What Stands in a Storm Read online

  Praise for What Stands in a Storm

  “The writerly brilliance—the terse dark poetry—of this debut book explodes from every page. Yet Kim Cross is too much of a writer to let mere masterful writing suffice. She has enlisted her sentences in the service of her tremendous reportorial mission: to recover and make sense of the thousands of fragmentary incidents, images, voices, and glimpses of human character ennobled by loss and imminent death—the sum and substance of the most catastrophic mass-tornado attack in recorded American history. This young writer has done the impossible: she has out-written apocalypse. A new star has appeared in our literary sky.”

  —Ron Powers, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers

  “Amid so much terror and pain and death, there is an overflowing of life here in What Stands in a Storm, gathered together in a blessing of uncommon decency and indelible beauty. If you want to know what shape your heart’s in, read this book and learn, through Kim Cross’s extraordinary reportage and artistry, that stories are as much a gift as life itself. Stories, in fact, are our afterlife.”

  —Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

  “Whether you live in tornado country or not, everyone should read this book. Heartbreaking and heroic.”

  —Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe

  “Turn off your cell phone. Call in sick. Tell your family whatever you need to tell them, because you’re going to have to have eight hours of uninterrupted time once you begin Kim Cross’s book. Her verbs pulsate, her narrative web sucks you in. Mostly, Cross makes you care about the people in What Stands in a Storm, their quirks and aspirations. You won’t look at a coiling sky the same way after reading this powerhouse debut.”

  —Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Factory Man

  “What Stands in a Storm is a dramatic and carefully reconstructed account of nature’s unexpected and explosive power and the strength of humans to bond together in its destructive wake.”

  —Peter Stark, author of Astoria and The Last Empty Places

  “With exhaustive, on-the-ground reporting, spellbinding prose and voices of the living and the dead recounting every haunting moment of the storm’s three-day reign of terror, Kim Cross has produced a spine-chilling narrative. What Stands in a Storm will tear apart, forever, our complacent sense of security when we look at a dark sky overhead.”

  —George Getschow, writer-in-residence, The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference

  “A powerful book, unforgettable in its recreation of a horror that swallowed entire communities. Kim Cross brings to life the soul-searing experience of people standing prostrate as a monstrous storm tears their lives to shreds. But there is joy in this horror. She shows us how ordinary people in the worst-hit areas discovered what they and their communities were made of as the sky fell around them.”

  —Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump

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  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Foreword by Rick Bragg

  Epigraph

  Historic Tornado Outbreak Map

  PART I: THE STORM

  1. Racing the Storm

  2. Trouble on the Horizon

  3. The Calm

  4. The Prelude

  5. The Opening Act

  6. Ground Truth

  7. Scanning the Skies

  8. Tornado Down

  9. Birth of a Weatherman

  10. Red-Letter Day

  11. Unbroken

  12. Chasers

  13. Safe Place

  14. Cordova

  15. Code Gray

  16. Entrapment

  17. Slouching Toward Tuscaloosa

  18. The Train

  PART II: THE AFTERMATH

  19. The Rescue

  20. The Silence

  21. Under Siege

  22. The House

  23. Charleston Square

  24. Beverly Heights

  25. Twilight

  26. The Search

  27. The Unthinkable

  28. Graduation Day

  29. The Walk

  30. Chance

  31. The Wake

  PART III: THE RECOVERY

  Tuscaloosa, Alabama Storm Fatalities

  32. Picking Up the Pieces

  33. But Not Destroyed

  34. The Wedding

  35. Healing

  36. One Step at a Time

  37. The Anniversary

  38. Remembering

  39. The Master

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About Kim Cross

  In Memoriam

  Memorial Scholarships

  Index

  For those who lost their lives to this, and for everyone who loved them

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  April 27, 2011, became the deadliest day of the biggest tornado outbreak in the history of recorded weather. It was the climax of a superstorm that unleashed terror upon twenty-one states—from Texas to New York—in three days, seven hours, and eighteen minutes. Entire communities were flattened, whole neighborhoods erased, in seconds, by the wind.

  This was an epic storm in an epic month: April 2011 saw three separate outbreaks and a record 757 tornadoes—nearly half of which (349) occurred during the April 24–27 outbreak that inspired this book. This anomalously stormy month blew away the previous April record of 267 tornadoes in April 1974 (and the record for any month, topping the May 2004 count of 542).

  The storm left in its wake long scars across the landscape, $11 billion in damage, and at least 324 people dead. Most of them died in Alabama, which now leads the nation in tornado deaths. On April 27, a total of 62 tornadoes raked the state; in some moments, there were six or more on the ground at once.

  This book tells the story of this storm through the characters who lived it. All the characters and events in this book are real, based on more than a year of research and one-hundred-plus hours of interviews with responders, meteorologists, survivors, and the families of those who died.

  Any dialogue in quotation marks was taken directly from an audio or video recording, or from transcribed interviews in which those conversations were recounted directly to me. Time-stamped posts were recorded directly from Facebook, Twitter, and chat rooms. Text conversations were retrieved from victims’ salvaged phones and shared with me by their families. These conversations have been left raw and intact, with no editing for grammar, spelling, or punctuation. Emergency radio transmissions were transcribed from time-stamped recordings. A person’s thoughts set in italics were based on social media posts by that person, or were remembered by primary sources present when the character said what they were thinking.

  I have attempted to check and double-check my scientific facts with the help of many experts, including respected research and forecast meteorologists and a fact-checker trained in science writing. That said, any errors are mine.

  FOREWORD

  Almost nothing stood.

  Where the awful winds bore down, massive oaks, one hundred years old, were shoved over like stems of grass, and great pines, as big around as fifty-five-gallon drums, snapped like sticks. Church sanctuaries, built on the rock of ages, tumbled into random piles of brick. Houses, echoing with the footfalls of generations, came apart, and blew away like paper. Whole communities, carefully planned, splintered into chaos. Restau
rants and supermarkets, gas stations and corner stores, all disintegrated; glass storefronts scattered like diamonds on black asphalt. It was as if the very curve of the earth was altered, horizons erased altogether, the landscape so ruined and unfamiliar that those who ran from this thing, some of them, could not find their way home.

  We are accustomed to storms, here where the cool air drifts south to collide with the warm, rising damp from the Gulf, where black clouds roil and spin and unleash hell on earth. But this was different. A gothic monster off the scale of our experience and even our imagination, a thing of freakish size and power that tore through state after state and heart after Southern heart, killing hundreds, hurting thousands, even affecting, perhaps forever, how we look at the sky.

  But that same geography that left us in the path of this destruction also created, across generations, a way of life that would not come to pieces inside that storm, nailed together from old-fashioned things like human kindness, courage, utter selflessness, and, yes, defiance, even standing inside a roofless house.

  As Southerners, we know a man with a chain saw is worth ten with a clipboard, that there is no hurt in this world, even in the storm of the century, that cannot be comforted with a casserole, and that faith, in the hereafter or in neighbors who help you through the here and now, cannot be knocked down.

  —Southern Living, August 2011

  I wrote, after the winds had died, that we would never look at the sky the same way again. But it changed us in more ways than that.

  Before April 27, 2011, the wail of the warning sirens might have caused some concern, some pause. After, after the winds bore down and into this place, the sirens struck us with dread, and sent us moving for basements and strong buildings not in panic, maybe, but aware—certain—of the destructive power that swirled somewhere nearby.

  Before, we looked at the weatherman with the remote control in our hands and heard his warnings, certainly, but it seemed distant, that danger, something we could just flip away from at any time if we wanted, and hide inside an old movie, or the cooking channel, or ESPN. After, we searched for him, quickly, because he had been the only warning a lot of people had.

  Before, we looked at things like concrete blocks and red bricks, like lumber and nails and poured cement, as solid things, substantial things, something stronger than the elements. After, we saw steel twisted into ribbons and bricks scattered like bread crumbs, saw cars crumpled like wadded-up newspaper and trees snapped like Popsicle sticks and whole streets swept raggedly free of houses; in some cases of whole neighborhoods.

  Before, we took the darkening skies as a kind of inconvenience, thought to ourselves how inconvenient it might be when the lights winked out. After, the funerals lasted for days.

  Most of us could only imagine the horror of April 27, 2011. Some of us were very lucky, and only came home to the great sadness of the destruction of splintered houses and lives. We drove back into our neighborhoods to see only material things smashed and hurled about, and knew nothing of the deeper misery, in places like Rosedale, the Downs, Forest Lake, Holt, Alberta City, and other places.

  I had been about three hundred miles away and watched the storm—disconnected, somehow—terrify people I knew and leave many of them homeless, and when I came back into the city in the awful calm I was not even sure where I was, because the lovely trees and the landmarks had been erased.

  I felt lost, in this splintered place, but I didn’t know what lost was.

  Now, because of the work Kim Cross has done in re-creating the drumbeat of horrors of that terrible day, I realize more than ever how lucky I was, how lucky we all were, to only lose wood and bricks and trivial things such as cars and trees.

  Because of her meticulous re-creation, we know more about what it was like to live through that time, and, tragically, what went through the minds of some who did not.

  Much has been written and said about the goodness of the people who responded in various ways after the winds died down. Those people can never be repaid, never be thanked sufficiently. People whose names I did not know sweated and even bled in my neighborhood, for strangers.

  We have, many of us, counted our blessings and moved on, until the next siren, the next darkening sky. The dead are buried, and prayers have been said, and love overflowing has washed through the pain.

  What Kim has done here is perhaps the oldest service a writer can supply. She has helped put a human face on the people inside those winds, and, maybe, etched their faces a little deeper into memory. At least, that is what we writers would like to believe.

  Rick Bragg

  In times of trouble, the things that tear our world apart reveal what holds us together.

  PART I

  THE STORM

  CHAPTER 1

  RACING THE STORM

  3:44 P.M., WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2011—SMITHVILLE, MISSISSIPPI

  Patti Parker watched the dark funnel grow until it filled the whole windshield, blackening the sky. Its two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds were furious enough to blast the bark off trees, suck the nails out of a two-by-four, and peel a road right off the earth, and it was charging at sixty miles per hour toward everything she loved most in the world—her children, her husband, their home. She was racing behind the massive storm, down the seven-mile stretch of rural highway between her and the life she knew.

  Smithville, Mississippi, was much smaller than Oxford, the postage-stamp of native soil that William Faulkner called home. Too tiny to appear on some maps, it was a 1.5-square-mile speck of a town about ten miles west of Alabama and twenty miles southeast of Tupelo, where Elvis was born. Set on the banks of a dammed river some locals believed tornadoes would not cross, Smithville was a place where women put on makeup before going to the Piggly Wiggly, planned dinner around choir practice, and took their families to Mel’s Diner for fried catfish and the town’s late-breaking news. It had one stoplight and five churches.

  Smithville’s earsplitting tornado siren, just fifty feet from Patti’s house, had been screaming so often this spring that she found herself sleeping through the warnings. A high-pitched, lugubrious wail, it sounded just like the air-raid sirens of World War II. When people heard it, they would run into their closets and bathrooms, although many would pause first and go outside to stare up at the sky.

  The sirens had interrupted Patti’s work again today in the neighboring small town of Amory, Mississippi. The executive director of the local United Way, she had been at her desk answering e-mails and reviewing disaster plans. When the sirens screamed she sighed and joined her colleagues in the stairwell, pausing by the coffeepot along the way to pour another cup.

  Tornado season hovered like an unspoken question over every spring in the South. It was just part of living here. But this time, when someone opened the metal doors beneath the stairs to peek outside, Patti noticed a sinister shift in the wind. She had told her husband she would wait it out and come home when the warnings expired, but she felt the urgent need to be with her kids. If she left now, she thought, maybe she could beat this thing to Smithville. Driving on the road was quite possibly the worst place to be in a storm, aside from a mobile home. But the pull of family overcame logic.

  And now here she was, caught behind a mile-wide tornado that was rushing immutably toward the center of her universe.

  At home in Smithville, Patti’s son, Johnny Parker, one day shy of his seventeenth birthday, was leaning into his computer, peering at the radar maps. What he saw made him prickle with fear. Severe thunderstorms were popping up across the state, dotting the screen with red and yellow tie-dyed splotches marching steadily northeast. He knew some of these storms were pregnant with tornadoes. A student of the weather since the age of four, when a storm nearly crushed his house with a toppled tree, he studied the maps, searching for patterns and clues that might foretell what the sky would do. His fingers flew over the keyboard, dashing off an e-mail warning to the hundred friends who followed his weather dispatch, which he always typed, because
cerebral palsy hijacked his words somewhere along the path between his mind and his mouth. Johnny could type a blue streak and you would never know, reading his forecasts, that he struggled to speak.

  Johnny’s concentration was broken by the sound of his father yelling, calling him and his fourteen-year-old sister, Chloe, to come out and look at the sky. Together, they stared up at the terrible beauty: steel-colored clouds that whorled around like dishwater circling a drain. Johnny turned his head, and all he could hear was the terrible roar. He knew without looking what it was, and that it filled the Mississippi sky.

  “Get inside!” yelled his father, Randy.

  Johnny and Chloe raced to the innermost hallway, where a parade of tiny handprints on the wall, growing bigger through the years, marked the passing of their childhoods. They knelt and tucked themselves into balls, covering their heads with interlaced fingers, just as their teachers had taught them during tornado drills. The roar turned deafening, so large and loud they could feel it rumbling inside their chests. Their ears popped with the sudden drop in pressure as the walls of their home began to shudder. And then, in a moment most meteorologists will never experience, Johnny’s house came apart around him.

  Four miles away on the two-lane highway, Patti pounded the steering wheel, stuck behind a slow-moving pickup truck. Rain and hail were sheeting down, and wind gusts were shaking her car, but this pickup was creeping down the two-lane road as if the world was not about to end. She wanted to pass, but through the curtains of rain she could see the silhouettes of falling trees, huge and ancient pecan trunks crashing across the road. The truck went around them, and she followed its blurry taillights through the sluicing rain. And then the truck stopped dead in the road, blocked by live power lines and mountains of debris.

  Patti stopped the car, flung open the door, and ran to the driver’s window. An old man looked at her mutely. Her auburn hair snapped like a flag and her green eyes squinted into the wind as she heard her own voice, as if in a movie, rising in pitch with panic.