The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,111
a visit from them?”
Fate Harkryder almost smiled. “Perhaps I would,” he said. “Why don’t you see if they’d like to come and say good-bye?”
“I can certainly do that,” said Ritter smoothly. “Now let’s talk about you for a moment. Are you experiencing any symptoms of undue anxiety? Loss of appetite, trouble sleeping?”
“ Undueanxiety?” The prisoner stared at him. “The state of Tennessee is going to strap me into a chair and shoot electricity through my body until I burn to death from the inside out. Just what anxiety would you call undue?”
“You would do well to remain hopeful. You might possibly get a stay of execution,” said the psychologist, ignoring the emotional outburst. “Meanwhile, we would hope that you can stay as calm and upbeat as possible under the circumstances. I can recommend sleeping tablets—in carefully controlled doses, of course—and perhaps some sort of tranquilizer for daytime use, if you feel that would help.”
Fate Harkryder shook his head. “Keep the drugs,” he said. “If I only have a few more days to spend being alive, I don’t want to miss any of it. I intend to go down fighting.”
Ritter’s frown told him that he had misunderstood.
“Legally, I mean,” said Fate. “Appeals. Motions filed in every court we can think of. Messages to the governor.”
“I see. Meanwhile, if you’d like, we can discuss the incident that put you here. Would you like to tell me your side of it?”
“I don’t believe I would.”
The psychologist shrugged. “Some men find it easier to go to their deaths having made their peace with this world. Is there any bit of unfinished business that troubles you?”
“Not anything you can put right,” said the condemned man.
Burgess Gaither
THEESCAPE They’ll not hang a woman, folks kept saying, over and over like rain on a roof. You’ll not hang, Frankie. I was a young girl, a proper married woman, the mother of an innocent babe. I was no madwoman crazed for blood, nor no town whore robbing a young blade and adding killing to the slate of her sins. You’ll not hang. And I carried myself meek and mild every time the court met, with my hair combed smooth, and my dress as clean and fitten as I could get it. “She’s a pretty little thing!” the men would say when I passed by. “She don’t look like no Jezebel.” And I would keep my head down low and pretend not to hear them, for it was all a game, and if I could not tell the truth flat out to that court full of strangers and be done with it, why then I must play their game and take care to win.
I had done good. The fine town ladies brought me pies and came and sat with me and read out the Bible in my cell, and I was thankful, for they were kind, but the tales I liked best were the fairy stories that my mama used to tell me. There was one about a beautiful princess who was walled up in a tower, and a handsome prince rode up and saved her. When my mama told the story, the princess had long golden hair like mine, and the prince was a dark-haired man with a big house and all the money he needed. I didn’t ask for the ladies to tell me stories like that, for it wouldn’t have been fitten, but I thought about them all the same, to myself, and to pass the time I pretended that I was the princess in that tower, awaiting to be saved.
The ladies told me that people were working hard to get me a pardon. They were writing letters to Governor Stokes, begging him for mercy, and there was talk of getting up a letter signed by half the county, asking that my life be spared.
Governor Stokes left office at the new year, and the new governor was a man called David Swain, who came from Buncombe County, not far from here. Then the jailer’s wife, Sarah Presnell, who wasn’t one for making fine promises, she came to my cell with the news, and she said, “Happen you’ll be all right now, Frankie, for the new governor is from these parts, and he’ll be made to listen to all the folks who won’t stand to see you hang.” The other ladies of Morganton came and said the same. They told me that even the jury was sorry they had ordered me hanged, and that some of them had