“I’ll just tell it straight out, I guess. It’s been bottled up inside me so long now, I feel like it’s poking out my stomach. Let me tell it.”
I sat down on the camp bed, took out my writing materials, and set my quill to paper. “Whenever you are ready,” I said, with what I hoped was an encouraging smile.
The tears flowed freely down her pale cheeks. “I killed him,” she said.
I drew in my breath. I knew, of course, that she must have done it, and the jury had pronounced her guilty more than a year ago, but there is still a chill that comes when one hears a murderer say quietly,I killed him. I waited for her to continue, but she simply sat there looking at us.
“We must know more,” said Thomas Wilson.
She nodded, and looked back toward the window and the green mountains in the distance. “Charlie… I was sixteen when I married him. He was handsome enough, and I reckon that’s why I said yes when he asked me. Folks were always saying what a handsome pair we were. And I was wanting to get away from home anyhow. Seems like all there ever was to do was chores, and I thought, I may as well do the washing and the cooking for my own man in my own house instead of letting Mama boss me every whipstitch doing the selfsame tasks at home. I wish I hadn’t of now.” She looked at me. “You ain’t writing,” she said.
“No. I will only set down what pertains to the crime itself,” I told her. I could not write as fast as she spoke, and at any rate I thought this preamble would be of little value for our purposes. “You may say whatever you like, though, Mrs. Silver. I will read it back to you when we are done.”
She nodded. “Where was I? Oh, Charlie. You’d think with his mama dying a-borning him, that he wouldn’t be spoiled by his stepmother, but I reckon he was. Or else he was just naturally trifling. He didn’t hardly lift his hand to help with the work. He’d chop wood and feed the cattle, and he called himself hunting when he’d slip off for hours at a time while I tended to everything else.”
Thomas Wilson scowled at her. “Madam, did you kill your husband because he was lazy?”
She shook her head. “No, sir. I didn’t mind him much most times, but the thing was, Charlie liked to get drunk, and the liquor turned him mean.”
“How so?”
“He’d come home cold-eyed and set in his jaw, looking for things to find fault with. I answered him back a time or two at first, but he’d hit me across the face with the back of his hand and split open my lip. Or he’d black my eye and say I’d earned it. I learned to keep out of his way when he was drinking. There’s many a woman does the same, sir.”
“He had been drinking on the night in question?”
“The night and most of the day as well. He went over to George Young’s to get liquor, and he must have put away a jugful before he ever started home. He came in after dark, toting his pistol and letting the cold wind in the cabin when he pulled the door open, and Baby woke up a-bawling.”
I wrote:The prisoner avers that Charles Silver did come home intoxicated on the night of December 22, 1831.
“We had words then, sir, for I was fit to be tied that he had been gone so long, leaving me to tend the fire and the cattle. I reckon I hollered at him:It’s about time you got home, or some such words, and he shoved me away. I fell against the cradle, and the baby yelled even louder. Charlie scrunched up his face like the noise hurt his ears, and I was still talking too loud to make myself heard over the din. He pulled out his pistol then, and said,I’m sick of both of you, by God I am! I wouldn’t have taken much notice of that, for he was always full of talk, except for the look on his face, which wasn’t red like anger, but gray, like somebody who was cold all the way to the bone. He looked down at my baby then, sir, and he says to me,Frankie, if you don’t shut that baby up, I reckon I will. ”
“He pointed a pistol at his own child?” I said. Mr. Wilson gave me a withering stare, and I mumbled an apology for forgetting myself and went back to setting down her testimony.
“Charlie pulled the hammer back, and I knew he meant to do it. He wasn’t himself at all. He was mad with drink, and we’d been shut up in that cabin most of the winter on account of the deep snow, with the baby colicky and crying day and night. Charlie likes a good time, sir. He wasn’t one to suffer bad times. He would have been sorry afterward, most likely, if he had killed the baby, but it wouldn’t have been no use then.”
Mr. Wilson said softly, “And what did you do?”
“Well, I didn’t have more than a heartbeat to think on it, for he was a-steadying that pistol at the baby’s head. Next thing I knew, the ax was in my hands and I was swinging at him with all my might. I had to stop him, you see, any way I could.”
Thomas Wilson and I looked at each other. There was sorrow in his face and anger in mine, but we said nothing to the prisoner except a calm “Continue, please.”
“I hit him. I reckon I did.”
“And then?”
“He went down, and there was blood around the side of his head, and he was twitching. I had me a white kitten once, and while it was playing by the hearth, my daddy’s hunting dog snapped at its little throat and shook it while I stood and screamed. When that dog dropped my kitten, it lay there twitching, blood coming out of its mouth, with its eyes like ice, staring without seeing. Took it a long, long minute to die. I cried for three days.” She looked up at us, as if she had suddenly remembered we were there. “It was like that with Charlie. It was quick.”
We sat there in silence for a moment; both Wilson and I were waiting for her to pick up the threads of the story again, for she was no longer weeping, but the silence continued. At last Thomas Wilson said softly, “And then what, Mrs. Silver?”
She stared up at him. “I killed him,” she whispered. “And I told you how. That’s all I can say.”
“But how did you come to burn his body?”
She shrugged. “Just did.”
“Surely you realize that it is the destruction of the body that has caused the greatest outrage concerning your crime?”
She nodded. We waited another long minute in silence, but it was clear that the prisoner would say no more.
Wilson’s eyes narrowed. “Very well then, madam,” he said. “Let us proceed. Tell us what transpired on the night you escaped.”
She took a deep breath. “Will them that helped me get in trouble for it, Mr. Wilson?”
“They deserve to,” he replied. “They have set the governor’s feelings very much against you, for he thinks now that you are an outlaw. You may save yourself, however, if you will hand over those who effected your escape.”
“That wouldn’t be right,” said Frankie Silver.
“It would save you.”
“If I told on them that helped me… would they hang?” She was looking not at Mr. Wilson, but at me.
“We cannot say what punishment the jury would fix upon them,” he said primly, but my expression must have told her my thoughts: they would hang, as surely as I’m sitting here.
“I can’t say,” she whispered, huddling back against the wall.
Wilson tried to persuade her to confide in us, but she would say nothing further. At last he fairly shouted at her, “Mrs. Silver, without your testimony these people cannot be convicted!”
At that she smiled and shook her head again. I wondered if she really understood what her refusal would cost her.
We left the cell then, for it was clear that nothing more could be got out of badgering the poor creature. She had made up her mind to keep silent. As we descended the stairs, I murmured to Wilson, “She should not be hanged for this crime, sir! It was self-defense.”