Aquifer: A Novel (15 page)

“Nonsense! How do you know you’ve nothing in common unless you meet them?” Larry argued rhetorically. “Besides, I already told them you’d come.”

=/\=

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

Chitwood Home

Thirty minutes later Clayton and Larry stepped from the Hummer, which they had parked beside the Chitwood home, and approached the front gate. Three boys, Johnny, Austin, and Frankie, were playing flag football in the front yard along with Tina and two men. It appeared that the adults were losing. Tina stopped playing to greet Larry and his mentor.

“You're right on time,” she shouted from halfway across the front yard.

“You know what they say about starving college students and free meals,” Larry responded as he and Clayton entered the yard and advanced toward the group.

“Who said the meal was free? There'll be lots of dishes to wash,” Tina teased. She motioned for the others to join her, and when they arrived she introduced the guests to her family. “This is my brother Walter Therman, but everyone just calls him W.T.” She turned to W.T. and continued, “And these are the
frog guys
, Dr. Thomas Clayton and his research assistant Larry Beringer.”

“Glad to meet you Dr. Clayton,” W.T. greeted him with a friendly outstretched hand. “I hope the frogs aren’t causing you any problems in your research.”

Clayton wasn’t sure if that was meant as humor or sarcasm. In either case he was clearly uncomfortable, “Just Clayton, please,” he responded, as he shook W.T.’s firm hand.

W.T. nodded his head in agreement with a disarming expression that showed he understood and meant no harm. Clayton sensed that W.T. sincerely welcomed him into their family gathering.

“And this is my oldest brother, Lillburn,” Tina said as she introduced her remaining brother. “He's a minister down in Winona; that’s the next town south of here, about twelve miles.”

The men shook hands and exchanged greetings.

“Okay Clayton,” announced W.T., who was obviously a take-charge kind of guy, “You, Tina and Johnny are my team. Larry, you're with Lillburn and the other two boys.”

They took their places on their assigned teams, lining up on the scrimmage line. But before the ball could be snapped Opal stepped onto the front porch and called everyone to dinner.

Inside the home the family and guests were seated elbow to elbow around an extremely crowded table in an even more crowded dining room. Massive serving bowls and platters were heaped with mashed potatoes, gravy, roast beef, vegetables, rolls and salad. Opal was so used to cooking large quantities of everything at the restaurant that she usually forgot to scale it down when it came to cooking for her family.

Opal sat at the head of the table with Lillburn at the opposite end, next to his wife. Clayton was seated at the side of the table, to Opal’s right. Larry sat to her left. Between Clayton and Lillburn sat the three boys, opposite W.T., his wife, and Tina.

With a voice intonation that contradicted her words, Opal spoke while looking straight ahead. “Guests are always welcome in our home.” She seemed full of reservation and suspicion and didn’t bother trying to hide it. Glancing to her son, she rhetorically asked, “Lillburn, will you say grace?” Then bowed her head, not waiting for a reply.

Obediently, everyone took the hand of the person on either side of them as they reverently bowed their heads. Clayton kept his eyes opened and studied the faces of everyone around the table, his mind wandering back to his childhood and to a typical Sunday dinner with his adoptive parents . . .

*

Tommy Clayton, age twelve, and his parents sat at a large table in a spacious dining room. The room seemed cavernous for only three people. A maid scurried around the table serving them a sumptuous, multi-course feast, though each person was served only a very petite portion. A mantle clock ticked thunderously loud in the otherwise silent room.

Tommy’s parents talked quietly with each other as if they were in attendance at a symphony concert, opera or ballet and were discretely discussing the program during its performance. The subject matter of their conversation, however, was quite trivial. They were merely discussing the hectic day they had each experienced while dealing with their respective students at the university.

Tommy politely, but timidly, tried to interrupt his parent’s conversation to invite them to his Little League baseball game the following Saturday. Sadly, he was totally ignored by the two people that should have mattered most in his life. The season was rapidly drawing to a close, and he desperately wanted his parents to come to at least one game before it was over.

After a number of attempts to break into his parent’s conversation, Tommy finally got his mother’s attention, but only to catch a reprimand from her. “Tommy, we're talking about some very important things; now be patient and eat your dinner,” she condescendingly commanded.

The boy, obviously hurt by the rebuke, slowly began to eat . . .

The memory faded and Clayton suddenly realized that he was in the Chitwood’s home where Lillburn was still praying. Clayton sighed, closed his eyes, and bowed his head.

*

After dinner the family retired to the parlor where they talked and visited while sipping tall glasses of iced sweet tea. Each member of the Chitwood family seemed genuinely interested in each other. They talked and gabbed quite loudly, and soon the parlor was filled with several simultaneous cross-conversations.

Clayton was struck by the difference between the almost rowdy conversations of this lively family and the hushed serenity, bordering on monastic silence, of his childhood home. Yet the thing that struck him the most was that even the children participated. The adults seemed as equally willing to talk to a child as they were with another adult.

After almost two hours of visiting “to let their dinner settle,” they returned to the front yard to finish their football game. Clayton could not get over how well the children and the adults intermixed. Both were completely comfortable with the other. It was quite a contrast to the way he had been raised.

The teams took their sides and play resumed. Opal, and the wives of Lillburn and W.T., made up the spectators and cheerleaders. The football game continued until the sun slid behind the ridge. At that point W.T. announced that he had worked up another appetite. Following his lead, both teams stormed the kitchen where they made roast beef sandwiches from dinner’s leftovers. When they were quite satisfied, Opal served them short-cake topped with strawberries she had picked from the garden that morning, smothered with mounds of cream skimmed from milk produced by the neighbor’s cow and hand whipped into mountains of fluffy rich topping.

*

No front porch of a self-respecting country home would be complete without a massive porch swing suspended from its rafters, and the Chitwood’s home was no exception. Larry and Tina settled into it and slowly began to swing as dusk settled over the landscape. They lazily swung for several minutes in comfortable silence as Larry drank in the tranquil surroundings of the small town they could see below them from their vantage point on the hill. He was just about to speak when the telephone in the front room began to ring – two short rings followed by a long one. He and Tina continued to swing and the phone continued to ring.

After several rings Larry asked, “Isn’t anyone going to answer it?”

“Of course not. It’s for the Thompsons a couple of blocks over,” Tina replied.

“The Thompsons? Why is it ringing at your house?”

“Well, Eminence isn’t thoroughly integrated into the technological modern world. We share a rural party line with two other families. If it rings just two short rings then it’s for us.”

At that moment Johnny, Austin, and Frankie ran through the front yard catching fireflies, or “lightning bugs” as Johnny called them. The boys imprisoned their captives in Mason jars with holes poked in the tops. It was a nightly ritual engaged in by hundreds of thousands of youngsters throughout the Midwest. Regardless of whether fireflies advertised their intended courtship by blinking in the country or in the major metropolitan centers, the tiny luminous insects always seemed to attract more children than potential mates.

“Growing up as a kid in the country must be a lot of fun,” Larry sincerely mused.

“I wouldn't trade it for anything,” replied Tina.

“You said Johnny was your nephew but you seem to mother him a lot.”

“Yeah, I do. His Dad was killed in a logging accident before he was born, and my sister died giving birth to him.” Tina threw her head back and took in a deep breath, letting it out very slowly as if debating whether or not to continue. “Mom lost her first child and has never stopped grieving for him. I don’t know much about what happened, but I’m sure there’s more to the story than what Momma’s told us . . . She’s never said so, but I’ve always felt that for some reason she blames herself for whatever happened. But, it’s a secrete she refuses to share. She just lets it gnaw at her and suffers in silence . . . anyway, when Johnny came along he sort of filled a void. But Mom works so much at the restaurant that I've done most of his raising.”

“Wow, heavy stuff . . . Speaking of your Mom, I wonder how she and Clayton are getting along back there?”

“Yeah, Mom can be very opinionated and a little ornery and stubborn at times . . . I just hope she doesn’t climb on her high horse and pitch a hissy fit.”

“Pitch a what?”

“A hissy fit . . . You know . . . a conniption.”

“Excuse me?”

Tina beamed a broad smile and slathered on her thickest hillbilly twang, “Why Ah do declare! Yer skulin’ ain’t a helpin’ yu none. Ya cain’t ev’n understan plain ole Engaleash when it’s taulked straight out at’chya.”

Larry looked quite surprised and opened his mouth to respond but before he could speak Tina continued, “Now don’t ya go givin’ me no never-mind or Ah’l be a giv’n yu what fer. Ya knowed perfectly well wha Ah jus sayed.”

Larry flashed her a whimsical smile and simply responded, “Yessum.”

Then he momentarily stopped the swing and turned his head, craning to see through the large picture window in the wall behind him which opened into the dining room. There he could see Lillburn and his wife playing pinochle on the coffee table with W.T. and his wife. At the far end of the dining room was a door that opened into the kitchen through which Larry could see Clayton and Opal doing dishes together in the tiny, crowded kitchen at the back of the house.

*

Clayton was somewhat stiff and formal in his mannerisms, not knowing exactly how to relate to this country woman who had just fed him. Just as Clayton had surmised earlier that afternoon, he felt little in common with his host, yet there was something he couldn’t explain that made him feel right at home amidst this family of strangers. Opal, on the other hand, was blunt and cool toward him, suspicious of his motives for coming to their town – and especially suspicious of Larry’s attention to her daughter.

“It was very kind of you to have us over for dinner,” Clayton said, groping for words to break the ice as he placed the plate he had just dried into the cupboard. Presenting great social skills in unfamiliar surroundings was not his forte.

“Twern’t nothin’,” she said as she rinsed the suds from a newly washed dish and placed it into the draining rack on the counter at the edge of the sink. “How long ya goin’ to be here doin’ yer research?” she bluntly asked.

“We'll be here all summer,” Clayton replied, picking up another dish to dry.

“I see. Collectin’ all the evidence you can to shut down our loggin’ industry!” she quipped.

“No. I just want to insure that it's done properly,” Clayton awkwardly responded, realizing too late that this conversation had just gotten off on the wrong foot and desperately wishing that he were back at his research lab.

“Well . . . my daddy was a loggin’ before I was born, and his daddy ‘afore him. It used to be pretty dangerous. My husband died in a loggin’ accident. So did Johnny's dad. They both used horse teams.”

She dried her hands on a dish towel which hung from a towel-rack near the sink, then turned squarely to face Clayton. She was almost a foot shorter than he, but she stood tall in her words. Looking up and staring him straight in the eye she continued.

“I hear tell you want us to go back to those unsafe ways, where a man's life is valued less than an owl's or frog's.”

There was an awkward silence as the tension between them mounted. Clayton felt like bolting from the room.

“I reckon we know how to cut down trees without you big city boys with yer fancy textbook learnin’ tellin’ us how to do our business!” she emphatically concluded.

=/\=

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Soda Fountain

The next afternoon, Larry and Clayton were seated at the soda fountain counter in the Eminence Drugstore. There were only two working antique, 19
^th
century, soda fountains in the entire state of Missouri. One of them was located in the Eminence Drugstore.

The two men were devouring the last few bites of their hamburgers and fries, and washing them down with thick chocolate malts, topped with whipped cream and a long-stemmed maraschino cherry. The malts had been served in tall, V-shaped soda fountain glass tumblers.