The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,120

open, and Baby woke up a-bawling.”

I wrote: The prisoner avers that Charles Silver did come home intoxicated on the night of December 22, 1831.

“We had words then, sir, for I was fit to be tied that he had been gone so long, leaving me to tend the fire and the cattle. I reckon I hollered at him: It’s about time you got home,or some such words, and he shoved me away. I fell against the cradle, and the baby yelled even louder. Charlie scrunched up his face like the noise hurt his ears, and I was still talking too loud to make myself heard over the din. He pulled out his pistol then, and said, I’m sick of both of you, by God I am!I wouldn’t have taken much notice of that, for he was always full of talk, except for the look on his face, which wasn’t red like anger, but gray, like somebody who was cold all the way to the bone. He looked down at my baby then, sir, and he says to me, Frankie, if you don’t shut that baby up, I reckon I will.”

“He pointed a pistol at his own child?” I said. Mr. Wilson gave me a withering stare, and I mumbled an apology for forgetting myself and went back to setting down her testimony.

“Charlie pulled the hammer back, and I knew he meant to do it. He wasn’t himself at all. He was mad with drink, and we’d been shut up in that cabin most of the winter on account of the deep snow, with the baby colicky and crying day and night. Charlie likes a good time, sir. He wasn’t one to suffer bad times. He would have been sorry afterward, most likely, if he had killed the baby, but it wouldn’t have been no use then.”

Mr. Wilson said softly, “And what did you do?”

“Well, I didn’t have more than a heartbeat to think on it, for he was a-steadying that pistol at the baby’s head. Next thing I knew, the ax was in my hands and I was swinging at him with all my might. I had to stop him, you see, any way I could.”

Thomas Wilson and I looked at each other. There was sorrow in his face and anger in mine, but we said nothing to the prisoner except a calm “Continue, please.”

“I hit him. I reckon I did.”

“And then?”

“He went down, and there was blood around the side of his head, and he was twitching. I had me a white kitten once, and while it was playing by the hearth, my daddy’s hunting dog snapped at its little throat and shook it while I stood and screamed. When that dog dropped my kitten, it lay there twitching, blood coming out of its mouth, with its eyes like ice, staring without seeing. Took it a long, long minute to die. I cried for three days.” She looked up at us, as if she had suddenly remembered we were there. “It was like that with Charlie. It was quick.”

We sat there in silence for a moment; both Wilson and I were waiting for her to pick up the threads of the story again, for she was no longer weeping, but the silence continued. At last Thomas Wilson said softly, “And then what, Mrs. Silver?”

She stared up at him. “I killed him,” she whispered. “And I told you how. That’s all I can say.”

“But how did you come to burn his body?”

She shrugged. “Just did.”

“Surely you realize that it is the destruction of the body that has caused the greatest outrage concerning your crime?”

She nodded. We waited another long minute in silence, but it was clear that the prisoner would say no more.

Wilson’s eyes narrowed. “Very well then, madam,” he said. “Let us proceed. Tell us what transpired on

the night you escaped.”

She took a deep breath. “Will them that helped me get in trouble for it, Mr. Wilson?”

“They deserve to,” he replied. “They have set the governor’s feelings very much against you, for he

thinks now that you are an outlaw. You may save yourself, however, if you will hand over those who effected your escape.”

“That wouldn’t be right,” said Frankie Silver.

“It would save you.”

“If I told on them that helped me . . . would they hang?” She was looking not at Mr. Wilson, but at me.

“We cannot say what punishment the jury would fix upon them,” he said primly, but my expression must have told her my thoughts: they would