The Ridge (27 page)

T
HE WHITMAN COLLEGE LIBRARY
was open until Christmas Eve, but with classes already out of session for the semester there was hardly a student or faculty member to prowl the shelves. Roy met the librarian at the door as she unlocked the building, and his presence gave her a start. It was well past dawn but barely light, the sun hidden by layers of leaden clouds. They were predicting snow, the season’s first chance of accumulation.

Roy was vaguely acquainted with the librarian who greeted him—her name was Robin and she’d helped him out with a few bits of research over the years—and that was both reassuring and a little troubling. She’d be good to him, he knew, but she might also have questions that he wasn’t prepared to answer.

She led with a question, in fact. As Roy showed her the photographs and explained that he was hoping to find the source, she asked immediately what he was working on, now that the newspaper was closed.

“Looking for that next step,” he said. “You know, maybe a book or something.”

“I think that would be just great,” Robin said in the tone of
voice you used when a toddler announced his intention to learn to fly a plane. Or, in Roy’s experience, when damn near anyone announced their intention to write a book. “We’d hate to lose you from town, you know.”

“I don’t think it’s in me to leave, even if I wanted to. Still stories to tell, too. I suppose I’ll turn into an old man sitting on a liar’s bench, passing my news along that way.”

“You could start a blog,” she said cheerfully and seriously, and the word stirred bile in Roy’s stomach.

“I could,” he said. “Now, it looks to me like these are microfilm printouts. But they aren’t from my paper.” Even now, he couldn’t get that out of his system.
My
paper. “I was thinking that there was a predecessor to the
Sentinel.
Very old. Back when the town was still in mining-camp days.”

Robin nodded. “The
Whitman Company Chronicle.
Your
Sentinel
was a rival and eventually the last one standing. They took issue with the controlled voice during some labor disputes. For a while there were two newspapers. The
Whitman Company Chronicle
became the
Whitman Chronicle
to hide the obvious ties, as if they could be hidden, but within a few years the
Sentinel
had rendered it irrelevant.”

“That’s what I recalled. You do have the
Chronicle
on microfilm?”

“A lot of them. Some have been lost to history, I think, but we’ve got most of them.” She frowned at the photographs he had in the open folder. “Who are you looking for?”

“Just names.”

“Why are so many labeled
NO?
”

That one hung him up for a second, because he didn’t understand the truth well enough to lie about it.

“I guess I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know who they were,” he said finally.

“Okay. So you just want to match pictures? That’s going to take a while. Maybe a very
long
while.”

“I’ve got four names, too. Just no dates.”

“Do you know who they were? What they were involved with?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“How did you get the names, then?”

Roy thought for a second and then smiled sadly. “It was a hot tip.”

She gave him a curious look but didn’t push it. “Well, give me the names and I’ll see what I can find. We’ve got pretty good indexing of the company records, so if they had anything to do with the Whitmans, I should be able to generate something.”

The family archives were housed in a private, locked room at the rear of the library. You couldn’t spend time there without supervision, and you couldn’t check anything out. There was a reason: this collection held the most precious recorded elements of the town’s history. Robin unlocked the door and led Roy into the room, which featured glass cabinets displaying certain historical relics, one long and ornate reading table, and, everywhere you looked, the austere faces of Whitman family members watching from portraits and photographs along the walls. It was not unlike being in Wyatt’s lighthouse.

“I’ll get you the microfilm and let you start where you like,” Robin said. “Then I can run a search on those names you have. It’s a shame you don’t have a clearer starting point in time. Are there no indications in the photographs?”

“Well, it’s a work crew of some sort,” Roy said. “Not miners, either. Looks like they’re timber men, probably. Or builders.”

He set the folder down on the table and rifled through the photographs, pulling out a few as indications. “See, there’s a group of men holding a timber saw, and here we’ve got—”

“Oh,” Robin said, “they’re building the trestle.”

Roy turned away from the pictures and looked at her. She smiled in perfect confidence.

“The one that’s still standing. The wooden one, out west of town?”

“At Blade Ridge.”

“That’s right.”

He looked back down at a photograph of men holding a large log over their shoulders and said, “How in the hell can you be so sure?”

She laughed. “I’m not clairvoyant. I’ve already been through this routine once. Someone else was researching the trestle itself, and we went through a lot of those old company papers.”

“Wyatt French?”

She nodded, indifferent, neither surprised that he knew about this nor sharing the troubled sensations that Roy was feeling.

“That’s right. He owned most of the property at one time. He was very interested in the history.”

He certainly seemed to be,
Roy thought, and then he said, “Well, that can cut some time down. Maybe I should start with the trestle. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

“It’s a sad story,” she said, moving toward a row of locked cabinets at the back of the room.

“I know that the mines didn’t pan out for the company.”

“I mean the trestle itself,” she said over her shoulder, unlocking a drawer and running her index finger over canisters of microfilm. “A lot of people died while it was being built.”

“Died how?”

“Sickness, first. Murder, later.” She withdrew two canisters and said, “This should do it. Should give you a start.”

“Sickness, first,” Roy echoed, “murder, later?”

“That’s right. There was some hostility between the company and the laborers. The Whitmans tried to force sick men to work
to get their bridge done on time. They got it done, but there was a bit of uprising toward the end. You know, one of the stories that were all too common out here.”

Labor disputes turned violent were perhaps all too common in eastern Kentucky’s history, but Roy had a feeling that the Blade Ridge story might prove to be a little more unique.

“I might be wrong,” Robin said, feeding one of the microfilm reels into the reader in the corner of the room, “but I think if you start with the end of 1888 and go through the beginning of 1889 you’ll get a clear idea of it. But who knows if that’s even what you want. I can try some other—”

“Let me start there. That sounds right. Thank you.”

“Of course. We’re short-staffed because the students are gone, so if I can leave you to it, that would be a help. Just let me know what else you need.”

“That’s fine,” Roy said. He wanted to be alone to read this.

She left the room, and he sat down and snapped on the projector and saw an image of a 124-year-old newspaper. She’d started him in September, and he flipped through the pages quickly, looking for news of the trestle. The style of journalism was opinion stated as fact, and the stories themselves were focused on either braggadocio about the company’s successes or the mundane day-to-day of the mining town life. A local minister missing a service because of illness was front-page news. Obituaries were given prime placement as well, and the phrasing used to describe the deaths was colorful, to say the least. “The Reaper Calls upon Reginald Holmes,” one headline read.

The dominant figure of the news in Whitman in 1888 was the town’s namesake, Frederick Whitman Jr. His mining investments were just getting under way. In an early October issue, Roy found a match of one of his own photographs. Five men standing with a timber saw, smiles all around. The article announced that work on the trestle over the Marshall River was
coming along nicely and would be finished, as promised to investors, by the new year. The next picture featured the bridge’s Boston-bred designer, Alfred H. Tremley, a stern and bespectacled man who seemed quite pleased with the idea that the camera was preserving his image.

Roy had gotten all the way to late October before he saw another article that gave him pause.

“Trestle Work Lags as Fever Strikes,” announced a boldface headline. Three days later came the report of a death, and a week after that the news that the construction crew had been quarantined in camps beside the river, no longer allowed to return home. The decision, according to Frederick Whitman Jr., was made to safeguard the health of the townspeople. A short notation at the end of the article indicated that work at the trestle continued, and Whitman remained wedded to his promise of completion by year’s end.

After the quarantine, the company newspaper stopped reporting on the condition of the crew but continued to follow the trestle itself. On December 19, it was noted that only three bents—Roy understood those to be the bridge supports—had gone up in the past two weeks, and the writer predicted that the opening of the mines by 1889 was in jeopardy.

The next mention was on December 27, when it was observed—with clear astonishment—that all of the bents were in place and work had begun on the rails. On New Year’s Eve, the entire front page was devoted to the trestle, which was completed as promised. Amidst the proud remarks, a brief comment on the illness:

The bridge is a testament to endurance, completed despite the fever that infected the crew. Sixteen men were lost.

It seemed an impossibly short mention for all those lost lives, but Roy understood. The
Chronicle
was a mouthpiece, nothing
more. The reality of the way that bridge had been pushed toward completion despite the ravages of illness was probably quite unflattering to the company. It was in the midst of this era that the
Sentinel
had been born, and the significance of its name became all the more clear. It was a targeted move to balance the forces of the company. One paper identified itself as the chronicle of the town’s new power structure; the next chose the watchdog approach.

And now they’re all gone,
Roy thought.
What happens when you remove the watchdog from the grounds?

Frederick Whitman Jr. had been the company voice in the
Chronicle
until December of 1888. By the time the bridge was completed, however, he’d been replaced as spokesman by his younger brother, Roger, who closed out 1888 by boasting that the family had done exactly as promised, spanning the river with rails by year’s end, and plans were made to christen the trestle on New Year’s Day. Roger Whitman was quoted as saying he looked forward to crossing his bridge.

Roy loaded another canister of microfilm, feeling the familiar and beloved tingle of adrenaline that he’d enjoyed so often while working on a story, and was rewarded almost immediately by the first big news of 1889: true to his word, Roger Whitman had crossed his bridge.

Once.

On January 1, Whitman and fifteen assorted executives and investors piled into a single boxcar to celebrate “a glorious new year for the company, the community, and the country.” The locomotive crossed the Marshall River, cleared the trestle, and derailed upon reaching Blade Ridge, where an obstruction had been placed over the tracks. At that point, four men emerged from the woods and opened fire. By the time it was done, eleven of the men aboard the train had been killed. Roger Whitman survived.

Four men were arrested for the sabotage and murder: John Hamlin, Fred Mortimer, Henry Bates, and Bernard Snell.

But Wyatt already had those names; they were new only to Roy. The question of whom he’d been searching for in all those photographs remained. Why had so many been dismissed with a
NO?

Investigators of the day had been looking for a man named Silas Vesey, based on an anonymous tip. The arrested men refused to comment on Vesey and said they acted alone. All four, the
Sentinel
reported, had been involved in the construction of the trestle, believed that the Whitmans had caused death by forcing sick men to work, and readily confessed to their crimes. They hid neither guilt nor motive, and one, Mortimer, explained that Roger Whitman was never intended to be the target of the bullets.

“We wanted him to live with the price,” Mortimer said. “To see our faces, and to remember who we were and what he’d done. The blood we took is on his hands. It won’t end here.”

Whitman had no response.

Justice was swift. In February the four men were found guilty of murder, and in March they were hanged. A hundred operatives from the Pinkerton detective agency joined local police to enforce order on the night of execution. They feared a riot, particularly after Mortimer’s ominous pledge that the vengeance had not reached its end. Nothing happened, though. Nooses drew tight, lungs emptied, hearts stopped, and the violent controversy at Blade Ridge began its move from breaking news to historical footnote.