide with alarm. “What is it?” I said.

The man quieted now, content to have someone to hear him out. “I’m a constable, bringing in prisoners,” he said. “A man has been murdered, up past Celo Mountain, and we reckon we have the killers.” I was too astonished to reply, so he went on. “I brought them with me, but it was a day’s ride through deep snow, and I won’t put my horse or myself through that journey again yet awhile. I’ll be staying the night at the county’s expense before I head back up the mountain.”

I gave him a patient smile and drew him inside, shutting the door against the wind. “You will get no argument from me about your intention to rest in the tavern before heading home,” I told him. “I see the sense in your statement. Nothing could induce me to make such an arduous journey twice without respite.”

“And the county will pay for my lodging?”

“I am not the man to rule on these financial matters, or even to accept your prisoners. You want the sheriff, or, failing him, the jailer. I am the clerk of the Superior Court, and you’ll have no need of my services until the case comes to trial in the spring term, three months hence.”

“No one but you is about,” he told me. “A lad on the street said I’d find you here. I brought a man with me. He’s watching my prisoners for me now. I thought you might summon someone to take charge of them so that I can go off to a drink and a warm room.” He used his teeth to pull the deerskin gloves from his fingers. “I have the warrant with me,” he said, fishing a damp bit of paper out of the cavernous folds of his garments.

I recognized my visitor now. The young man, a constable from the far reaches of the county, was the son of old David Baker, a patriot of the Revolution, one of the prominent landowners to the west. I saw this young constable sometimes when court was in session. I scanned the document, an arrest warrant penned by his brother, a justice of the peace in one of those settlements miles from here, past the wall of mountains.

Burke County is more than fifty miles long, and the wild western portion of it lies in steep mountains, with bold rivers too rocky and shallow for riverboat commerce, and an endless thicket of trees walling out the world beyond. From the Carolina piedmont there are but three portals into that wilderness: the Gillespie Gap, the Buck Creek Gap, and the Winding Stairs; from within it, the Iron Mountain Gap is the way out, leading on into Tennessee. The fortress of hills between the piedmont and the Tennessee settlement was once the hunting ground of the Cherokee and the Shawnee. Now it is the kingdom of the bear and the elk; a land of strange bald mountains, rich forests of oak and chestnut, and, scattered here and there across it in makeshift homesteads, the frontiersmen.

A determined man, or a desperate one, could eke out an existence on such inhospitable land, but it would be a lonely life, removed from polite society as I knew it. No gentleman would set his plantation west of Morganton, for here ends the fertile piedmont land of rolling hills and wide flat fields. Some people did live in the western reaches of Burke County, but they kept to themselves. Great tracts of that unforgiving land had been given as grants to soldiers who fought in the War of 1812, causing scores of land-poor farmers to come down from Maryland and Pennsylvania looking to homestead the frontier, far from their prosperous Eastern neighbors who had trammeled the seaboard with their plantations. I supposed that the constable’s family was one of these backwoods gentry, but since their holdings were miles west of Morganton, they would not be known to me. Such outsiders as appeared socially at Morganton balls and dinner parties invariably hailed from east of us, for that way lay government, society, and civilization; westward lay only the trackless wilderness, Indian country, and Tennessee.

Murder done, Charlie Baker had said. It hardly surprised me in such a wild place. I scanned the document.

STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA BURKE COUNTY

This day came Elijah Green before me D. D. Baker an acting justice of the county and made oath in due form of law that Frankey Silver and [something was crossed out here] Barbara Stewart and Blackston Stewart is believed that they did murder Charles Silvers contrary to law and against the sovereign dignity of the State. Sworn to and subscribed by me this 9th day of January 1832.

Appended to this document was another few lines from Justice Baker authorizing law officers to take the accused persons into custody and to bring them safely before a justice of the county to answer the charges made against them.

“It all seems in order,” I said, handing the paper back to the justice’s brother. “And you say you have brought the prisoners? Two men and a woman?”

“Two women, sir,” said the constable.

I glanced again at the warrant. “Barbara Stewart and … Frankie?”

“Mother and daughter. The daughter, Frankie, is the wife of the deceased. They’re all outside with the fellow I brought with me. They haven’t given us any trouble on the journey, but all the same I’d better head back directly.”

“So you shall,” I told him. “Bring your prisoners here into the courthouse, where you may all keep warm, and I will find Mr. Butler for you, or, failing that, Mr. Presnell. And in exchange you must promise to tell me what has happened in those mountains to bring about such a grievous charge.”

I was eager to hear more of this news, but in good conscience I could not keep women waiting outdoors on such a bitter day, even if they were wicked murderesses. Barbara Stewart and her two grown offspring. The names meant nothing to me. I pictured a wizened crone and her witless children, caught poisoning some poor traveler, or a pair of madwomen perhaps, driven out of their senses by the cold and isolation of that mountain fortress. I shuddered to think that our fair country could contain such evil. However, news is currency in Morganton, as in any other bustling town, and I wanted to be enriched with the information before the gossips had spread it far and wide. I retrieved my overcoat and accompanied Baker outside. Five snow-dusted horses were tethered to the oak tree near the steps. Constable Baker’s companion stood on the courthouse walk, his pistol drawn and aimed at his charges.

Two of the prisoners squatted on the ground beneath the tree, so bundled up in their winter wraps that I could tell little about them except that they seemed indifferent to the gun trained on them, for they did not even glance in our direction.

On one of the horses sat a young girl, so little and pale that at first I took her for a child. She was covered in a hooded woolen cloak, but I could see fair hair at the sides of her face, and her cheeks were rouged with cold. Frankie Silver was small and slight, but she had the wiry body of one who had seen her share of drudgery on a hardscrabble hill farm. She appeared to be about eighteen now, only seven years younger than I, but what a distance there was between us in experience and opportunity! At thirty, when I am still short of my prime, she will be an old woman, if childbirth or sickness does not take her first. Just now, though, she was lovely. Her hair was the color of straw, but her features were even and there was a pleasing aspect to her face, except for its sullen expression. At least she was not weeping, as I feared she would be, but perhaps if you have done what she is accused of, you have no tears within you.