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 to B. 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 death against the defendant, Francis Silver. On motion judgment is granted against Jackson Stuart and Isaiah Stuart, sureties to the appeal, for the cost of this court in the suit incurred.
Jno. L. Henderson Clerk of Supreme Court of North