Fate Harkryder was thinking about death.
It seemed strange to know that you were going to die when you felt perfectly sound. When he came to consider the matter, it seemed not so much strange as… improbable. Ridiculous to believe that after twenty-odd years of sedentary monotony, the very people who had wished him good morning and to whom he had passed the occasional remark about a basketball game or a change in the weather would come for him, strap him into a plain wooden chair, and kill him.
Strange to think that the ridge he had watched day in and day out for so many years would go on changing from green to gold with the seasons without his presence as the observer. He liked to think that the ridge was there on his account, and he found it hard to believe that his death would go unheeded by his ridge.
Of course, he knew that deep down he didn’t believe in death at all. Not for himself, that is, and certainly not by execution in the state of Tennessee. He was still young and strong. He did push-ups every day for exercise, and despite a twenty-year pack-a-day smoking habit, his lungs and his blood pressure were fine. He trusted his body to keep him around for many more years, and he trusted the Tennessee legal system to spin its wheels for at least that long before they got around to trying to execute him. By then, maybe the voters would abolish the death penalty altogether, and someday, when his crime was so far in the past that nobody cared anymore, he would be granted parole. He intended to be hale and hearty enough to enjoy that freedom when the time came.
Even with lawyers who were mediocre at best, Fate Harkryder had been able to stave off the death penalty for twenty years already. It wasn’t difficult. There was always some objection that could be made in the appeal process, and any little quibble could tie the court up for a year or more, so slowly did the mills of justice grind. His lawyers had argued that his original counsel hadn’t been any good. That fellow was now quite a prominent attorney in Knoxville, but no one seemed to notice the discrepancy, and Fate figured that it was just one of the moves in the game: a formality. Anyhow, it bought him more time. When that objection played itself out a few years down the line, his legal advisers objected to the expert witnesses who had testified at his trial. They had now spent years nitpicking through a stack of transcripts and documents that would fill a pickup truck, but each legal dispute ate up a few more months: filing time, waiting time, court time, awaiting-the-decision time, appealing the decision, and then back to square one to begin again.
Fate sometimes thought that the delaying tactics would go on even if he dropped dead in his cell, so impersonal and relentless was the process. He was not the quarterback in this legal scrimmage; he was the football. It had been years now since anybody had mentioned the names Mike Wilson or Emily Stanton to him. The paperwork just rolled on, oblivious to real time and real people. Sometimes it seemed that the judicial process had taken on a life of its own, independent of any actual, long-ago crime.
Burgess Gaither
CHOOSING COUNSEL
The snows of January deepened into a bleak February chill, and we town folk gathered at our firesides, passing the time away in desultory conversation. We discussed the presidential election coming in autumn, and what the reelection of Andrew Jackson boded for the Western lands. Since the time of the Revolution, the landholdings of the Cherokee nation had shrunk from many thousands of acres stretching from Alabama to Virginia to the present remnant of their past glory: a few townships in the steep mountains to the southwest of us. Now, even that pittance was begrudged them. Since the recent discovery of gold in those mountains, the United States government had been besieged with demands to move the Indians westward so that better use could be made of their mineral-rich acreage. The Indian Removal Act had passed in 1830, ordering all Indians to be resettled on lands west of the Mississippi, but so far it had not been enforced. People were growing impatient. Andrew Jackson, who rose to fame as an Indian fighter, was said to be sympathetic to the plight of the settlers, and people claimed that he’d see to the eviction of the Cherokee to win the support of the voters on the frontier. Gold fever had swept the mountains.
There was much local speculation about the gold fields, and what effect the discovery might have on our own prosperity. Old John Tate, who is seventy if he’s a day, has already taken his family off to the hills of Georgia to seek their fortunes, and other folk talk of joining him. They are waiting to hear if he strikes it rich.
Aside from the economics involved, there is much concern among my colleagues that Andrew Jackson may ruin the country if his presidency continues. Most of the gentlemen of my acquaintance think that Jackson is a lout, an uncouth peasant who would turn the country over to the mob rule of uneducated dirt farmers. He is an Antrim Irishman who prides himself on his common touch.
He is also a lawyer. He read law not far from here-with Spruce MaCay in Salisbury, North Carolina. In 1787, when my father-in-law the squire was a young clerk of court in Morganton, Andrew Jackson was the public prosecutor for the Western District of North Carolina. The older gentlemen remember him as a hard-drinking, quick-tempered scarecrow who would sooner fight than gamble.
People still talk about the incident that occurred when Jackson was practicing law over the mountain in Jonesborough in the months before he moved on to Nashville. He was invited to an elegant ball at the home of one of the county’s prominent families. Jackson asked if he might bring a companion, and the request was granted, no doubt in hopes that he might introduce another eligible frontier gentleman to polite society. Instead Andrew Jackson arrived at the home of his host in the company of five bawds, tavern women of easy virtue whom he tried to pass off as “ladies.” The shock and outrage of those present meant nothing to Andrew Jackson; it only satisfied him that the gentry had correctly interpreted his message of contempt.
Now gentlemen everywhere talk bitterly of President Jackson’s 1829 inaugural party, when a drunken mob of his beloved “common people” were allowed to rampage through the White House, leaving a trail of mud and broken china in their wake. The aristocrats are afraid that if this ruffian is allowed to run the country for another term of office, ruin will follow. There is talk of placing tariffs on imported goods, which worries a good many people. They do not criticize the president so publicly, however, for Jackson was a hero in the war with England twenty years ago, and his ties to western North Carolina are cherished by many. Jackson’s popularity with the local farmers and backwoodsmen is as undeniable as it is bewildering. I confess, though, that I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be independent of rich and powerful old men, and to be able to oppose them with impunity. Andrew Jackson is every inch a self-made man, and it heartens me to see that such a feat is possible, although I would wish to have more respect from educated and wellborn gentlemen were I in his place.
Besides these political and economic topics, and the ever-present discussions about the weather, we all spoke endlessly, obsessively, perhaps even morbidly, of Frankie Silver. Her trial was but a month away.
She alone of her family languished in the Burke County jail now. Her mother and brother had been let go after the hearing before the magistrates in January. Mr. Burgner quite rightly set them free, declaring that no one had offered any evidence to show that they had known of or participated in the death of Charlie Silver. They were, however, to be witnesses in the forthcoming trial, and to ensure their appearance in court on the appointed day, he made them post a bond of one hundred pounds to secure their liberty. Isaiah Stewart paid the requested sum, and he lost no time in putting forty miles of mountains between them and the law in Morganton, for he took his wife and son back up the Yellow Mountain Road to their land on the Toe River. Frankie Silver was well and truly alone in her prison cell, for the journey across the mountains was too great for a family visit, especially in winter. She must have missed her baby daughter dreadfully, but we did not speak of that. The ordinary folk of Morganton recounted the crime to one another, thrilling anew to the horror of it with each retelling, while we in the legal profession had a more prosaic matter to contemplate. Which of us would defend this wretched young woman?