The Ballad of Frankie Silver

Chapter One

SHERIFF SPENCER ARROWOOD had dodged a bullet. At least in the metaphorical sense he had; that is, he did not die. Literally, he had not been lucky enough to dodge. The bullet had hit him solidly in the thorax, and had cost him his spleen, several pints of blood, and a nearly fatal bout of shock before the rescue squad managed to get him out of the hills and into the hospital in Johnson City. He had been enforcing an eviction—unwillingly, and in full sympathy with the displaced residents. The fact that he had been shot by someone he knew and had wanted to help made the attack on him that much more bitter to his family and his fellow officers, but he had not cared much about the irony of it. The injury seemed disassociated somehow from the events of that day, as if he had been drawn into another place and it did not matter much how he got there. He felt no bitterness toward his assailant, only wonder at what had happened to him. Coming so close to death had been a shock to his mind as well as his body, and its effects were so intense that it seemed pointless to consider the cause of the injury; its effect overshadowed all that went before. In the hospital he did not speak of these feelings to anyone, though. They might be mistaken for fear, or for an anxiety that might require the ministering of yet another physician. Spencer kept quiet. He wanted out of there.

That confrontation on a mountain farm had taken place three weeks earlier, and now, newly released from the Johnson City Medical Center, he was recuperating from his injuries at home.

He was able to get dressed by himself now, and to hobble around the house taking care of his own needs, microwaving what he wanted to eat, walking a bit to keep from getting stiff, and watching movies on cable until he was sick of the flickering screen. Three days earlier he had insisted that his mother go back to her own house and leave him to take care of himself. He understood that she was concerned about him, but her hovering presence had dragged him back into childhood, and he chafed at the old feelings of dependence and helplessness. He had claimed more strength and energy than he had really felt in order to convince her that he was well enough to be left alone. He had walked her to the door, waved a cheerful farewell, and then closed the door and leaned against it for ten minutes until he was strong enough to make it to a chair.

He was better now. His mother still phoned him four times a day to make sure that he was still alive, but he bore that without complaint. He knew how frightened she had been when he was shot, and how many years she had dreaded that moment. He did not begrudge her the reassurance that all was well. In fact he was determined to put an end to his convalescence as soon as he possibly could, to end her worry and his own boredom at his confinement.

He was lying in a lounge chair on his deck looking out at the valley and the mountains beyond, enjoying the spring sunshine and the ribbons of dogwood blooms across the hills, but he was still thinking about death. Physically he was recovering well, but the shock of coming so close to nonexistence had left its mark on him. Although he was past forty, he had never really thought about dying before. As a young man he’d had the youthful illusion of immortality to carry him through the daredevil stunts of adolescence and the rigors of a hitch in the army. When Spencer was eighteen, his brother Cal had been killed in Vietnam, but there had been an unreal quality about that, too: a death that occurred a world away, and a closed-casket funeral in Hamelin. The tiny part of his mind that was only ascendant in the small hours of the morning told him that Cal might not be in that box in Oakdale. To this day he might be roaming the jungles of Southeast Asia, or hanging out in bars in Saigon. Spencer would say that he did not believe any of this, of course, but the tiniest fraction of possibility existed, and he welcomed that doubt because it distanced him from death.

As the years went by, Spencer stayed too busy to think much about philosophical matters. Brooding on death was not a healthy pastime for someone in law enforcement. It was better to take each day as it came without anticipating trouble. Now, though, he found himself with unaccustomed time on his hands, and he was under orders to restrict his physical activity until his body had more fully recovered. He thought too much.

The sound of a car horn in the driveway stirred him from contemplation. He lurched over to the railing of the deck and looked out in time to see a white patrol car coming to a stop in front of the garage doors. Deputy sheriff Martha Ayers got out, and he waved to her, to let her know she should come out to the deck instead of going to the front door.

“Up here, Martha!”

“Figures you wouldn’t be in bed!” Martha yelled back, but she sounded cheerfully resigned to his defection from bed rest.

He tottered back to the chaise lounge and lowered himself carefully onto the canvas, allowing himself a wince of pain because Martha wasn’t close enough yet to see him grimace. She hurried up the wooden steps to the deck, pausing for a moment as she always did to admire the view. “It sure is peaceful up here.”

“I like it,” he said.

When he bought the twelve acres of ridge land a couple of years back, he had a local contractor build him a wood frame house, three stories: two bedrooms on the top floor, kitchen and living room on the middle floor, and a den, office, and laundry room on the ground floor, garage attached. Both living room and den had sliding glass doors facing the east, where the slope fell away to reveal a landscape of meadows threaded by a country road, and beyond them the wall of green mountains that marked the beginning of Mitchell County, North Carolina—out of his jurisdiction. He had painted the house barn-red, and he had built the decks himself little by little in his free time. Now they encircled the house on the ground floor and the one above, giving views from every conceivable vantage point. Spencer Arrowood liked to see a long way. The view diminished the problems of a country sheriff, because looking out at the green hills made him feel that it could be any century at all, which made his problems seem too ephemeral to fret about. Just lately, though, that same timeless quality had been showing him just how fleeting and fragmentary his own life was against the backdrop of the eternal mountains. The feeling of insignificance disturbed him. For once he was glad to have company.

Martha Ayers leaned against the back of the other deck chair. “I’m on break,” she told him. “Can’t stay long, but I thought I’d see if there’s anything you needed. Glass of water? Pills?”

He shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“I brought you your mail,” she said. “But only because you insisted.”

“I appreciate it, Martha.”

He was still too thin, and his cheekbones were still too prominent, making him look haggard, she thought, but some of the color was coming back to his cheeks. The gray sweatshirt and sweatpants he wore hid the bandages. “Pull up a chair,” he said. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up.”

Martha snorted. “I’d like to see you try. I’ll have your mother over here faster than white on rice. And don’t think I didn’t see you over there at the railing waving at me when I drove in. I should report you to Miss Jane.”

He grimaced. “The training academy didn’t do anything for your sweet disposition, did it, Martha? How are things at the office?”

“It’s a good thing I came back when I did,” said Martha. She considered the deck chair for a moment, and then sat down in one of the wrought-iron garden chairs. “LeDonne may think he’s Superman, but even he can’t pull two shifts a day seven days a week. He’s nobody’s idea of a diplomat, either. But we manage.”

“Any arrests?”

“Nothing to speak of.” Her tone told him that he wasn’t going to get any details from her. “If you had any sense, Spencer, you’d just lie back in that lawn chair and drink your iced tea without giving the department another thought. Lord knows you could use the rest, and I’ve been telling you so for years now. Trust you to get shot before you’d take my advice.”

Sheriff Arrowood smiled. “Well, Martha, all I can say is: I wish I’d got shot at the beach, or maybe in Hawaii, because this business of laying around the house with nothing to do but watch talk shows is about as dull as ditchwater. The view is nice, but it doesn’t change enough to keep me occupied. I’ve taken to spying on the deer in the evenings. I try not to meddle in the department business, but sometimes the boredom is overpowering.”

“Sounds like you’re feeling better then,” said Martha. “This time last week, you weren’t nearly this feisty. I guess we’ll have to take your car keys soon.”

“I’m fine. Cooking my own meals even. You want some lunch? I have a whole freezer full of frozen dinners.”

“I can’t stay that long,” she told him. “This is my lunch break, but I ate an apple on my way up the mountain to check on you.”

He smiled as he sifted through the stack of letters—mostly junk mail, brochures for various law enforcement–related products, but among the few first-class envelopes he saw an official-looking one from Nashville with the state seal of Tennessee incorporated in the design of the return address.

“What’s this?”

Martha sighed. “I knew I should have left that one on your desk. It looks like the state wants something from us, which means you’ll either be filling out more forms in triplicate or else driving all over creation going to committee meetings.”

He tore open the letter and began to scan its contents. “I can always plead ill health if they—”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Spencer’s pale face had gone gray, and he was staring at the letter as if he’d forgotten that she was there. Martha clenched her fingers around the iron rim of the garden seat, wondering if she ought to run into the house and phone the rescue squad. The sheriff was supposed to be recovering nicely from the operation that removed a bullet and his injured spleen, but she supposed that even a week later something might go wrong. A blood clot, perhaps? She wondered if her rudimentary knowledge of first aid would be of any use.

“I’m fine, Martha.” He didn’t look up, and his voice had that perfunctory tone that meant he wasn’t listening. He was staring past her, gazing at the white-flowering dogwood tree as if he expected it to walk away.

“Don’t give me that,” said Martha. “What’s in that letter? You looked better right after you’d been shot. Tell me what’s wrong.”

He handed her the letter. “I’ve been invited to an execution.”

The waiting was the hardest part. Spencer had given his testimony hours earlier, but he was still dressed in his dark suit and starched white shirt, feeling as if he, not the defendant, were on trial.

Closing arguments had ended a little after four, and the jury had filed out to begin their deliberations in the case of the State of Tennessee v. Fate Harkryder. Now there was nothing to do but wait. He sat awkwardly on the bench in the reception room of the sheriff’s office, hot and uncomfortable in the unaccustomed business suit. It was just as well that he wasn’t set to go out on patrol that night. He was too jumpy to be much good at it.

Spencer had testified in court cases before, of course, but those trials had been insignificant compared to this one. In previous cases the defendants had faced fines or a few weeks in the county jail at most if his testimony helped to convict them. This time it was a matter of life or death. He felt solemn, weighed down by the fate of the prisoner. He also felt angry at him for committing a vicious and senseless crime and setting this chain of events in motion, soiling so many lives with his recklessness.

“Why don’t you go on home?” asked Nelse Miller, sitting down on the bench beside him.

Spencer shrugged. “Can’t. The jury might come back early, and then we’d have to take the prisoner back to the courtroom. I figure—what with his family and all—all of us ought to be on hand to escort him over.”

“I don’t figure the Harkryders to open fire on a crowded courtroom, like folks in that Hillsville shoot-out over in Virginia. No, the Harkryders would prefer to ambush an unarmed man in the dark some night, preferably at odds of four against one. It’s their way.”

“I’m not worried about them,” said Spencer.

“Now, I’m not saying I don’t appreciate your offer of an extra guard when we have to walk the prisoner back over to the courtroom, because the Harkryders might be in the same melodramatic mood that seems to have seized you—but that jury isn’t coming back tonight.”

“You don’t think so? The case is open-and-shut. We had enough evidence to convict him twice over.”

“Yes, but it’s detailed evidence. Complicated for ordinary folks. Blood evidence, and the forensic testimony about the defendant being a secretor. That’s a lot for a jury to digest. The jewelry is probably the clincher, but it’s circumstantial. Even with an ironclad case, the state wants to make sure it removes any shadow of a doubt, jurors being what they are. It’s hard to convince honest average citizens that there are monsters in this world. They look at the defense table and they see a boyish young man in a Sunday suit with a new haircut, and they just have a hard time believing that this soft-spoken lad would have put a knife to the throat of a twenty-one-year-old boy and severed the windpipe and jugular while the victim’s girlfriend watched, tied to a tree, crying, screaming for him to stop, and knowing she was next. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

“I’ve felt that way myself.”

“Give yourself a few years as a peace officer, then. You’re young yet. The time will come when you’ll count your fingers after shaking hands with the preacher. You’ll lose your faith in humanity if you stay in police work long enough. But juries never get seasoned to evil. Every case is tried before a new bunch of innocents, and you have to bury them in evidence to get it through their heads that clean-cut young men can be guilty of the terrible crimes we’ve charged them with.”

“So you think they’ll take a long time to deliberate?”

“Did you look at those jurors? Some of them were taking notes like there’d be an exam to follow. They won’t want to let that effort go to waste. They’re probably retrying the case right now, just to prove to one another that they were paying attention. And reasonable doubt! Reasonabledoubt, mind you. Some juries would make a cat laugh. Why, they’re probably in there looking for loopholes as if this was Perry Masonon TV. What if this fellow had a twin nobody knew about who just happened to own a gun exactly like his—all that hogwash not fit for a fairy tale, much less a court of law. Makes them feel important. This is a big event for Wake County, you know. We go years without having anybody tried for murder.”

“I could have done without this time,” said Spencer.

“It’s finished. Your part is, anyhow. You said your piece in court, and the lawyers said theirs, and now the matter rests in the hands of twelve other people. And I know for a fact that the judge has dinner plans. It’s over for the night. So go home.”

Spencer shook his head. “I wouldn’t be able to get my mind off it. Might as well be here.”

The old sheriff sighed. “You sure do beat all, boy. Now, if it was me having to testify against that little piece of bull turd, I’d leave that courtroom with a spring in my step and never give him another second’s thought. That boy is trash and trouble, like all his kinfolk up there in the holler, and if he didn’t do this crime, he did a lot more we never caught him at, and he deserves what he gets.”

“What do you mean if he didn’t do this crime?” said Spencer.

“Oh, nothing. It’s not our job to decide guilt anyhow. That’s for judges, lawyers, juries. We just catch the suspects and round up such evidence as we can find. After that, it’s their call.”

“I know that, but what do you mean if he didn’t do this crime? Don’t you think he’s guilty?”

“Well, personally, I don’t care,” said Nelse Miller. “You could have looked into Fate Harkryder’s cradle and told that he was going to end up in prison. If it wasn’t one thing, it’d be another. I’ve known his kin for more than fifty years, and there’s not a solid citizen in the bunch. You’d stand a better chance of getting a thoroughbred out of a swaybacked donkey than you would of getting a good man out of the Harkryder bloodline.”

Spencer just looked at him, waiting.

Finally Nelse Miller let out a sigh, and looked away. “Oh, hell. I just got a feeling, that’s all.”

“But the case is ironclad. Blood type. Forensic evidence. The victims’ possessions found on him. We have him dead to rights. Everything but a confession.”

The sheriff shrugged. “It’s not up to me. Or you. We gather the evidence. Theydecide.”

“Why didn’t you say anything about this feeling of yours before now?”

“Because feelings aren’t evidence. They’d have laughed me out of the courtroom. Maybe Elissa Rountree would believe me. Sensible woman. She’s the only juror that would have! But nobody cares what your opinionis in a murder case. Facts. Evidence. Fingerprints. Then they make up their own minds. We’re well out of it.”

Spencer nodded. “I think he’s guilty,” he said. “I was there that night. I’m the one who arrested him. I wouldn’t have testified for the prosecution if I thought he wasn’t guilty.”

“Oh, you’d have testified. You were the law that night, and what you saw and what you did is the state’s business. But it helped that you had a moral certainty. Now stop fretting about it.”

Spencer wanted to protest that he hadn’t been fretting at all about the matter of guilt until the sheriff brought it up, but instead he said, “You’ve testified in capital cases before. Are you ever unsure of the man’s guilt?”

“Well, son, I tell you: I’ve been lucky that way. The doubts I’ve had have been in trifling cases, most of them. The punishment was at most a couple of months in jail, and like I said, most of the folks we arrest have that coming to them on general principles. But a capital case? There’s only two murder cases in these mountains that I’m not happy with. And I may be wrong on both of them, mind you.”

“What two cases?” “One is the fellow you’re about to put on death row. And the other one is Frankie Silver.” “What do you mean, an execution? In Tennessee?” Martha shook her head. “It just doesn’t happen.” “It does now.” Spencer handed her the letter. “That judge who has been granting automatic stays for all these years finally retired, and now it looks like the state is going back into the capital punishment business.”

“After all these years? When was the last time we executed anybody in Tennessee?” “The early sixties. But we didn’t abolish capital punishment. Juries kept handing out death sentences right along. We just haven’t carried one out in a very long time. Decades. Apparently, that’s going to change in about”—he glanced at the letter—“six weeks.”

“Why are they telling you about it?”

“Tradition. The sheriff of the prisoner’s home county is usually asked to be one of the official witnesses when the sentence is carried out.” “Can you refuse? Like you said: plead ill health. Or decline the honor—if that’s what you’d call it—of being a witness.” He didn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t think I can do that, Martha.” “Sure you could. Dr. Banner would write a letter to get you out of it. And it wouldn’t even be a lie, Spencer. You just had major surgery. Shot in the line of duty. They shouldn’t ask you to hand out doughnuts at a choir meet, much less do something as stressful as—as watch a man die.” Spencer didn’t answer. He was looking out at the ridge lines, where a bank of dark clouds settled in low on the horizon, adding a new mountain chain at the edge of the mist.

Martha tried again. “How do we do it in Tennessee these days? Lethal injection?” “No,” he said. He watched the cloud lines with even greater attention. “It’s still Old Sparky. No options.” “Oh. The electric chair. I see.” Martha shuddered. After another stretch of silence she added, “Of course, the victims didn’t get any options, either. You’ve got to remember that.” “I’ll try to bear it in mind.” Spencer folded the letter and slid it under the rest of the stack of mail. “You’re not against capital punishment, are you? Not after what we see in this job. Not after what happens to children at the hands of some of these people. . . .”

“I can’t say I’m against capital punishment, no,” said Spencer. “I see the victims, which is a misfortune that most people don’t have. It’s just this one. Just—this—one.”

“Why do you feel like you have to go to this thing, Spencer? You’re already upset about it, and it’s still six weeks away. If the state of Tennessee insists on having somebody from Wake County present for the occasion, why don’t you send LeDonne? It wouldn’t bother him to watch an execution. He’d pull the switch himself and never turn a hair.”

“I can’t.”

Martha looked at him. She had known Spencer Arrowood all her life. They had been students together at the local high school. She knew his mother from church. She had been a dispatcher in the sheriff’s office, and now she was a newly appointed Wake County deputy, all of which added up to a good number of years of close observation of the man. She decided that his reaction to the summons from the Tennessee Department of Corrections amounted to more than just squeamishness. The sheriff hated cruelty on any level, but he was no coward, and he never shirked an obligation. “You want to tell me what this is about, Spencer?” she said quietly.

“It’s been about twenty years ago now. I guess you don’t remember.”

Martha frowned. “Twenty years ago. I was gone by then. I was off being an army wife in some godforsaken little town close to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Husband number one.”

“I forgot. You wouldn’t know about the case then.”

“Who is it they’re executing?”

“Fate Harkryder. I arrested him. Testified against him. And he got the death penalty. He’s been sitting on death row in a Nashville prison ever since. Lord, I haven’t thought of him in ages. And now this.”

“What did he do?”

“Murder.”

He had been planning to leave it at that, but Martha’s expression told him that the discussion wouldn’t be over until he told her the rest. He sighed. “He killed two hikers from the Appalachian Trail. Boy and girl—college students from the University of North Carolina. He was ROTC; she was a colonel’s daughter. Honor students. They were very clean-cut and attractive kids. They were worth ten of him.”

In his mind he could hear Nelse Miller’s voice. He might as well have killed Donny and Marie.The Osmonds. Spencer had nearly forgotten them, too.

“Apparently he ambushed them at their campsite while they were sleeping. He tortured the boy. We . . .” He didn’t want to remember about the burn marks. “And he raped the girl before he killed her. Mutilated the body. I think that’s what really got him the death penalty. The jury looked at pictures of that smiling girl with the big calf’s eyes, and then at what was left of her in the crime scene photos. . . .” He shrugged.

He took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t started talking about the case, because he had tried hard to forget what he had seen that day. He didn’t want to picture the remnants of bodies he’d found at that campsite. He hadn’t had that nightmare in a long time. And now he would.

“I don’t remember this,” said Martha. “What were their names?”

“Her name was Emily Stanton. I can’t remember his.”

Martha shook her head. “The name doesn’t mean anything to me. I sure do remember the Harkryders, though. They were memorable, every single one of them. How many were there? I lost count.”

Spencer smiled. “Seemed like dozens, though some of them were cousins of the other ones. Nobody talked family with the Harkryders. If you were kin to them, you wouldn’t claim it. Tom was the one in our class, wasn’t he? I don’t think he started out with us, though. We caught up with him.”

“Mean as a striped snake. Which doesn’t say much to distinguish him from the rest of the litter. Which one was Fate?”

“Lafayette Harkryder. The youngest. There isn’t much to say about him. He was only seventeen when it happened. I guess he’s been in prison now longer than he was out in the world. Funny, in my mind, I still see him as a skinny teenage boy. He must be middle-aged by now, at least in prison years. You age fast in there. I probably wouldn’t know him if I saw him.”

“And you arrested him back then?”

Spencer nodded. “My first murder case. I was a deputy for Nelse Miller, and the bodies were found late one night on my watch. . . . Fate Harkryder . . . I’d almost forgotten about him. I fretted over it enough at the time, though. I guess I never thought it would come to this.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” said Martha. “In the first place, I’m sure he has it coming to him, and in the second place, the way they mollycoddle criminals these days, I doubt very much that he’ll keep that date with the executioner. He’s probably got a roomful of lawyers writing appeals on everything they can think of. Trust me. An execution hasn’t happened in Tennessee in thirty-some years, and it won’t happen now.”

“Maybe you’re right, Martha.”

“Of course I am. Now, I have to get back on patrol, so I’m going to leave. You’re sure you’re all right?”

He nodded. “Just a shock to the system, that’s all.”

“But I worry about you being stuck up here on this ridge all alone. Thank the Lord it’s not winter. Is there anything I can bring you?”

“Yes,” said Spencer. “I’d like you to bring me the case file on Fate Harkryder.”

Martha sighed. “You’re going to wear yourself out worrying about this thing, aren’t you?”

“No. I promise I’ll go easy. I just want to refresh my memory. And, Martha—one other thing. Have you ever heard of Frankie Silver?”

The old woman stood on the side of the road clutching the letter. She waited there until the pickup truck swirled into dust below the brow of the hill before she took a step toward the small iron gate bordered by tiger lilies. The white frame house at the end of the path sat like a pearl on a seashell, poised as it was on the ridge above the patchwork of fields and river far below. The beauty of the scenery did not gladden her heart, though. She looked warily at the prim little house, knowing that for all the urgency of her visit, she was in no hurry to open that gate.

Nora Bonesteel lived here.

Not that anybody ever said a word against old Miz Bonesteel. She was still a handsome woman, who wore well her seventy years, and she never asked favors of a soul. She stood faithfully in her church pew every week, and she kept to herself, but for doing what had to be done: food taken to the sick, and fine things knitted and sewn for the brides and the babies of the parish, but still . . . Still.

Nobody wanted to have much to do with Nora Bonesteel. She knew things. People said that when you came to tell her the news of a death in the valley, the cake for the family would already be in the oven. The Sight was in the Bonesteel family; her grandmother had been the same. The Bonesteel women never talked about what they knew, never meddled in folks’ lives, but all the same, it made people uneasy to be around them, knowing that whatever happened to you, they would have seen it coming.

The old woman looked down at the letter from Nashville. Would she know about that, what with the letter coming from so far away? With a sigh she bent down to open the gate.

When she looked up again, the tall, straight figure of a woman in gray stood on the porch, silently watching her. She clutched the mason jar of peach preserves tighter against her belly. She had brought a gift. She would not be beholden to this strange old woman.

As she neared the porch, she called out, “Afternoon, Miz Bonesteel! I’ve come to sit a spell.”

Nora Bonesteel nodded. “You’re Pauline Harkryder.”

“I am.” She held out the jar of preserves, but the burden of the letter from Nashville was too great for the pretense of a social call. “I’ve got a letter here,” she said. “It’s about my nephew Lafayette, down at the state prison in Nashville.”

“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.

D. D. Baker Elijah Green 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.

She seemed apprehensive, but from time to time when she would steal a glance at her surroundings, curiosity lit her face, banishing the frown of care. She was fine-featured—not as elegant as my Elizabeth, of course; not a lady; but pretty enough.

She has never been to town before,I thought. There are many such girls in the wildwood, born and bred in log cabins, and strangers to the ways of gentlefolk. What a pity that this poor creature should see the sights on such a sad pretext as this.

“This is your prisoner?” I asked Charlie Baker, still doubting the evidence of my own eyes.

He nodded. “Frankie Silver.” He had thanked the man who was minding the horses and the prisoners, and told him to take the mounts to the livery stable. The young fellow holstered his pistol and walked away, somewhat reluctantly, I thought. There was a tale in this strange arrival, and he thought it his due to be in on the telling of it, in return for his services on the trail. He was to be disappointed. Charlie Baker would have the glory all to himself.

“But, Constable, surely this . . . this child cannot be charged with murder.”

Charlie Baker turned away, probably to hide a grin at my naïveté. “She’s a grown woman, right enough. Married these two years or thereabouts, and left a baby up yonder at the Silvers’ place. A fatherless one now.” He turned to the shivering young woman and untied the rope that looped under her horse’s belly, binding one of her ankles to the other. “Get down off your horse now, Miz Silver. Get up, Miz Stewart. Blackston. We’re to wait in the courthouse.”

Barbara Stewart and her son trudged toward the courthouse steps without so much as a glance in my direction. The mother leaned against the shoulder of the sturdy youth, whether from weariness or despair I could not tell.

Frankie Silver raised her hands from beneath the folds of her cloak, and for the first time I could see that her wrists were bound with hemp rope. Baker held the horse, and I assisted her in dismounting, for the hands of her brother were tied as well, so that he could not have assisted her. She seemed to add but little to the weight of the cloak itself; indeed, I could have carried her all the way into the courthouse without feeling the strain, but it would not have been seemly, and I did not. I set her properly upon the ground, and then, feeling as if I should pass some pleasantry with this small person who was in such straits, I said, “Well, madam, I hope that a stay in our jail will not be too terrible for you. I could wish you better lodging than this on a cold winter morning. They will not grant you bail, of course, but still, guilty or not, it is a great pity to keep a woman in such a tiny, cold room with no windows and no chair, and hardly room to turn around in.”

She looked up at me for a moment, and then she shrugged. “Reckon what do you think I lived in before I came here?”

I had not seen Sheriff Butler that morning, though I thought there was little for him to do on a snowbound Tuesday morning. If he was not at his home, then I thought a tavern the logical place to seek him out. There were several to choose from in Morganton. They offered lodging to those who came to town for the courtEdward Butler of Locust Grove, a prominent landowner and an active participant in the affairs of Burke County. Both of the Butler brothers were often to be found at the Erwins’ social gatherings, and we in turn had broken bread with them at Locust Grove. Will’s late wife had been a lifelong friend of my Elizabeth, who still mourned the untimely death of her childhood friend. Such are the bonds of friendship among the men of business in a small town. I wondered what Will would make of this piece of news.

I greeted such folks as I knew in the tavern, and motioned for Sheriff Butler to accompany me outside. “Your duty calls, sir,” I said, trying not to make the matter sound important. He knew, though, that something was amiss, for he picked up his hat and coat and followed me to the street without a moment’s delay.

“A constable from the west county has brought in three prisoners,” I told him, steering him through the frozen carriage ruts toward the courthouse square.

He heard me out in silence while I told of the warrant and the arrival of the constable. “Indeed I know little of what has transpired,” I said. “But since the jailer cannot be found at the moment, I have put Mr. Baker and his trio of prisoners in the courthouse to await your pleasure. When we have seen the ladies and the boy safely stowed in your custody, perhaps we can prevail upon the constable to tell us the circumstances that brought her here.”

Will Butler permitted himself a smile. My use of the word “us” had not escaped him, but he nodded in agreement to my suggestion. “Yes, we must hear his tale, Burgess.”

“He will have to speak with the tongues of angels to persuade me of the daughter’s guilt. I cannot speak for the other two, for I barely glimpsed them, but indeed I am convinced that an error has been made in arresting her. Wait until you see her, Butler! She looks scarcely more than a child.”

“If the prisoner is, as you say, a pretty young woman, they must be sure enough of her guilt in the west county to bring her in at all. The trial will be in March, though, at the spring term of the court—but if worse comes to worst, the consequences of that trial will not occur until after my time. I don’t envy my successor his job.”

I took his grisly meaning at once, but I doubted his prediction. “It will not come to that,” I told him. “They will not hang a woman.”

I left Will Butler to his duty and went back to my office and my record books. I had extracted a promise from him to fetch me when the prisoners had been safely locked away into Gabe Presnell’s care. The Morganton jail is but a short walk from the courthouse, a two-story log structure with two rooms on the ground floor for the jailer’s lodging, and four rooms upstairs for the incarceration of prisoners. It is hardly a fit place for women to be kept, I thought, but I suppose it is better than the dirt-floored stockade that had served as the jail ten years ago. I had heard my father-in-law, Squire Erwin, speak of it, for he was clerk of Superior Court before me, and for much of his tenure that rude byre was in use as the county’s prison. Once he described to me the stench and the straw and the dirt floor.

“Like a stable,” I had remarked.

“Not at all,” said the squire. “No one would keep good horses in the wet and foul-smelling darkness of that log pen, but Burke County in its wisdom reckoned that such accommodations were good enough for its prisoners. We even locked up debtors in those days, poor wretches. Still, I suppose it was fit enough for most of the villains we got.”

The new wooden jailhouse was a far cry better than the old log pen, and I had made light of its discomforts to the young woman prisoner, but, really, I’d sooner sleep on the courthouse lawn than up there in that tiny room, in too close proximity to the stink and the body lice of the other prisoners. Outdoors could be no colder, and at least the air would be clean.

I went back to my ledger, and my breath still clouded the air above my desk. Still, a new year had begun and I had much to be thankful for, most of it due to my late brother, whose untimely death these two years past still grieved me. I had come to Morganton on Alfred’s coattails, courted his wife’s sister, and won her, though Alfred did not live to see us wed. My bride, Elizabeth, was three years my senior, intelligent, well-spoken, and every inch a lady, for all that she was no great beauty. She was an Erwin, though, and that counted for everything. Erwin was a name to conjure with in Burke County, for the

Erwins wereMorganton. The two Erwin brothers who settled there in the late 1700s were gentlemen planters, and their numerous descendants owned vast expanses of land, commanding positions of respect and authority throughout the community. After more than forty years in residence, the Erwins looked after the people in Burke County with a benignity that was almost feudal. To a newly minted young lawyer, they seemed the epitome of hospitality and noble friendliness, offering lodging to newcomers and hosting dinners and parties at Bellevue and Belvidere for those who came to town for the circuit court in the spring and fall. To a new son-in-law, they were bountiful. They were kindness itself. When Miss Elizabeth Erwin graciously consented to be my wife, I was summoned to the study at Belvidere to face her father, who duly inquired into my prospects. I was obliged to tell him that but for my education, my profession of law, and my family’s good name—indeed, I had none.

William Willoughby Erwin was a lawyer himself, and he had been father-in-law to my older brother Alfred, who had married Miss Catherine Erwin in March of 1828, so I felt emboldened to speak frankly to him, since we were brother attorneys, and all but family in kinship. I told him that I had hoped that Alfred and I might have set up a law practice together, but that was not to be, for he died before I had even completed my training for the law, and I was forced to conclude my studies under the tutelage of Judge Caldwell. The Gaithers were educated and wellborn, but we were not well off. My father had died when I was twelve, and Alfred, the eldest child in the family, had taken on the duties of father to the eight younger Gaithers. He had been my guide, my friend, and my companion in the law, and I missed him sorely. With Alfred’s passing went my hopes for partnership and prosperity, and I admitted my penury readily enough, as I was sure Squire Erwin knew of it already.

“But,” I told him, “I am an honest, God-fearing man, not afraid of hard work, neither accustomed to nor in need of luxury.” It was a pretty speech to make, standing on the squire’s turkey carpet, surrounded by his library of a thousand leather volumes. I waved my crystal wineglass for emphasis, nearly hitting the cut-glass chandelier that shimmered above me.

William Erwin remained solemn at my declaration, but I fancy that there was a twinkle in his eye. “You’ll do,” he said. “We’ll see what can be done about your prospects, sir.”

Perhaps he was thinking of the fact that his daughter Elizabeth had seven sisters, and that eligible young lawyers on the frontier were not so plentiful that one could afford to be too particular about prospective sons-in-law. So Elizabeth and I were married, and within a few months Squire Erwin resigned his post as Burke County’s clerk of Superior Court, a position he had held for forty-four years. The job was given to me.

It was a steady income, and a respectable civil position that kept me on good terms with the legal community, and it provided me with a chance to learn more of my craft by observing more seasoned attorneys at work. In a few years’ time, my experience and my standing in the community would be such that I could afford to establish a law practice of my own. Until then, I was content to toil as a learned clerk in the halls of justice. I had been clerk of Superior Court for eighteen months, well liked and well content with my profession and my family, for Elizabeth and I had a son, whom we named William, after the old squire. We would name the next one Alfred.

I had been at work for less than an hour when the sheriff and the messenger appeared at the door of my office. “Come with us, Burgess,” said Will Butler. “Constable Baker promises us a tale worthy of a tavern, but we had better get the news in private. Come to my house, and warm yourselves by my fire while we learn what this is about.”

A short walk took us to Butler’s house. He settled us in the parlor, a simple enough room, but as warm and comfortable as a man could wish for. He offered us some corn whiskey that he kept in an

earthenware jug—not the crystal decanter of brandy that Raleigh’s gentlemen lawyers might have proffered, but it was welcome nonetheless, and it chased away the last of the chill from our bones. Soon enough Constable Baker was sitting by the fire, thawing his muddy boots on the hearthrug and stroking the head of one of Butler’s hounds. We waited while the sheriff read the warrant from Justice of the Peace Baker.

After a few moments of silence, Will Butler put aside the documents and looked at his guest. “Now,” he said, “tell me what has happened.”

Charlie Baker warmed his throat with a swig of whiskey and began: “You know Jacob Silver from the other end of the county—along the Toe River, his land is—”

“I do not know him,” I said.

“Has someone killed this Jacob Silver?” asked Butler. He reached for the papers again, but then shook his head, remembering that another name was on the warrant as victim. He settled back in his chair then, seeing that Baker was bound and determined to make a tale of it. We might as well hear him out.

“No, sir. No one killed the old man, though I think the grief of this has dealt a blow to his constitution. Jacob Silver is a well-respected man in the community. He’s got a smart bit of land over the mountains from a soldier’s grant. He came down from Maryland about twenty years ago, after the English war, him and some of his brothers. With him he brought his boy Charlie, whose mother had died birthing him. Not more than a lap baby, Charlie was then.

“Old Jacob has a passel of children now. He married Nancy Reed over at Double Island, more than seventeen years ago, and they have about eight young ’uns. Charlie, the one that got killed, was that son from Maryland, by Jacob’s first wife. He wasn’t but nineteen years old. Two years ago he married Frankie—”

“The name is probably Frances,” I murmured to Butler, who nodded in agreement.

“That’s right,” said Baker. “Miss Frances Stewart she was before she married into the Silver clan. The other two prisoners, Barbara Stewart and youngest boy Blackston, live on the other side of the Toe River, about two miles downstream from the Jacob Silver homestead. It’s Isaiah Stewart’s place. He’s from Anson County, and he and his wife Barbara—”

“Tell us about the murder,” said Will, losing patience at last. “We can sort out their bloodlines later.”

“First sign of trouble was on December 23. That morning Frankie Silver went to her in-laws’ cabin, with the baby on her hip, and she told them that Charlie had lit out from home a couple of days back, and he hadn’t returned. She was wanting somebody to come feed the cows.”

“Why didn’t she ask her own kinfolk to do it?”

“The menfolk were gone. At least her father was away from home. She has an older brother, Jackson, who’s married to a Howell girl, but he was off with his father. I heard they were on a long hunt over in Kentucky. They weren’t back when I left there yesterday. I reckon the younger boy, Blackston, could have helped her. He’s about fifteen. But like I said, the Stewarts live two miles from Frankie, and over on the other side of the river, while the Silvers’ cabin is just a quarter mile down the hill from Frankie and Charlie’s place. The snow was knee-deep and the river was frozen. I reckon she didn’t want to chance crossing it, with the baby and all. Anyhow, she showed up at Charlie’s parents’ house, cool as snowmelt,

saying he was gone getting his Christmas liquor. She said he had gone to George Young’s house with his jug and his fiddle. Boasted about how she’d been busy since sunup doing her washing and redding the cabin. She didn’t seem to mind much that her husband was gone, only she wanted somebody to feed the stock. So the Silvers sent over Alfred, their next oldest boy, to see to the cattle, and Frankie went back home.

“Every day after that, Frankie would stop by, still more peevish than affrighted, saying Charlie wasn’t back yet, and the Silvers were growing more anxious by the minute. Charlie was a sunny fellow; always a smile and a song; everybody liked him. Finally Frankie said she didn’t care if her no-account husband came back or not, she was going to stay at her mother’s house, and she was taking the baby with her.

“By then the Silvers were all-fired worried about Charlie, it being the dead of winter and all. Since Charlie Silver was a great one for drinking and fiddling, they thought it was just possible that he had found a party too good to leave and was holed up drunk somewhere, but it had been more than ten days by then, and it wasn’t like him to be gone that long. They sent over to George Young’s place, looking to find him, and George said that Charlie had come for that Christmas liquor right enough, and he had got it, but he said that Charlie had come and gone many days ago. The Youngs hadn’t seen him since.

“By then the Silvers were hunting the woods for him, and all the trails that led to George’s cabin, in case Charlie had fallen or come to harm while he was on his way home from the Youngs’ place, and maybe the worse for drink. The Silvers and some of their neighbors and kinfolk even went down to examine the river, but it was frozen solid and covered with unbroken snow. There was no sign that anybody had fallen in. After that, some of the neighbors—my people, Elijah Green, the Youngs, the Howells, the Hutchinses, and old Jack Collis—kept up the search, and Jacob—he was beside himself by this time—he . . . well, he went over into Tennessee.”

Whatever we had been expecting, it was not this. “Went to Tennessee?” said Butler. “What did he do that for?”

Baker shrugged. “Advice, I reckon you’d call it. He had heard tell of a Guinea Negro there, over Jonesborough way, that people say has the conjure power.”

I smiled at this touching bit of superstition, but then I recalled the tragic nature of this tale, and it sobered me at once. Parents who have lost a child will reach out for whatever comfort they can find. I was interested in this development. Guinea Negroes were said to have occult powers that they brought with them as a vestige of paganism from their own lands, but I had seldom heard of anyone asking them for more than simple fortune-telling: benign promises of a rosy future. This urgent task of finding a lost youth would prove a challenge indeed for such a conjure man. “And what did the African tell Mr. Silver?”

“He asked Silver to draw him a map of the valley where Charlie went missing, to mark the cabins, the river, the ridges, the fields—everything. Then that old conjure man took up a pendant, strung on a leather thong, and he swung it around in a circle over the map. To hear Jacob Silver tell it, that ball swung around and around over the map, getting slower and slower, until it came to a full stop and just hovered there—right over Charlie’s own cabin. And the conjure man, he looked up and said, ‘That boy never left his own house.’ ”

Butler and I looked at each other. Surely the prisoner was here on more evidence than a trick of ball and string over a map? “They searched the cabin then?”

“Already had!” said Charlie Baker, grinning triumphantly. While Mr. Jacob Silver was gone over the mountain into Tennessee, and Frankie had quit the place to go home to the Stewarts, that old bear hunter

Jack Collis decided to look a little closer to home. He never did put much stock in what Frankie had told him, ’cause he couldn’t find no tracks in the woods, despite the deep snow, and he couldn’t think where Charlie could have got to without leaving some kind of a trail. While everybody else was out combing the deep woods and the land over by the Youngs’ place, Jack Collis snuck back to that cabin of Frankie and Charlie’s, and he poked around. There was a goodly pile of ashes in the fireplace, as if somebody had burned a whole cord of wood without cleaning out the fireplace, he said. Jack studied about that for a while, and then he put some of those ashes in clean water in the kettle over the fire, and what do you think he found?” Baker beamed at us expectantly.

We waited politely, for it was obvious that he was bursting to tell us.

“Grease bubbles!”

When my expression did not change, the constable must have realized that such rustic deductions were wasted upon gentlemen, for we lacked the requisite frontier skills to recognize the significance of that discovery. After a flash of disappointment, Baker explained. “There shouldn’t be any grease in fireplace ashes. The meat is cooked inside the pot, don’t you see? So when Jack found grease in the grate itself, he knew that a quantity of—of flesh—had been burned directly in that fire.”

This time our expressions were all he could have wished.

“Then Jack Collis took a candle and went to checking that cabin like a dog on point. He found bits of bone and a shoe buckle in the fireplace, and blood drops in the cracks of the puncheon floor. He raised the alarm to the rest of the men, and we began to direct our search closer in, near the spring, right there around the cabin.”

“Did you find him?” I asked. “Did you find Charlie Silver?”

Constable Baker swallowed hard. “Most of him.”

They have brought me down from my beautiful mountain in the white silence of winter, my wrists bound with hemp rope, my legs tied beneath the pony’s belly as if I were a yearling doe taken on the long hunt. And perhaps I am, for I am as defenseless as a deer, and as silent. They say that deer, who live out their lives in silence, scream when they are being killed. Well, perhaps I will be permitted that.

The horses are almost swallowed by the snow drifts in the pass. They push forward against the white tide, plunging and pushing with their chests, as if they were fording a swollen spring river instead of threading their way down a cold mountain.

No one sings or whistles as we make our way down the trail toward town, and I have only the wind to listen to. Sometimes I think I can hear voices in the torrent, indistinguishable words singing close harmony, and I strain to make out the words, but their sense escapes me. Charlie used to sing when he was coming home from George Young’s place, but that was never a pleasant sound for me, though I once thought that he had as fine a voice as ever I’d heard. When we were courting, he used to sing me “Barbary Ellen” and “The False Knight in the Road.”

No one sings to me now.

The two lawmen are scared of what I have done, what I might do—a crazy woman, a man-killer. What if I worked free of my ropes, and what if I had a knife hidden beneath my skirts? My brother is sullen as always, and I think my mother is afraid of me, too, but for a different reason. She wishes my father were not gone from home, for he would be able to tell us what to do now. He always knows what to do, but he was not there to ask. I look at her: her hands are clenched over the saddle horn until the knuckles show white, and she takes deep breaths every now and then, as if a scream keeps rising up to the top of her throat and she has to keep swallowing it back. She will not look at me.

I wish my daddy were here. I wish he had not gone to Kentucky in search of the elk herds. If he had been home on those days before Christmas, we would not be here now, cloud-breathed and shivering, our horses breasting the snow drifts as we plough our way through the pass, heading for jail in Morganton.

Hemp rope shrinks when it is wet, and its grip numbs my wrists even more than the cold already has, but I do not complain, because if I began to speak I might never stop.

I see you looking at me, Constable Charlie Baker. I know you of old. Your daddy fought in the Revolution, and your brother is the justice of the peace, so you have land and position, but for all that you are a runty fellow with never a smile for ary soul. Constables get to thinking they are better than other folks. You used to come to dances at George Young’s, but you never did dance. You came to the cabin raisings in Hollow Poplar and Grassy Creek, and you’d work as hard as any man there, but when the toil was over and the eating and the dancing began, you’d hang back, bashful to speak to the girls. You weren’t as handsome as my Charlie, and though I saw you looking at me a time or two, you never asked me to sit supper with you. You never asked me to dance. Maybe you figured you’d never cut out a young buck like Charlie Silver, and maybe you were right. Now you are wondering what would have happened if you had. If I had chosen Charlie Baker instead of Charlie Silver? Would you have saved me, or would you be laying in three graves in a mountain churchyard, wishing you had never seen my face?