The Ballad of Frankie Silver

dress, but a plain brown one that looked ancient and none too clean. She put her hands to her hair, as if to smooth it into a semblance of presentability, and as she edged forward a bit toward her visitors, we heard a clattering sound from the floor.

Miss Mary peered down at the straw. “What was that noise?”

“Chain,” said the prisoner softly.

“I beg your pardon?”

Frankie Silver lifted the hem of her skirt a few inches from the straw, revealing thick links of chain. She wriggled one small white foot and the chain rattled.

I intervened with a discreet cough. “Mrs. Silver is in restraints. There is an iron shackle around her ankle, which is chained to a ring in the center of the floor.”

Miss Mary rounded on me with a look of outrage suggesting that I was personally responsible for this indignity. I think she was on the verge of banishing me from the room when the prisoner spoke up softly, “It’s all right. I’m used to it. You can’t go too far in this cell anyhow.”

Catherine left my side and went to put her hand on the prisoner’s arm. “We are very sorry to see a woman in such straits,” she said. “Are you well?”

Frankie Silver shrugged. “Reckon I’ll live ’til September,” she said. September is the time of the next sitting of Superior Court, at which time the judge will set the date for her hanging.She is unlettered, but she is not stupid, I thought. Her answer had a pleasing irony that spoke well of her wits.

“Is there anything we can do for you?”

She hesitated for a moment before she whispered, “Can I see my baby?”

They all turned to look at me, and I was forced to play the villain once again. “That is not within our power,” I said as gently as I could. “Your child is back up the mountain with her grandparents.”

“Am I ever going to see her again?”

“It is a long journey for a young child,” said Catherine gently. “I have a little daughter myself, and I would not care to have her travel so far in the summer heat.”

“Let us hope that someday you will go home to her,” said Miss Mary.

“She’ll forget me.”

“Your family will not allow that,” I said, although I had no idea if this was true or not. I did not want to torment the wretched woman with false hopes, but neither did I want to add to her misery with agonizing thoughts of home.

We stood there awkwardly, trying to think of something else to say to this poor creature. She could hardly know or care about politics or the fashions of the day, and her concerns for her home and family in the wilderness were equally foreign to ourselves.

At last Miss Mary remembered the basket on my arm. “We have brought you some food,” she said, motioning for me to set it down on the straw mattress. “Are you hungry?”

Frankie Silver looked away, and I fancied that her pride was struggling with her hunger. The mountain people are shy about accepting favors from anyone; they do not care to bebeholden, as they call it. A curious attitude, I have always thought, whereas we gentlefolk of the lowlands take care that everyone in our circle of acquaintances should owe us a debt of gratitude for something, be it a dinner party given for a traveling gentleman, or a political appointment arranged for the son of a prominent neighbor. We take care to see that these loans of influence and hospitality are repaid in kind and issued again to a widening circle of acquaintances, for such is the currency of polite society. Frankie Silver would not understand the mechanics of a system of interlacing benevolences. But she was hungry.

“I’m afraid you will have to eat it now,” I told her. “Mr. Presnell will not want us to leave the basket or its contents here when we leave.”

“Please don’t worry about us,” said Catherine. “We have had our dinner.”

We stepped away from the camp bed to let her approach it, much as one might leave scraps for a stray dog who was shy of people. Mrs. Silver sat down on the straw mattress and began to look through the contents of the basket. “Thank you,” she said softly, looking away from us. “You’re right kind to do this.” She balanced a chicken leg between her fingers and began to tear chunks out of its brown flesh. We fidgeted in silence, not wanting to stare but finding little else to do.

“Do they feed you well in here?” asked Miss Mary.

The prisoner gulped down a morsel of chicken before she answered. “Tolerable,” she said. “A deal of corn mush, and sometimes a little meat in a stew. Hardly nothing fresh, though.” She sighed. “I dream about tomatoes and onions. I used to tend the tomato vines up home, and keep the deer out by pelting rocks at ’em, and pick the bugs off the tomato leaves, and I’d watch the little green bobs get bigger every day, until finally they’d get red and soft and you could eat them. I reckon I could eat a bushel of them now. Eat ’til I foundered and my sides swole up with gas, like an old horse in a corncrib.”

My sisters-in-law exchanged glances. This was not the sort of discourse they expected to have with a condemned prisoner, and since they had never been hungry in their lives, I am sure that they could find little to add to the conversation. I had been hungry, though, a few times after my father died, and I remembered well that feeling of emptiness that crowded all other thoughts out of one’s head.

“With me it was always the apple harvest,” I said, smiling. “Sometimes I couldn’t wait for them to get ripe, and I’d eat the green ones and be sick as a pup.”

She smiled and nodded, “Apples, too!” She looked like a child when the smile illuminated her features, and I thought for a brief moment that some mistake had been made. Surely this little girl was not the wicked murderess everyone talked about? She found the blackberry pie just then, and took a great bite out of the side of it, spilling purple juice down her chin and onto her breast. She wiped the stain away with the back of her hand and blushed. “I ask your pardon,” she said. “But it’s been a long time since I had pie.”

She ate for a few more moments in silence, and then, the edge taken off her hunger, she began to study her visitors. She swallowed a mouthful of food and said to Miss Mary, “That is one pretty dress, ma’am. I always wanted me a white dress with lace on’t. Reckon I oughtn’t to have one now.” She nodded toward Catherine, in her widow’s weeds. “Ought to wear black like you, ma’am.”

Miss Mary and I glanced at each other, neither of us daring to enter into a discussion on the proper mode of etiquette for a widow who has become one by her own hand, so to speak. Catherine said gently, “Did you have a white dress for your wedding?”

The prisoner shook her head. “We got married after harvest, Charlie and me. We waited ’til the circuit rider came to meeting so we could stand up before him and make it all legal. Mama cut up one of her old calico dresses from back in Anson County and made me a new frock for the wedding. And Charlie’s sisters Margaret and Rachel helped me weave leaves and daisies into a garland for my hair. It was over so quick, I hardly had time to think on it. They give a picnic supper for us, though, after. Folks brought beans, and yams, corn bread, and the last of the summer tomatoes. Silvers killed one of their cows for a barbecue. They roasted it on a spit over an open fire.”

“Who butchered it?”The words rose unbidden to my mind, and I said them before I was even aware of it.

Frankie Silver’s wide blue eyes turned on me with a careful stare. “I don’t believe I’ve eat that much before or since,” she said.

One blazing July day, when the air shimmered like creek water, distorting the shapes of the trees and hills in the distance, a letter arrived for me from Raleigh. It was addressed toB. S. Gaither, Clerk of Sup. Court, Burke County, Morganton, in the spidery copperplate script that is the hallmark of professional scribes and minions of the law. I knew exactly what it was, and I took a deep breath before slitting open the envelope, for it is a solemn thing to hold someone else’s life in your hands.

A few lines in black ink, nothing more. I stood there in the red dust of the road, reading those words, for, unseemly as it was, I could not wait to walk back to the courthouse to read the verdict contained in that missive.

It is considered by the Court that the judgment of the Superior Court of Law for the county of Burke be affirmed. And it is ordered that the said Superior Court proceed to judgment and sentence of