What Stands in a Storm (9 page)

On the TV in the lobby of TES, the voices of the weathermen rung with urgency. James Spann was showing live video from a SkyCam
above Cullman. A textbook supercell thunderstorm was hovering on the horizon, with a bright rain-free base on the right and a dark curtain of rain on the left.

Danielle and a coworker stood in the small lobby and watched the scene unfold on a small TV. On the screen, a dark finger reached down from the cloud and began to claw the earth. The camera zoomed in. Fragments of debris were visible, whirling. It was 2:46 p.m.

“We've got a tornado down,” James Spann said on the air. “This is a tornado emergency for the City of Cullman.”

The charcoal mass writhed malevolently against the milky sky. To a storm spotter, the funnel looked like a textbook specimen from Kansas or Oklahoma. It was rare to see one so clearly defined in the South, where funnels often come in disguise, cloaked by a curtain of rain.

Danielle watched the monster grow on the TV screen, thickening, darkening, and churning mercilessly toward the heart of Cullman.

The church!

Sacred Heart church, where Michelle would be married next week, was a landmark of downtown Cullman, a city of fifteen thousand about an hour's drive north of Birmingham. Built in 1916, the Romanesque church was one of the prettiest Catholic sanctuaries in the state, with a roseate window framed by steeples topped with twin golden crosses. Its stained-glass windows, crafted in Germany, were so exquisite that they had been buried during World War I to protect them from the bombings, and later shipped to America. Inside, one of the largest pipe organs in northern Alabama echoed off the vaulted ceilings. Michelle had always dreamed of getting married there.

Danielle worried about her sister. A student at Mississippi State University, Michelle lived in Starkville, a college town eighty miles west of the University of Alabama. Storms forming in Mississippi would hit her at least an hour earlier. The state had more than half a dozen warnings in effect, and an EF5 was pounding Philadelphia, a tiny town about sixty miles south of where Michelle sat studying in her apartment. Danielle's phone was broken—the caller could only
be heard on the speakerphone setting—so she texted her sister to check in.

Michelle and Danielle had a relationship straight out of a Hallmark card. Michelle, two years younger and two inches taller, looked up to Danielle, figuratively at least, and called her “my little-big sistor.” As military brats, the girls had seen each other through the hardships of deployment and relocation. Their father, an air force ground crew chief, had been sent to Iraq during the first Gulf War, and their hardworking air force mother held the family together when he was away. By high school the girls had lived in three states, and during the many moves they had learned to make friends easily but also let go and move on. The one constant was each other. When Michelle was a baby, her parents could not understand her first garbled words. Three-year-old Danielle would translate, and Michelle would nod as if to say, “Yep—that's what I said!” When they were older, they'd test this unique ability in the bathroom mirror while brushing their teeth. Michelle would mumble through a thick lather of toothpaste; Danielle always knew what she said.

Danielle had become like a second mother to Michelle, whom she had potty-trained, taught to ride a bike, and guarded fiercely. They were two sides of the same coin. Michelle was the sweet one, tall and willowy with sky-blue eyes, a guileless smile, and more book smarts than common sense. Danielle, shorter and built like a swimmer, had knowing eyes the color of almonds, a disarming smile, and the ability to smell bullshit a mile away. Danielle stood up to bullies and broke up fights, and got in the face of anyone who dared to tease her sister.
Michelle hid behind her, followed her, and admired her for the traits they did not share. Danielle was a coxswain on the rowing team. Michelle played clarinet in the marching band. Danielle picked the biggest school in Alabama. Michelle preferred smaller Mississippi State. They had briefly considered sharing an apartment halfway between the two but couldn't afford the commute.

The sisters texted almost daily, but the last time they had spent time together in person was during Christmas at their parents' house in Priceville, a small town on the outskirts of Huntsville. A rare Alabama snow had closed the roads, so Danielle couldn't go back to work. The sisters pulled on parkas and ran out to catch snowflakes in the front yard. Feeling like kids again, they built a real-size snowman—not the dirt-colored midgets made with spatulas, which is usually all that can be made from a Dixie snowfall. They posed for a photo on either side of their “rock-star snowman,” made with pinecone eyes, a carrot nose, and a pine-needle mohawk.

Danielle watched the funnel grow on the screen. Suddenly it appeared to divide into three, with two small tendrils swirling diagonally around a large central column. The weatherman called it a multiple-vortex tornado. It looked like a dancing strand of DNA, with a strangely hypnotic, haunting beauty that made it hard to look away.

“This is the time to go to a safe place!” Spann said. “A small room, hall closet, bathroom . . . lowest floor, near the center, away from windows.”

With live footage, there was no need to put the radar screen on TV, but all across the country weather buffs were admiring the textbook signature: a bright red dot at the center of a tie-dyed spiral. That dot was the debris ball, the vortex of the tornado, where the beam of the antenna was bouncing off shredded bits of trees and earth and buildings. The shape grew on the screen, thickening as it headed at fifty miles per hour straight toward downtown Cullman.

“This could be a half mile wide,” Spann said. “This thing is probably going to stay on the ground for a long time.”

On the screen, specks of debris were lofted into the air. From a distance, it appeared to rotate in slow motion. But inside that funnel, winds were ripping and shoving and tearing around at 175 miles per hour.

“That's pieces of buildings in downtown Cullman flying apart,” Jason Simpson said as he watched the EF4 tornado penetrate the heart of a town filled with people he knew.

The funnel plowed straight through the business district, ripping the roof off the courthouse and lofting it thousands of feet into the sky. It knocked down the Busy Bee and flattened Christ Lutheran Church, just a few blocks from Sacred Heart, where the priest who would marry Michelle and Clay ran outside the church and gaped. It peeled the redbrick facade off A Little Bit of Everything, a curio shop, revealing the wall underneath where a painted ad for Fuller Bros. Ford Motor Cars had been covered up for so long that most locals never knew it existed. It bent the NOAA Weather Radio Transmitter Tower like a twist tie.

On the SkyCam, the antenna tower from Channel 52 was a faint line that quivered and vanished, snuffed out by the dark finger. Just as it grew into a wedge about a mile wide, the image froze on the screen.

“We just lost power,” the weatherman said.

About that time, Ashley Mims called her daughter from Walgreens to tell her about the bronze cowboy boots she had bought her at the mall.

“Mama, did you see what happened in Cullman?” Loryn interrupted. “I'm getting scared.”

“Yeah, baby, I saw it,” Ashley said. “Me and the little kids are coming there.”

“No, Mama, you can't!” Loryn said. She was crying now. “You can't get on the road now. It's too late!”

“Well, you get in that basement,” Ashley said, her voice calm and reassuring. “You get those pillows and blankets, and you start studying down there.”

The house didn't have a basement, but Loryn knew what her mother meant. She started gathering books and blankets to move to the windowless hallway beneath the stairs. The safest place in the house. It was nearing 3:00 p.m. and her mind was not on her Spanish exam.

“Have they canceled classes yet?” Ashley said.

“Not yet.”

At 2:54 p.m., above a rural stretch of Newton County, Mississippi, a new supercell was born.

1962—GREENVILLE, ALABAMA

Little James Spann stared out the window of his classroom, watching the clouds go by. He was six years old, and the white billowing shapes parading across the skies of Greenville, Alabama, were considerably more interesting than whatever was being taught in first grade.

At the head of the class was his first-grade teacher, the fearsome Mrs. Porterfield, who looked to be least a hundred years old and had the disposition of a water moccasin. Edna Porterfield was feared and reviled by misbehaving schoolboys. She was known to yank them out of the classroom and into the hall, where she would wear the cotton out of their britches with a wooden paddle. Mrs. Porterfield was strong for an old lady, and she could make hallways ring with the yelps that followed each echoing
whap!

If she caught you with a piece of chewing gum, you had to trade it for a stale one from the gum jar, and the notion of tasting someone else's spittle on a calcified wad instilled in James a fierce and lifelong aversion to gum. Mrs. Porterfield addressed students by their last name, and McClendon, who would grow up to become Mayor McClendon, spent all of first grade believing that his best friend's name was Spann. Which in Greenville was pronounced with two syllables: Spa-yunn.

“Spann!” Mrs. Porterfield yelled in the middle of a lecture.

Six-year-old James pulled his wide eyes away from the window, certain his life was about to end. “Spann! Get out here
now
!”

He trudged across the snickering classroom and into the hallway with lead feet and mounting dread. He had never felt the sting of a paddle.

It's all over
, he thought.
I'm dead.

In Mrs. Porterfield's hand was not a paddle but a book.

A library book. About clouds.

Mrs. Porterfield, who was indeed old but not blind, had noticed James staring out the window day after day and figured out his interest. From that book in her hands, James learned the shape and name of every cloud in the sky. From Mrs. Porterfield, he also learned that people are often not what you think. Both lessons would guide him like a lighthouse through the rocky shoals of life.

Greenville, Alabama, in the 1960s was a hard place and time to grow up without a father. The small lumber mill town in south Alabama was populated by boys who came to school flush with stories of hunting and fishing with their daddies. Young James Spann had no such stories to share, and he listened with silent longing. More than a rod or a hunting rifle, he yearned for a baseball, a wooden bat, and a well-worn glove. And as much as he wanted those simple things, which his mother could not afford, he longed for one thing more: a father to play catch with.

His father had walked out when James was six. For a while, he would come back from time to time to visit his only son. On one occasion, his mother dressed him up in his nicest clothes and sat him in a chair by the door. Little James sat in that chair for hours, waiting for a father who never came.