Acts of God (2 page)

“He told me to put the ice cream in the freezer.” Little Buddy Scott drew near and joined the conversation. Jessica McCamey had been his Sunday School teacher and his ideal woman from the time he was seven until he was grown. He put his hand on her arm and looked deep into her eyes. “He was not in pain, Jessica, and your Momma was already dead. There are a lot worse ways to go when you are as old as they were. This could have been a blessing in disguise.”

Jessica moved in nearer to him. She had always thought Little Buddy was a good-looking man. From the time he was a football hero until he started being a wealthy man she had had her eye on him. Well, I'm sixty years old, she remembered. He's Jessica Anne's age, not mine.

“Thank you for coming to help them,” she told him, letting him keep hold of her arm. “I have to accept this, I know, but it's taking time, Little Buddy. I was at the beauty parlor getting a manicure when they called me. Can you imagine what that was like?”

“I was climbing onto a tractor,” he agreed. “And it was my swimming pool, my wall of concrete that was hardly dry.”

“I was in my office,” Walker said. “Anything can happen at any time.”

“Let's pray,” David offered. “Let's hold hands and say a prayer of thanksgiving for their lives. We're a family. Let's remember that we are one.”

“Invite the sitter to the funeral,” Jessica put in, to show off for Little Buddy what a nice lady she was. “Let's not forget her pain and guilty conscience.”

While they were arguing and mourning and chattering and all the things human beings do with their wonderful voices and memories, especially in times of death, which is the worst thing they have to dread and contend and struggle with, the doors of the funeral home opened and the oldest son came in with his retinue. William Tucker had grown up to become a graduate of West Point and a four-star general and lived in Washington, D.C., and only came home for weddings and funerals. He came in wearing his uniform with his wife of forty years by his side and two of his sons and one of his daughters and her daughters. They were immediately surrounded by his brothers and sisters and taken into the adjoining room to view the bodies of his parents.

“A sad but brilliant death,” he pronounced. “I didn't want Daddy to be an old man but this was more than I expected. What can I do to help?” he asked.

“Help us decide about pallbearers,” his brother Daniel said. “There are so many children and they will all want to be one.”

AT THE SITTER'S
house the sitter was crying her heart out to her next-door neighbor. “It's all my fault,” she wailed. “I was derelict. I didn't do my duty.”

“They were old fools,” the neighbor said. “Their children should have taken away the car. No one can blame you. You called them. You said you would be late.”

“Late,” the sitter wailed. “Oh, I was far too late.”

“Well, they called and asked you to attend the funeral,” the sitter's other neighbor put in. “I think you better start finding something to wear. I have a black dress if you don't have one.”

“I can't go,” the sitter said. “How can I show my face.”

“They were old fools,” the next-door neighbor said again. “Everyone knows that's true.”

“I guess I will go.” The sitter stood up. She brushed off her lap and pulled her shoulders back. She had just remembered a new brown cotton suit she had bought on sale at Penney's a week before. It might be sort of hot but it would look real nice at a funeral. She had to show her face. She couldn't look like she felt guilty and, besides, the McCameys had been nice. Except for making her turn down the television stories they had not done one single thing to make her hate them, which was more than she could say for most of the old people she had to watch.

“Good girl,” her neighbor agreed. “Go wash your face and I'll make you a cup of coffee.”

THE FUNERAL WAS
very sad but very beautiful. Eight grandsons carried Amelie's coffin and five sons and a cousin carried William's coffin and they used the old service out of the old prayerbook and Lily Hight sang “Ave Maria” and the church was full and the day was bright and they carried the coffins out to the old cemetery on Walkerrest and laid the old people in the ground, and, except for Olivia, who kept taking tranquilizers for three weeks, grabbing her chance, they all went back to their regular lives. “To be alive becomes the fundamental luck each ordinary, compromising day manages to bury” was a saying Will had written on a piece of paper and stuck up on his dresser. After the funeral his youngest son, Walker, took it down and took it home and decided to remember what it said. He put the handwritten piece of paper up on his dresser in his bedroom and then he decided to make a list of all the people he was related to who were still alive as of September 11, 2005.

The list expanded and expanded and finally his wife, who had studied art at the University of Virginia, took all the names and dates he had collected and made them into a family tree. It was as large as a poster when they were finished with it and they had copies made and sent them as Christmas cards to many of the people whose names were part of the tree, of the branches and smaller branches, and everyone who saw it hanging on people's walls were reminded of life and its burgeoning and fruitfulness and joy and forgot for a while about death and sickness and old age.

After the youngest son and his wife made the large, beautiful, poster-size tree, they began to look around them at other families, at groups of people they didn't know, at large Mexican families at grocery stores and in malls, with a deeper understanding of what is going on in the world and how priceless and marvelous life is and to be cherished and protected in all its forms.

There is much we know that we forget, Walker kept reminding himself, so much goodness we must strive to remember.

T
he tornado struck in the middle of the night. It swept across an eight-block stretch of the small town of Adkins, Arkansas, and leveled dozens of houses.

At ten the next morning four teenagers from the Fayetteville, Arkansas, First Methodist Church Youth Group left Fayetteville headed south and east to Adkins to see if they could help. Their names were Jason Hall, Marie James, Hardin James, and Tommie Anne Farley. At the last minute they were joined by John Tucker Farley, whose Jeep Cherokee was the automobile they were driving.

They stopped at the big Walmart near the mall and picked up as much bottled water, warm clothes, and food as they could pack into the vehicle, then they started driving. They were dressed in long pants and were wearing hats and carrying work gloves. John Tucker and Jason had on hunting boots. The rest were wearing tennis and basketball shoes.

JOHN TUCKER AND
Tommie Anne Farley's father was a weatherman on Channel Five and he had called several times to tell them it might be raining in Adkins on and off all day. “Spitting rain,” he predicted. “So be prepared and take extra clothes. I went on one of these operations after a tornado in Oklahoma. The worst part is getting wet and cold. Let me talk to your mother.”

“We have to go, Dad,” John Tucker said. “Call us on the way if you find out anything new. Call Mom on the land phone. We need to leave.”

John Tucker and Tommie Anne had excessively attentive parents. Both John Tucker and Tommie Anne had spent a lot of time developing skills for getting their parents out of their rooms or off of telephones. Later, in 2010, when John Tucker was involved in running a senatorial campaign for a physician in Springdale, he would be invaluable for his ability to get people off the telephone at campaign headquarters.

But I am getting ahead of this story, which is about a miracle that occurred on the ninth of April, 2008, in the small town of Adkins, Arkansas.

IT WAS RAINING
when they left Fayetteville, making it difficult to load the supplies into the Jeep at Walmart, but the Walmart checkers double-bagged everything and the greeters helped with the packing. They let John Tucker back the Jeep up to the front door where a twenty-two-year-old greeter named Zach Wells was just starting his shift. “I wish I could go with you guys,” he told them. “I heard about the tornado on the radio driving to work. There are fourteen dead people already. It took out two churches, a school, and most of the downtown. It's the worst tornado in fifty years. The president of the United States is coming tomorrow. The governor is on his way.”

“Well, we'll be there, too,” Marie James said. She was handing double-wrapped packages to Zach and admiring the way he picked up the heaviest ones and fit them into the back of the Jeep.

“I hope it stops raining down there for you,” Zach said. “It said on the radio it's still raining on the rescue effort.”

“We know,” Marie said. “Our driver's dad is the weatherman on Channel Five.”

“Get in,” John Tucker said. “Let's get going. It's going to be crowded with all this stuff. Sit wherever you can find a seat belt.”

In Adkins the Red Cross had trailers in place to register people coming to help. The Fayetteville Five, as they had decided to call themselves, were assigned to a squad that was searching wrecked neighborhoods for survivors or lost pets.

They spent the day pulling apart wrecked houses and moving debris. Everything they touched was soaking wet. All the boards had black nails showing through the wet wood. The predicted spitting rain came and went but none of them noticed it. There was too much destruction for rain to seem an issue. Bodies were being taken out on stretchers, lost dogs and cats were wandering around and being captured by an animal rescue team from Hope, Arkansas, and another from Morrilton. Houses had been completely flattened and others torn apart with untouched upstairs rooms leaning dangerously down toward the search parties.

At three in the afternoon they ate lunch at Red Cross headquarters, then started back to work. Marie and Hardin James were in a group with two teenage boys and a forty-three-year-old retired Marine sergeant who had been injured in the Gulf War. The sergeant had lost three fingers from his right hand and wore a strapped-on device that looked like something from a futuristic movie. He pulled apart wrecked houses like a madman. His name was Dooley Williams and he led his group with a fierceness and concentration that was amazing to watch.

At six o'clock in the evening they stopped at what had been the corner of a residential block. It was beginning to get too dark to see nails and glass on the ground. Thirty minutes before, they had found the bodies of two women and a twelve-year-old-boy in a house behind them. The firemen working the area had come in and cleared the area and removed the bodies.

“They were in the bathroom,” Hardin said several times. “They were in the bathtub and they still got killed.”

“You kids want to go back to the rest trailer?” the sergeant asked. “It's getting too dark to see.” The sergeant was worried about Marie. She looked tired and she had started crying when the firemen came and removed the bodies.

The sergeant took a bottle of Gatorade out of his pocket and held it out to her. “Drink this,” he said. “You don't want to get dehydrated.”

Marie drank part of it and handed the rest to her brother.

“We have flashlights and there's still light in the sky,” Hardin said. “Let's go through that bad block one more time.”

“There was a baby stroller in that house with the bodies,” Marie said. “There should be a baby, but there isn't a baby. Why would they have a baby stroller in the living room unless they had a baby? I'm a babysitter. No one keeps a baby stroller unless they have a baby. They take up too much room.”

“There's no baby here,” the sergeant said.

“There's no furniture either,” Marie insisted. “Let's look one more time.”

“Okay, one more hour, but let's collect the other kids from Fayetteville.” He called the group behind them on his cell phone and the leader sent John Tucker, Jason Hall, and Tommie Anne Farley to join the sergeant's group.

“Marie and Hardin want to look one more hour. We're going to spread out and search as long as we can see. Does everyone have flashlights?” Everyone had them. John Tucker had two.

The sergeant called Red Cross headquarters and told them they were staying out another hour. “Volunteers numbers 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and me, Sergeant Dooley Williams. Ten-four.”

“Where do we start?” Hardin asked.

“At the first house on the block and work our way around the four sides. We didn't look all the way into the middle of the cul-de-sac because we found the bodies. Zigzag into the center when you can. Spread out.”

Hardin had been walking alone through the debris for twenty minutes when he saw the piece of cloth. It looked like a colored square. He drew nearer and saw that it was a cloth doll in the shape of a giraffe. He picked it up. It was soaking wet like everything in the debris. He wrung it out, then stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. He speeded up, stepping through the broken boards and nails and bricks and the long branches of a fallen oak tree. He pushed apart the branches and then he began to scream. “Over here, Marie, Sergeant Williams, a baby, it's a baby.”

He reached down into the branches, which had fallen on a mattress, and picked up a big, fat baby boy dressed only in a diaper and a torn white shirt.

He picked up the child and held it against his denim jacket. He held it as close as he dared. Its eyes were open. It was breathing. A living, breathing baby boy in a soaking wet diaper. He kept holding it against his shoulder, only once moving it enough so he could be sure it was still breathing. Then Marie was there and Sergeant Williams right behind her. The others were moving toward them, coming from four directions.

The sergeant called the Red Cross trailer. While they waited for help they stood in a circle with their bodies around the child, barely able to speak in the wonder of their find.

“He isn't crying,” Marie said. “He should be crying.”

“He's in shock,” the sergeant said. “He'll be okay. He's breathing. He'll be okay.”

Marie pulled off her windbreaker and her blue Izod shirt and put the shirt on the baby and pulled off the soaking wet diaper and tied her windbreaker around the baby's legs.

John Tucker took off his football jersey and put it on Marie and they all moved closer to keep the baby warm.

“The wind blew him here,” Tommie Anne said. “He flew here on the wind.”

“Why isn't he hurt?” Marie said twice. “How did he land?”

“They're flexible,” Sergeant Dooley Williams said. “Babies are real flexible from being curled up in the womb while their bones are growing.” Marie had the baby now cuddled up in her arms in her blue Izod shirt and the windbreaker, cuddled up against John Tucker's Fayetteville High School football jersey. He was a running back. Hardin was a kicker. He kicked the field goals and he was very good at kicking them. He didn't know why he could kick them. He just could and he practiced hours a week to make sure he didn't lose the gift.

They all stood there in the brilliantly clean, rain-cooled and rain-scrubbed air, close around the baby, barely daring to talk about what was happening.

The baby began to cry. Sergeant Williams called the Red Cross again. “Get someone over here,” he yelled into the phone. “We have a baby here. A living baby. Corner of Chestnut and something. You'll see us. You can see us.”

The baby began to cry louder. Sergeant Williams pulled a cookie out of his pocket and broke off a piece and handed it to Marie to give the baby. “He's big enough to eat,” he said. “I've got kids. I know about such things.”

Police cars were arriving from three directions with their sirens running. Men were running toward them. A very large woman in a police uniform got there first and took the baby from Marie.

The baby's name was Rafael and his father was alive. His father had been at work on a night shift at a chicken-plucking plant in Dardanelle. The dead people in the house were the baby's mother and grandmother and older brother.

Rafael's father got to the Red Cross trailer twenty minutes after Marie and John Tucker and Jason and Hardin and Tommie Anne got there. He picked up his son and sat cuddling him in his arms, sitting on the edge of a straight chair.

“Theese is your shirt?” he asked Marie.

“It's his now,” she answered. “I'm okay.”

AT NINE THAT
night the Fayetteville Five started driving back to Fayetteville. For a long time no one really talked. Then Marie began.

“Last spring when I met my biological father I told my mom, Annie, I thought nothing important would ever really happen to me again. She told me I was wrong.”

“The stock market crashed,” Jason said.

“That's nothing compared to this. This could be the most important thing that ever happens to any of us as long as we live.”

“No, it's not,” Hardin said. “Lots more is going to happen. I haven't even gotten my driver's license yet. All I have is a learner's permit.”

“I almost didn't come with you,” John Tucker said. “I only came so Tommie Anne wouldn't be driving my car.”

THEY STOPPED AT
a filling station in Carville and then drove across the street and got hamburgers and french fries at McDonald's. Marie went into the restroom and put on a T-shirt she had bought at the filling station. It was dark green and had some sort of corny painting on it but she wanted a clean shirt and it was the only one in a small.

“Wear it inside out,” Tommie Anne suggested.

“And have this ugly painting next to my skin. No way.”

Tommie Anne leaned in close and looked at the painting more closely. “What's it of, anyway?” she asked. “You can't even tell.”

“It's some kind of monster truck from a video game. See, it says
MONSTER MADNESS
. Disgusting.”

“How much did it cost?”

“Five ninety-five. It doesn't matter. We found a baby boy alive in the ruins of a tornado. I'd wear this shirt to school to get to be there again when Hardin started yelling and we went there and saw it. I'm going to start liking Hardin a lot more after I saw him holding Rafael. Rafael—I'll remember him always. When he gets bigger we have to go to Adkins and see him and maybe take him to a park to play. I don't want to lose this night forever.”

“We will. We'll go see him every year and see how he is doing.”

“He lost his mother and his grandmother.” Marie looked down. She didn't want to cry again. It embarrassed her to keep crying about things.

“And his big brother.”

“That's another reason I'm going to start liking Hardin. I'm going to tell him I like him and not get mad if he wants to watch his stupid football games on television when I want to watch
Say Yes to the Dress
.”

“
Say Yes to the Dress
is so good. I could watch it all day.”

“Let's get out of this bathroom. We have to get on back home before our parents freak out. Dad's called four times.”

The next morning the story was on the front page of the
Arkansas Gazette
along with a photograph of the baby's father holding the baby. In the photograph the baby was still wearing Marie's baby blue Izod that she liked so much she washed it by hand in cold water so it wouldn't fade. There was a quotation in the story about her putting it on the baby. Later that week she received a package from the manager of Dillard's Department Store with three new Izod shirts in her size. One baby blue, one yellow, and one white.

“How did they find out my size” was all she could think of to say when she told her friends about it.