What Stands in a Storm (37 page)

After the casket was lowered into the ground, Ed and Terri each took a shovel to the dirt and let it rain down on their daughter. Michelle, who had kicked off her heels in the field, walked barefoot to the edge of the grave. She dipped her small hand into the soil and sprinkled it gracefully upon her sister.

Before they left, a light breeze stirred the flowers in the field. It felt as if it was Danielle, whispering good-bye.

One hundred and seventy miles away, Loryn went down the aisle of her church one last time. As her mother wished, she was in a white dress.

A lady from church had taken the dress and scrubbed the red clay away, and the white cotton gleamed from the open casket. Ashley
tucked into her casket a miniature crown and a sign that she hung on her doorknob:
SWEET DREAMS
. Loryn's grandfather, Ashley's father, had written her a letter, and they placed that with her, too.

One month and eight days after her twenty-first birthday—her grandfather and great-grandmother's birthday, too—Loryn Alexandria Brown was laid to rest in the small cemetery by her church. The grave sat in a peaceful spot in the shade of a stand of pines. There was no sound in the world quite as lonely as the sigh of the wind in those pines.

The headstone was black marble engraved with a photo that they had taken that Easter Sunday. Loryn stands in a white dress, hands on her hips, one red boot cocked out to the side. Her hair blows back off one shoulder, and she smiles. On the back of the stone is her senior quote:

Live life to the fullest, it's not the years

in your life, it's the life in your years!

9:00 A.M., TUESDAY, MAY 3, 2011—BEVERLY HEIGHTS, TUSCALOOSA

By the time Dianne Rumanek arrived at the house, Loryn's grandfather was driving his bucket truck. True to his word, he was going to take the house down. He did not want strangers going through his granddaughter's things. This was one thing he could do in a helpless situation, one thing that made him feel less powerless.

“Loryn thought Pop-Pop could fix anything,” he told Dianne. “I couldn't fix this. But I could be sure it's handled right.”

The day was cold and drizzly. With its mechanical palsy, the backhoe lifted each wall carefully, one by one. As they rose, the families scurried under them, scavenging quickly for whatever they could find. One wall was still covered with Loryn's photos and notes, taped to the pink paint with clear Scotch tape.

The insurance adjuster was also there, scribbling on a clipboard.

“You want to go up?” Mr. Brown said.

The two men went up in the bucket and looked down upon the house. From up high, they could see the damage path and could tell that this was the most badly hit house in the neighborhood. It was the trees.

Mr. Brown had been trimming trees for fifty-five years, and he remembered the day, some years ago, when a previous owner had called him out to 31 Beverly Heights. Brown had counted twenty big red oaks and sweet gums, each three or four feet thick. “The trees are too
big and too heavy,” he had told the man, advising they cut them down. “Good storm comes along, and they're gonna go.”

Now, overlooking the lot from the bucket truck, he counted fourteen trees on the house. The biggest, a red oak that looked nearly a hundred years old, had sliced it through the middle. The agent wiped tears from his eyes. He had never seen anything like this.

Dianne asked the agent whether he could pay Loryn's grandfather for bringing down the house. It was what he wanted. He should be the one. The agent checked her policy and told Mr. Brown what it could pay.

“Is that enough?” he asked.

Mr. Brown nodded slowly.

“That's about what I was thinkin'.”

Danielle's family could not be here today. When Dianne called them to tell them they were taking down the house, Terri flatly described the week ahead.

“Tomorrow we have Will's funeral. Then we have Michelle's rehearsal on Thursday night, and the wedding on Friday.”

“Seriously?” Dianne said.

“Dianne, the very last thing Danielle would want is for us to cancel this wedding,” Terri said.

“You're stronger than me,” Dianne said. “I don't think I could do that.”

“We just need something to be happy.”

FRIDAY, MAY 6, 2011—CULLMAN, ALABAMA

On the morning of the wedding in Cullman, the mother of the groom sat on the floor of her closet and wept quietly. Patti Whatley's house was thrumming with groomsmen and guests, and she could not let them hear her cry even though they had buried the maid of honor five days ago.

This is not how it's supposed to be.

She had overheard whispers in the grocery store: “They didn't postpone. It's going to be a sad wedding.” Patti wanted to ask these ladies just how long they thought it would be until losing Danielle was no longer sad. One year? Two years? Five years? Ten? No amount of time would change the fact that Danielle was gone. That would never stop being sad.

“Are you going to reschedule?” well-meaning friends and family had asked in the nine days between the storm and the wedding.

“Not that I know of,” said Michelle, alarmed and taken off guard the first time she heard the question. It had not even occurred to her.

She ran to her parents in tears. Should they postpone the wedding for a year? Terri and Ed felt strongly that Danielle would have wanted Michelle and Clay to move forward, to be happy. The whole family needed to come together in this moment of joy. No matter how long they waited, Danielle's absence would be present. Clay and his family agreed.

Sacred Heart Church stood a few blocks from Cullman's torn downtown, its twin spires towering skyward, topped with gold crosses that caught the sun. On one of the state's biggest pipe organs, Pachelbel's Canon soared over wooden pews and an altar as intricate as lace. The bridesmaids glided down the aisle in long satin gowns the color of wet sand. One by one they lined up by the altar, holding small red bouquets. In the spot where the maid of honor would have stood, a white pedestal presented Danielle's bouquet—white hydrangeas with sprigs of eucalyptus, wrapped in a shimmering ribbon.

The small moments of comedy that punctuate every wedding lightened the gravity. The ring bearer sprinted down the aisle and nearly stepped on a bridesmaid's hem. Two flower girls tottered behind him, the tiny one crawling up the altar in her dress.

And then the music soared and the people rose and turned to the
back of the sanctuary, waiting for the bride to emerge through the two great wooden doors. Behind them, Michelle was fighting the hiccups, which she got whenever she was nervous.

“Michelle, breathe,” her father whispered. “Breathe.”

The doors opened to a new chapter of her life. Clay stood at the altar, looking so handsome in a black tuxedo with a white vest and bow tie. In him, Michelle saw her harbor and her anchor, the man and the future meteorologist who would weather life's storms by her side. The aisle stretched before her, another small walk and another great journey.

At the altar, the priest said, “Love is both in this life and in the next life. Maybe Danielle will be with them during the darkest times, when they seem to be out of gas with each other. We won't be able to see her, but her presence will be there. She will be part of the gigantic unity of love that is God.”

During the prayer, Clay took Michelle's right hand. In her left hand, she swore she could feel Danielle's. They always did that in church, and at the end of the prayer, they would try to crush each other's fingers. Danielle always won. Now Michelle thought she felt her sister's squeeze, and she almost laughed out loud.

They lit the unity candle and exchanged vows and rings. The priest wrapped their joined hands in his vestment. After they took their first Mass, the priest presented them to the church. The congregation leapt to its feet.

SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2011—BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

On the weekend after the storm, James Spann put down his smartphone and closed his laptop. He pulled on a T-shirt and a baseball cap, loaded a chain saw and a few cases of water in the back of his SUV. His wife and son climbed in to join him for a day they all desperately needed, a day when they could help someone. Part of a caravan of baseball dads in pickup trucks, they drove out of the city and into the rural countryside northwest of Birmingham.

The storm had left eleven hundred miles of tornado tracks that stretched like scars across the South, through cities, forests, and no-stoplight towns. The storms were indiscriminate in their carnage, killing rich and poor, black and white, old men and infants. There was probably not a single person in Alabama who did not know someone touched by this.

Tornadoes are the Russian roulette of storms. In hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and some other disasters, the damage is widespread. But tornado damage is acute and erratic, leaving one home destroyed next door to one barely touched. Because of this, people ask themselves, perhaps more than in any other disaster:

Why them? Why not me?

The only answer to this question is going out to help.

The Spanns drove to Walker County, the same rural county that had been hit in the April 3, 1974, Super Outbreak, where James Spann
spent a pivotal night inside the hospital. They were driving to Cordova, where everyone knew everyone, and strangers could be spotted a half mile away and were often eyed with suspicion. A former mill town that dried up when the mills closed, Cordova before the storm was already fighting for all it had. The city could not afford a paid fire department, but its volunteers were as devoted and passionate as anyone who had ever held a hose.

Cordova had rolled snake-eyes; it was the one town in Alabama to be hit by two major tornadoes on April 27. In the morning, the EF3 had wrecked the downtown. Twelve hours later, almost to the minute, the EF4 struck the mostly empty downtown. Five people died in Cordova that day. Had the first one not hit when it did, and where, that number could have been much higher.

Some of the rescuers were also the victims. Brett Dawkins, the young lieutenant who rescued his aunt and jacked a house off his dead cousin, had come home after two or three days of recovery work downtown to find his house destroyed. He was so tired that he made himself a little pallet of clothes where his bed used to be, curled up, and fell asleep. Now he and his mother were living in the abandoned pharmacy building that had turned into the temporary headquarters of Fire & Rescue, whose station had also been lost. They put cots between the pharmacy shelves and hung a sheet for privacy. They showered at the homes of friends. Life would be this way for months.

Cordova's churches ran the recovery efforts and people from all walks came together. But it was not without its problems. Tragedy brings out the best in people, and also, sometimes, the worst. The mayor was criticized by the national news for enacting a ban on FEMA trailers downtown, though part of that, at least, had to do with the fact that they simply would not fit on those skinny lots. The
New York Times
published a story about a black teenage boy who woke up in the hospital saying that he, his mother, and his two white friends had sought shelter at a church and were turned away. When the second
tornado had struck their house, his mother and two friends were killed. Anonymous donors had raised enough money to buy him a ticket to Hawaii to live with his brother. This raised many questions in and outside the little town. Some believed it a genuine effort to help a kid who lost everything, including his mother. Others speculated that certain people wanted to get the boy out of town before he could talk anymore. Few residents would go on the record to answer. Officials looked into it, but it was never resolved.