What Stands in a Storm (16 page)

Under the house, it was dark and smelled of dust and wood and leaking gas. Beverly Moseley, fifty, was trapped under the floorboards, her right bicep pinned by the crushing weight of the house. She was sitting on the dirt, in the unfinished section of the basement, with her neck bent uncomfortably toward her chest by the unyielding wood of a floor joist.

On the other side of a crumbled support pillar, her arm was still wrapped around the shoulders of her twenty-one-year-old stepson, Jackson Van Horn, who was unnaturally quiet. Beverly's view was blocked by a heap of crumbled brick between them, but she could feel his hair and warm neck.

“Jackson?” she said. “Are you okay? Jackson! Say something to me! Please, Jackson, just say something!”

When the second storm came through, they had been ready. Though the power was out, they had a police scanner handy to listen for news of coming storms. They had crawled under the house and crouched in the four-foot-high crawl space, bracing themselves against four brick pillars that held the house up.

As the jet-engine sound of the storm had blasted their ears, a window had burst, spraying glass across the room. Then the house had lurched violently, shifting back and forth on the pillars.

“Lord Jesus!” Beverly had screamed, wrapping her arm around Jackson. “Keep us safe!”

The house had shifted on its pillars six feet to the right, turning square rooms into parallelograms. Then came a brief silence. Bev could hear the wind, but it sounded different, distant. When it roared again the house shifted in a new direction. With the third lurch, the walls and roof came down and they felt dust and rocks flying under the house, pelting them like mortar.

The floor joists thrust down upon Beverly's head, shoving her neck forward, pressing her chin into her sternum. She felt herself slowly suffocating, the sharp bend in her throat like a kink in a hose.

I am dying
, she thought.
I am breaths away from dying.

Missy, her big mutt, was on her lap, and yelping and digging frantically. When the dog broke free, Beverly was able to shift her body ever so slightly so that she could open her throat and breathe again. She tried to extricate herself, but she felt her arm pinned by a crushing weight.

“Baby!” her husband yelled. “Are you okay?”

“I am, but my arm's stuck,” she said.

Mike Van Horn dug himself out and ran for help. Taylor and her boyfriend freed themselves and stood outside, holding each other and crying.

Mike had run toward downtown, calling for help.

“Help!” he yelled. “Bev's stuck! Help!”

That's when Mike saw his grown nephew running toward him.

Brett Dawkins was only twenty-one, the same age as his cousin trapped under the house. But people who looked at Brett saw the eyes of someone older. He had been the man of the house for as long as he could remember. His mother said he had met his daddy, once, but he could not recall a face. But he did remember the fire trucks that had wailed all through his childhood. Once, when he was three, he cut his hand on a broken bottle, sliced right through his lifeline. When a fireman came to fix up the cut, Brett looked up at him and saw the kind of man he wanted to be. After that, he had spent endless afternoons playing with a toy fire station, pushing the little red ladder truck through the dirt, glancing up whenever he heard a siren, looking for the heroes on the big red truck. When he grew into his first bicycle, his helmet had a little flashing light. He trick-or-treated in bunkers, fireman's pants, almost every Halloween.

When Brett turned fifteen he started coming to the real station with an uncle, who let him go on calls with the men. The boy would help unload axes and medical boxes on the scene, and later, roll up the big, flat hoses when they got back to the station. His strength did
not go unnoticed or untapped. Brett had been an offensive lineman on the football team that went 15–0 for the first time in the history of Cordova High, winning the 3A State Championship that year, blowing everyone out of the water. He still had the build of a football player, and his broad shoulders served him well in his new occupation, lifting hoses at burning buildings.

Now enrolled at the Alabama Fire College, he worked shoulder to shoulder with men who had fought fires for decades. In a way, he had lots of fathers now, but they treated him as an equal. This was his family. His best friend, a young black man affectionately called “Chocolate”—his real name was Mike Simon—was the one he trusted most to follow him into a burning building. Both boys were strong of body and mind, and were known to keep their heads when things got real.

The house had listed to one side and collapsed like a cardboard box. The walls came to pieces as they hit the ground. Somewhere under this mess lay his aunt and cousin, and he quickly had to figure out where. Brett could hear Beverly yelling up through the floor. He followed his aunt's voice to a spot in the floor, revved his chain saw, and cut himself a manhole. As he peeled back the cutout, as if opening a trapdoor, light flooded into the basement, blinding Beverly briefly. He crawled into the darkness with a flashlight.

Crouching, Brett could see Beverly sitting awkwardly in the dirt, legs splayed out in front of her, neck kinked severely, right arm disappearing under a collapsed wall. Beside her, his cousin Jackson was slumped forward and motionless, chin pressed into his chest. The house was resting on Jackson's shoulders, his still body the only thing holding it off Beverly. His eyeglasses had slid to the tip of his nose, and one small drop of blood marked his cheek. His phone lay in his unfurled hand.

“He's gone,” Beverly moaned. “He's gone.”

She could not see him on the other side of the wall. She did not have to. Her arm was still wrapped around his neck, and she had felt him grow cold in her hand.

A couple of blocks away, other members of Cordova Fire & Rescue were frantically searching collapsed houses, the decimated remains of the Piggly Wiggly, and the blown-out storefronts of Commerce Street.

Firefighter Amanda Hodge was running toward the Piggly Wiggly when something on the ground caught her eye. It was a boy, curled up like a fetus. He looked about eight years old, and he was so caked with mud that his white skin looked brown. He blended right in with the brown debris. She must have passed him several times before she even noticed he was there.

Hodge ran and knelt beside the boy, feeling his neck for a pulse. Then she yelled for Dean Harbison, the fire chief and a paramedic, who drove the busted-up rescue truck with the EKG while she started CPR.

The boy's right shoulder was marred with a gaping hole, and from it a black streak marked the length of his body, all the way to his heel.

Lightning strike
, she thought.
Lord.

Hodge heaved over him, compressing his small chest as the chief hooked him up to the monitor. She prayed for a pulse. Maybe there was a chance they could bring him back. The chief did not see a heartbeat.

“Stop, Amanda, stop,” the chief said. “He's gone.”

But she could not stop. The firefighter in her knew, deep in her gut, that the boy could not be saved. But she was also a mother, and that part of her could not quit.

“Get me some water!” she screamed. “Somebody bring me some water!”

A firefighter brought her cup after cup. She was bathing him, washing the mud away. She knew this boy. One of the Doss brothers, Justin and Jonathan, who went to school with Amanda's own sons, Justin and Johnathon, a coincidence of names that would haunt her
for months. She wanted to take care of him. This boy had a mother who needed him to live.

“Amanda, he's gone,” the chief said gently. “Just stop.”

“Dammit. Dean!” she screamed. “You can't stop!”

He understood. Chief Harbison had been a paramedic for eighteen years, and a father for nineteen. He knew as well as anyone that kids were hard to give up on. He let her work on the boy, perhaps longer than he should have. He let her choke on the sobs.

Then he made her look up and look around. There were others.

In the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly lay the little boy's twelve-year-old brother, Justin. His body looked like a wet towel that had been wrung out, as if every bone in him was broken. They had been hiding in the house on the hill with a friend when the tornado obliterated the house, throwing them hundreds of feet.

Now their friend, sixteen-year-old Madison Phillips, was being carried up the hill from the Piggly Wiggly, unconscious, blood oozing through the bandages that wrapped his head. His mother, Annette Singleton, lay dead in a ditch.

Trapped under the house with the body of her stepson, Beverly Moseley watched her nephew climb down with an armful of objects that struck her as so odd for him to be bringing that she actually heard herself laugh.

“What are you going to do with those pizza boxes?” she said.

They were not pizza boxes. They were air bags, and Dawkins placed them beneath points of the house that would hold. He connected them to an air compressor, and with an angry hiss of air, the house began to rise.

Brett pulled out the body of his cousin. He did not cry; the time for that would come later.

Jackson was gone. But in death he had saved a life.

It began to rain again, and there was talk of more storms coming. The rescuers kicked in the door of the vacant Miles Pharmacy on the corner of Commerce Street, where Brett had dropped supplies off, carrying victims there and laying them on the cool tile to keep them out of the rain.

In the town of around five thousand, four people were dead and eighty-six were injured, many of them needing transport to a hospital in Jasper or Birmingham. Chief Harbison called 911 and asked for any available help. Within minutes, several ambulances showed up and Emergency Management Agency staffers from other counties came to help Cordova. The chief paused to think how lucky they had been, to have the first tornado hit when and where it did. Had that first storm not torn through Commerce Street, the downtown would have been brimming with people at 5:00 p.m.—dozens of people would have been at the restaurant, maybe sixty at the medical clinic, dozens more at the Piggly Wiggly, the bank, and the shops.