Tremley’s photograph had appeared in the newspapers, and Wyatt hadn’t selected it.
For several months, the exchanges between the Whitman brothers were buoyant, filled with predictions of great wealth. Then came November, and a letter from Frederick that was a good deal bleaker: “David Watson awoke in the night shivering and soaked in sweat, and by dawn he was unable to stand, lying huddled in blankets while the others left camp. Our physician warns of a possible contagion, which we cannot afford at our current pace. Hopefully, he is wrong.”
“He wasn’t wrong,” Roy muttered. “It was contagious, Frederick, old boy.”
Future letters confirmed the diagnosis. The illness was spreading, and with it dissatisfaction among the workers, whom Frederick feared would abandon the project entirely. His younger, brasher brother responded with firm words, suggesting that the crew be quarantined along the river and saying that work could not cease, as the company’s investors had been guaranteed functioning mines by the new year.
Correspondence quickly took on a grim tone—Watson had perished, and a second and third man succumbed soon after. The camp doctor told Frederick Whitman Jr. that he would have to hope the fever didn’t spread through the crew.
Hope, that winter, did not seem a powerful tool. By the first week of December, seven men were dead. Frederick Whitman Jr., while holding the men to quarantine at the work site, made his own camp across the river, telling his brother that he feared “sharing in the conditions of the men.”
In other words, he wanted to crack the whip from a safe distance.
Roger wrote to his brother to suggest the threat of jailing all workers who did not hold to the letter of their contract: “They were hired to build a bridge, and a bridge they shall build.”
Frederick responded with caution.
“Our deadline may no longer be attainable, as I’ve been tremendously disappointed in our physician’s abilities to handle the epidemic,” he wrote. “The locals are an astoundingly superstitious people, given to beliefs in conjuring, charms, and the handling of snakes. I had long refused such foolishness be permitted in the camp, but as it seems to give them some comfort, I’ve since allowed the practices despite my disapproval. Well, today, brother, my disapproval has grown. A gentleman by the name of Mr. Silas Vesey arrived on foot at the camp several nights ago. He is an odd man, and I distrusted him immediately. He is clean in appearance and yet carries a quality of purest revulsion in a manner that I cannot properly articulate. There is an odor to him, almost that of cooling ashes, and he speaks in a voice that somehow distresses the soul. He told me that he understood we had health troubles, and that he was capable of offering assistance. I told him that our finest doctor was unable to handle the problem, and I doubted he could do any more. Mr. Vesey responded that he was quite certain he could assist those men who were willing. I was unsettled by the man and sent him away. He made camp not far from us, though, and I wish he would return to whatever forsaken hollow from which he came.”
Soon there was another letter about Vesey, who apparently had not left his camp but stayed within range, tending to a small bonfire and watching the progress—or lack thereof—on the trestle.
“Our foreman, Mr. Mortimer, is among the gravely ill. Yesterday I saw him nearly out of his head with fever, and I feared that when the men lost their leader, our hope would perish with him. Last evening, I observed as he rose, wrapped in blankets, and went to see Vesey. I was troubled by it, but the man appears nigh his end, and I wished to make no move to stop him.
“Mr. Mortimer returned after many hours in a state of remarkable good health. I was so astonished, watching him work today, that I inquired. He has encouraged me to consider Vesey’s offer, believing firmly that the man is capable of healing, and while I do not, it is worth noting that these people are deeply superstitious and perhaps others would respond to Vesey as did Mr. Mortimer.”
Roger’s response was swift and firm: “Allow them any fool’s cure they desire so long as it encourages them to work.”
Reading the letter more than 120 years later, Roy Darmus felt a chill ride up his spine.
That wasn’t impossible to believe. Photographs of people from that era were scarce. But then of course there were other possibilities, the folktale kind about those whose image couldn’t be captured by a camera at all…
Roy found himself staring back at the ancient photographs that Wyatt had collected. The Blade Ridge dead were just names on maps in Wyatt’s lighthouse. The murderers, though? They were names on pictures.
He returned uneasily to the letters, discovering without much surprise that Frederick had taken his brother’s advice and gone to meet with Silas Vesey, who still lingered along the ridge.
“I told him that the delays were unacceptable, and that if he was capable of aiding the sick, I bid him to do so. He asked if I wished him to see that the men were bound to the bridge. I responded that if he was, indeed, capable of healing, that is exactly what I wished. His response was most unusual. He put forth a smile that chilled me more than the wind and the snow and what he told me made no sense at all. He said that it might be far easier for him to bind the most gravely ill of the men to the bridge. I denounced the claim as preposterous, but Vesey said that he could heal only the willing, and sometimes desperate men were more willing. At that moment, I had a distinct and abiding sense of fear, and wished deeply that I had not made the trip to see him at all. He seemed to sense my doubt, and told me that he could promise the bridge shall be completed, and said that I was fortunate because he was the only man in the region who could see to such a thing. There are others capable, he said, but none in these mountains. I said I had no time to send for anyone else, and he told me that if I wished the crew bound to the bridge, then he would need to be of them. I was not surprised that he should try to extort a wage, but I said not a dime would pass into his palm until I saw proof of his abilities. He then told me that dollars were not his concern, that he simply wanted me to know that once he agreed to help, he’d be required to remain with the crew for a long while, and then asked whether I believed Blade Ridge will be a prosperous and well-traveled region for years to come. I assured him that it will be, though the idea of his wishing to linger among us did not appeal in the slightest. I wished no dealings with him at all, but I know well that our time is short and our investors impatient, and so I sent him on to try. I doubt he will be of help despite his assurances, and I look forward to the day of his departure.”
The next letter was a great deal shorter, and far more optimistic.
“I have counted more men working on the bridge each morning than the day before. There is an odd quality to watching them work—never have I seen a more silent group of men—but the construction is sound.”
Then came his final letter, written on Christmas Eve 1888, and Roy read it with astonishment.
“My concerns about Mr. Vesey have been growing immensely, and last evening I endeavored to put them at ease by observing the men in the night. Their silence during the day, which is when I typically visit, has unnerved me, and well it should. Our bridge, brother, is a creation of an evil I have never believed possible. The nails are being driven by dead men. At night, Vesey visits the sick with a torch in hand. Sometimes he moves on, and the next morning those men have passed. But on two occasions last evening, I watched with my own eyes as he lowered the torch to a dying man. The flames turned to coldest blue, and then the man rose. I watched this happen, Roger. There is no mistaking what I saw.”
It was the last letter Frederick Whitman Jr. wrote, or at least the last that the family had preserved. Roy flipped through several pages of business-related correspondence with frustration, hoping for more, and finally hit upon an exchange from May 1890, between Roger, by then located in Sawyer County, and his wife, who was still in Boston. It was the first mention of his older brother.
“We are moving him again, and I maintain hope that the plagues of his mind will soon abate. I’ve heard numerous accounts of the miraculous restorative powers of the mineral springs of French Lick and West Baden, Indiana, and have been assured that time spent at rest amidst those healing waters may well be what my brother requires.”
The next appearance of Frederick Whitman Jr. in the college archives was his obituary, published in 1892. It said that Frederick, an ill man, had perished in Indiana. The formal language of the time did not succeed in entirely obscuring the fact that he had died by his own hand.
33
