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The Covered Bridge Murders
by Jerry Rust
Chapter 1— Opal and the Covered Bridge
The old lady awoke with a violent shudder that shook her old bones and wrapped her wrinkled face in agony. Another night of terror inside the damp old London sanitarium was upon her. The six by eight room that had been her home for more than forty years had the claustrophobic feel of a coffin laid out in a morgue. Her acute pain came from a long ago memory. And strangely, her relief came by simply closing her eyes and remembering that horrible day.
There was heavy tension in the air that late summer day in 1907, over one hundred years ago. Inside the Lowell Covered Bridge, the beams and trusses, built from green wood still drying, yearned to shrink and twist. The bridge was a monster; one of the widest covered bridges ever built in Oregon. Lowell was the frontier town whose citizens went up the Willamette with winter coming on to rescue the Lost Wagon Train of 1853. It was a small town surrounded by small farms settled by the pioneers. The new bridge put the old Dexter Ferry out of business, just as the new covered bridge at Eugene had consigned Skinner's Ferry into history's dust bin.
The two giant Howe trusses which carried the entire bridge across the long span were tuned by a Lane county bridge worker, who, just two days earlier, twisted the giant steel turnbuckles and tightened the nuts on the steel rods inside the bridge trusses until the stress inside the trusses tightened up perfectly. Now the bridge had 'tone'. The new, highly-tuned wooden covered bridge was like an exquisitely made, giant acoustic guitar, resonating with tone to every sound made inside its enclosed wooden-plank-environment. Every clip clop of the horses' hooves on the massive rough sawn fir planks rang throughout the big, wooden covered bridge. Every hollow sounding reverberation lent an air of expectant urgency. The bridge, newly built, now waited endlessly for the tide of history to enter and pass through it's portals.
The hot, beautiful late summer day bred, up in the mountains, deep white, puffy, thunder clouds, or 'thunder boomers'. Boiling vapors from the high Cascades morphed into the billowing clouds that spawned dry lightning flashes and low, guttural rumblings, further charging the air. There was a forked horn black tail deer warily browsing, tail switching, at the edge of the pasture. A gray and brown speckled digger squirrel chattered intermittently from the hollow trunk of a big leaf maple tree, there on the bank of the Willamette, with the swallows looping and gliding and diving for insects above the riparian zone below the new wooden covered bridge.
One drainage over from the new bridge lived a young girl named Opal Whiteley. Opal was 10 years old and precocious. For several years she had been keeping a diary at the suggestion of her secret French, Classics and Shakespeare teacher, an old Bourbon lady, her Angel Mother. The old lady lived in a small cabin with Angel Father on the very edge of the of the groves of old fir, huge alder and maple trees, mystical, gnarly yew trees and all the other twisted old trees of the valley's persuasion. Sundays after church were spent with the loving Garrotte family speaking French and eating savory dishes laced with butter, garlic, parsley and thyme. The native forest, here at the edge of a small community, supported blacktail deer on the hillside, steelhead and salmon in the streams, and long tailed silver gray squirrels jumping from limb to limb up in the tree canopy while cutting the ripe fir cones that fell like little missiles to be picked up and stored later. Blue jays and robins lived in these woods year round. To Opal, these forests were a kind of natural factory where the birds and animals went to work, toiling away constantly. Opal saw the entire Willamette Valley of Oregon as a vast petri dish of volcanic, alluvial soils bathed in soft rain, giving life to every kind of seed and spore and sprout, ringed by forests of 'Talking Fir', bisected by blue-green rivers. In 1907 Oregon was a lush paradise for fish, birds and wildlife. This was Opal's natural laboratory.
In the land of her distant childhood Angel Mother heard many voices and different tongues. She could still hear the incantatory songs and prayers chanted and sung by nuns in the monastery in the valley below her wind swept wooden house on the barren hill. She still remembered the smoke from the incense and the Latin sounds.
The old Bourbon woman's cabin in the woods called to Opal often, where knowledge, itself, was the answer. To Opal, the cabin, stuffed with books and a big black walnut table by the window, was a place of magic and enchantment where Angel Mother taught her about literature, French, and the natural sciences, classical Latin and Greek and Roman mythology. Opal was already planning her career as a nature writer. She got her hands on advanced Shakespeare and French through the old lady. She followed her keen instincts and natural literary talents and developed them at the suggestion of mother Bourbon. Her genius would not be denied. The old lady, with the shelves of books, the House of Bourbon embossed on the covers, led to her amazing storehouse of knowledge about the natural world as well as the Classics. That, and the voices she heard, of nuns praying.
The letter from Mark Twain to Opal, in answer to her question about his 'Little Mermaids' literary association, was now hanging on the wall of her family cabin. The great author recommended she pursue both prose and poetry, advising her not to ignore poetry as a means of expression.
"Poetry comes in like a flash of lightning, and illuminates the landscape instantly," he said.
Opal knew her mission; honor, love and protect nature by writing about it. She saw herself taking up the cause of Judge John Breckinridge Waldo of Salem, who advanced, she thought, a magnificent proposal to Congress to preserve the wild lands of the Cascades. She wanted to join him on a summer expedition into the high Cascade Mountains to see the lakes and the towering sugar pines and Hemlock forests with meadows of white tufted bear grass.
Opal's father took her to the high mountains once to get huckleberries and elder berries. The atmosphere of the high mountain lakes in summer was intoxicating. She remembered squirrels busy in their forest, working in the trees, dropping cones from the high elevation pines, and the beautiful cruising raptors, the eagles and hawks. She got a close-up look at a big horned owl at its daytime roost in a wizened fir, cracked open, and partially burned by a lightning strike. They gathered the berries and hiked back to their horses and made the return ride to the logging camp.
Opal was a young lady to be noticed with her tall dark supple form, flashing bright eyes, long pigtails, dressed all in beaded buckskins; especially when fetching a string of trout through the logging camp right at dinner time. She was the star of the camp, and even knew how to play a couple of popular tunes on the fiddle, often accompanied by an old miner, an uncle, who had a one-string gut-bucket. She had a good word for everyone, and an endless stream of Classical names for everything else. Her star-power made everyone she came in contact with feel good. She was great for log camp morale. In this half canvas, half wooden assortment of always-onestep- ahead-of-temporary-settlement world she was a welcome presence. The only rules? What the logging outfit decided. And, for the timber man, the lumberjack, the logger, if he had work, a bunk, and 'three squares a day' and a modest paycheck, he was settled enough. Opal could make these working folks happy. She helped out around the house and camp, preparing food, and after dinner, grabbed her fiddle to the delight of all.
Opal's family worked on the farm, the forest and in the mines. They worked the beginning of the harvest of old growth trees in the drainages east of Cottage Grove. For the past four years, the little assortment of two dozen tents, cabins and shacks in the camp all had a small stove to burn wood for heat and cooking. More often than not, the meals were taken communally at the big cook house and dining hall with the rusty metal roof. The little camp in the woods supplied the men who cut the trees and loaded them on the train. And there were plenty of support employees for cooking and animal care. And kids, who were always accounted for by someone.
Down the road and through a glen stood a tiny schoolhouse where Opal went, leading her pet pig, Peter Paul Reubens. Much to the dismay of her teacher, the animal loafed at the doorstep, waiting for school to end each day. He waited patiently while Opal and the handful of other children recited their lessons. Then it was back to the pig pen and a bucket of slop for Peter Paul Reubens.
Opal loved to go off into the woods with her dog, Horatio. She stole away to Angel Mother whenever she could. She didn't often venture far from home. But today was different. Today, she took a detour from her usual meanderings. Here, she was miles and miles from home at the new bridge and a long way from the logging camp, chatting gently with a silver grey squirrel up in an incense cedar tree and with the chipmunks at her feet. Opal looked up through the riverbank foliage at the brand new bridge. Lowell Covered Bridge, 1907. Bridge Builder Nels Roney, read the inscription. A couple of years earlier Opal's dad paid forty cents to get them across the Willamette here by taking the big wooden ferry connecting Dexter and Lowell.
The earlier trip Opal made here was her first time out of the logging camps when they went into Springfield. Here she was again, at the same place, but she was now ten years old, a much different girl, having been secretly tutored by an old man and an old lady, only too eager to teach their most precocious and hungry-for-knowledge star pupil, who went skipping home after the lessons, making songs about trees and birds and animals in Latin and French. The old lady whispered to her: "Keep a diary of the talking fir and singing willows," and she taught her two brand new hit songs, Redwing and Marie of Sunny Italy to go with all the Shakespeare and Classics.
Yes, Opal was here, looking at this big, old, square-shouldered, working covered bridge. "Magnifici. Merci bo coup Au Revoire to — to sadness today — non," thought Opal, who grew up in the lumber camps, and not without considerable personal hardship. She came here near Lowell, partly to run away from something, and partly to look at one of Oregon' great modern design accomplishments she had heard about from the Bull Bucks of Bohemia. They were the Bulls of the Woods, the bosses of the logging show. They told her the new, big, wooden, covered bridge would last a hundred years, holding wagons and trucks of rocks and logs. Opal recorded in her diary the conversation with the Bull Bucks about the new bridge and in her words: "Some wise people did have understandings and they did build it a bridge to go across on."
And the Bull Bucks, the two bosses of the Bohemia Lumber Company logging crews, Big Bill and Little Ben, she considered the wisest and the kindest men in camp. Big Bill was tall, dark haired with dark eyes, and three creases across his white brow which crinkled quickly into frown or smile, depending on the immediate occasion. He was usually dressed in black jeans and a blue pin striped work shirt. He didn't cuss, or swear; nor did he drink, smoke or chew. His booming voice and imposing figure commanded respect and a certain amount of fear. Little Ben was not really little, just when compared to Big Bill. Ben was blonde and blue-eyed. He was also a tee-totaler. Thick bodied and alert, his word was rarely challenged, and Little Ben was accorded the nickname, 'No Nonsense Ben'. Big Bill and Little Ben were always to be found together after work each day, talking over the day's totals and planning the next day's work. Opal went to their cabin and talked to them every day when they came out of the woods after work. They knew she wanted to hear about the trees and wildlife, so they brought her specimens from the forest, and told her stories about the birds and wildlife they saw.
So today was a dreadful, terrible day. Opal saw the lifeless body of the sixteen year-old lumberjack, the orphan Billy Joe, carried into camp that morning. She ran. She ran along the Row river and over the old road that went over the hills and through farm lands and came out at the new Lowell Covered Bridge. "Au revoir". She had to shed the sadness of death. As she ran, her mind was flooded by a jumble of thoughts.
