Mr. Bynum smiled. “Why don’t we wait half an hour so that Waightstill can join the party?”
“But surely-”
Woodfin nodded in agreement. “Unless I miss my guess, we haven’t time to leave the premises. The jury should be back within the hour.”
They were back in ten minutes. As the jurors filed in, my colleagues exchanged satisfied glances, as if the speed of the verdict were a tribute to their skills of oratory, but I was still not convinced that the verdict would be a favorable one, for I had seen the shooting take place myself, and I could not call the killing of an unarmed man “self-defense,” regardless of the provocation several weeks earlier.
“Has the jury reached a verdict?” asked Judge Battle, in a tone that suggested surprise at seeing them again so soon.
“We have, Your Honor.” The foreman handed a slip of paper to the bailiff, who conveyed it to Battle.
“The prisoner will rise.”
Waightstill got to his feet and stood there with great calmness, but I saw that he was gripping the edge of the table with both hands. Even the most confident of men must realize that a jury is a capricious creature. No one knows this better than a lawyer.
Judge Kemp Battle studied the words on the paper for an agonizing minute before he looked up and announced, “The jury finds the defendant not guilty.” He paused here, as if he wanted to say more, but instead he shook his head and sighed. “Mr. Avery, you are free to go. The jury is thanked for its time.”
The color came back into Waightstill’s face, and he released his grip on the table. Tod Caldwell pounded his old adversary on the back, shouting, “We’ve done it!” as a crowd of well-wishers surrounded the defense table. My own congratulations were left unsaid, and I think the omission went unnoticed by my nephew and his supporters.
I gathered up my notes from the trial and made my way upstream against the crowd of spectators, seeking the open air. The day was bleak and colorless, with a spitting rain and gusts of cold wind coming down off the mountains as if to sweep away every last leaf of autumn in their wake. Despite the chill and the damp, I braved the elements on the side of the courthouse lawn, out of sight of the main entrance, through which the spectators and the celebrants would be leaving. I was thinking of John Boone, dead these fifteen years, and of all the trials that had come and gone since I arrived in Morganton.
Presently I heard footsteps approaching from behind me, and I turned to see Nicholas Woodfin in his great black cape coming toward me. “We have carried the day,” he said, smiling.
“Yes,” I said.
“We are going to the tavern now, as you suggested, to celebrate the jury’s good judgment, and I’ll wager that our old friend will spend more there than his defense cost him. Walk with me.”
I shook my head. In my present mood, the brown stubble of garden beside the courthouse suited me better than the prospect of revelry in the tavern. “I will join you later,” I said.
“You are not pleased? Waightstill has a great political future. And we have saved him.”
“So we have,” I said. I turned away and left him staring after me. The dead leaves crackled under my feet, and the north wind numbed my face until I felt nothing at all.
So William Waightstill Avery went free. We had saved him-for another dozen years, anyhow-and he used them well. He served two terms in the State Senate, and fathered three more children with his wife Mary Corinna, who was the daughter of a governor. But the Bible says that he who sheddeth blood shall his own blood be shed by others. In Waightstill Avery’s case, the volley answering the death of Samuel Fleming was fired in June 1864, at a place called the Winding Stairs, where the mountains rise not twenty miles west of Morganton. There the Confederate North Carolina First Regiment troops were overtaken by Kirk’s raiders, Federals from Tennessee, and Waightstill Avery was wounded in the skirmish. He died of those wounds on July 3, 1864, and I hoped I mourned the death of a brave soldier as sincerely as anyone that day in the churchyard of our Presbyterian church.
As I stood there in the dappled sunshine of the old cemetery, paying my last respects, I thought that I stood in an ever diminishing circle of light. My dear Elizabeth had passed away, and last year we laid her sister the lionhearted Miss Mary into the earth at Belvidere. So many brave people had left this world, and I was growing old alone.
As they lowered Waightstill’s coffin into the earth, I heard the drone of flies about my head and I could not help thinking about another “brave little soldier” who had died on a July day many years back, and who lay in unconsecrated ground somewhere up the mountain, unmourned and unremembered. I wish I could have taken just one rose from the mound of flowers on William Waightstill Avery’s coffin and laid it on the grave of Frankie Silver.
IWANT TO SHOW YOU a grave,” said the sheriff.
Three rocks stood alone in the little mountain graveyard: smooth stubs of granite, evenly spaced about four feet apart. The stone pillars were uncarved, weathered from more than a century’s exposure to the elements and farthest away from the white steepled church in the clearing at the top of the mountain.
Sheriff Spencer Arrowood and Nora Bonesteel had said very little to each other in their journey across the mountain into Mitchell County, North Carolina. Early that morning Spencer had appeared at the door of the white frame house on the ridge on Ashe Mountain.
“I need to know about Frankie Silver,” he told her.
He had a longer drive to make tomorrow, but first he needed to go to Kona. At first light that morning, LeDonne had called him, knowing that he slept no more than they did. “We’ve made an arrest,” the deputy told him. “Guy with an earring. One of the other hikers noticed him. We found the murder weapon in his possession. He’s eighteen years old.”
So the sheriff was back where he started, with no new evidence, only a feeling that there was something he didn’t understand about the Harkryder case. He had asked LeDonne to continue the check on the names he had given him, but Spencer could not sit still and wait any longer. They were almost out of time. He promised himself that instead of sitting by the phone, he would see the place where the Silver murder happened, and if there was anything to be learned from that ancient riddle, he would do his best to find it.
Spencer asked Nora Bonesteel to go with him, and without asking a single question, she went. Later he would remember that when she answered the door, she had on her walking shoes and the little blue-flowered hat she sometimes wore to church.She knows when you are coming, people said of Nora Bonesteel, but the sheriff did not believe it. He believed in coincidence.
It’s unofficial,he told himself.The case is a hundred years old. It’s not as if I’m using a psychic to consult on a police investigation. This is a private thing. He was not driving the patrol car. He was still officially out on sick leave, and the pain in his side reminded him from time to time that this should be so.
Spencer escorted the old woman to the passenger seat of his white sedan and waited for her to fasten her seat belt before he took off down the winding Ashe Mountain road and made the right turn that would take them east into North Carolina.
Nora Bonesteel said nothing.
She knew. He wouldn’t ask himself how, or whether his belief in that statement constituted faith of any kind, but he had to know about Frankie Silver, and there was no one else he could bring here who would be able to understand.