Suburban Renewal (29 page)

Gram's old storm cellar was at the edge of the property, next to the alley, only about thirty yards from the back door. That afternoon it seemed like miles. By the time we got there an eerie darkness had settled around us, and the wind was full of trash and papers. It was then we heard it—a roaring, an ominous and distinct roaring.

Nate set Jin on her feet beside the cellar door and tugged at it to get it open. We hurried down the steep narrow stairway into the musty blackness. Makayla was crying. I felt like crying, too. The place was cold and dark and I was scared. When Nate pulled the door shut, it was as if we were in a tomb.

“There's a lantern in here someplace,” Nate said, fumbling around among the antique canning jars, odd pieces of metal pipe and God-only-knows-what on the shelving behind him.

“There won't be any kerosene in it,” I warned him.

Jin and I sat down on the long, hard bench that ran the length of the wall. When this had been Gram's cellar there was always oil in the lantern, fresh water in the jug and clean quilts on the bench.

Nate managed to find a candle and a match. I watched as he lit it, his hands shaking.

Makayla's crying abruptly stopped as Jin began to nurse her.

The quiet inside the closed space made the roar outside sound more frightening.

The light helped a little, though the flame flickered as if the wind was whipped up inside as well. The door rattled slightly and Nate tied the rope to the back of the door, pulled the length of it across the room and looped it twice around the support pillar before sitting in the chair nearby to hold it taut. The door didn't rattle. But my knees did.

It was over in minutes. The roaring moved on. Beside me I stroked Makayla's head.

Nate undid the rope, climbed the stairs and opened the door. It was as if Jin and I were collectively holding our breath.

“Come on out,” Nate said. “It's fine. It missed us. The house is okay. No damage, really.”

He took Jin's hand. I followed after them. Everything was standing, although the yard was strewn with lumber and trash and shingles.

“What a mess!” I said. And then I laughed. I was so relieved.

That's when the sirens began.

“Is that the all clear?” Jin asked. Even the tone of her question was skeptical.

Then another siren sounded.

“It's fire trucks,” Nate said.

“Or ambulances.”

Nate was looking along the horizon.

“Oh, God,” he said. “I think it's downtown.”

If he said anything else I don't remember. I began to run. I ran up the alley to West Hickory. I turned and continued running to town. My thoughts were muddled, scared. I had to get to Sam. Sam was downtown and I had to get to Sam. I was near the end of West Hickory when I got lost. I don't mean I really got lost. It was as if I suddenly couldn't recognize where I was.
A big tree blocked the street and I had to actually walk on somebody's porch to get around it. I didn't recognize the house. It looked like a dilapidated shack. There were no shacks in this part of Lumkee. I recognized the park only by the cement benches along the street. It seemed to be all broken limbs and downed trees and power lines.

I hastily picked my way around that disaster to find myself on Main Street. Or what had once been Main Street. There were no buildings, there was nothing. Yet there was everything. Mountains of bricks, cars standing on end and huge chunks of things I didn't recognize.

Where was Sam?

I'd lived my whole life in this town. I couldn't tell where my father's drugstore had been. I couldn't tell where my husband's business might be. I couldn't tell where the sides of the street once were.

There was no way to run through the piles of debris. I began climbing over it, crawling through it. I was not alone. There were people everywhere, dirty, frightened-looking people, sifting through the mess, calling out names.

I began calling, too.

“Sam! Sam! Where are you? Damn it, Sam! Where are you?”

“Corrie!”

I heard my name and rose to my feet, looking all around. I saw him standing in a pile of rubble, a hundred yards away in a direction opposite to the one I pursued.

“Corrie! Over here.” He waved at me.

I was crying then, crying as I made my way to him as quickly as I could. He was covered with dust and
sweat and blood. I wanted to throw myself in his arms. But there wasn't time for that.

“Mr. Chai is in here,” he said. “Help us dig him out.”

It was then I noticed—Cho Kyon was on her knees, tears streaming down her face as she dug through the bricks of her grocery store.

1999

I
t was a wonder that there weren't more people killed. Seventy-six tornadoes in Oklahoma that Monday. Forty-three people lost their lives. Two of those in downtown Lumkee. Harjo Peeples, who had been instrumental in keeping the name of our town, was driving home from the post office. His old car was tossed into the bank like a toy. And Brian Gilbert, the new pharmacist Hye Won had hired to manage Maynard Drug had been crushed when the walls of the old building collapsed upon him.

There were serious injuries as well. Broken arms, broken legs, electrical burns and internal damage. Some of it permanent and severe.

Mr. Chai's back was broken. He would never walk again. Loretta, one of my most dependable employees, had her left eye put out by flying glass.

And Cherry Dale Pepper, taking a day off work to celebrate her forty-fifth birthday, was in her double-wide mobile home when it was picked up from its foundation and rolled end on end for a city block. She was alive but in a coma.

There were tragedies in the aftermath as well. One young teenager was electrocuted by stumbling across a
live wire. A telephone repair worker was hurt when he freed a line from the trees only to have it snap back on him and knock him from his perch on the cherry picker.

Corrie's dad was out cleaning up debris in his yard and suffered another stroke.

The damage estimates were over the moon. And because our disaster looked piddling compared to the cities of Moore and Stroud, we didn't get a lot of attention from the news cameras, FEMA or even our own insurance companies.

The path of destruction started just west of the city park, plowed through the main business district and then into the three blocks of houses on the east side. The experts estimated the funnel was less than a mile in length and had touched the ground less than three minutes. But with so much loss.

Building inspectors condemned the few buildings left standing. The entire downtown commercial district was wiped out.

How we got through those first days, first weeks, first months, remains a blur of work and worry. All of us were up at dawn, working until after dark and falling into bed exhausted.

Jin was helping to take care of her father. Corrie was helping with Doc. Nate and I were simultaneously trying to sort through what was left of our building and keeping the business afloat and our employees working. We'd set up the tamale production in our garage. Of course, I couldn't expect the health inspector to sign off on that for public distribution, so we fed the tamales to ourselves, our families and the volunteers downtown. Financially, I wasn't sure how long we could
keep that up. But my staff continued to draw paychecks, so they didn't have to take jobs elsewhere.

The interior of Okie Tamales was a total loss. They found part of our huge steam oven in a cow pasture two miles from town. In many ways, the loss of our financial records was more trouble than the loss of the equipment. All the paper was backed up on computer files, but both were literally “gone with the wind.” I didn't know who I owed or who owed me. And I had no idea how I would pay my quarterly taxes. I was too busy to worry much about it. Life had become a day-by-day operation. Which was good for me. Emotionally I was kind of tapped out. The enormity of what had happened affected the way I thought about things. Or it made me think about them for the first time in a long time. I'd lived through uncertainty in my job and uncertainty in my finances. I'd even begun to let go of any sense of control over my children's lives and futures. But still, there are things that you take for granted will always be there. The little downtown where I'd spent all my life was one of those things.

What I found was that the loss of that made me value more those things that truly matter to me. I felt a surge of love for my kids, my home and especially for Corrie.

We were so busy, we hardly saw each other all day. At night we were both so exhausted, I didn't have the energy to spell
sex,
let alone have it. But I could lie in our bed and hold her in my arms.

“I love you, Corrie,” I told her, probably more often in those frantic, busy months than I had in all the rest of the years of our marriage.

“Me, too,” she responded, and turned her back so that she could spoon up to me in the center of the bed.

It was amazing how just the feel of her body next to
mine could ease all the strain and aches and tension that a long, hard day could make.

As soon as her final exams were over, Lauren returned home. Gilkison came with her. When I saw his Land Rover in the driveway, I groaned aloud.

To my surprise, I found him in the garage helping out with the tamale packing. The man wasn't afraid of work.

The next few days proved that as a certainty. He stayed for a week, and Nate and I put his shoulder to every task that came up. To our complete surprise he never grumbled, complained or shirked. Gilk, as Nate and I began to call him despite his dislike of nicknames, salvaged lumber, hauled out trash by the wheelbarrow load and fed Doc chicken soup at the hospital. Wherever we needed him, he was willing to go.

His relationship with Lauren appeared to be very different from what we'd seen when she'd brought him home to meet us. Then he was the man-in-charge and she was trying every minute to get along and smooth things over. But it was different after the tornado. Lauren was amazingly good at crisis management. She could readily see what needed to be done and come up with a plan for doing it.

We had never seen her like this. I assumed that she'd learned these skills on her mission trips. If we were surprised, poor Gilk was virtually stupefied. But when she said “frog,” the guy hopped. We all hopped. What else could we do? She spoke with authority and her directions made sense. She brought more out of people than they knew they had in them.

Cho Kyon was struggling with the enormity of her husband's care and rehab. Hye Won had come from
her new home in Midwest City and had been designated to help her. It was Lauren who realized that Hye Won was pregnant, and therefore, her mother wouldn't allow her to help. There were no extra hands, so Lauren had Belinda, one of the young women who worked at the tamale factory, trade places with Cho Kyon for a few hours every day. Belinda had started a nurse's aide course once, but dropped out. She was still interested in the medical field and was able to follow the directions of the home health-care staff and the therapist.

Just the few hours that Cho Kyon got away from her house and sat down to do something else seemed to rejuvenate her. And it rekindled Belinda's interest in the medical field.

It was a simple solution. Lauren came up with it, because she looked at a problem as if a solution already existed; it just needed to be puzzled out.

What Gilk thought of this sudden change in his girlfriend, we didn't know. But Nate summed up the situation clearly.

“He's finding out our Lauren is more than just some Christian arm candy.”

I was asked to attend a last-minute citizens' meeting one afternoon. I didn't know where Nate was, so I took Gilk with me. It was held out under the mayor's carport, standing room only. It was a semi-secret gathering. There were so many contractors, developers and urban planners running around town that it was difficult for us to differentiate them from the shysters, swindlers and con men trying to make a buck on our misery. We, the people of Lumkee, needed to figure out what to do next, without their self-serving input or the glare of camera lights.

“What we should do is level the whole area and put it in houses,” Tim Reynolds suggested. “We can rebuild a business district closer to the expressway.”

“I liked Lumkee just the way it was!” Marvin Kredmur complained. “We should build it back like it was.”

“It can't ever be what we remember,” Pat Dawson said. “They just don't make buildings that way anymore.”

“We should take this opportunity to use our insurance money to build better, more modern, efficient buildings.”

“I'm thinking I won't bother to rebuild. The cash is good. I'll make more investing it than putting it back into small-town commercial real estate.”

I glanced at Gilkison after that comment. Fortunately for him, I didn't read a hint of agreement in his glance.

In the end we formed committees to work out the details. Everything from zoning specs to contract bidding had to be managed. The decisions would lie with city council, but they couldn't begin to take care of the tremendous overflow of detail being thrown at them. The mayor decided to divide the different aspects of the tasks into committees. Each committee would report to a member of the city council.

“But how will the whole thing be coordinated?” Tim Reynolds complained. “Who'll put it all together?”

“I'm the mayor,” he answered. “I make the final decisions.”

“That's exactly right, Mr. Mayor,” Reverend Shue interrupted. “For that very reason, you won't be able to shepherd the deal along.”

“I don't get your meaning,” the mayor said.

“As an elected official,” Reverend Shue continued, loud enough for everyone to hear, “you will be called
upon to make final approval of all the infrastructure spending. You'll be making improvements on the city codes and permits. And it will be you who has to ultimately come up with plans that city council can approve. I'm sure you'll do your duty to the best of your ability. But politics will inevitably rear its ugly head. Any ‘no' to your political opponents will be suspect. And any ‘yes' to your political friends will be deemed favoritism. The fate of this town can't rest on the outcome of elections. The final decisions will have to be yours, but we don't want politics to taint the process.”

Everyone was listening closely.

“In a big city, the mayor would hire this job out,” Reverend Shue went on. “We can't really afford to do that. We'll have to take a volunteer.”

There was some murmuring among the crowd.

The Reverend continued, ostensibly talking to the mayor, but in fact speaking to everyone. “I think you should pick someone outside of your sphere of influence. Not anyone who works for the city or a company that might be bidding for work. Maybe one of the businessmen directly affected by the disaster. And let him coordinate the committees.”

“Do you have anyone in mind for this committee coordinator?” he asked the Reverend.

He shook his head.

The mayor briefly scanned the crowd.

“Anybody got any ideas about who we might get to do this?”

People began talking among themselves.

“You,” the mayor called on someone. “You, young man with your hand up, in the back. Do you have something to say?”

“I'd like to suggest you ask my dad, Sam Braydon.”

I whipped my head around. I couldn't see Nate, but I could hear him.

“My dad is honest, dependable, he works well with people and he knows how to get a job done. I trust him. Everybody in this town trusts him.”

I was stunned by Nate's words. Stunned and embarrassed and proud. I had no idea that he held that opinion of me. It touched me as much as anything he'd ever said to me. I glanced over at Gilk beside me. He looked at me as if he'd never seen me before.

Of course, I wasn't picked for the job. Even in small towns, guys who never went to college and sell tamales for a living aren't singled out to be community leaders. But I was asked if I wanted to be on a committee. I requested Architecture and Design. I thought that would be something where my family might be able to help. Corrie understands everything about design. And
architecture
is a three-dollar word for
building:
Nate knows a lot about building, so I figured he could help me with that.

For the next three months I attended committee meetings in a Sunday school room in the basement of the Methodist church. We decided that we weren't going to allow anyone to not rebuild. We formed a downtown consortium. If you wanted your cash you could only sell your business to us, and we were offering only a minimum fair price. We decided that there would be one design. All the buildings would conform to this design, and we accepted bids for the whole Main Street area.

Like me, everyone there had far too much to do to while away their days in book work. I took stacks of proposals, information on city codes and zoning home
with me every night to study. There was so much to be worked out, so many snags to be unsnarled.

One night in the family room with Makayla banging on her musical toy, Jin sleeping in front of the TV and Corrie working at her computer, I was deeply immersed in my work. There was so much that had to be kept together. Every decision had to be documented. I finally got everything together in a big file. Across the top of it I wrote,
City of Lumkee: Suburban Renewal.