The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,26

eyes looking out of their daddy’s furrowed face, or Ewell with Mama’s aging dumpling chins and graying hair. His brothers still grinned out at him from Technicolor daydreams as swaggering youths on the brink of manhood.

Tom and Ewell.

Tom was the oldest, a dark-haired banty rooster with a look of sleepy indifference that masked his intensity. That vacant stare had stood him well in poker games and bar fights. His opponents thought that he would be easy pickings, and by the time they cottoned on to their mistake, it was usually too late.

Ewell . . . Mama’s side of the family. Bigger, soft-bodied, with heavy-lidded eyes and fleshy lips, and always that look of wantingsomething. He had looked at girls in church, cars on the highway, and deep-fried drumsticks on other people’s plates with that same naked hungry stare.

Tom and Ewell. How long had it been since he’d heard from them? There had been a few letters at first.

Just after Fate had been sent away to prison, Ewell sent him a couple of postcards that said things like Cheer up, kid! The lawyers won’t give up. They’re bound to get you out.Eventually. Ewell didn’t seem to mind about “eventually,” since it was not his life trickling away behind cinder-block walls. Fate wondered, sometimes, who Ewell had turned out to be, but he didn’t much care about it one way or the other. Not enough to try to find out. Ewell had drifted away from home, and the family had lost touch with him—not that any particular effort was made by the Harkryders or Ewell to maintain the ties. Maybe he had done well and wanted no reminders of his hillbilly relatives. Maybe he finally had enough money to buy all the things he lusted after in the catalogues and the mall displays. Or maybe he was already dead. It was all the same to Fate. Ewell wasn’t real anymore.

After the trial Tom did a stint in the army, and ended up with an infantry company in Korea. I reckon we must be in about the same boat,Tom had written him. Both of us government prisoners, only they want me to kill people. It rains here all the time. Rains ’til your feet rot in your socks. You probably eat better than I do. . . .Fate couldn’t remember if he’d bothered to answer.

At first he had thought a lot about his brothers. During the first months of his imprisonment, rage had been his warmth, his comforter, and his friend. He would look at the wall, trying to shut out the ceaseless noise of the cell block, and he would imagine his brothers eating hamburgers at the Dixie Grill, or walking the October woods with rifles in search of deer, or burying their faces in the breasts of sweet-smelling doe-eyed girls. In his imaginings they were always laughing, always free. Fate wanted to destroy them. He would escape from prison, he thought, and he would put a gun barrel into Tom’s grinning mouth, and he would make the laughter stop. Or he would recant. Break the silence. Tell what happened that night, but tell it a different way, so that they, not he, would be shut away here until they faded away into nothingness. Except that no one would believe him this time. Nobody cared about the truth anymore—if, in fact, they had ever cared at all. The trial was finished, the sentence was passed, and now it was all over but the waiting.

His brothers were beyond his reach now. Gradually he had come to accept that. Eventually the rage flickered out, to be replaced for a while by sweeter memories of home and family. Fate lived for a while on scenes from his boyhood. There hadn’t been many happy memories of home, but the few that could be lit with the softer light of reflection he replayed over and over again in his mind until they became a tapestry of warmth and laughter, and the other, darker truths lay discarded and forgotten in the bottom of his mind. He subsisted for months on snapshot recollections: he was six, wobbling down the blacktop on a homemade bike, built by Tom from scraps and scrounged (perhaps stolen) parts. . . . He was eight, in overalls and barefoot on a cold, wet rock, fishing in the creek with Tom and Ewell, the spring woods ablaze with redbud. . . . Ten, chugging his first beer in the cool darkness of the smokehouse, Ewell