The Ballad of Frankie Silver (47 page)

“Including this one,” said Nora, “don’t you reckon?”

“Well, I can’t imagine Frankie cutting up her husband’s body. She’s only eighteen. He’s her husband, for God’s sake! The baby is there.”

“Someone else then?”

“Barbara Stewart!” whispered Spencer. “Frankie’s mother!” He tried to picture a tiny, faded blond woman, old at forty, staring down at the lifeless body of the man who had beaten her daughter. “She is without pity. It is the living who matter now.
Go stall the Silvers. Your brother and I will take care of this.
Yes. She must have said that. Frankie couldn’t do it. She was nearly in shock, and besides, there was the baby to tend to. The mother and brother know that if they make Frankie cut up that body, she will become hysterical, and then all is lost. So come sunup, they send her to the Silvers’ cabin to visit.
Pretend like nothing is wrong
, they tell her.
Say that Charlie went over to the Youngs’ place and he’s not back yet. Give us time to take care of this.”

“That poor girl, having to sit there and make small talk with her husband’s relatives, knowing what she’s left back there in the cabin.” Nora Bonesteel sighed. “No wonder they thought she was a monster, later, when they found out. But by now she had her mother and brother mixed up in it, too, so she had no choice. She was fighting for all their lives.”

“Barbara cut up that body. She must have butchered deer before. Her husband was a hunter. She had the ax and a hunting knife, at least. She had time, I guess. The search for Charlie went on for nine days.”

“Yes, but she had to get it done a lot quicker than that,” said Nora. “Someone must have dropped into the cabin before then. They had to figure that somebody would stop by as soon as Frankie went back home from visiting. Maybe nobody did come to see her, but the Stewarts couldn’t chance it. They had to be ready for company by the afternoon of the first day. They’d have disposed of the body that first night, best they could, and cleaned the blood off the cabin floor.” She shrugged. “Leastways, I would have.”

“You’re right,” said Spencer. “Of course you are. Close family—there were a dozen Silvers, give or take a child—living less than half a mile away. Someone could have walked in on them at any time. Besides, Barbara and Blackston Stewart couldn’t risk being gone from their own cabin for too long, either. If they were missed, someone might wonder later what they were up to.”

“People did wonder,” said Nora Bonesteel. “Didn’t you tell me that they were arrested at the same time that Frankie was?”

“Yes, but they were never tried. There was no evidence against them. Frankie saw to that. She never implicated them at all. But the cutting up of the body is what got her hanged. That’s what shocked people so. I wonder if she could have saved herself by telling what really happened.”

“More likely she’d have got all three of them hanged,” said Nora Bonesteel. “The law was in the hands of the townspeople, you know, but the Stewarts were frontier folk. They must have figured there was no telling what townspeople would do.”

“There’s still some of that,” said Spencer. He stopped and listened. The woods were completely silent. No birds sang. No gnats swarmed above the damp earth. “She was brave, wasn’t she?” he said at last. “Frankie never told who cut up the body, and she never said who helped her escape. She died protecting her family.”

“It must have been hard to die like that, wondering if the truth might have saved you.”

“She tried to speak on the gallows. They asked her if she had any last words, and according to eyewitnesses—there was a lawyer named Burgess Gaither who told the story years later—they asked Frankie Silver if she had any last words, and she stepped forward and started to speak. But her father was in the crowd, and he yelled out:
Die with it in you, Frankie!
And she stepped back, and was hanged without saying a word.”

“It wouldn’t have saved her then. He knew that.”

“That’s what her father was saying to her then,” said Spencer. He pictured the grizzled old man, surrounded by shouting strangers, staring up at his daughter with the rope around her neck, and he’s ashamed that his sorrow is mixed with fear for what she might say.
Die with it in you.
Mr. Stewart was saying: “We can’t save you, Frankie. We did all we could. We tried to keep you from getting caught, but the blood would tell. Then we hired you a lawyer and paid for the appeal, but we lost the case. We even broke you out of jail. We can’t save you.
Don’t take the rest of the family down with you.
”

“Yes.”

Die with it in you.
Spencer shivered in the pale sunshine. “I have somewhere to go tomorrow,” he said softly.

“Yes.”

“I have to go to Nashville and watch a man die in the electric chair. I put him there.”

The old woman nodded. Her face showed no trace of surprise or alarm. She began to retrace their steps back to the logging trail. It was time to go back.

Spencer followed her back through the tall yellow-flowered weeds. He said, “I think I understand what bothered Nelse Miller about the case now. I know why Frankie Silver has been on my mind.”

“Yes.”

“Will I be able to save him?”

Nora Bonesteel turned to look at the sheriff. “Knowing is one thing,” she said. “Changing is another.”

*   *   *

It was nearly three o’clock when Spencer reached the sheriff’s office. “We’ve finished interrogating the suspect,” LeDonne told him. “He confessed. I think there’s some mental deficiency there, so he’ll probably end up in a treatment facility.”

“Did you ask him about the Harkryder case?” asked Spencer.

“Yeah. It happened before he was born. He never heard of it. There’s a press conference at four. Do you feel up to conducting it?”

Spencer knew that he should. Elected officials have to stay visible to let their constituents know they’re on the job. He shook his head. “It was your case,” he said. “You and Martha handle it. I just came back to get the information you ran down for me on my case.”

LeDonne handed him a folder. “You don’t have much time,” he said.

“No. But at least I know who to ask.”

His old desk felt strange to him now, after weeks away from duty. He saw that the plant in his window looked better, since he had not been around to pour cold coffee into it, and there was a tidiness to his desktop that made him uneasy. He read through the laser-printed sheets in the folder, making notes as he went. It was coming together now. Everything was beginning to make sense, but still he had no proof.

He picked up the phone and dialed a number in Kentucky. He wished he had time to go in person, but there were only hours remaining. “Tom Harkryder, please,” he said when the ringing stopped. “Mr. Harkryder, this is Sheriff Arrowood from Wake County, Tennessee. I’d like to talk to you about your brother.”

There was an intake of breath at the other end of the phone, and then a sigh. “I can’t help you with Ewell,” drawled the voice. “Bailing him out is a waste of money. Let him sleep it off.”

“I meant your other brother, Tom. Lafayette. Remember him?”

After another pause, Tom Harkryder said, “I can’t help him, either.”

“I think you could,” said the sheriff. “I think you could save his life—if you told what really happened on the mountain that night twenty years back.”

“Fate said he was innocent. The damned jury didn’t believe him.”

“I believe him—now. He’s scheduled to die tomorrow night. If you meet me in Nashville, I can get us in to see the governor, and we can stop the execution.”

“By telling them what?”

“Tell them who killed Mike and Emily. It’s your brother’s only chance.” The silence dragged on so long that Spencer finally said, “Mr. Harkryder—Tom—are you there?”

The voice whispered, “I don’t believe I can help you,” and the line went dead.

CHAPTER NINE

So now he knew.

Spencer Arrowood wondered if Constable Charlie Baker had known the truth back in 1832, and if he had ever been tempted to use that knowledge to save Frankie Silver.

Maybe the constable had known a lost cause when he saw one.

The six-hour drive to Nashville had never seemed longer, but at least the sheriff knew where he was going. Someone from Riverbend had faxed him directions with his final instructions for attending the execution (“no cameras, no recording devices…”). The sheriff did not play the radio for fear that every country song would sound like an omen. Instead he tried to concentrate on I-40, rather than on the jangle of possibilities that crowded his mind. He had finally received the information he’d asked LeDonne to find for him, and he had spent much of the previous evening making telephone calls and assembling the paperwork on the case. He was already weak from his injury, and he got little enough rest, but he told himself that he would not have been able to sleep anyhow.

It was 7
A.M.
By the time he reached Nashville, Spencer Arrowood would have nine hours to save a life.

From I-40W, he took the Robertson Road exit, turning right onto Briley Parkway, and onto Centennial Boulevard. The exit from Centennial put him in sight of “The Walls,” Tennessee’s Gothic-looking old prison, a nightmare in red brick, which had closed its doors to real prisoners in 1989, when the new penitentiary was completed. Now only movie stars in shapeless prison garb walked its corridors while the cameras rolled. The state rented out the old facility on a regular basis to film producers, so that the old building spent its declining years in a grotesque parody of its former existence. Now people only pretended to die there.

The real maximum-security prison of the state of Tennessee did not look like Hollywood’s idea of a penitentiary. The new prison, Riverbend, would never look the part.

Centennial Boulevard led to Cockrill Bend Industrial Road, past the MTRC (Middle Tennessee Reclassification Center), where new prisoners were evaluated and assigned to various state facilities—and finally, on a wide bend in the Cumberland River, for which it was named, lay Riverbend itself. Riverbend Maximum Security Institution might have been a community college or a prosperous modern elementary school except for the high chain-link fences and the loops of razor wire surrounding the inner compound. Once past the repetitive, ironclad security of code words stamped on one’s hand and a succession of locked doors at short intervals, the place had a peaceful, rural look about it, as if the menace of the old days had been replaced by a brisk, impersonal efficiency. The one-story brick buildings were connected by concrete pathways set in a green lawn, and the view, glimpsed from between buildings, was of the bend in the river and the high wooded hill on the other side.

Spencer parked in the lot outside the main entrance and sat for a few moments in his car, collecting his thoughts and wishing he’d stopped for coffee somewhere along the way. It was past one o’clock, and he still hadn’t eaten anything. He couldn’t spare the time, he thought. The execution was scheduled for eleven o’clock that night. He wondered how persuasive he would have to be to get them to let him in early. The badge should do it, though; badges opened a lot of doors.

At the glass-covered reception booth, he had to give his name and show them the paperwork relating to his being summoned as a witness to the execution, but no one seemed to think it odd that he wanted to meet the warden. He told them that he was unarmed, and they gave him a clip-on red badge and told him to wait. After only a few minutes, he was taken down the left-hand hallway and ushered into the warden’s office, past an outer room containing a wall-sized aerial photo of Riverbend and its surroundings.

“I’d like to speak to the prisoner,” he said, as soon as the preliminary greetings were out of the way.

The warden raised his eyebrows. “You’re one of the witnesses, aren’t you, Sheriff?”

Spencer Arrowood nodded. “Wake is Mr. Harkryder’s home county. In fact, I was the arresting officer.”

“That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

“Twenty years.”

“And you want to see him today?”

The sheriff nodded. “Today.” They both knew there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow for Fate Harkryder.

In the long silence that followed, Spencer studied the walls of the warden’s office. The room might have belonged to a college president or an official in a small-town bank except for the two framed drawings on the wall, childlike renderings of the prison, with little stick-figure guards manning large, carefully drawn weapons from the rooftop. The sketches were signed “James Earl Ray.”

“I see. You want to talk to Mr. Harkryder now.” The warden was watching him closely, waiting for the explanation to tumble out, but Spencer said nothing. Interrogation was an old game to him, easier than chess.

“Fate Harkryder is going to die tonight, Sheriff,” the warden said at last. “And I want him to go peacefully. He’s been a good prisoner here. No trouble. Kept to himself. I owe him the courtesy of death with dignity. So if you have some old score to settle…”

“No. I’d just like to talk to him.”

“Well, it’s up to him. It’s his last day on earth, and a man ought to have a say in who he sees or doesn’t see at a time like this. You arrested him. You’ve come to watch him die. In his place, I don’t believe I’d relish the sight of you, Sheriff. But I’ll tell you what: I’ll send one of the guards in to ask Mr. Harkryder if he wants to see you or not, and we will both abide by his decision. Agreed?”

Spencer nodded. “Can I send a message with the guard?”

“All right,” said the warden. “A verbal one. Make it short. What do you want us to say to Mr. Harkryder?”

“Tell him I’ve been talking to Frankie Silver.”

*   *   *

The forty acres of Riverbend were nestled into the curve of the Cumberland River: fourteen buildings, encircled by a road and surrounded by two twelve-foot fences whose separate electronic systems for detection of movement and vibration secured the area. The fences were separated by a no-man’s-land of gravel and razor wire. There were no guard towers at the facility, but a twenty-four-hour mobile unit patrolled the perimeter. Only Building Seven, the administration building, lay outside the fences, but its sally port, the one entrance to the prison itself, was the focus of intense security.