What Stands in a Storm (35 page)

I think the main reason I have reacted so was because her death forced me to admit that I love her. Not in the romantic way, but in the “This is truly my friend and I would do anything for her because I know she would do anything for me” way. And, when you think about it, how rare is that?

Joe Kryzkowski was one of 350 people who consoled the Downs family with poignant testaments. For three hours they absorbed a thousand hugs, ten thousand tears, and a million kind words. No parent ever imagines such a day, but Ed and Terri found themselves moved and humbled. With each hug, Terri felt a little bit stronger.

Even in the midst of their infinite sorrow, Ed and Terri had the chance to catch a glimpse of their daughter through the eyes of the world. That she had meant so much to so many different people revealed a side of her they always knew, but now they cast it in a new light. She truly had made a difference. She had not died on the cusp of a life of service; she had already lived one. And for this she would be remembered. With that knowledge came the very start of healing.

There is no getting over this. There is only getting through it.

Kelli Rumanek felt that she could breathe again for the first time in five days. Terri's words had released the chains of fear and guilt that held her psyche hostage. That moment was the first step on a long and treacherous road through grief and recovery. With this influx of oxygen came new strength that surprised both Kelli and her family.

“I am not sure what I expected, but I am so glad we came,” Kelli told her mom. “I think we can still make it to Loryn's visitation.”

“Really?”

“No, Mom. I feel better!”

“Well, okay!”

They left one funeral home and drove to another, 170 miles away.

AFTER THE STORM—ACROSS THE SOUTH

Little pieces of Mississippi fell on Alabama. Alabama rained down on Tennessee. A flock of blue jeans from a plant in Hackleburg flapped forty-six miles and landed in a field. Photographs from Phil Campbell fluttered down over Lenoir City, Tennessee, 280 miles away. Across the South, bits of lives that had ridden the winds were picked out of azaleas and barbed-wire fences.

One of them was a memory quilt that flew over two counties and landed in a muddy backyard in Athens, Alabama. When she found it, Leah Meyer saw through the rips and stains, saw the life unfolding in photos—a baby, a little girl in a pageant, a teenager playing basketball. The bobcat emblem was a clue that led to Phil Campbell High School, seventy-five miles away. Leah ran her fingers over the embroidered name—
Carrie Lynn
—and knew she had to find her. She posted a photo of the quilt on a Facebook page that served as a giant lost-and-found for belongings taken by the storm. And then she waited.

It was like this all across the South, as people helped victims pick up the pieces of their lives. Friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers did not wait for the many agencies that were on the way with help. As soon as the winds died down, they started rescuing one another.

In a trailer park in Holt, Angie Hays lay under a collapsed wall, trapped with her son and daughter-in-law. The wall was pinned by a
water heater and a double-door fridge, and they pushed in vain. Hays cried out for help.

She could not see help coming. But she will never forget its voice.

“Just keep hollerin'!” the voice boomed. “I'll find you!”

“I'm right here!” she screamed. “Someone's standing on my leg!”

“Good—it's me,” said the voice. “Hold on a minute. I'll get you out.”

The voice belonged to Robert Reed, a man who had seen the inside of a Mississippi prison, but started over in Crescent Mobile Home Estates. At first, the neighbors, black and white, had eyed him with suspicion. His hard work and pretty landscaping had won them over. Now he was the manager.

Huddled in the bathtub with his fiancée and kids, Reed had flown through the air, grabbing for the children, and landed in a field. He threw himself on his daughter as an airborne truck grazed the back of his neck. Afterward, he plucked an air-conditioning unit off his fiancée's head, and once he saw she was alive, he ran to help others.

Within minutes he had dug out twelve people.

The days that followed were fueled by volunteers with coolers.

Even as relief trucks filled with cans of beans and shelf-stable meat rolled into every battered town, so did a battalion of Junior League bakers, backyard chefs, and Samaritans armed with spatulas. They rolled into town after devastated town, towing grills the size of campers.

Cooks of all stripes tied on their aprons, stepped up to the plate, and filled it. They were faith groups that set up buffet lines under tents in church parking lots. Families from small towns that had been spared. Professional chefs who offered free meals at their restaurants. Students who fired up their backyard grills and cooked all the meat from their neighbors' melting freezers. When the parking lots were filled with trucks and tents, they found a flat spot on the side of the road and held a cardboard sign:
FREE FOOD!

They did it because food is love. Because they knew that dragging branches and lifting boards could not be done on an empty stomach. In the South, food and tragedy are sisters. And while the instinct to feed others in a crisis may not be strictly southern, what they prepared, and how they did it, may be the region's finest recipe.

Some ills in this world cannot be cured by a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting. But that cake, and the compassion baked into it, may be more beautiful than any cake that graced the cover of a magazine. It was what Rita Trull could give of herself, and she joined a few friends from a small-town church on a drive to Smithville, Mississippi, devastated by an EF5. From the looks of the spread in front of her, she was not alone in her ability to help, and cope, through baking. When she put out a call for help after the storm, the answer came strong and sweet:

“I said, ‘I need some cakes for these people!' I had twenty-one cakes come to my house.”

In Tuscaloosa, a man with a grill and trailer loaded with groceries tried driving into Alberta City. The National Guardsmen stopped him at a roadblock—only residents were being allowed in. So the man found a grassy median by the river and parked his grill in the middle of four-lane Jack Warner Parkway. People saw him and honked and pulled over to help. Before long he was feeding the National Guard. They got him into Alberta.

He set up his tent in a strip-mall parking lot, a staging area surrounded by devastation. Soon he had neighbors. The tents sprang up like wild mushrooms after a rain, and together they merged into a phenomenon that felt like the cross between a food court and a melting pot. The Germans from the Mercedes plant brought a cooking team that built burgers like a well-oiled assembly line. An army of Baptists teamed up and did prep work. The Methodists were in charge of deliveries. A group of Muslims grilled side by side with football coaches. The only walls between them were built out of clear stacks of cases upon cases of water. Their culinary resourcefulness knew no limits; if it didn't move, they grilled it.

“Hey, Coach, d'ya think we can grill this?” asked a man, holding up a giant soft pretzel.

“I dunno. Do you?”

“What the heck, let's try!”

In the storm-whipped town of Vilonia, Arkansas, two thousand volunteers showed up to pitch in. The Senior Citizens Center became the headquarters of help, and those who ran it—retired teachers, moms—somehow found a way to feed twelve hundred people three square meals a day.

In the fable of Stone Soup, a broth that starts with one boiled rock is proven to feed a village—when each villager chips in one ingredient. Vilonia saw that happen, as the meals came together like a town-wide potluck. The elementary school gave sausage and biscuits. The bank donated a near half-ton of meat. Ten flats of milk arrived from the grocery store, unbidden. The brand-new Mexican restaurant fed everyone and charged no one. The ice-cream company brought freezers and an eighteen-wheeler packed with ice, a giant community fridge where people saved food from their powerless kitchens.

Some people cried into that first hot meal, because it tasted so good, so normal. No one saw even close to the bottom of the barrel, much less had to scrape it.

“I had twenty-five cases of hamburger meat in the fridge trailer, and I went in there the other day and there were still twenty-five cases, even though we've been going through it every day for two weeks,” said Sandy Towles, a retired teacher who volunteers at the Senior Citizens Center. “People just keep bringing us more to serve. It's like the proverbial loaves and fishes.”

Vilonia's victims were soon feeding its volunteers. Miss Dollie Pruett, in her midsixties, rose at 4:00 a.m. to bake two hundred biscuits slathered with gravy for the National Guard. Military, firemen, and police came hungry from around the state. Volunteers such as Lorenda Gantz-Donham worked double-shift hours to feed them.
“We may be stinky and we may be bankrupt,” said Lorenda, who had never before cooked for an army, “but we will be full.”

On an urban farm in Tuscaloosa, where fourth graders once studied rows of turnips, the crops were poisoned with fiberglass. Tuscaloosa's Forest Lake was stripped of many of its oaks. But the founders of the Druid City Garden Project looked at the mess and saw another teachable moment. Andy Grace, a film professor, and his wife, Rashmi, tore out the ruined crops and planted sunflowers, zinnias, and marigolds, something pretty to look at as the neighborhood was rebuilt.

They reached out to local farmers for vegetables they could not grow themselves and turned them into collards and corn bread, roasted potatoes, homemade lasagna bursting with summer squash. A break from the shelters' emergency rations, often spooned from a can, these meals would be their next lesson: food heals.

They called their project the Soul Food Brigade. In the kitchen of an Episcopal chapel, the couple formed a unique supper club, a group of friends who had already shared a meal many evenings before, chopping hip-to-hip, weeping over cut onions, preparing a communal meal. Now they cooked for people who didn't have kitchens, for people who had driven hundreds of miles to ask a stranger “How can I help you?” They cooked meals that they would proudly serve company, prepared things that feed more than hunger. “This is the kind of food that we make when we're together,” Andy said. “We wouldn't serve anything less.”