The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,54
image from my Latin studies at Hull’s School leaped to my mind: Ulysses caught between a deadly pair of monsters, Scylla the rock and Charybdis the whirlpool. Although it seemed particularly apt, I decided against sharing this Homeric inspiration with the rest of the party.
“We shall do our best, Miss Mary. Indeed we shall.” Wilson tried to strike a note of geniality but his voice rang hollow. “Still, you must see that the evidence against Mrs. Silver is very strong.” He glanced warily at the judge, as if he expected that worthy gentleman to rap upon the table with a carving knife and call him to order.
At that point Squire Erwin came to the aid of his struggling dinner guest. “Mary, my dear, you mustn’t badger poor Mr. Wilson about his unfortunate client, particularly when his own involvement in the case is indirect. Mrs. Silver will be defended in court by a splendid young lawyer from Asheville, a Mr. Nicholas Woodfin.”
Since Nicholas Woodfin was not present at the dinner party, Squire Erwin had succeeded in rescuing Thomas Wilson without throwing his colleague to the wolves. Before Mary could pursue the matter, another guest changed the subject, and we all fell upon a discussion of some trivial matter with more relief than interest.
As we left the table, though, I heard Colonel James Erwin murmur, “Has anyone warned young Woodfin about our Miss Mary, do you think? She is far more menacing than his rustic client.”
“Old home week, indeed!” said my wife Elizabeth.
It was Saturday, March 17, the day after my twenty-fifth birthday. I was preparing to leave for the courthouse, where this morning the grand jury was meeting to decide which of the possible cases should go on to trial when the Superior Court met the following Monday.
“Whatever do you mean, my dear?” I murmured, but my attention was on the mirror.
“The grand jury is meeting today, is it not?” I nodded. “And as clerk of court, you selected the jurors?”
“Well . . .”
“And who did you choose to be foreman of the grand jury?”
I sighed. Sometimes I think people in Morganton know things beforethey happen, so quickly does gossip spread through the community. “Samuel Tate.”
Elizabeth smiled. “Oh, Burgess, you are such a humbug! After all that fuss you made before father’s dinner party about the court being ‘old home week,’ as you put it, because of the lawyers’ family connections. And then, who do you put in charge of the grand jury? Sam Tate!”
“It is a small town, Elizabeth,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster. “Nearly every eligible juror is connected in some way—how isSam connected, by the way?”
“Samuel Tate is married to my cousin Elizabeth, the daughter of Peggy Erwin, that was.” (Peggy Erwin Tate is the sister of Colonel James Erwin, in case you are as obsessed with family connections as everyone else in Morganton seems to be.) “But that is hardly the point, Burgess, as you well know.”
I did know. Apart from his family connections, Sam Tate is hardly the disinterested village yeoman that people seem to think comprise grand juries. Although he is just past thirty and his primary occupation is farming his landholdings at “Hickory Grove,” Sam Tate is a former sheriff of Burke County, and now serves as a justice of the Burke County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions.
“I think he is a very fitting choice,” I said. “I realize that the notion of a former sheriff acting as jury foreman might strike the casual observer as an odd and even suspicious circumstance, but he will be very useful. He has a working knowledge of law and procedure, and he can direct the other jurors in a sensible fashion.”
“He is hardly a disinterested party.” Elizabeth’s questions were serious enough, but something in her tone made me think she might be laughing at me. “And hardly an angel of mercy, either, I fancy.”
I knew what she was referring to. Although the incident had happened before I became the clerk of Superior Court, and thus I did not witness it, I had heard the story told more than once. During Sam Tate’s tenure as sheriff, a man had been convicted of a felony that required him to be branded upon the thumb with the letter symbolizing his crime. ( Mfor manslaughter, and Tfor thief or any other crime.)
There are many crimes on the law books for which the prescribed penalty is death, but in these enlightened times we choose not to