Wicked Woods (4 page)

There was indeed the arc of a rainbow formed by the sunlight shining through the spray of the river below them. Not that the river was that far from the bridge at this point in time. With the spring runoff there was only a hand span between the river and the bridge at its lowest point.

“Do you think there's a pot of gold at the end of it?” Lawrence asked.

“If there is any gold down there,” old Stewart said, with a cheeky wink, “it's a filling in the mouth of the last fellow who drowned here.”

He was being a wise guy and they all knew it. No one had drowned in the river for years.

“I sure don't want to go down there to the river bottom and have myself a look,” David Price said.

The river was fierce that day, engorged and spilling over to swallow nearby fields and a siding of the railroad. Still, they could see the local fishermen angling for brook trout, bass, and the pos–sibility of a late-running salmon in the river below. Folks around here were used to living next to the river and weren't afraid of it one bit.

Perhaps they should have been.

As the five travellers crossed the first third of the bridge, it began to swing and dip in the wind. The added weight of the five didn't help matters and before the five of them knew it the bridge was swinging down so low that it was skimming across the river.

“Should we chance it?” Tennyson asked.

“You don't want to go back, do you?” Willard said.

“Come on,” old Stewart said. “We could all use a wee foot bath before the wedding tomorrow.”

There was no more time for second thoughts. The bridge swung again and at that moment, a cable snapped under the strain, pitching the five to their knees.

David would have been torn away by the torrential force of the river, except he had a death grip on one end of the snapped cable. Lawrence was hopelessly tangled in the bridgework and bouncing like a bobbing cork in the water. Old Stewart hung onto the bridgework, harder than any barnacle. Tennyson kicked and dangled, his hands wrapped around a rope, his feet caught up in the current behind him.

“I'm going to swim for it,” young Willard called out as he let go of his grip and struck out into the Miramichi. By all reports he was the first to go. The water took him, tossed him up and under, and he washed ashore miles down the river. As far as the townsfolk could tell he had drowned just minutes after he hit the river.

David Price continued to inch along the cable, pulling him–self in as it whipped about in the river water. His heavy hip wad–ers filled with river water and threatened to drag him under. He remembered swearing to God above that if he could be saved from this mishap he would never sin again.

Meanwhile the folks on the shoreline could only stare in hor–ror as the bridge slowly tore itself apart, urged by the spring tide and the weight of the men. Some looked away in revulsion, while others tried in vain to throw rescue ropes.

The terror of the moment intensified as Tennyson's hands lost their grip, and he was carried off by the Miramichi. There would be no wedding for this poor young man, who no doubt went to his death dreaming of his wife-to-be. Lawrence thought he saw tears in Tennyson's eyes as his grip failed him, but it might have been nothing more than river spray.

The next to go was old Stewart, whose hand cramped up and betrayed him.

“I guess I'll have to go now,” he was heard to say, as if he were only stepping out for a short swim.

Meanwhile, David continued to whip about in the water, drag–ging himself closer to shore. His fingers were numbed chunks of dead meat, nearly frozen by the icy tide. A pain shot through his left leg and he was afraid that the impact of hitting the river had broken it.

At that moment, he heard a quiet voice calmly calling to him.

“Take your time, David,” the voice said. “You've got all the time in the world.”

He swore that he knew that voice, but for the life of him, he could not place it. He kicked his heavy water-laden boots free and continued to inch his way towards the shore. He could see the fishermen now, and the screams of the onlookers urged him closer. No one was more surprised than he, when he felt his bare feet stick into the sludge of the muddy shoreline.

Now there was no one left but young Lawrence, tangled hard in the wire work of the bridge. He could not last much longer out there. The freezing river current would chill his life away.

“Oh God,” his mother called from the shoreline. “Won't some–one try and save him?”

“I guess it's up to me, then,” Tom Wilson, a local fisherman, said as he tried to push a dory into the water.

“You're not alone in this,” his friend Claude said, as he took the other side of the dory.

The two of them struck out, hauling hard at the oars. They were determined to save the boy. It was a battle rowing the dory out into those waters, and it nearly took the two of them with it. They rowed the dory closer, then Claude steadied it as Tom Wilson reached out with a pair of hand pliers. Working at the bridge wiring, he nearly dropped the pliers twice, before finally managing to cut young Lawrence Price free.

As hard as cutting the wire had been, dragging Lawrence into the dory was even harder. They managed the trick, and rowed Lawrence back to the shoreline and the arms of his waiting mother and anxious family. They say he shivered for two whole days, but in the end, both David and Lawrence lived good long lives.

For days afterward folks swore they could still hear the cables of the bridge swinging wildly in the wind. Sometimes at night the local townspeople say they see three figures walking by the river towards the distant ocean. Maybe they were only shoreline hik–ers, but folks around Priceville still remember and talk about that fateful May morning.

They rebuilt the bridge with a sturdy centre pier and it's per–fectly safe since its reconstruction. People still love to walk across the bridge, but the older townsfolk who still remember that day have probably wondered to themselves as they walk slowly across the McNamee Swinging Bridge.

4
T
HE
M
ONCTON
W
ITCH

MONCTON

Moncton is the second largest city in the province of New Brunswick — it ought to be chockablock full of ghost stories and so it is. Monctonians in the know will tell you of the Capitol Theatre, the site of the city's only recorded death of a firefighter in the line of duty. On March 6, 1926, a raging fire took the life of Alexander H. Lindsay, who became the theatre's infamous resident ghost. Theatre staff will tell you that they've often seen the shape of someone moving behind the ticket booth after everyone else has left. Noises have been heard, and the smell of smoke sometimes per–vades certain areas of the theatre, but the ghost is dutifully quiet during any performance. Some folks will tell you that it is the ghost of a little girl who was also killed in the fire, but I'm not so sure about that. I imagine you'd have to ask the ghost the next time you see it.

However, we aren't here to talk about theatre ghosts.

The city of Moncton was named after Robert Monckton, the British military commander who captured nearby Fort Beauséjour in 1755 and went on to oversee the infamous and ruthless depor–tation of the Acadians. The missing letter k was dropped in 1786 due to a typing error directly attributed to an overworked clerk. Don't you love bureaucracy in action?

If you ask around town for ghost stories, folks will tell you the story of Rebecca Lutes, the Moncton witch. Others will tell you that Rebecca Lutes was just a farm girl who died of tuberculosis back in 1876. That's not the way I heard it, however. Let me tell you the tale as it came to me.

Pull up a rock and give a listen, would you?

It was an evil time in Moncton, New Brunswick. A plague of consumption was sweeping the area, claiming lives wherever it touched. Crops were bad and unexplained fires razed more than a few barns and farmhouses. Farm animals were stolen and slaughtered. Strange lights were seen dancing in the dark night sky, and rumours of demonic rituals were whispered about town. All of this pointed to the work of a witch and certain members of the town set out to find a handy scapegoat.

No one is quite sure just how the trail of evidence led to young Rebecca Lutes, but a mob of concerned citizens dragged her out of her home one night, forced her into the woods, and hung her from a tall, old poplar tree. Afterwards, convinced that they had done what was right, they buried her face down at the foot of the tree, so that if by some devilish power her body should return to life, she could claw down to that hot cellar that old Satan keeps burning for folks who like to dabble in magic.

“That'll fix her,” they swore.

Apparently that simple burial wasn't enough for some deter–mined witch hunters, who thought further and stronger measures of protection were called for when dealing with such arcane power.

“She's too powerful a sorceress,” they claimed. “She'll find her way back to us, even if she has to dig herself clear to China.”

So the witch hunters decided that the best way to protect them–selves from Rebecca Lutes was to pour a large slab of concrete directly over her grave. That way, they figured, she'd be sealed up tight and would bother them no longer.

So how did Rebecca Lutes die? Official records list one Rebecca Lutes as indeed living in a farmhouse on this very road and dying on the date in question, January 2, 1876; however, her cause of death is listed as consumption.

A mysterious concrete slab can be found along the Gorge Road, just before you arrive at a local rock quarry and an aban–doned cement and culvert company, but another explanation has been given for this. The Lutes's farm was apparently sold after Rebecca's death, and the new owner was unhappy to discover that provincial statutes declared that the gravesite became the responsibility of whoever purchased the land beside it. So, the story goes, the farmer poured the slab over the grave and fenced off the site to prevent possible vandalism, and damage to his farm equipment if he inadvertently ploughed over the slab. In later years, he moved on. The farm fell into disuse and the outbuild–ings and farmhouse were condemned and torn down.

The legend of Rebecca Lutes sprung up in the minds of local teenagers who swear that the gravesite is haunted by the spirit of a jet black cat with red fiery eyes —presumably Rebecca's famil–iar. Strange bloodstains have been found on the cement only to vanish shortly afterward. Eerie lights are seen and mournful sounds are heard up this road, and passersby will tell you that they feel a distinct and uneasy chill as they walk past the concrete slab by night.

So was Rebecca really a witch or was she just a simple farm girl whose memory unjustly suffers from modern-day teenagers' restless imaginations? The storyteller in me has already made his decision, but I'll keep that verdict buried under a yard or two of freshly poured concrete for now.

5
C
LUTCH
AND C
LAW

WOLF POINT

New Brunswick's forests hold an awful lot of secrets. The woods are full of life and death as green shoots push up through the ground cover of dead branches, pine needles, and rotted leaves. More bone–yard than forest, never are you closer to the secrets of life and death than when you travel these winding paths through the woods. The wind is a whisper gossip–ing with the trees. Listen hard when you travel alone in the woodland. There's just no telling what you'll hear.

The Bay of Fundy stabs upwards into the Maritimes, slicing a watery barrier between Nova Scotia and New Bruns-wick. As it approaches Westmoreland County the bay is split in two by one long peninsula, forming Shepody Bay on the side closest to New Brunswick and Cumberland Basin on the Nova Scotia side.

The waters here are anything but calm, surging upwards to create the world famous tidal bore of the Petitcodiac River. I have seen this bore, and to my overactive storyteller's imagination it looked as if a sea serpent was speeding straight up the river, cut–ting a wild, strong wake behind itself.