What Stands in a Storm (32 page)

The man who opened the door that day looked nothing like the memory. He was old and drunk, and filthy words spilled freely from his lips. He had never told his son he loved him. He did not say it now.

And yet, deep in the old man's eyes, Spann glimpsed the dad of his youth. Small memories broke free from some buried place. Going with him to the circus in Montgomery. Their fishing trip in Georgiana. Small things. Big truths. And suddenly, the anger slipped away.

Spann called him sir, and spoke of faith.

“The least I can do is forgive you,” Spann said. “I need to say that to you, and you need to hear it.”

The old man rambled and cussed, and did not seem to hear it. He drank his beer and urinated in his own front yard. James turned and left, still fatherless; sad, and yet at peace.

A year later, he learned the old man had died, alone, in some facility.

After the game, the Spanns climbed into the black 4Runner for a drive into the disaster zone. From a part of town where the landscape allowed them to forget what had happened, they drove west, squinting into the sun, to a place where the trees were bare and twisted. Blown-out windows stared back at them like vacant, haunted eyes. Under their tires, gritty pieces scattered in the streets. The air smelled of death, and pine.

“This is the edge of the storm,” James said quietly.

In the passenger seat, Karen Spann felt her soul ache. She was not sure what was drawing her so desperately to this area, but she needed to be here. Officials recognized James behind the wheel of the 4Runner and waved him through the blockades.

Pleasant Grove was a suburb of Birmingham that had been hit by the same tornado that had ravaged Tuscaloosa. Southwest of the city, it was an old-fashioned blue-collar neighborhood of modest homes and beautiful hardwood trees. Home to ten thousand residents—generations of coal miners, retired teachers, and working families—it was a place where people sipped lemonade on the porch in the afternoons, where on Friday nights in the fall, fight songs played by high school marching bands could be heard filtering through the woods.

Now all that was gone. The Spanns drove slowly through the streets of vanished neighborhoods. The car rattled and shook as the damage grew more grotesque. In the backseat, Ryan quietly took it all in. James had briefed his son about what he might see or encounter.

At the breakfast table with Karen, James Spann had finally broken down. She had not seen her husband cry in years. He told her about horrible things he'd seen that she would never write down or speak aloud. Yet they'd broken her heart and become part of her, even though she only saw them through her husband's eyes. She was grateful for the tears and for his honesty.

Go ahead
, she thought.
Get it out
.

But then he was needed on the radio, and he went upstairs to the War Room to take the call. Hearing his voice on the radio, no one could have known how much he had been hurting. That was her James.

Now as they entered the devastated neighborhood, James remarked on how the cleanup had progressed, but Karen wondered how it possibly could have been worse. It looked as if the mouth of hell had opened up, spewing death and brokenness everywhere. The odor that hung in the air seemed the saddest smell in the world, a combination of sick and sweet, foul and musty. It was as if the air itself mourned the horror of it all. And yet the sky seemed almost obscene in its clear blueness, just as it had been days before when a breeze had carried the scent of blooming jasmine and freshly mowed grass.

“Leave your cleats on,” James told Ryan as they stepped out of the car. “Look down. Always look down when you walk.”

They tiptoed through devastation so vast and incomprehensible that it was hard to process—twisted cars and broken dishes, books and sinks, toilets and clothing, pictures and papers and purses and luggage. They stepped over family portraits and a life insurance policy. Karen wept over the remnants of a crib, a doll tangled up in the insulation, a stuffed animal lying in broken glass—hoping that somehow, somewhere, the baby was fast asleep in its mother's arms.

As she walked, Karen wrestled with dissonant emotions. There they were, uninvited, walking through the ruins of strangers' lives. She felt as if they were trespassing through someone else's sorrow. As they passed sad-eyed people picking through the carcasses of their homes, she held back, respecting the invisible walls of privacy. A few wanted
to talk, and she listened, knowing that part of healing lies in the telling and the hearing of stories.

James looked through the eyes of a meteorologist and saw in the wreckage a few signs that gave him hope: the interior walls and closets still standing, the safe places he always rants about, ragged but intact. Among the twisted metal and fallen walls, they saw a closet filled with clothes, hung tidily on their racks, as though somehow immune to the winds. Karen noticed her husband's posture lift as he took it in, because it meant that someone could have survived there. He documented a few such places with his phone. Karen took only one photo the entire day: a magnolia blooming from the rubble.

SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2011—TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

One of the rescuers, Shannon Corbell, who had helped recover the bodies from 31 Beverly Heights, had never been involved in search and rescue. A tree maintenance supervisor for the Tuscaloosa Department of Transportation, Corbell was accustomed to dealing with trees, but not trees that crushed houses and killed people. Strong and stoic, he did not ordinarily show emotion, but having just seen bodies and babies who had flown through the air, this hit him pretty hard. He called his girlfriend, who lived in Georgia. They were supposed to head out on vacation this week, but they decided to spend their vacation together, helping Tuscaloosa.

Corbell's girlfriend, Tracy Sargent, was a professional K-9 handler for search, rescue, and recovery dogs. In her twenty-three years of work, she had been on hundreds of searches and seen them end in grisly, terrible ways. Tuscaloosa would be no vacation, but she loved her work and lived to help in times precisely like this. She loaded her Suburban with search-and-rescue gear and called her two K-9 partners, Cinco and Chance, who bounded into the car, eager to do their job.

Sargent joined thousands of volunteers pouring into Tuscaloosa. Police officers and firefighters and EMTs drove emergency vehicles from several states to work side by side with their overwhelmed brothers. A team from Montgomery Heavy Rescue was searching the west side of town, working its way east. Prattville was searching Alberta east to west. Louisiana Task Force One jumped in with the Technical Rescue Team, helping search precarious structures. There were six hundred National Guard members on the ground, guarding neighborhoods from looters and helping direct traffic, and five hundred more were on the way.

Some 850 volunteer civilians registered with the city on Friday, and 1,350 more signed up Saturday—individuals, whole families, church brigades. A couple with nine kids sorted donated clothes in Holt. A mother with a three-month-old baby drove in from North Carolina. Medical students came down from Philadelphia. An arborist from Tennessee climbed trees and doctored broken limbs. Fraternity brothers grilled burgers and pushed old ladies' garbage cans up their driveways. People noticed the mayor on the ground, pitching in, when the cameras were not present.

The city of Tuscaloosa had come a long way in the past seventy-two hours. Thirty-nine bodies had been found. More than seven hundred people reported missing had been located, but 570 were still on the list. The hospital had treated at least eight hundred people, though the exact number would never be known.

But there was still a long, long way to go before the city came close to feeling normal.

The tornado's six-mile blitz through the city put twenty thousand Tuscaloosans directly in its path. Even more were indirectly affected—more than twenty-three thousand city residents still had no power. City crews had pieced together seven garbage trucks from the wrecked EMA building, but the trash trucks, which haul away brush and large garbage, were not even close to salvageable.

“At the beginning of this cleanup, it's going to look like we're throwing rocks at a battleship,” said Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox.
“But we're out here, and we're moving. And it's going to take some time, but we're going to cross that finish line.”

Will's father stood at the edge of the house once again, feeling just as lost as before. Darrell Stevens never received a phone call with the news that Will's body could come home. Frustrated, he and his daughter drove back to Tuscaloosa, hoping to find at 31 Beverly Heights a few of Will's things, and some answers. There would not be much to find, since he had not lived in that house, but Taylor desperately wanted to find her brother's laptop, which held all of his photographs, papers, and notes, and the backpack he always carried.

Will's truck was undrivable but not totaled, so Darrell Stevens had brought the flatbed truck to haul it back home to Priceville. The truck reminded him of the conversation they had that Sunday before Will left.

“Hey, Dad, can I take your truck?”

Will loved his dad's red 4WD dualie, a larger and beefier version of his own truck. Darrell let him take it to school from time to time, but this week he needed it on the farm. He agreed, on one condition.

“Tell you what I'll do, son,” Darrell said. “Your last class is Wednesday. I'll let you drive my truck back down there if you'll come home after your last class.”

“Nah,” Will said. “I want to stay down there.”

“That's the only way you'll get to drive my truck. If you'll come home after your last class and bring the truck back.”

“It costs too much. And I've got things I want to do and things I need to catch up on.”

Darrell thought about that now. If only Will had changed his mind. But thinking like that was useless now. It would not bring Will back.

He could still see Will's wiry silhouette in the front yard, where he had stood talking with a friend hanging out of a pickup truck window as he paused on the street to say hello.

“I guess I'm gonna leave,” Will said, poking his head in to say good-bye.

“You still got the option of driving my truck,” Darrell said, “if you bring it back Wednesday.”

That was the last time Darrell Stevens saw his son alive.

Will's best friend, Rand Hutchinson, had come to Beverly Heights with his parents to help the Stevens family. Rand remembered seeing a sports bag sitting on Will's passenger seat Wednesday night. It was gone now, and his train of thought pulled him down the steep, rocky slope of anger. That someone would steal from a dead man.

Beverly Heights was filled today with people helping with the cleanup. A group of volunteers approached them, asked how they could help.

Taylor had not eaten in two days and was desperate to find the only thing of Will's that would be here.

“I'm trying to find my brother's laptop,” Taylor said.

The family set them to work, knocking away walls with axes and shovels. After twenty minutes one of the volunteers walked up to her.

“Is this what you're looking for?”

She hugged it and fell to the ground, crying.

But they still could not find Will.

A man who lived down the street heard about their situation. He came down to see what he could do.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked Darrell Stevens.

“You can help me find my son. We're not leaving Tuscaloosa until I find him.”

“They may have taken him out to the VA hospital,” the man said. “Do you know where that is?”

“No.”

“Come on. Let's go.”

Tommy Wagner drove Will's father to the VA and waited as he was taken into a little room, where a series of nurses and doctors asked
questions about Will. He knew they were doing their best, but he was tired of questions. He wanted answers.

“Why can't you just let me look at him?”