But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To tell you why seventy people showed up on a Saturday in July to put a roof back over our heads, I have to tell you about the Thursday it got taken off.

And I have to tell you about Vernon.

Chapter Two: The Thursday

The twister came on a Thursday in April. The eighteenth. A little after five in the afternoon.

We’d been watching the sky since lunch. It had that color it gets in spring. Green underneath, like a bruise. The air was warm and heavy and smelled like rain and wet dirt. The radio had been saying “conditions favorable” since noon.

Dwayne was out in the barn with the calves. We’d had fourteen that spring. Angus crosses, most of them less than three weeks old. He was bedding them down with fresh straw, because the weather was turning.

I was in the kitchen. I had a meatloaf in the oven.

The siren in Cedar Bluff went off at 5:06. You can hear it from our place on a still day, four miles away, faint and wavering.

I went to the back door. I looked west.

It was coming across the Ostrander quarter. A gray rope hanging down out of the clouds, swinging back and forth like a snake trying to make up its mind. It was maybe two miles off. Then it wasn’t. Then it was a mile and a half and getting wider, and the sound was coming with it.

People say it sounds like a train. That’s not right. It sounds like everything at once. Like the whole sky is tearing.

“Dwayne!” I screamed. “Dwayne!”

He came out of the barn at a dead run. Caleb was right behind him. Our son was ten that spring, and he went everywhere his dad did. I didn’t even know he was out there.

We made it to the basement. Down the outside steps, through the old cellar door, into the corner under the stairs where we keep the lantern and the jugs of water and the weather radio. Dwayne pulled Caleb and me down and put his body over both of us.

Then the house shook.

It shook like a dog shaking water off. The windows upstairs blew in. I heard glass. I heard something huge hit the side of the house and keep going. My ears popped so hard I thought my head would split.

And then it was gone.

The whole thing took maybe forty seconds.

When we came up, the house was standing.

Most of the windows were gone. The porch roof was in the front yard. A tree limb the size of a car was lying across the hood of my Buick. Shingles everywhere, like somebody dumped a box of playing cards over the farm.

But the house was standing.

Then Dwayne turned around. And he made a sound I’ll never forget.

The barn was gone.

Not damaged. Not leaning. Gone. Folded down like a hand closing. The whole big red gambrel roof had come down on top of itself, and the walls had gone out sideways under it, and now it was just a pile. A heap of red tin and broken beams and hay and mud, taller than me.

The haymow. The calf pens. The workbench. Dwayne’s grandfather’s tools on the pegboard. The 1952 Farmall Super C that Dwayne was restoring in the corner, three winters’ worth of work.

All of it under the roof in the mud.

And the calves.

Dwayne ran to the pile. He started pulling at the tin with his bare hands. It was jagged. It cut his palms open. He didn’t stop.

“Dwayne!” I grabbed his arm. “Dwayne, stop. You can’t. It’s not safe.”

“They’re in there, Lorrie. They’re in there.”

He pulled loose and went back at it. I stood there holding Caleb’s hand. Caleb was crying. I don’t think I was. I don’t think I could.