[at-l] Mary...

Below is an excerpt from "She Walks These Hills" by Sharyn McCrumb
Copyright 1994, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York
ISBN 0-684-19556-9

This is a mystery/suspense novel about a man hiking on the Appalachian Trail
in search of a two century old spirit...

Reproducing this is probably not entirely legal.  Felix, which institute
would be best suited for the CON RUCK?


Chapter Eleven

"Good evening, folks.  This is Hank the Yank coming at you on WHTN-Hamelin,
Tennessee, your electronic neighborhood watch program. We're still
monitoring sightings of Wake County's own geriatric fugitive, Harm Sorley,
three weeks out of the Northeast Correctional Center in Mountain City, and
now residing in the Twilight Zone. We're giving WHTN coffee mugs to the five
callers with the best theories as to his whereabouts. It's not much of a
reward, as bounties go, but it's a lot less work than tracking fugitives
with a bloodhound, and besides, our budget wouldn't be spending money for a
gerbil, so don't complain about it. Don't think of it as a coffee mug; think
of it as a ceramic tribute to your creativity.

"We're going to play some old-time country music between call-ins, and we're
going to do some ruminating tonight on Tennessee justice. Just how good is
it? We're talking about the legal system that ordered Harm Sorley to prison
until he was a hundred and four years old for one murder that may have been
unpremeditated, or may have been self-defense, or may have been committed by
someone else entirely. What kind of system keeps people locked up until
they're a hundred?

"What's that, Arvin?-Well, folks, Arvin says that if Harm Sorley could
manage to escape from prison in Mountain City at the advanced age of
sixty-three, then the state might have the right idea, after all." Hank the
Yank chuckled appreciatively.

"Arvin, that's cold. By any chance, were any of your ancestors on jury duty
over in Erwin in September 1916? That was another fascinating example of
Tennessee jurisprudence, you know. That's when they hanged the elephant.

"That's right, Arvin. They hanged an elephant over in Erwin, Tennessee, in
1916. If I'm lying, I'm dying. Now I bet there are a lot of new people out
there in our listening area who think I'm putting them on about this, but
I'm not. It's the gospel truth,
folks. They hanged an elephant in these parts, nearly eighty years ago. So
if you're ever charged with murder here in Tennessee, don't plead elephant.
It is not a valid defense.

"Her name was Mary, this elephantine felon. She was a pachyderm with a
traveling circus called Sparks World Famous Shows. The circuit of traveling
shows used to travel by railroad, and around here they'd hit all the towns
along the Clinchfield line. They went from St. Paul, Virginia, to Kingsport,
Tennessee, and the next stops would be Johnson City and Erwin. The circus
had a new trainer, a drifter by the name of Eldridge who had joined the show
in St. Paul, and apparently he didn't know enough about handling five-ton
females. All circus elephants are females, you know. They tried using males
in the early days, but they proved to be unruly. One bull called Hannibal
killed seven people. Personality-wise, Mary took after him.

"The fatal incident happened during the circus parade along Center Street in
Kingsport. This fella Eldridge was sitting on Mary's back, leading the
five-elephant procession, when the big gray lady spotted a melon rind on the
street. She started to sniff it with her trunk, and her trainer prodded her
with his stick. Hey, she was holding up the parade, all right? She reached
for the rind again; he poked her again.

"That did it. That big gray trunk snaked up over Mary's head, snatched
Eldridge off his perch, and cracked him like a bullwhip. Then she flung him
into the air, and he crashed headfirst into a wooden refreshment stand by
the side of the road. Before anybody could do much more than gasp and stare
big-eyed at the fallen man, Mary walked over to where he lay in the dirt,
and she put her big rough front foot on top of his head, and then she pushed
down, until his head went squish like a cantaloupe. People were screaming
and running to get away from the rogue elephant. The other elephants were
trumpeting and backing away, and the local blacksmith charged out of his
forge and fired five bullets at Murderous Mary. They just bounced off-which
left the people of Kingsport and the state of Tennessee with another
dilemma: what do you do with a murderer if it happens to be an elephant?

"I'll tell you what the circus would like to have done: change the
elephant's name, and sell her cheap to one of the other dozen or so
traveling shows of that era. That's what they usually did. More than a few
people suspected that Mary had killed before, someplace else under some
other name.

"What's that, Arvin? Yes, that is correct. An elephantine serial killer.
Quite a problem for local jurisprudence. Mary went ahead and performed that
night at the Kingsport show, but the mayor of Johnson City had heard about
Eldridge's death, and he wasn't going to let the matter drop. He declared
that the circus couldn't play Johnson City unless they got rid of Mary.

"Now the circus was in a pickle. They had to choose between sacrificing an
eight-thousand-dollar elephant-that was Rolls- Royce money in 1916, folks-or
missing play dates in Johnson City and Rogersville. And the newspaper had
fired folks up so that they were screaming for her blood. It doesn't appear
that anybody considered Mary's feelings in the matter. Was she a victim of
abuse under a cruel and inexperienced trainer? Did she consider her actions
self-defense? Did she understand that her actions would result in the man's
death?

"Those are nineties questions, neighbors. Nobody asked them in 1916. The
circus owner reasoned that he couldn't afford to lose money from missing
show dates, and after all the notoriety occasioned by Eldridge's death, he
didn't think he could get any other show to buy her. Apparently, he decided
that the only way to profit from the experience would be to reap some free
publicity by staging a spectacular public execution.

"That's where Erwin comes in. I mean, how are you going to kill an elephant?
Poison? How many pounds would it take? Electrocution? I wouldn't want to be
around if you miscalculated the lethal dosage and pissed her off. But Erwin,
population in 1916 two thousand, was the site of the repair shops for the
Clinchfield Railroad. It offered the circus owner a solution. Why not hang
the beast on a one-hundred-ton railroad derrick? That's the equipment they
used to lift railroad cars. A five-ton animal would pose no problem at all
for such a contraption.

"Arvin is making faces at me here, neighbors. I think he was hoping that I'd
tell him Mary got herself Clarence Darrow for an attorney, and that he'd got
her off with life. Arvin was picturing Old Mary over there in Mountain City
to this day, pressing out license plates with her trunk. 'Fraid not, Arvin.
Absolute justice can be a terrible thing.

"They marched Mary down to the railroad yard after the matinee performance,
and she was nervous about it, too. Elephants are big, ungainly looking
creatures, but they aren't stupid. She knew something bad was happening. The
circus people put a chain around her neck and hoisted her right up off the
ground. It took them two tries, but they finally succeeded in killing a rare
and intelligent creature, that maybe had no business being enslaved in a
sideshow anyhow. Maybe she even preferred a quick death to a life of
servitude. I don't claim to be an expert on the opinions of elephants.

"I do know this: sometimes the law seems more concerned with shutting up
mobs who are too dumb to be reasoned with than they are with dispensing
justice. Maybe you're wondering what all this has to do with one old man who
took an ax to his prosperous neighbor a quarter of a century ago. It's just
a feeling I have folks. Something tells me that Harm was just as much a pawn
as Mary was. I think there's another side to both stories, and while we're
never going to hear the truth in Mary's case, I'm still hoping that it can
be uncovered for Harm Sorley.

"The switchboard's lighting up now. It must be time to start giving away
those coffee mugs."

Pittsia Bookworm-ovia


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