The Ballad of Frankie Silver (50 page)

He looked at his watch. Two minutes had passed since the last time he checked it. He looked around at the other witnesses, wondering if any of them would be unable to handle the strain of watching a man die in the electric chair. Would the doctor standing by attend to fainting witnesses, as well as checking to see that the condemned man was dead?

Spencer could feel his heart beating, and his breath was coming in gulps. He wondered if he had overtired himself too soon after surgery, or whether he was feeling the anxiety that Sheriff John Boone had felt when the time came to hang Frankie Silver. He thought that Boone’s anguish must have been worse: in 1833 the Burke County sheriff had been executing a nineteen-year-old girl whom he knew to be innocent of first-degree murder. In those days, innocent people could and did go to the gallows, but nowadays, only the most heinous of crimes is punished by the death penalty: rarely a first offender or a single-victim killer, rarely an upstanding citizen driven beyond emotional endurance. With few exceptions, today’s death row is the pit of the sadist and the psychopath, the paid assassin, and the refuse of the drug world. No innocent young girl defending her child would ever reach death row today. It was harder to feel charitable toward these men than to feel sorrow for the plight of Frankie Silver. Their appeals for mercy were not the shining arguments of innocence but the specious claims of technicalities, loopholes, and political maneuvers. He could wish mercy for some of them, but he could not pity them, even as he grieved for a girl who died a century before he was born. She was not one of them.

Spencer heard the two reporters in the front row whispering to each other. “This is way cheaper, man,” one of them was saying. “North Carolina claims that it costs $346.51 to kill a prisoner by lethal injection. But the chair uses only thirty-two cents’ worth of electricity.”

“It’s more painful, though,” the other reporter said.

“Nah. Two thousand volts. You’re unconscious in two seconds. You never know what hits you.”

“You sure about that?”

“Guess we’ll find out tonight. See if he yells or anything.”

It seemed to Spencer a long time before the hall door opened. Fate Harkryder, hunched over his chains, shuffled into the room, surrounded by guards in black padded armor. A man with a Bible trailed the procession, reading aloud in a steady monotone. No one paid him any mind.

The condemned man wore carpet slippers covering his bare feet. The legs of his trousers were slit to the knee, and he had a close-cropped buzz cut that in any other setting would have made one think of boot camp. He was pale, with beads of sweat on his forehead, and his eyes kept darting around the room, looking for a familiar face, or perhaps a way out.

With practiced ease, the tie-down team backed the prisoner into the wooden chair and fastened the airplane seat belt straps to his wrists, legs, and chest.

“That was fast!” muttered the reporter in the front row. “Wonder who they practiced on.”

“Do they still call the chair Old Sparky?” his companion whispered back.

Spencer looked at his watch. Less than two minutes had elapsed since Fate Harkryder had entered the death chamber. They had made him wait twenty years on death row, but at least the end, when it finally came, would be mercifully quick.

The warden, who had been standing beside the right-hand doorway, approached the chair and said a few words to the condemned man. The witnesses could not hear what was said, but they could see Fate Harkryder’s face, and he appeared to make no reply. He was staring at the glass window in front of him, squinting a little, as if he were trying to make out individual faces. The guard dimmed the lights in the witness room.

As the warden turned to walk away, a member of the tie-down team placed a dark leather cap on the prisoner’s head. The top of the cap contained the metal fitting to which the wire would be attached. The current would enter the body through the headpiece. It was fitted with a snap-on flap that covered the top half of the prisoner’s face. Now he was merely a human figure, pinioned in a wooden chair.

As the warden took up his old position beside the control-room doorway, the peal of a telephone broke the silence. One of the reporters yelped and grabbed the arm of his companion. Charles Stanton held up a photograph of Emily. Spencer gripped the sides of his chair. He was holding his breath.

A voice from the other room said clearly, “No. This is the death house.” Then silence.

“Wrong number,” another witness muttered, with a giggle that was somewhere between embarrassment and terror.

The execution itself began without Spencer’s at first being aware of it. He knew that the room lights would not dim, as they did in old black-and-white gangster movies, but he had expected a loud buzzing noise, or some other indication that high voltage had been turned on. He let his eyes stray for a moment to the stricken face of the chaplain, and then a gasp from behind him made him look again at the man in the chair. Fate Harkryder had stiffened, and he appeared to be straining against the straps, or perhaps the force of the current had thrown him forward against them. For about a minute, although it seemed much longer, the current surged through the prisoner’s body, keeping him rigid against the restraints, and then the body slumped back.

No one moved.

*   *   *

Fate snuggled against his brother Ewell in the darkness, shivering in the crisp July night, watching the sky and breathing grass scent. He was four years old—maybe five—not the youngest child in the field, but surely the only one out alone with his older brothers instead of cradled on a blanket between doting parents. It was late. Daddy usually chased them off to bed before now, so they had learned to slope off before he started his serious drinking, knowing that as long as the boys were out of sight, the old man did not care whether they were in bed or not. It was better not to be home before the rage took him. They had scars to remind them to find somewhere else to be.

Fate couldn’t remember Mama being around; maybe she had already started running around by that time. She died when he was eight, but as far as Fate was concerned, she’d been gone much longer than that.

Tom gave him brown sugar on bread for breakfast, and Ewell made him trucks out of scrap wood and bottle caps. And they took him with them, like a cute but useless puppy, wherever they went. His brothers grew up loving to roam the night, as free as the raccoons and the possums, and often as 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

Frankie Silver was the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina. This account of her story is as accurate as I could make it at a remove of a century and a half from the incident. Burgess Gaither, the young clerk of court; the Erwins; and all the people who figure in the 1830s part of the story were real. Their actual names are used, and the circumstances of their lives and kinships are faithfully recorded.