The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,112
signed their name to the paper asking the governor for mercy. I reckoned it would be all right then, just like Mama said. I sat through the winter thinking about how big my baby Nancy was getting and wondering how many teeth she had, and if she was walking good yet. I reckoned I’d see her in the spring. She’d have to get to know me all over again, but at least we’d be together, when I got shut of this old town.
But then in March a new judge came, and he was old and sour, with a pinch-prune face and eyes like the pebbles in the creek bed, and he looked at me as if I were a shriveled-up old woman, and you could tell that he didn’t think me a pretty little thing, but only a wicked murderess to be damned and sent to hell, and he was the one to do it.
He fixed the twenty-eighth of June as my day to die.
I never figured on dying in tomato time. Leaving my baby without a mama or a daddy to look out for her. Going into the cold clay while my teeth are still strong and my hair is yellow as moonlight. It don’t seem right.
The ladies tell me that Daddy has been stumping around the county like a bear tied to a stake, trying to get some help for me. He went hat in hand to this colonel and to that gentleman, and they all gave him advice, but sometimes they’d say the opposite of one another. At last I reckon Daddy figured it was up to him to look out for his own. And what could I say when they came for me? I wanted to live. I wanted to feel the grass again on my bare ankles, and drink spring water.
So when they stood there in the night with the key to my cell a-dangling from Jack’s hand, I didn’t spare a thought for the governor or the fine ladies of Morganton with their pies and their petitions. I put on Jack’s old shirt and breeches and blacked my face with coal dust, and I went with them.
The people in that town meant well, most of them, trying to help me with letters and such, but we don’t take charity from strangers if we can help it. It’s not our way. I’d rather trust a surefooted horse and a steep mountain than all the fine words in the world.
I know that people have said I must have known something about it, but upon my oath I did not. Though I should have guessed, perhaps. I had heard the story often enough, when people spoke of Eliza Grace McDowell. The family is proud of it, and perhaps they should be, but just lately it troubles me all the same.
It was a warm evening, the seventeenth of May, and I was pleased to see a red sunset, a sign that we should have no more of the spring rains that had blighted our days, muddied our roads, and made ponds of our fields for a good many days. I lingered on the courthouse lawn, talking with Sheriff Boone in the glow of the spring twilight. We were merely exchanging pleasantries, as I was leaving to go to Belvidere for dinner. I do not think we spoke of Frankie Silver, for her execution was still some weeks away, and I knew that the sheriff was uneasy in his mind about having to perform the grim task, and he did not care to talk about it. So it was apropos of nothing in particular when Boone said to me, “You know, Mr. Gaither, I have been thinking about John Sevier these past few days.”
My mind was on other matters, I suppose. I was thinking of the baby’s cough, and of whether my old black coat would see me through another season, and I was wondering whom I should be put next to at dinner this evening, for I was too tired for sparkling inanities with the ladies or the sober political doomsaying of my elders. “John Sevier,” I said, to show that I was listening. I barely glanced at Sheriff Boone, for I was anxious to begin the evening, if only to see it over with. “A hero of the Battle of King’s Mountain. Sevier was a fine, bold fellow, and a patriot.”
“Perhaps too bold,” said the sheriff. “But I believe he was a good man nonetheless.”