The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,51

of the kind,” I said, with ill-concealed irritation.

“Thomas Wilson is acting as advisory counsel until the trial. He has cautioned his client with the utmost severity against speaking to anyone about her case. I doubt that Sheriff Butler would permit you or Mary to visit. I urge you not to attempt such a thing.”

“My sister Mary is quite determined.”

“Your sister Mary always is.”

“And you are sure that Mr. Woodfin will be a sympathetic and conscientious defender of poor Mrs. Silver?”

“I am certain that he will be excellent, my dear,” I assured my wife. But I was thinking, He is a good deal more than she deserves, for we believe she is a wicked murderess.I did not tell Elizabeth that her cousin James’s parting remark had been, “Won’t we look like fools if the young devil gets her acquitted?” And we all laughed heartily at that.

I miss the flowers. I can hardly bear to look out. The ground is so bare and brown now, and the trees look for all the world as if they were dead. “Don’t you worry,” Sarah Presnell says to me when she brings me my dinner. “The flowers will be back in late March. Everything comes alive then, same as ever.”

I must be the opposite of the flowers, then, for they will reappear the very week that my trial is held. They will be coming alive as I commence to dying. They have got me a lawyer, Mrs. Presnell says, and she seems to set a store by them, always going on about what fine gentlemen they are, and big political men, but I cannot see what use that will be to me. I don’t trust strangers, and I’ve seen the way these town-bred folk look at us mountain people—like we were something they caught in a trapline, and they’re afeared of catching something off ’n us. I do not want to tell my secrets to such as them, for they are men, and like as not they own slaves to boot. What would they know about being afraid? They think the law looks after people that needs help. They live in a town with a sheriff within hollering distance, and prying neighbors to see that everybody does what he ought. It’s easy to die in the wilderness, and there’s nobody around to save you.

I dream about Charlie sometimes. He is standing in a field of buffalo grass, and it is summer. He has been picking wild blackberries for me, because he knows I love them so. He lifts a handful of blackberries to his mouth and he bites into them, and the dark juice runs out of his mouth. But suddenly I see that it is not blackberry juice running down his chin, but blood, and there is a gaping wound at the side of his head, matting his brown hair. His eyes are open and staring, but their sense is shut, and he walks toward me, holding out the basket of blackberries. Before he reaches me, though, the dream changes and I am kneeling beside the little branch that runs back of our cabin. The water is so cold that it numbs my fingers, but I am washing white linen in the branch water, and I cannot stop. Swirls of red slide away down the cloth when I hold it up to look at it, but it is not yet white again. I scour it harder on the cold rocks. Someone is behind me, watching me scrub the bloodstains out of the white linen. Someone is watching. It is not Charlie.

Burgess Gaither

THE GRAND JURY For one week of every September and March, the session of circuit court transforms Morganton from a sleepy frontier village into a boisterous festival of tavern phillipics on law and politics, dinner parties, and, I am sorry to say, more than a few drunken brawls and fistfights, which simply generate more business

for the legal community that created the occasion to begin with. The local hostelries teem with travelers come to town for the court. Some of the newcomers are litigants or relatives of the accused, but many others are merely spectators who have come for the sport of it. They see the week of trials as a bit of drama to spice up a humdrum existence. As I have said, court is our theatre.

My wife’s parents, the Erwins of Belvidere, offer their hospitality to the visiting attorneys, hosting a sumptuous dinner and even lodging to those who prefer not to