All Over but the Shoutin' (35 page)

31
Coming home

Y
ou hear them more than you see them. People always say they sound like freight trains rumbling across the sky, and maybe that is it, exactly. We hunkered down in hallways or storm shelters three or four times a year, when I was a boy, waiting for the tornadoes to go away. Momma prayed. I saw only one, my whole life, a fat gray snake writhing in the sky over the Crystal Springs community, not far from home. I tried not to be afraid, but I was.

I lost my fear of them over time. In my adult life, the bad winds were just one more story, written about strangers. The names were strange names, the dead were benignly alien to me. I wish it had stayed that way.

It was Palm Sunday, 1994, in the
New York Times
newsroom. The Associated Press moved a story that a tornado had destroyed a church in northeastern Alabama, toppling a wall onto its congregation, killing twenty people, including six children. The dateline read “Piedmont,” the town where I was born. The editors on the national desk asked me if I would be the rewrite man on the information coming in. First, I called my momma to make sure she and my kinfolks were fine. They were. Then, I wrote about death in my backyard. I knew the names, I knew the place, I knew the color of the ground and the smell of the grass and the height of the trees.

It was not a good story, just another story about dying in the paper of record. It didn’t mention the small patent-leather children’s shoes scattered in the ruin, brand-new Easter shoes, bought especially for church, that church, for that day. For some reason I thought not about the rubble and the dying but about mommas leading toddlers through the Dollar Store or the Wal-Mart, searching for the perfect shoes.

I wanted to do more than give a body count punctuated by a few quotes. It deserved more than that.

The next day I flew to Atlanta, rented a car, and went home to the little community that straddled the Calhoun-Cherokee county line. It was a brilliant, beautiful day, and if you didn’t see the tin from old roofs wrapped like foil in the branches of trees, if you didn’t notice blank spaces on the spring grass where houses were supposed to be, you would have thought everything was just fine. As I drove, too fast, toward the church, a man in a pickup waved at me, and I forgot to wave back. The city does change you.

People who believe I was just speeding to another compelling story are dead wrong. Any reporter who has had to write about his or her own people—like the reporters who covered the bombing in Oklahoma City—will tell you that they do so with great reluctance, but knowing they might do the story better than a stranger.

I found instead of a church a pile of sticks and crushed red brick, with a scrawny cross made from scrap stuck up in its center. People pulled their cars and pickups over to the side of the road and walked up, to look at it. I remember that men took their hats off.

I remember there were still some buttercups out, and that the rain had turned the red clay to slick mud. It was why no one I ever knew had white carpet. That mud, it was harder to get out than bloodstains.

I looked at it for a while, then did my job. I talked to the survivors. I jotted names I didn’t have to ask to spell and ages I didn’t really need. I had played Softball against their nephews, gone to school with their sons and daughters, and, probably, waved at every one of them at one time or another as my car met their car on a strip of blacktop.

I found them troubled by more than grief. You do not die in church in northeastern Alabama. You do not die under the eye of God, under His hand, in His house. You cannot. Later, when I asked Momma what people were saying, how they made of sense of it, she just sat there, with not much to say. Others I asked wouldn’t look me in the face. I guess what I sensed was not anger, but doubt.

As I stood just outside the crime scene tape—a crime of nature, I guess—that ringed the pitiful pile of rubble, I tried, like I always do, to re-create the thing in my mind, to see it. The survivors had filled my head with it.

The destruction of the little country church and the deaths, including the pastor’s four-year-old daughter, had taken just a second, maybe two. The children had been putting on a play, and in the middle of praising His name, six of the little ones and fourteen grownups were crushed to death. Most of them died instantly. There had been screams, of pain and fear, and some merely shifted the direction of their prayers, like a car changing gears on a hill. There had been almost no warning—just those uneasy glances as the winds pounded the walls—but where better to be in a storm, than here.

They are country people, so instead of lying helpless they tried to help each other. The wounded were carried off on stretchers fashioned from the splintered pews. In a makeshift morgue in the National Guard Armory in Piedmont, volunteers wiped the faces of the dead children before zipping up the body bags. The bags were too long, and had to be rolled up from the bottom. Outside, grown, tough men sobbed into the arms of other men, who held them like babies.

The funerals lasted all week in the surrounding towns, and obituaries filled an entire page in the local newspaper. No one died. People merely said that God took them. He took Miz Ruth Peek, sixty-four, and Mr. Cicero Peek, seventy-two. He took Derek Watson, who died with his wife, Glenda Kay, and their daughter, Jessica. Everyone knew Derek; he worked at the Super Valu. He took four-year-old Hannah Clem, the Pastor’s daughter, and Earl Abbott, whose wife played the organ. Earl’s brother was the one, Rudy, who coached baseball and told me that people like me and him couldn’t fail.

I learned from my momma and kin that two other churches were destroyed during services, but those congregations somehow survived. The winds had snapped two-hundred-year-old trees and ruined houses and lives in five states that day, but Goshen was the centerpiece of the agony. The same winds had ravaged Spring Garden, Rock Run, Possum Trot, Bennefield’s Gap, Knighten’s Crossroad and Webster’s Chapel. At Mount Gilead Church, about ten miles from Goshen, the wind had pulled tombstones from the earth and smashed them to pieces.

I knew that over two counties there would be pickle jars on the counters of stores, filled with quarters and wadded-up dollar bills, for the victims’ families. The funerals would be a hardship for many of them, the children of farmers, mill workers, seamstresses, carpenters and steel-workers, some who had moved on to other work, some who stood in the places where their fathers and mothers had stood at sewing plants and cotton mills. The mill, I knew, had just had a new round of layoffs.

I went to the funeral home one night myself, half as a reporter, half as a man whose obligation it was to be there. The line in the door was fifty yards long, and as I walked by people would throw up an arm and say, “Hey, boy. Where you been?” I shook a dozen hands, and hugged a man whose name I could not really remember. Maybe he had gotten fat, or I had grown stupid.

Later, in the dark in the parking lot, I jotted down what they said, what they felt. The people said the same thing. How awful, how sad, and how hard to understand.

“We are trained from birth not to question God,” one young woman, Robyn Tucker King, told me. I met her outside the funeral home, where the cars half filled the parking lot of the nearby football field. “But why?” she said. “Why a church? Why those little children? Why? Why? Why?”

“It was church,” said Jerri Kernes, delivering flowers to the funeral home. “It isn’t supposed to happen in church.”

I ran into Sam Goss on my way to the car. Everyone knows Sam, too. He runs the filling station, and believes in heaven the same way he believes that walking in the Coosa River will get him wet. He smoked a cigarette, cried some, and talked about Glory.

“It’s hard not to question God in this,” he said. “But they say there ain’t no tears in heaven. We’re the ones left to hurt. You see, God took them because he knew they were ready to go. He’s just giving all the rest of us a second chance.” I don’t know, for sure, if anyone in that little town of five thousand or so ever shook their fist at God. I don’t know for sure how many felt their faith slip away from them, in the dark nights after that awful thing. But I doubt if it is many. Life can be hard here without some faith. I remember what Vera Stewart, Piedmont’s seventy-year-old mayor, told me when I called her about the tragedy. Piedmont, she reminded me, has two doctors’ offices, and twenty churches. “As long as we have our faith, we are as strong as our faith,” Mrs. Stewart said. “Because no matter how dark it is, if I have faith, I have a song in the night.”

The minister of the Goshen church, the Reverend Kelly Clem, took a few minutes to talk to me beside the ruins of her church. I remember feeling a great surprise that the minister of a little country church in my part of the world was a woman. I hadn’t known we had gotten so progressive. When I saw her, her face was covered with bruises from the falling bricks, and her eyes had that weary look that would have been hopelessness, if something inside—or from On High—had not been propping her up. She had spent all her time since the disaster ministering to the grieving parishioners, to the heartsick.

You hate this part, as a reporter, you hate to look into the eyes of a woman who has seen her child taken away forever. But maybe even worse, I felt like I was insulting her, her beliefs, to ask for an explanation of this disaster in a sacred, holy place.

She just smiled at me, a little wearily. “This might shake people’s faith for a long time,” said Mrs. Clem. “I think that is normal. But having your faith shaken is not the same as losing it.” She explained that God did not send the storm that killed their daughter. She explained to me the distinction between God’s laws and the laws of nature, something theologians have debated for years. “My God is a God of hope,” said her husband, Dale Clem, also a minister. “It is never His will for anyone to die.”

I had been taught as a child that He controlled everything, even the wind. At the funeral for the Clems’ daughter, the presiding minister told the congregation that it was okay to be confused. “People have asked, why did it happen in a church,” said the Reverend Bobby Green. “There is no reason. Our faith is not determined by reason. Our faith is under-girded by belief, when there is no reason.”

In the Bible, Palm Sunday is a day of destruction, not hope, he said. Hope comes later, on Easter Sunday. I stood with the mourners and said the Lord’s Prayer, the only one I know all the way through.

I
t was my first time home as the big shot newspaper reporter, the
New York Times
guy, but few people there knew or cared. They had lost track of me, a few papers ago. They asked me how I liked Birmingham, and if I was still married. When I told them I was a
New York Times
reporter now, they looked at me funny. I am sure that a few of them thought I was lying, or crazy. I wrote my story at the
Gadsden Times
, just a short drive away. The
New York Times
owned it now, like me, and the nice people there let me write my story there.

The
Gadsden Times
had just gotten in a new chair, one of those very fancy ergonomically correct jobs with more adjustments than a barber’s chair. They insisted that I take it, since I was visitin.’ It was a fine chair.

I wrote the story over two days. It was important to me that it be good, I guess because I wanted people there to think well of me, but also because it was my responsibility. I was one of them. Nothing that had ever happened, over all the years I had been away, had changed that. I began it this way:

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven. This is a place where the song “Jesus Loves Me” has rocked generations to sleep, and heaven is not a concept, but a destination. Yet in this place where many things, even storms, are viewed as God’s will, people strong in their faith and their children have died in, of all places, a church. The destruction of this little country church and the deaths—including the pastor’s vivacious 4-year-old daughter—have shaken the faith of many people who live in this deeply religious corner of Alabama, about 80 miles northeast of Birmingham. It is not that it has turned them against God, only that it has hurt them in a place usually safe from hurt, like a bruise on the soul.

I
flew back to Manhattan on Saturday, and met some reporter friends for a late dinner at a Cuban joint on Broadway, uptown. As we ate, talking about worthless stuff that reporters are expert at, I noticed a young man—he had to be a student—eating alone at a counter and reading an early copy of the Sunday
Times.

The story was there, on the front page, with a picture of that raggedy cross, and a headline that said something about an anchor of faith holding. I asked him if I could see it, and he said something to the effect of, “Get your own.” So I read over his shoulder, to the jump.

“I wrote that,” I said.

He didn’t bother to turn around.

But the fact is that I didn’t give a damn what he thought of it. Over the next few weeks, I would learn that editors back home reran the story in the Alabama papers. For weeks, months, people wrote me letters, letters from strangers, letters from home. It wasn’t that I had gotten it right—God knows I mess up a lot—but that I had gotten it true.

I
was back there, less than a year later, in the false spring we always get during February. The congregation stood not in a church but, as I wrote, in the promise of one. They sang “Amazing Grace” in a green field specked with red anthills, and I noticed it was hard to tell when people were praying and when they were just checking their feet. I saw some grown men cry. I saw people I knew, and people who were alone who should not have been. I saw gaps in families. They had come to this old cornfield just a mile or so from the site of the old church to start over, and consecrate the ground. One by one, starting with the children, they poured cups of red dirt from the old site and mixed it into the clay of the new one.