What Stands in a Storm (36 page)

People gave what they could. Nothing was too big or too small. Hair bows for Hackleburg. Free haircuts in Pleasant Grove. Portrait sessions for families whose memories were stolen by the wind. A thirteen-year-old girl from Arkansas found a temporary home for a family. Five friends in Mississippi filled a truck. Someone bought a brand-new house for a person he would never meet. A man who had lost everything
to his own life's storms—divorce, a lost job, a wreck that left him in a wheelchair—gave blood. It was all he had left to give.

It was not only southerners who gave with great heart and imagination. The Yankees gave five hundred thousand dollars. A Los Angeles–based group called Calabama held a bikini car wash to raise funds for Tuscaloosa. Las Vegas gave cash. Texas sent gas cards. One New York lady dispatched a tractor-trailer full of tarps, just in time for the first Alabama rain. Japan sent eight thousand blankets to Alabama, a thank-you gift for all the help Americans had sent in the wake of the March tsunami.

A man in the little medieval town of Holt, England, saw a photograph of Holt, Alabama, where entire neighborhoods of modest homes had been mowed into the ground. Inspired by that image, Alan Heath rallied his church choir to hold a benefit concert for their sister town four thousand miles away. They sang gospel songs and great southern spirituals and auctioned off a quilt. They called the concert Heart to Heart; Holt to Holt, and they raised two thousand dollars.

The tiny town of Phil Campbell, Alabama, had been nearly wiped out by the EF5 that killed twenty-seven, destroyed three hundred homes, and demolished the high school. It was the eponymous destination of the Phil Campbell convention, a gathering of Phil Campbells (and at least one Phyllis) from around the world. In the wake of the storm, twenty Phil Campbells convened from as far away as England and Australia to rebuild their namesake town.

People still wrote checks to the Red Cross, still carried boxes of clothes to the Salvation Army. But help also flowed from house to house. Responding to tweets and retweets for help, strangers drove across town with a box of formula and hugged the mother with the hungry child. Synapse by synapse, whole communities knitted themselves together into a symbiotic phenomenon that transcended, or maybe even ripped away, the invisible walls that had once divided.

As complex as the system was, the needs were plain and simple. Hackleburg posted a need for juice boxes and children's underwear
of every size. Fultondale needed chain saws and cardboard boxes dropped off at the command center—the library. Ohatchee needed manual labor. TES, Danielle's workplace, requested baby supplies. One woman from Etowah County had a message posted on James Spann's Facebook page, asking for help in fixing her house. Forty people came to her doorstep. Spann's Facebook page became such a valuable hub that the Red Cross began monitoring it.

The tragedy drove a die-hard alumnus of Auburn University, who answers her phone “War Eagle! This is Holly” to send truck after truck to rivals who yell “Roll Tide!” That said everything about the power of a crisis to unite. Holly Hart hated the University of Alabama Crimson Tide with the heat of a thousand suns.

“I'll tell you straight,” she told everyone, whether they asked or not. “I cheer for Auburn and whoever is playing Alabama.”

Yet here she was, one of a team of eleven staunch Auburn fans who gave everything to help the Tide's hometown. They could not explain it. They only knew one thing: in times of trouble, people help people. No matter what.

Toomer's for Tuscaloosa began as a Facebook group where victims and volunteers could connect online. The name was a twist on Tide for Toomer's, a group that had formed when a wayward Tide fan poured herbicide on the roots of the hallowed oaks that towered over Toomer's Corner in Auburn. It was sacred ground to Auburn fans, who honored the longstanding tradition of toilet-papering the trees. Fans of the Tide, acknowledging their brother's breach of the rules of warfare, had banded together and raised fifty thousand dollars for an effort to save the trees. They had called it Tide for Toomer's.

All but two of the eleven Auburn alumni behind Toomer's for Tuscaloosa had never met in person. But that did not seem to matter, and they came together behind the cause. Within two days, the Facebook group grew to more than twenty thousand people and would ultimately top eighty thousand. They would send help to more towns than they bothered to count—even to their own sworn enemies.

Equipped with a smartphone and uncommon sense, Holly Hart, an interior designer and mother of three, played dispatcher controller for waves of trucks sent by church groups, towns, and folks who have learned not to wait for help. She used a Facebook group as her command center where avatars moved semi-trucks and status updates brought real people face-to-face.

“This is social media, but how it is being used is more like the old-fashioned church phone tree,” said James Chris Fields, a member of the Toomer's crew. And that is how a mother with grown kids, who had never been trained in emergency response, managed donations and cries for help from eighty-six thousand people.

“Anybody can make a difference in the lives of others if they're just willing to show up,” said Holly. “None of us has any training in this. If each person gets out and helps one other person, it doesn't take long for this to be taken care of.”

The memory quilt that had flown seventy-five miles in the storm finally found its way back to the place where it took flight. Leah Meyer had tried to clean it but decided the rips and stains were another chapter in its beautiful story. One sunny day a few weeks after the storm, she unfolded it on a flat, dry place where a house once stood in the rural town of Phil Campbell.

Cradling her newborn son, Carrie Lynn Morgan, a mother of two, reached out to accept one of the last mementos that remained of her childhood. She had lost her house, and all the memories in it, to a fire some years ago. The quilt survived at her mother's house. She left it there, where she thought it would be safer. When April's tornado took that house—thank goodness no one was home—it left nothing behind but sky.

Leah did not know that story when she posted a picture of the quilt on a Facebook lost-and-found page. Carrie Lynn did not see that picture. She had no power, and her phone was dead. The news found
her, though, through the old-fashioned grapevine, a little luck, and a friend who spotted a familiar smile before the post rolled off the screen.

“This quilt is my life, my journey through everything,” she told Leah. “I see my baby pictures and realize how much my kids look like me.”

Leah smiled.

“I'm glad we found you.”

MONDAY, MAY 2, 2011—PRICEVILLE, ALABAMA

Chanel Chapman, the good friend of Danielle's who also worked the front desk at the Wingate, had driven up for the funeral from Tuscaloosa. She was still trying to grasp the existence of a world without her friend. Chanel's toddlers called her Auntie Danielle and did not care that her skin did not look like theirs, and the young mother had considered moving with Danielle to Florida, finding a place near the beach where her kids could play in the gentle surf with Danielle's little cousins.

Why would someone who cared so deeply for others be stolen from a world that needed her? Chanel remembered the day they had checked in a guest who seemed sad, so sad. Danielle had tried to cheer him up. The next day, housekeeping found his body in the bed. He had died in his sleep. Danielle sat in the office and cried until her worried boss sent her home early. It struck Chanel that it took a special person to feel that kind of compassion for a stranger. “No matter what anyone does in their life,” Danielle had said, “nobody deserves to die alone.”

Michelle had picked out her sister's outfit one final time. A lavender blouse had seemed to leap into her hands at Goody's. It felt like a sign, so she bought it. Never again would she be able to shop there without thinking of that moment. On her feet she placed the happy shoes that had walked across the stage.

Danielle's going to kill me
, she thought, laughing briefly through the tears.
Her feet are going to hurt forever!

Before they closed the casket, Michelle cut a lock of Danielle's hair to take to the beach and release in the waters that brought her sister peace. She placed in her casket a few favorite things: the radio she used for listening to UA football games and her purple stuffed dragon. Around her neck Danielle would wear her Joan of Arc medal to the grave.

The funeral was held at Annunciation of the Lord, the family's Catholic church, on a Monday at 3:00 p.m. Sunlight backlit the stained-glass window filled with angels whispering to Mary. A priest spoke of heaven as he sprinkled holy water on a sky-blue casket with a Celtic design that Danielle would have liked.

Terri saw Danielle's life spooling backward through the years, like an old home movie on rewind. She saw the woman about to graduate, the teenager who agreed to a blind date to junior prom with a cancer patient she had never met. The little girl who befriended a child in a wheelchair who could not go onto the playground. The baby with the wisest eyes.

As they played the next-to-last song of the funeral, Terri had a vision of Michelle's future. This home movie ran fast-forward. She saw her as a baby in Danielle's arms, as a sweet-faced toddler hiding behind her sister. She watched Michelle grow up, graduate, and get engaged. The vision ended with an image so bright and clear it seemed as real as a memory.

It was Michelle, five years from now, dressed in a white skirt. Beside her, Clay wore khakis and his MSU polo. Terri and Ed were dressed in wedding clothes. They encircled a baptismal fountain, smiling. In Terri's arms, wiggling in Michelle's tiny white christening gown, was a newborn baby girl.

That afternoon, they stood on the edge of a grave. It was a beautiful spring day, and just beyond the cemetery was an open field exploding with purple wildflowers. It was the ground where Ed's family was
laid to rest, so she would not be alone. Her parents bought the plots on either side of her, so she would never lie next to a stranger. The family bowed in prayer.

Terri had chosen a special headstone with great care to detail. The shape of it mirrored the pointed arches of the stained-glass windows of their church. The stone was carved with the words Danielle had written on the whiteboard they found in the rubble:

We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed,

perplexed, but not in despair;

persecuted, but not abandoned;

struck down but not destroyed.

—2 Corinthians 4:8

Michelle looked beyond the grave to the lavender field and felt her sister's presence. She picked a small bouquet and laid it on the casket. Her baby cousins did the same. They did not understand this moment, not yet, but they knew it was her favorite color. A little one turned to her mother and worried, “Dan-Dan can't breathe in that box!” Her mother hugged her and cried.