Nora Bonesteel lived here.
Not that anybody ever said a word against old Miz Bonesteel. She was still a handsome woman, who wore well her seventy years, and she never asked favors of a soul. She stood faithfully in her church pew every week, and she kept to herself, but for doing what had to be done: food taken to the sick, and fine things knitted and sewn for the brides and the babies of the parish, but still… Still.
Nobody wanted to have much to do with Nora Bonesteel. She knew things. People said that when you came to tell her the news of a death in the valley, the cake for the family would already be in the oven. The Sight was in the Bonesteel family; her grandmother had been the same. The Bonesteel women never talked about what they knew, never meddled in folks’ lives, but all the same, it made people uneasy to be around them, knowing that whatever happened to you, they would have seen it coming.
The old woman looked down at the letter from Nashville. Would she know about that, what with the letter coming from so far away? With a sigh she bent down to open the gate.
When she looked up again, the tall, straight figure of a woman in gray stood on the porch, silently watching her. She clutched the mason jar of peach preserves tighter against her belly. She had brought a gift. She would not be beholden to this strange old woman.
As she neared the porch, she called out, “Afternoon, Miz Bonesteel! I’ve come to sit a spell.”
Nora Bonesteel nodded. “You’re Pauline Harkryder.”
“I am.” She held out the jar of preserves, but the burden of the letter from Nashville was too great for the pretense of a social call. “I’ve got a letter here,” she said. “It’s about my nephew Lafayette, down at the state prison in Nashville.”
“You’d best come in.”
They sat down in Nora Bonesteel’s parlor with its big glass window overlooking the river valley and the green hills beyond, but Pauline Harkryder had no time to spare for the glories of a mountain summer. She had seen more than fifty of them, and they had not given her much. Each summer reminded her that the world stayed young, while she wore herself out doing the same old thing year after year, with nothing to show for it. She handed the letter to Nora Bonesteel.
She waited, twisting her hands in her lap, while the old woman read the few typed lines announcing the scheduled execution of Lafayette Harkryder in a few weeks’ time.
When Nora Bonesteel had finished reading the letter, she set it down on the table. “You’d better have some tea,” she said.
Pauline Harkryder shrugged. It was all one to her. She couldn’t remember whether she’d eaten anything today or not. “They say they’re going to kill Lafayette,” she called out. Nora Bonesteel was in the kitchen now, setting the copper kettle on to boil. It made her easier to talk to, Pauline thought, if you didn’t have to look at those blue eyes staring through you.
A few moments passed, and there was no answer from the kitchen. Pauline tried again. “Do you think they will? Kill him, I mean.”
Nora Bonesteel appeared in the doorway. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll pray about it.”
“But-what I came to ask… If I could just know for sure… Miz Bonesteel-is he guilty?”
They stared at each other in silence. At last Nora Bonesteel said, “Do you need me to tell you that?”
Pauline Harkryder covered her mouth with her hand. “I’ve never said anything,” she whispered. “In all these years I never did. Is it too late?”
Nora Bonesteel sighed. “Do you have any kind of proof that would convince a judge?”
“No.”
“Then let it be.” Behind her the teakettle screeched and rumbled, breaking the silence.
“It’s hard to know what’s best to do,” said Pauline. “He was a sweet young ’un, but he growed up wild, same as the other two. I did what I could for those boys after their mama was gone.”
“You can write to him,” said Nora Bonesteel. “Ask him what he wants you to do. Aside from that, all you can do is pray and wait, because only one person can save him, and that isn’t you.”
A plain wooden chair sits on the tiled floor of an otherwise empty room. The chair is dark oak, with wide, flat arms. Its back is a solid plank, except for the three rectangular openings on either side, positioned to accommodate two pairs of blue nylon restraining straps ending in metal seat-belt buckles. Behind the chair a round wall clock familiar to schoolrooms hangs high on the pale cinder-block wall. The chair faces a large glass window covered by blinds, concealing a viewing room with space for perhaps twenty chairs. The only ornament in the observation room is a wall plaque, approximately one foot in diameter: a circle with the words “The Great Seal of the State of Tennessee 1796” encircling a drawing of a plow with “Agriculture” written beneath it, and below that a sailing ship designated “Commerce.” The walls to the left and right of the chair are fitted with ordinary doors. One leads to the corridor of holding cells and a kitchen such as one might find adjoining the reception hall of a modern country church. The other door opens into another plain, bright room, containing a small metal cabinet with lights and dials fitted on the gray surface. Beside it a power-supply box containing a transformer converts the standard 220-volt current coming into the room into a charge of 2,640 volts at the proper time. A wall telephone hangs a few feet away.
The chair was made for the state of Tennessee by the firm of Fred A. Leuchter Associates in Boston in 1989, but in style and composition, it looks much older. Parts of it are. The state sent the Leuchter company wood from the first Old Sparky, built in 1916, to be used in the construction of the new one, a ritual that was not without precedent. Some of the wood from the 1916 electric chair had been salvaged from Tennessee’s old gallows and used to construct its replacement when hanging went out of fashion. Now its successor contains the wood of both, so that more than a century of tradition has been incorporated into the new device. The new chair cost the state $50,000, and it, too, was called “Old Sparky.”
It has never been used.
Once a month, though, it is tested.
Once a month a jar of salt water-a much more accurate representation of a man than the biblical image of dust-is placed on the flat wooden seat; electrodes are inserted into the water; someone presses a button on the gray machine, and current surges through the water, proving that all is in readiness.
At least that is how the prisoners believe the chair is tested. They recount the story to one another in bull sessions, and engage in private speculations about who among them will be the first to go. Who will christen the new chair with his bodily fluids? But the prisoners also say that there are claw marks in the wide arms of the wooden chair, a chair that was built in 1989 and has never been used.
Even when the power is not turned on, the electric chair generates its own current of legend.
Burgess Gaither
ARREST
I remember the first time I ever heard of Frankie Silver.
Constable Charlie Baker was pounding on the door of the courthouse in snow-caked boots, bawling like a branded calf, “Sheriff! Where’s Sheriff Butler? There’s been murder done!”
It was January 10, 1832, the Tuesday morning after Twelfth Night. I was shivering in my office, still worn out from Saturday’s Old Christmas revels at Belvidere, but determined that a headache and a touch of fever should claim no more of this fine new year, my twenty-fifth year of life and the third year of my profession of law.
I was trying to write legibly in the Burke County record book without removing my gloves. The fire burned bravely in the grate behind me, but it was no match for the wind that knifed through the cracks in the wooden walls, and I could see my breath hanging in the air above the candle flame. This sight inspired in me waves of self-pity as I imagined elegant velvet-curtained offices in the great stone edifices of Raleigh: roaring fires blazing beneath marble mantelpieces and crystal decanters of brandywine on mahogany sideboards. In such palatial quarters, more prosperous young lawyers, those who had read law with statesmen and judges, and who were not eighth sons in genteel but modest families, would practice their calling with an exalted clientele, while I, who had read law with my poor older brother, rest his soul, sat freezing in a frontier courthouse, far from the corridors of power, and likely to remain so.