The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,70
was to hearing her meager possessions thus outlined before a room full of strangers, but she remained impassive.
“It was clean,” said Jack Collis, noticing perhaps the faint distaste in Mr. Alexander’s expression.
“So you went into this one-room abode to look around, sir. And what did you find?”
“Well, I couldn’t see much to begin with. The fire was out. It was almighty dark in there. And cold. I went over to the fireplace to see about starting a fire, so’s I could see better, and when I knelt down it struck me that there was too much ash in the fireplace.”
“Could you tell us what you deduced from that?” I suspected that the prosecutor’s bewilderment was not entirely feigned. William Alexander had never cleaned out a fireplace in his life.
“Somebody had burned up a lot of wood without cleaning out the fireplace. Seemed like a lot of logs had been burned in a hurry, and I wondered how come, so I commenced to sifting through the ashes.”
“What did you find?”
Jack Collis told how he lit a new fire to heat the water in the kettle, and how the grease bubbles told him that flesh had been burned upon the logs, which prompted him to make a more careful search of the cabin.
“Once the room warmed up, the smell told me something was wrong.”
“What smell, Mr. Collis?”
“The smell of butchering,” Jack Collis said, scowling at the memory. The courtroom shuddered with him.
“What did you do then, sir?”
“I went and found Jacob Hutchins with the search party, and took him back to the cabin. He helped me take up a plank of the puncheon floor next to the fireplace.”
“And what did you find, sir?”
“Blood. A dried-up puddle of blood in the dirt underneath that plank.”
William Alexander smiled indulgently. “A rabbit, perhaps, or a deer?”
“You butcher animals outdoors.”
Several of the jurors were nodding in agreement. Most of them had hunted in the deep forests of Burke County at some time in their lives, and they knew the truth of Jack Collis’s words. William Alexander looked pleased with himself as he nodded to Nicholas Woodfin and returned to his seat. “Your witness.”
I was watching the defendant. She sat perfectly still, staring past the jury as if she were so deep in prayer or meditation that the words did not reach her. I fancied, though, that I saw her wince when Jack Collis spoke of butchering.
When Nicholas Woodfin stood up to question the old man, Mrs. Silver’s blank stare wavered, and for a moment she regarded her lawyer with shining eyes, but the look was gone in an instant, and she resumed her pose of indifference to the proceedings around her.
I wondered what Mr. Woodfin would make of this witness. The legal strategy would be to discredit Jack Collis, if he could, by questioning the old man’s eyesight or establishing Collis’s close ties to the Silver family and his animosity toward the young widow. I would have hesitated to take such a course of action, though, for I had seen what a forthright fellow the witness was, and I thought that he had won the respect—and therefore the trust—of that simple jury. They would view with disfavor any attempt by a town lawyer to impugn this man’s testimony.
Woodfin must have felt as I did, for after one or two perfunctory questions concerning the circumstantial nature of the grisly discovery, he dismissed the old woodsman with grave courtesy.
I looked about the courtroom for familiar faces. Charlie Silver’s family was represented by his uncle Mr. Greenberry Silver, himself a prominent landowner in the western reaches of Burke County. One of the constables had mentioned that Charlie’s stepmother had a new baby, born only a few weeks ago, and I surmised that either Jacob Silver had chosen to be with his wife, or else he had not cared to venture down from the hills to hear the particulars of his son’s murder detailed before uncaring strangers. Other Silver relatives waited in the hallway for their own turn as witnesses.
I caught sight of Isaiah Stewart midway back in the throng. His face bore that look of composed grief that one often sees at funerals, and I wondered whether he had accepted his daughter’s guilt or if he thought that she was doomed despite her innocence. I could not decide which burden would be the more terrible for a father to bear.
At Stewart’s side was a husky, sandy-haired fellow who looked like a twenty-five-year-old version of