Aquifer: A Novel
Authors: Gary Barnes
Aquifer
A Novel
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Gary Barnes
Blue Spring Press
T
ABLE
O
F
C
ONTENTS
Chapter Seven – Cheyenne Mountain
Chapter Fifteen – Chitwood Home
Chapter Sixteen – Soda Fountain
Chapter Seventeen – Sheriff’s Office
Chapter Eighteen – Rymer’s Ranch
Chapter Nineteen – Chitwood Home
Chapter Twenty – Current River Slough
Chapter Twenty-One – Current River Fishing
Chapter Twenty-Two – Chitwood Home
Chapter Twenty-Three – Blair Creek
Chapter Twenty-four – Rocky Falls
Chapter Twenty-Five – Blue Spring
Chapter Twenty-Six – Gimp Foot
Chapter Twenty-Seven – Shut-Ins
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Nesting Chamber
Chapter Twenty-nine – Sheriff’s Office
Chapter Thirty-One – Fears Cave
Chapter Thirty-Two – Nesting Chamber
Chapter Thirty-three – Sheriff’s Office
Chapter Thirty-Four – Nesting Chamber
Chapter Thirty-Six – Swimmin’ Hole
Chapter Thirty-Seven – Meramec Caverns
Chapter Thirty-Eight – Sheriff’s Office
Chapter Thirty-Nine – Nesting Chamber
Chapter Forty-One – Blue Spring
Chapter Forty-Two – Jack’s Fork River
Chapter Forty-Three – Eminence
Chapter Forty-Five – Sheriff’s Office
Chapter Forty-Six – OperationTrot-Line
Chapter Forty-Seven – Town Meeting
Chapter Forty-Eight – Rock Quarry
Chapter Forty-Nine – Crash Site
Chapter Fifty-One – Conflagration
Chapter Fifty-Two – Blue Spring
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Blue Spring Press
P.O. Box 173
Provo, UT 84603-0173
This book is a work of fiction, though references to major springs, caves, rivers and other natural formations are entirely factual (as are their exact locations), with the exception of the underwater cave at Blue Spring and the spring at Johnson’s Shut-ins. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Gary A. Barnes
First Edition December 2005
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact Blue Spring Press, P.O. Box 173, Provo, UT 84603-0173
For information regarding special discounts on bulk purchases or for general questions and feedback, please contact us at
[email protected]
.
For Trudy Lynne Tyler Barnes
Acknowledgments
I could not have produced this book without the help of many people, and I am very happy to acknowledge their contributions and express my gratitude for their assistance. Michael Taylor, anesthesiologist; R. Scott House, Ozarks Operations Manager of the Cave Research Foundation; Gary Clayton, U.S. Special Forces; Shiree Best, Stacey Meldrum, and Caprice Fiene for their encouragement, suggestions and proofreading; Richard H. Cracroft for his proofreading, editing, encouragement and much appreciated feedback.
Special thanks to the National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior, the Ozark National Scenic Riverways; the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park; and to the Cave Conservancy of the Virginias amended for the Ozarks by The Nature Conservancy.
To my wife, Trudy Lynne Tyler Barnes, who has been steadfast and unwavering in her love and support of me and this book, I express my deepest gratitude.
Aquifer
C
HAPTER
O
NE
Doc
Ozark Mountains - Southern Missouri
Summer - 1954
The 1948 forest green DeSoto was already six years old as it made its way down the narrow, tree-lined, graveled road. Though it was only traveling twenty-five miles per hour it left a massive trail of dust behind as it snaked through the hills toward the river in the valley below. The Ozark Mountains in Southern Missouri were mere foothills in comparison to their towering big brothers the “Rockies” further west, but the driver of the DeSoto thought they had never been more picturesque than they were that day.
“Doc,” as the locals called him, had come from St. Louis where he had been a physician at St. Luke’s Hospital for eighteen years. Juggling the heavy demands of his three-pronged career - chief of staff at the hospital, teaching at the St. Louis University Medical School, and attending to the patients in his private practice - had all taken a heavy toll. He had felt weary and was tired of the fast-paced hassles he once enjoyed. Erroneously, he had believed that those activities were crucial to his success.
Doc frowned as he painfully remembered the price his family had paid. His wife had practically raised their three children by herself. It seemed that he was either on call at the hospital, attending some faculty meeting at the university, or spending time with patients in emergency situations.
He felt guilty about the tremendous burden he had placed upon his wife during that foolishly busy time of his life. Though it wasn’t funny at the time, they now laughed about the time that a neighbor thought that his wife was a single mother and had come over to see if she needed help with the yard work that had gotten seriously out of control.
Fortunately, those hectic days had ended five years earlier when Doc resigned from all three positions. Abandoning his hectic life, he moved his family from the big city to Ellington, a small farming community in the Ozarks of Southern Missouri.
Prior to the Civil War, Ellington had been called Barnesville - having been settled by Thomas Barnes in 1837 when he moved his family from North Carolina and settled along Logan Creek in Southern Missouri. The area had been acquired from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Barnesville grew rapidly and became an important trading center along the Ozark wilderness trail. During the war, however, Barnesville shared the same fate as many of the surrounding towns – the Union Army, determined to rid the area of Confederates and their sympathizers, burned it to the ground. The Union Army then erected Fort Barnesville nearby to ensure that the Confederates could not retake the area. Following the war, Fort Barnesville was dismantled and the town of Barnesville was rebuilt on acreage owned by Sina Ellington. A few years later, the town changed its name to Ellington.
Life was much slower in Ellington and Doc took to it well. More importantly though, his hillbilly patients accepted him as one of their own, as if he had lived there all his life. This was unusual, since outsiders, especially those from the “City,” were generally looked upon with distrust.
Doc found that life in the Ozarks was vastly different from his life in St. Louis. Simple things like running water, indoor plumbing, electricity and central heating were almost non-existent in the cabins of most of his backwoods patients. Still, he loved being a country doctor and thoroughly enjoyed working with his patients – except for the occasional unpleasant tasks like the one he was about to perform at the Sutton farm. He was bearing news that he knew would be received with mixed emotions.
The Suttons were sharecroppers whose dry farm straddled both banks of the Current River, about a mile downstream from the ferry Doc was about to board at Owl’s Bend, and lay halfway between Ellington and Eminence. As was typical of most families of that region, the Suttons had a large family – thirteen children, the oldest of whom was only twenty-two, and the youngest was not yet one.
Though the Great Depression had ended with World War II, no one would have ever known that by observing the lives of most Ozark families of the early 1950s. The Suttons were no exception.
Otho Sutton barely had two nickels to rub together. He and his oldest sons worked hard all year farming, cutting timber by hand for railroad ties, and doing anything else they could to keep body and soul together. Life for them was a constant struggle. Their farm provided most of the necessities of life, but certainly none of the luxuries. The few things they needed which the farm did not provide were obtained by bartering.
The hard work wasn’t restricted to just the men folk. Otho’s wife, Armenda, and the older girls made everything the family needed. They hand-sewed clothing and quilts, milked the cows, churned the butter, and ground the wheat or corn into flour which they used to bake their bread. They slaughtered their own chickens and pigs, and cured their own ham and bacon. The cooking was done on a large cast-iron wood-burning stove - making summers in the kitchen almost unbearable, but during the long, dark, winters it kept most of the house quite comfortable.