The Ballad of Frankie Silver (34 page)

Fate Harkryder shook his head. “Keep the drugs,” he said. “If I only have a few more days to spend being alive, I don’t want to miss any of it. I intend to go down fighting.”

Ritter’s frown told him that he had misunderstood.

“Legally, I mean,” said Fate. “Appeals. Motions filed in every court we can think of. Messages to the governor.”

“I see. Meanwhile, if you’d like, we can discuss the incident that put you here. Would you like to tell me your side of it?”

“I don’t believe I would.”

The psychologist shrugged. “Some men find it easier to go to their deaths having made their peace with this world. Is there any bit of unfinished business that troubles you?”

“Not anything you can put right,” said the condemned man.

BURGESS GAITHER

The Escape

They’ll not hang a woman, folks kept saying, over and over like rain on a roof. You’ll not hang, Frankie. I was a young girl, a proper married woman, the mother of an innocent babe. I was no madwoman crazed for blood, nor no town whore robbing a young blade and adding killing to the slate of her sins. You’ll not hang. And I carried myself meek and mild every time the court met, with my hair combed smooth, and my dress as clean and fitten as I could get it. “She’s a pretty little thing!” the men would say when I passed by. “She don’t look like no Jezebel.” And I would keep my head down low and pretend not to hear them, for it was all a game, and if I could not tell the truth flat out to that court full of strangers and be done with it, why then I must play their game and take care to win.

I had done good. The fine town ladies brought me pies and came and sat with me and read out the Bible in my cell, and I was thankful, for they were kind, but the tales I liked best were the fairy stories that my mama used to tell me. There was one about a beautiful princess who was walled up in a tower, and a handsome prince rode up and saved her. When my mama told the story, the princess had long golden hair like mine, and the prince was a dark-haired man with a big house and all the money he needed. I didn’t ask for the ladies to tell me stories like that, for it wouldn’t have been fitten, but I thought about them all the same, to myself, and to pass the time I pretended that I was the princess in that tower, a-waiting to be saved.

The ladies told me that people were working hard to get me a pardon. They were writing letters to Governor Stokes, begging him for mercy, and there was talk of getting up a letter signed by half the county, asking that my life be spared.

Governor Stokes left office at the new year, and the new governor was a man called David Swain, who came from Buncombe County, not far from here. Then the jailer’s wife, Sarah Presnell, who wasn’t one for making fine promises, she came to my cell with the news, and she said, “Happen you’ll be all right now, Frankie, for the new governor is from these parts, and he’ll be made to listen to all the folks who won’t stand to see you hang.” The other ladies of Morganton came and said the same. They told me that even the jury was sorry they had ordered me hanged, and that some of them had signed their name to the paper asking the governor for mercy. I reckoned it would be all right then, just like Mama said. I sat through the winter thinking about how big my baby Nancy was getting and wondering how many teeth she had, and if she was walking good yet. I reckoned I’d see her in the spring. She’d have to get to know me all over again, but at least we’d be together, when I got shut of this old town.

But then in March a new judge came, and he was old and sour, with a pinch-prune face and eyes like the pebbles in the creek bed, and he looked at me as if I were a shriveled-up old woman, and you could tell that he didn’t think me a pretty little thing, but only a wicked murderess to be damned and sent to hell, and he was the one to do it.

He fixed the twenty-eighth of June as my day to die.

I never figured on dying in tomato time. Leaving my baby without a mama or a daddy to look out for her. Going into the cold clay while my teeth are still strong and my hair is yellow as moonlight. It don’t seem right.

The ladies tell me that Daddy has been stumping around the county like a bear tied to a stake, trying to get some help for me. He went hat in hand to this colonel and to that gentleman, and they all gave him advice, but sometimes they’d say the opposite of one another. At last I reckon Daddy figured it was up to him to look out for his own. And what could I say when they came for me? I wanted to live. I wanted to feel the grass again on my bare ankles, and drink spring water.

So when they stood there in the night with the key to my cell a-dangling from Jack’s hand, I didn’t spare a thought for the governor or the fine ladies of Morganton with their pies and their petitions. I put on Jack’s old shirt and breeches and blacked my face with coal dust, and I went with them.

The people in that town meant well, most of them, trying to help me with letters and such, but we don’t take charity from strangers if we can help it. It’s not our way. I’d rather trust a surefooted horse and a steep mountain than all the fine words in the world.

*   *   *

I know that people have said I must have known something about it, but upon my oath I did not. Though I should have guessed, perhaps. I had heard the story often enough, when people spoke of Eliza Grace McDowell. The family is proud of it, and perhaps they should be, but just lately it troubles me all the same.

It was a warm evening, the seventeenth of May, and I was pleased to see a red sunset, a sign that we should have no more of the spring rains that had blighted our days, muddied our roads, and made ponds of our fields for a good many days. I lingered on the courthouse lawn, talking with Sheriff Boone in the glow of the spring twilight. We were merely exchanging pleasantries, as I was leaving to go to Belvidere for dinner. I do not think we spoke of Frankie Silver, for her execution was still some weeks away, and I knew that the sheriff was uneasy in his mind about having to perform the grim task, and he did not care to talk about it. So it was apropos of nothing in particular when Boone said to me, “You know, Mr. Gaither, I have been thinking about John Sevier these past few days.”

My mind was on other matters, I suppose. I was thinking of the baby’s cough, and of whether my old black coat would see me through another season, and I was wondering whom I should be put next to at dinner this evening, for I was too tired for sparkling inanities with the ladies or the sober political doomsaying of my elders. “John Sevier,” I said, to show that I was listening. I barely glanced at Sheriff Boone, for I was anxious to begin the evening, if only to see it over with. “A hero of the Battle of King’s Mountain. Sevier was a fine, bold fellow, and a patriot.”

“Perhaps too bold,” said the sheriff. “But I believe he was a good man nonetheless.”

I nodded. There were those who said that Sevier had been too cruel in his treatment of the Indians, but I hardly thought that John Boone would be concerned about such matters some thirty years after the fact. Then I recalled that Sevier had been involved in a violent feud with the Tiptons in Tennessee, and I wondered if the sheriff was hinting at some political turmoil of his own, though I could not imagine what the sheriff might have done to incur the wrath of any local officials. Surely not! Not wishing to hear treacly confidences from this somber old fellow, I eased the subject along a new path. “John Sevier. Indeed, sir, Old Nolichucky Jack was a credit to this country, whatever his personal faults, but, Sheriff, I believe that if we talk of the region’s favorite sons, surely it is your uncle whose fame has spread throughout the world, and whose star will burn the brightest and longest in memory. Rightly so.”

John Boone blushed and nodded. The sheriff is the nephew of the great pioneer Daniel Boone, but he himself is a kindhearted and modest man, not much given to boasting about his lineage, and I wondered what had prompted his musings on long-dead heroes. I made one or two other inconsequential remarks praising the pathfinder of Kentucky, to which he made little reply, and then I took my leave of the sheriff. I left him standing in the twilight, and now that I think back on it, the old fellow looked as if he had something more to say to me but didn’t quite know how to begin. I left him thus, with his piece unsaid.

I realize now, of course, what had put the thought of John Sevier into his head. It was not Sevier’s exploits in the Revolution that John Boone had been thinking of, nor of his bitter feud with John Tipton, but a later incident, much closer to home. Nearly fifty years ago—before the time of Sheriff Boone and myself, but an incident still talked about—John Sevier and his supporters had wanted the mountain country to rid itself of North Carolina’s ownership. He had ample justification for this, I am sure, because North Carolina had been willing to cede the western lands to the federal government in payment of its war debt from the Revolution. We are a neglected section of the state even to this day. The State of Franklin was formed from the eastern counties of what is now Tennessee, and Sevier became its governor. Four years later the bold endeavor to form a new state collapsed in political infighting, and in 1788 the state of North Carolina sent a party of armed men to arrest John Sevier, to be tried on a charge of treason.

He was brought in chains over the mountains to Morganton—a sad plight for one of the great leaders in our war for independence. The sheriff of Burke County at the time, William Morrison, had served with Sevier at King’s Mountain, and he was appalled that his old commander should be treated thus by order of the craven politicians in Raleigh. Sheriff Morrison struck off the prisoner’s chains, and granted him bail so that he might remain in Morganton, but not under lock and key, awaiting trial. The bond money was put up by the grandfathers of Eliza Grace McDowell. These old soldiers, Charles and Joseph McDowell, were themselves brothers, and also brother officers of John Sevier’s, one a colonel and the other a general in the Revolution.

Sevier must have had powerful enemies in North Carolina government, or perhaps the politicians merely wished to make an example of anyone who would question the state’s authority. They meant to hang John Sevier, right there in Morganton, but that faithful old soldier-turned-sheriff William Morrison would have none of it. Before the court could be convened, word went out to John Sevier’s son that his father was at liberty within the town, but in peril of his life come the trial date. By and by, Sevier’s brother and his son John Jr. rode into town with some of his supporters, leading Sevier’s favorite saddle horse. Young Sevier found his father in the tavern with his old comrades, the McDowells of Quaker Meadows. “I’ve come to take my father home, sirs,” the young man told his father’s companions.

The McDowells wished John Sevier Godspeed, and they watched him ride off with his faithful friends toward the Yellow Mountain Road, which would take them at last into Tennessee and away from the jurisdiction of the state of North Carolina. No posse ever set out to bring them back. Nothing more was ever done by the sheriff of Burke County or by the state of North Carolina to prosecute John Sevier. Indeed, in the autumn of the very next year, Sevier was elected to the North Carolina Senate, and he took his place in that august body and was present when the legislators voted to reinstate his rank of brigadier general. It was as if he had never been a shackled prisoner and the object of North Carolina’s vengeance.

Surely that was the incident in John Sevier’s life that John Boone had been thinking of—not the war, not the attempt to secede from North Carolina, not the rivalry with his cantankerous neighbor, but the escape from the Burke County jail. The successful, unpursued escape from the very jail that Sheriff John Boone was now sworn to guard. Sometimes justice can best be served by avoiding the process of the law.

Frankie Silver escaped from jail that night.

Many stories were put about as to how she was able to flee, and I cannot say with any certainty which story is true. Everyone agreed that intruders had entered the building through a basement window and had unlocked the cell by means of a key. It seemed to have been done in stealth, for there was no battle between guards and rescuers. The most fanciful storytellers claimed that Frankie Silver’s brother Jack had made a wax impression of the lock of her cell door, and that he carved a key that would fit that lock, but I have never put much faith in that tale myself. I think—though I should never dream of saying it, much less trying to prove it—that a kind and scrupulous man could not bear the thought of hanging that poor, friendless little girl, and so, taking his text from the example of his predecessor Sheriff William Morrison, this gentleman left his own keys where the friends of the prisoner might get at them and thus spirit her away—perhaps, like John Sevier, to Tennessee, and then onward to the great empty Western lands, where she could disappear forever, beyond the reach of North Carolina’s terrible revenge. Or justice. Call it what you will.

The next morning word of Frankie Silver’s escape spread around the county as fast as a horse could run. I was sitting peacefully at the breakfast table when a commotion in the hall alerted us to the presence of an urgent visitor, and one of the young constables burst in past the servant to tell me the news. I set down my cup and stared at the fellow. He fairly danced on the handwoven rug in his muddy boots, rifle in hand, and he had not even remembered to take off his hat when the servant let him in the front door. “She’s fled in the night, Mr. Gaither!” he said, and his eyes were bright with excitement as if he were announcing a fox-hunting party rather than a grim search for a killer. “Frankie Silver has broke out of jail!”

I stared at him for one stricken moment, thinking a dozen thoughts at once. Finally I managed to say, “Was anyone hurt in the escape?”

He shook his head. “No one knew she was missing until they saw her cell empty this morning. Spirited clean away! Some of us are riding out in hopes of picking up her trail. Will you be going with us?”