Aquifer: A Novel (7 page)

In the distance Larry could hear the gently gurgling water of the Jack’s Fork River. It had been a long morning. He had been studying for over two hours and felt the need for a break. He stood, stretched, closed the books and started off in the direction of the river.

Though it was only mid-morning his tee-shirt was already drenched with sweat. The hot muggy Ozark temperatures often climbed into the high nineties and occasionally exceeded one-hundred degrees. The humidity levels were generally near saturation. Larry looked forward to a walk through the woods to cool off.

The footpath he followed wandered for a quarter of a mile through the dense virgin forest, a mixture of oak, hickory, pine, fir, maple, sycamore, and other deciduous varieties. The trees formed a thick canopy overhead casting the forest floor into a perpetual feeling of dusk. Grapevines dangled forty and fifty feet from the tree tops like massive two-inch thick ropes.

The forest floor was carpeted with ferns and dense patches of switch grass. A woodpecker hammered on a tree in the distance and squirrels chattered overhead.
The garden of Eden couldn’t have been more beautiful or peaceful than this
, Larry thought as he padded down the trail.

The path before him played hide-and-seek with the river and the forest before opening onto a large gravel bar beside the river. The Jack’s Fork flowed lazily with sun warmed, crystal clear water. Like most Ozark rivers, its mudless bottom was all gravel and its channels changed from year to year.

Larry found Clayton wading in knee deep water examining frog eggs deposited on aquatic plant leaves. Thirty feet upstream children splashed in the shallow water while farther upstream older boys jumped off a twenty foot bluff into the “swimmin’ hole.” Between the jumpers and the splashers was a fly fisherman in waders, casting a fly in toward the bank. Larry, wearing a tee-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, emerged from the wooded path by the edge of the river.

“What's the status of that grouping?” Larry asked Clayton, who was only a few feet from the shore.

“Looks good. The eggs are firm and well dispersed,” Clayton responded.

Larry waded out into the clear shallow river. “I've never seen a river so clear. Back home they were pretty muddy. And the water's so warm.”

“The Jack’s Fork is shallow enough for the sun to keep it warm. Frogs proliferate quite well in this warm lazy water,” Clayton responded without looking up, continuing to turn leaves over in his hands to examine the attached eggs. “We’ve collected some good data on the frogs in this area, so tomorrow I want to start collecting data on frogs that live in cold water.” He then raised his head and looked directly at Larry. “Break out the camping gear because tonight we'll be sleeping on a gravel bar at Two Rivers Ranch.”

“The what ranch?”

“Two Rivers. It’s a commercial tourist resort about twelve miles from here where the Jack’s Fork and the Current River hit head on. The water in the Current River is much deeper and swifter, and definitely much colder . . . spring fed,” Clayton explained as he straightened to his full stature and arched his back backwards to stretch his tired muscles. “You’ll see the differences in how the frogs adapt to the colder water.”

The head waters of the Current River had their source at Montauk Spring, a large artesian spring flowing about forty-five million gallons per day. It was located about thirty miles northwest of Eminence and not too far from Salem, Missouri. The cold spring water was perfect for the trout hatchery operated there by the Missouri State Department of Wild Life.

Over the course of the next 125 miles the Current River was fed by almost a dozen other springs, each of which dumped over fifty million gallons of cold water a day into it. The largest of these was located just outside the town of Van Buren, about thirty-five miles southeast of Eminence and was ironically, and uncreatively, named
Big Spring
. This one spring alone added over 290 million gallons of daily flow to the river. Big Spring was the largest fresh water spring in America.

Most of the Ozark springs were relatively calm, and even though they may produce several million gallons of water daily, their surfaces were smooth and glassy. Not so with Big Spring. The spring’s water gushed to the surface with such force that it appeared to boil out of the ground in violent eruptions, sending plumes of ice cold water several feet into the air.

In addition to the dozen or so major springs, there were dozens of others that flowed between one million and fifty million gallons daily, along with thousands of smaller springs dotting the Current River basin. These springs added half again as much combined water as did the major springs, ensuring that the Current River would forever flow cold and clear.

=/\=

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Barber Shop

The Eminence Barber Shop was owned and operated by Ezekiel Pyrtle, though everyone just called him Zeek. He descended from a line of four consecutive generations of oldest sons, each of whom had learned the art of barbering from his father.

It was rumored that Zeek’s great-grandfather had been a great hero. He saved the town’s bank from being robbed by giving Jesse James a shave. According to the legend, in 1875 Jesse and his gang had ridden into town intent on holding up the bank. To their chagrin, however, the bank was closed. An “Out to Lunch” sign hung on the curtained glass door.

The gang loitered about the bank while Jesse crossed the street to the barber shop. The gang had been riding hard for several weeks and Jesse had sprouted a heavy, itchy beard. When he entered the barber shop he found it was over-crowded with men from the town who were sitting around talking, playing checkers, or reading the newspaper. The barber shop was where the men gathered to swap stories or to catch up on the news.

Jesse promptly settled into the vacant chair. Zeek’s great-grand father lathered up the stranger and began to shave the beard away. Nearing the completion of the job the barber glanced at the wanted poster on the wall then at the clean-shaven face before him. Calmly, yet decisively, he placed the edge of the straight razor to Jesse’s neck, right over the jugular, and drew it tight. He then ordered Jesse to stand so that they could walk to the Sheriff’s office together. He continued to hold the razor to Jesse’s neck as they walked out the door and headed down the street.

Immediately the gang gathered around them and threatened to kill the barber if he did not release their leader. The barber merely replied that everyone had to die someday and that if it was his day that at least he would have company, as he pressed the razor harder into Jesse’s neck. The gang backed down.

The two men stepped into the street but the barber’s foot got tangled in Jesse’s spurs. He lost his balance, lunged forward and sprawled to the ground at the feet of his former prisoner.

With lightning speed the gang members all drew their guns, but Jesse ordered them to holster their weapons. He then reached down with his right hand and assisted the hapless barber to his feet. Turning to his gang Jesse stated that this barber had shown more grit than many a lawman that he had faced down. With that he and his gang mounted up and rode out of town, never again to return.

The legend of Zeek’s progenitor hero had been passed down through the family. Copies of old editions of the newspaper, preserved in the town library, were incomplete. Nevertheless, the partial story revealed in the tattered scraps seemed to give credence that something had happened that day, even though the details were impossible to reconstruct.

Zeek wasn’t sure that there was much truth in the family story. There was one thing for certain, though; Zeek’s barber shop was still just as much of a social gathering place for the men of Eminence as it had been in the days of his great-grandfather. Positioned on Main Street just a few doors down from the drug store, kitty-corner from the café and city center, just up the street from the feed store, and directly across the street from the only auto and tractor repair shop in town, the barbershop was ideally located as a natural gathering place for men to congregate.

Unlike barbershops in large cities where televisions blared non-stop sporting events with sport magazines littering empty seats, and where customers spoke almost exclusively of their favorite teams by bragging of their standings in national competitions; sports were rarely discussed at Zeek’s barbershop. Collegiate and commercialized sports had little in common with this backwoods rural community. Few of the citizens of Eminence had attended the universities or lived in the major metropolitan centers that supported such athletic teams. Even the names of most major teams were foreign to the men in Eminence.

The sports activities of their school children, however, were always a topic of discussion. During the previous season the high school baseball team took first place at the county seat playoffs. The proud fathers spent many days in the barbershop that season boasting about not only their son’s accomplishments but the team’s accomplishments as well.

Similarly, news of great national or international importance was seldom discussed at the barbershop. It wasn’t that national events were unknown in the backwoods community, it’s just that those things belonged to the outside world, and the outside world had little impact upon Eminence or its citizens.

That left the weather - the topic most frequently cussed or discussed in the small farming community. However, the men at the barbershop had no use for a weatherman. They relied upon the various aches and pains in their knees, elbows and other joints as indicators of when the weather would change. They adamantly prognosticated specific weather events, complete with time tables and degree of impact.

Unfortunately, it was not uncommon for mild arguments to arise because one man’s elbow predicted one weather pattern while another man’s knee predicted something different. The disputes were good-natured and seldom lasted long, because the weather would soon change in a manner that neither man’s joint had predicted.

Except for the limited seasonal impact of the summer tourist trade, the economy around Eminence was remarkably stable. It hadn’t changed much since the beginning of the 1930s Great Depression, except that perhaps conditions had worsened.

During the previous twenty years, the town’s population had decreased from 614 to only 523, a troubling fifteen percent drop. Unless this trend could be corrected within the next few years, it could spell disaster for the town. The City Council and the Chamber of Commerce had worked together to solve the problem, but so far none of their efforts had proven successful. What was needed was new industry to provide jobs. Unfortunately, the town was too far away from major transportation and communication centers. Its isolation, the very thing that most residents found appealing, was sealing its doom.

Outsiders that visited Eminence for the first time often had the distinct impression that they must have just passed through the
Twilight Zone
, and had gone backwards in time some seventy-five years, landing in the middle of the Great Depression. That sentiment was echoed by the lead story in the summer 2005 edition of
The Rootwad
, the official publication of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, a division of the National Park Service. The article, authored by the park superintendent, was entitled “In the Ozarks, the Depression Never Really Ended.” Admittedly, his article had little to do with actual economic conditions in the area. It was specifically written to entice tourists to visit a new exhibit called “Depression Homestead,” which the Park Service had just completed at Big Spring outside Van Buren, Missouri.

The exhibit consisted of a full-sized cabin, shed and other accouterments of a traditional Ozark dirt farm and was reconstructed to present a glimpse into what life was like at the dawn of 1933, reminiscent of the
Ma and Pa Kettle
lifestyle. Nevertheless, many of the old timers around Eminence maintained that there was much hidden truth in the article’s title.

Despite the lack of economic development, to the local multi-generational hillbilly families that made the Ozarks their home since long before any of them could remember, Eminence was the perfect town in which to live and raise a family – and the town’s barbershop was the perfect place for the men to gather to swap stories and to establish their bragging rights, mostly about their children and the “big one that got away.”

Other than the weather, the next most frequently discussed topic was any event that impacted either the men’s lives or their community. When there was nothing of importance to discuss in this vein then something usually got trumped up. Truth be known, the men were bigger gossips than the women.

Zeek still used a straight razor to shave his clients and to trim up around their ears and neck following a haircut. There were advantages to living in a small backwoods town – certain social diseases had not yet found their way into the populace, so there was no fear of infection from cuts, open wounds and other bodily fluids.

In addition to Zeek and a customer sitting in the barber chair receiving his monthly trim, there were four other men sitting around discussing the events of the day. There were days when men would lounge around the barbershop all day discussing trivialities with such ardor that one would think the fate of the universe hung upon the outcome of the trivialities they discussion.

A seventh man, Bill Jackson, a scruffy, bearded, tobacco chewing, backwoods redneck in his late fifties, was sitting in the corner silently reading
The Current Wave
, the local weekly newspaper.