The Ballad of Frankie Silver (45 page)

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” asked Judge Battle, in a tone that suggested surprise at seeing them again so soon.

“We have, Your Honor.” The foreman handed a slip of paper to the bailiff, who conveyed it to Battle.

“The prisoner will rise.”

Waightstill got to his feet and stood there with great calmness, but I saw that he was gripping the edge of the table with both hands. Even the most confident of men must realize that a jury is a capricious creature. No one knows this better than a lawyer.

Judge Kemp Battle studied the words on the paper for an agonizing minute before he looked up and announced, “The jury finds the defendant not guilty.” He paused here, as if he wanted to say more, but instead he shook his head and sighed. “Mr. Avery, you are free to go. The jury is thanked for its time.”

The color came back into Waightstill’s face, and he released his grip on the table. Tod Caldwell pounded his old adversary on the back, shouting, “We’ve done it!” as a crowd of well-wishers surrounded the defense table. My own congratulations were left unsaid, and I think the omission went unnoticed by my nephew and his supporters.

I gathered up my notes from the trial and made my way upstream against the crowd of spectators, seeking the open air. The day was bleak and colorless, with a spitting rain and gusts of cold wind coming down off the mountains as if to sweep away every last leaf of autumn in their wake. Despite the chill and the damp, I braved the elements on the side of the courthouse lawn, out of sight of the main entrance, through which the spectators and the celebrants would be leaving. I was thinking of John Boone, dead these fifteen years, and of all the trials that had come and gone since I arrived in Morganton.

Presently I heard footsteps approaching from behind me, and I turned to see Nicholas Woodfin in his great black cape coming toward me. “We have carried the day,” he said, smiling.

“Yes,” I said.

“We are going to the tavern now, as you suggested, to celebrate the jury’s good judgment, and I’ll wager that our old friend will spend more there than his defense cost him. Walk with me.”

I shook my head. In my present mood, the brown stubble of garden beside the courthouse suited me better than the prospect of revelry in the tavern. “I will join you later,” I said.

“You are not pleased? Waightstill has a great political future. And we have saved him.”

“So we have,” I said. I turned away and left him staring after me. The dead leaves crackled under my feet, and the north wind numbed my face until I felt nothing at all.

*   *   *

So William Waightstill Avery went free. We had saved him—for another dozen years, anyhow—and he used them well. He served two terms in the State Senate, and fathered three more children with his wife Mary Corinna, who was the daughter of a governor. But the Bible says that he who sheddeth blood shall his own blood be shed by others. In Waightstill Avery’s case, the volley answering the death of Samuel Fleming was fired in June 1864, at a place called the Winding Stairs, where the mountains rise not twenty miles west of Morganton. There the Confederate North Carolina First Regiment troops were overtaken by Kirk’s raiders, Federals from Tennessee, and Waightstill Avery was wounded in the skirmish. He died of those wounds on July 3, 1864, and I hoped I mourned the death of a brave soldier as sincerely as anyone that day in the churchyard of our Presbyterian church.

As I stood there in the dappled sunshine of the old cemetery, paying my last respects, I thought that I stood in an ever diminishing circle of light. My dear Elizabeth had passed away, and last year we laid her sister the lionhearted Miss Mary into the earth at Belvidere. So many brave people had left this world, and I was growing old alone.

As they lowered Waightstill’s coffin into the earth, I heard the drone of flies about my head and I could not help thinking about another “brave little soldier” who had died on a July day many years back, and who lay in unconsecrated ground somewhere up the mountain, unmourned and unremembered. I wish I could have taken just one rose from the mound of flowers on William Waightstill Avery’s coffin and laid it on the grave of Frankie Silver.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I want to show you a grave,” said the sheriff.

Three rocks stood alone in the little mountain graveyard: smooth stubs of granite, evenly spaced about four feet apart. The stone pillars were uncarved, weathered from more than a century’s exposure to the elements and farthest away from the white steepled church in the clearing at the top of the mountain.

Sheriff Spencer Arrowood and Nora Bonesteel had said very little to each other in their journey across the mountain into Mitchell County, North Carolina. Early that morning Spencer had appeared at the door of the white frame house on the ridge on Ashe Mountain.

“I need to know about Frankie Silver,” he told her.

He had a longer drive to make tomorrow, but first he needed to go to Kona. At first light that morning, LeDonne had called him, knowing that he slept no more than they did. “We’ve made an arrest,” the deputy told him. “Guy with an earring. One of the other hikers noticed him. We found the murder weapon in his possession. He’s eighteen years old.”

So the sheriff was back where he started, with no new evidence, only a feeling that there was something he didn’t understand about the Harkryder case. He had asked LeDonne to continue the check on the names he had given him, but Spencer could not sit still and wait any longer. They were almost out of time. He promised himself that instead of sitting by the phone, he would see the place where the Silver murder happened, and if there was anything to be learned from that ancient riddle, he would do his best to find it.

Spencer asked Nora Bonesteel to go with him, and without asking a single question, she went. Later he would remember that when she answered the door, she had on her walking shoes and the little blue-flowered hat she sometimes wore to church.
She knows when you are coming
, people said of Nora Bonesteel, but the sheriff did not believe it. He believed in coincidence.

It’s unofficial
, he told himself.
The case is a hundred years old. It’s not as if I’m using a psychic to consult on a police investigation. This is a private thing.
He was not driving the patrol car. He was still officially out on sick leave, and the pain in his side reminded him from time to time that this should be so.

Spencer escorted the old woman to the passenger seat of his white sedan and waited for her to fasten her seat belt before he took off down the winding Ashe Mountain road and made the right turn that would take them east into North Carolina.

Nora Bonesteel said nothing.

She knew. He wouldn’t ask himself how, or whether his belief in that statement constituted faith of any kind, but he had to know about Frankie Silver, and there was no one else he could bring here who would be able to understand.

“I’ve been studying the case of Frankie Silver,” he told her, after many miles of silence. “You probably know the story, but I’d like to tell it if you wouldn’t mind listening. It would clear things in my mind.”

Nora Bonesteel nodded, and the sheriff began to go over the facts of Charlie Silver’s murder—haltingly at first, but then with greater assurance, until at last he forgot she was there, and he was simply thinking aloud to align his thoughts. The Harkryder case hovered in his mind, parallel to the story he was telling, but although it flickered through his consciousness from time to time, he could not yet see the link.

They drove the winding back roads of Mitchell County, North Carolina, past settlements with colorful names like Bandana and Loafers Glory. It was just as Spencer remembered it from two decades earlier, when he had made the journey with Nelse Miller. If progress had come in the intervening years, it was treading lightly.

When they arrived at the white frame church in the community of Kona on state route 80, the air was still and the shadows sharp, promising a day of breathless heat. Spencer parked his car in the gravel driveway of the churchyard. A slender blond man came out of the church building and waved to them. “I’ll be right back,” said Spencer, as he got out of the car and headed toward the old church.

The blond man was a Mr. Silver, the keeper of the family history. He could have been any age, and he had been born here in the county, but his accent had been worn away like a river rock, softened by years spent in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles. Now he had come home to stay, and to tend the legends. He had a serenity now that one did not often find in the big cities in which he had spent his youth. People—mostly distant relatives, but sometimes scholars and writers—came thousands of miles to ask their questions, to look at the little stones, and to compare the list of names on their genealogy charts with the reams of information in the collection at Kona. They wanted to know who they were, and they seemed to think that Mr. Silver could tell them. Sooner or later most of the visitors got around to asking about Frankie Silver. Mr. Silver knew all the questions, and most of the answers. He was used to it by now.

Spencer told him who they were and what they wanted. Mr. Silver spoke with him for ten minutes, pointing out landmarks and telling Spencer Arrowood what he needed to know. When he had finished, the two men shook hands and Mr. Silver went back across the road to the newer church to tend to the family-history collection housed in its basement. Later they could come over and look at the maps and the photographs, he said. Spencer thanked him again and walked back to the car.

“We’re in the right place,” he told Nora Bonesteel, as he opened the door and helped her out of the car. She nodded without surprise and followed him through the little mountain graveyard.

Spencer walked over to the three uncarved rocks at the edge of the cemetery. “That’s Charlie Silver,” he said.

Nora Bonesteel nodded again. “Yes.”

“They didn’t find him all at once.”

The old woman was looking at the sheriff, not at the grave, and she knew that he was troubled by more deaths than this one. “It’s over now,” she said.

Spencer knelt and ran his hand along the top of the weathered stone. “Charlie Silver. He’s been nineteen for a hundred and sixty-five years now. I used to wonder what kind of a man he was. Whether he deserved what he got. Do you know?”

Nora Bonesteel considered the question. “The cutting came after,” she said at last. “He went quick. She didn’t.”

“Yes, but did he deserve to die?”

“I won’t say that anyone deserves it. Sometimes it has to be done, that’s all.”

Spencer thought that over. “Yes. Perhaps it did. Frankie said that what happened in the cabin was self-defense. I guess somebody was meant to die that night. The only choice was who.”

“Or how many,” said Nora Bonesteel.

Spencer remembered the baby.
What was her name?
Nancy. That was it. Nancy Silver. Named for Charlie’s stepmother. At least she had been saved. He wanted to see where it had all happened. “The cabin site is back in the woods a few hundred yards,” he said. “We can’t get to it very easily from here in the churchyard, though.”

Nora Bonesteel pointed to a log cabin at the bottom of a hill on the other side of the paved road. “That was the Silvers’ cabin, wasn’t it?”

“Charlie’s parents, you mean? Yes. Some of the family still live there. You see that brownish cut in the hillside across the road, leading to the cabin? Mr. Silver said that was the path that Frankie took when she went to tell her in-laws that Charlie hadn’t come home. It’s still there after a hundred and sixty-five years.”

Nora Bonesteel did not turn to look at the worn path in the hillside. “It would be,” she said.

“I hoped that we could go to the cabin site. Mr. Silver said to walk on past the old church, around the curve in the paved road, and take the first logging road to the right.” Spencer looked doubtfully at the old woman. “It’s a bit of a hike, though.”

“I’m accustomed to walking.”

They threaded their way past the modern gravestones of latter-day Silvers and their kinfolk, and walked the few hundred yards along Route 80 to the dirt trail that led off into deep woods. “Mr. Silver said to follow that logging road into the woods about half a mile, but from there the way to the cabin site isn’t marked.…”

Nora Bonesteel sighed. “I’ll know when to leave the road,” she told the sheriff.

Spencer looked at the thicket of trees lining the old logging road. The underbrush beneath the beech and oak groves was so thick that the ground was completely hidden. Walking through such a tangle of brush would be slow-going. He thought about Barbara Stewart, who had died from snakebite while she was out berry picking in these woods or near them, and he reminded himself to stay close to Nora Bonesteel, and to watch the ground. He had not brought his weapon along, but he thought that the noise of their walking would keep snakes out of their way.

“Strange to think that there was once a farmstead here,” he said. “You wouldn’t think this had ever been cleared land. I guess a lot can change in a hundred and sixty years.”

“Some things don’t.”

They walked for another ten minutes or more, with only the sound of their feet against the rocks on the road to break the silence. It was cool under the canopy of leaves, and the air had the moist, loamy smell of a forest after a rainstorm. The dirt was soft from the recent rains, and they had to make their way around puddles, occasionally pausing to scrape the mud from their shoes. At last Nora Bonesteel stopped. She shut her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and nodded. “Here,” she said to the sheriff, pointing down a small, steep slope.

Spencer could see nothing to distinguish this spot from any other point along the road through the woods. He could see no footpath leading from it, no break in the foliage, no remnants of an abandoned building. It seemed a random choice. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, Lord,” the old woman whispered. “Can’t you feel it?” She was standing stock-still on the red clay road, staring at the underbrush, one blue-veined fist pressed against her mouth as if she were holding back a cry.