The Ballad of Frankie Silver

destructive. Later, in adolescence, they would take to Daddy’s ways-drinking themselves into that state just before insensibility, when they became strangers even to themselves. He would come to dread going with them. Afterward, they never remembered the things they had done. He never forgot.

Not tonight, though.

Tonight Tom and Ewell had brought little Fate down the mountain, to the Wake County High School football field, where no one noticed them among the laughing crowd in the dark. They had bought him a package of cheese crackers and a grape Nehi with money swiped from the old man’s coin jar, and they’d helped themselves to his stash of beer for the road. It was a night of celebration.

Fate willed himself to be still, but inside he was squirming with impatience to see the wonders his brothers had promised. He held his breath, thinking that surely the magic could not happen unless you kept very still for it and wished ’til your teeth hurt. “Is it time?” he whispered to Tom. He saw a bright flashing speck among the stars far up overhead. “Is that it?”

Tom laughed, and ruffled his hair with an ungentle shove. “Naw,” he sneered. “You’ll know.”

“But what will it-”

A roar. A thunderclap.

Suddenly the sky exploded into a burst of red streaks and white stars, like a fiery dandelion blown apart by the night wind, and for that instant the field was as bright as day. He was so startled that he jerked away from Ewell and struggled to his feet, but then he heard his brothers laugh, and a strong arm pulled him down again to the grass, and he snuggled against the warmth of Ewell’s musky sweatshirt, and watched the stars wink out and the red streaks fade to black.

An instant later the second charge began.

Spencer looked away. He saw that the warden’s gaze was fixed on the clock high on the cinder-block wall at the back of the room. He was watching the second hand with the careful attention of a man who does not want to see what else is happening around him. Spencer heard one of the witnesses groan, but he did not turn around to look at the man. He knew that it was not Charles Stanton. He had just begun to reflect on the unreality of the scene before him, so familiar from films that it seemed to be merely a staged illusion, but before he could reflect further on the meaning of his own detachment, the people in the death chamber began to move around again, and he realized that it was over.

The people in the observation room stood up, avoiding one another’s eyes.

The doctor examined the body and nodded to the guards that it was indeed all over. There had been a wisp of smoke where the leather helmet met flesh, but no flames about the face mask, no smell of burning flesh that he could detect, no malfunction of the equipment. Tennessee’s first execution in three decades had gone off without a hitch, Spencer thought. Unless you count the fact that the prisoner was innocent.

“Gentlemen, you may leave whenever you’re ready.” The guard was opening the rear door of the observation room, allowing the witnesses to pass through the visitors’ lounge, and then back through the sally port to the administration building. To freedom. They filed out as silently as they had come, still careful not to make eye contact with one another. Even the two young reporters were silent. Spencer was walking directly behind Colonel Stanton, who was still clutching the picture of his daughter, but he could think of nothing to say to the man except, “Was it worth it?” There could be no answer, and he left the question unsaid.

The other witnesses filed out of the building and into the parking lot full of lights and cameras. Spencer was told to wait.

After a few minutes, an assistant warden came out and shook his hand. “I’m glad it’s over,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve agreed to take Mr. Harkryder’s remains back to the mountains?”

Spencer nodded. “He asked me to. He said he didn’t have anybody else.”

The assistant warden looked away. “The family was contacted. They expressed a desire not to be involved.” He sighed. “A sad life, Mr. Arrowood. A waste.” After a moment of silence, he went on, “The body has been taken for autopsy now. A strange formality, I always thought.” He shrugged.

Spencer did not reply.

“Anyhow, then we have arranged for the crematorium to receive the body and to process it at once. If you could come back here tomorrow morning… Around ten?”

The sheriff looked uneasy. “Are you sure I should do this? Maybe his family-”

The assistant warden shook his head.

“Or one of his lawyers-”

“Well, we asked them. They hadn’t been on the case very long, you know. One of them is stuck in Washington, and the other has to be in court tomorrow. They said as long as it isn’t out of your way…”

Spencer nodded. “Tomorrow. Ten o’clock.”

He went out into the starless dark of a city night, walking past the waiting reporters without sparing them a glance, and sat for long minutes in the parking lot, his head resting on the steering wheel. It was midnight. He had made reservations at a Nashville motel, so that he could rest before he began the long drive back to east Tennessee, but now he wished that he did not have to spend another hour in the breathless heat of a Nashville summer. If he drove all night, he could be back in the mountains by sunrise. But he had promised to come back tomorrow, and so he would. He would take Fate Harkryder home. He could have wished for other company on his long drive back to the mountains.

The summer haze lay across the distant mountains like a pall of white smoke, but the nearer hills were tangled skeins of green-the oaks and maples holding their own. The locust trees had already given way to the rusty brown of autumn, the first tinge of death on the wind. Soon the nights would turn cold, and summer would be gone.

In crisp October on this hill, facing eastward, Spencer could see Celo Mountain and beneath it the ridges and valleys of North Carolina. But not today. The humid summer air shrouded the distant peaks now, so that turning toward them was more of an act of faith than a fulfillment of a vision.

Through a glass darkly…

He wondered if he ought to say words before he began the task.

The pain in his gut reminded him that he ought not to be climbing hills yet, and he shouldn’t have come alone, but he wanted to be released from his promise, so that it would not loom over him in the idleness of his convalescence. He looked down at the small wooden box, not as heavy as it ought to have been to contain the mortal remains of a man, but Fate Harkryder had burned twice, he thought, once alive to satisfy the law, and once by the fires of an impersonal crematorium. The little that was left inspired in him neither anger nor pity, only a vague regret that a life had been spent to so little purpose, and that no one had cared to mourn his passing. Spencer wondered if anything besides duty would take people to his own graveside one day. He put the thought out of his mind.

He would do what had been asked of him, no more. No hymn, no prayer, not even a word of valediction for the dead. He hoped, though, that this would be an ending, that all of the victims of that long-ago night of violence-Charles Stanton, Mike and Emily, and Fate Harkryder himself-could rest in peace. It was not justice, perhaps not even mercy, but at least it was over.

He set the box on the ground and opened it. Then he carried it gently to the side of the hill and emptied its contents into the wind.

Author’s Note

The story of Frankie Silver is true, and the account of it given in this novel is as accurate as I was able to make it at a remove of 164 years from the events themselves. Burgess Gaither, the young clerk of court, and all the other persons mentioned in the narrative were real people. Their actual names are used,