“here in Chambersburg, the storm ripped the steeple off the church.”
First Published 2015 in Lalitamba
They say on the news there were tornados as far north as Buffalo and Toronto, but what I know is, here in Chambersburg, PA, the storm ripped the steeple off the church. We were huddled in the basement in the dark, children crying, deacons praying, and to me it all just sounded like wind.
The state troopers, afterwards, found Karla’s body underneath Ralph Farley’s pickup truck in the field across the road. They said death for her would’ve been almost instantaneous, which is some consolation, I guess, except for that word almost. She was still alive when she got swept up, I know that.
John says I should let it go, drop it, leave it be, but he wasn’t there, and Karla, she was just 24, not any older than our younger boy Jonathan. In bed last night John said to me, “Jill, you never even knew her. You’re just feeling bad because there’s nothing you can do, there’s no family left behind you can make a casserole for.” He said, “It’s nobody’s fault. What’s done is done is done. Let’s go to sleep.”
So I closed my book and I turned out the light, but the truth is I had been thinking of making a dish for the Metzgers—they’d loved Karla like a daughter. There was no point explaining that to John. I rolled over and put my back to him. Sometimes I wish he would just hold me like he used to when the boys were young.
♦
There hadn’t been a storm like this in Franklin County since May of ’85, when we had a tornado cross Route 11 and travel along Orchard Drive all the way up to Wayne Avenue, where it tore the roof off the K-Mart. It brought down trees and power lines, knocked a house off its foundation, and shattered all the windows in the Wendy’s by the stoplight—but nobody got hurt.
I remember watching that day as the sky turned from marbled grey to ghost-green while I waited for John to get home from work. Trashcans blew down our street like tumbleweeds, the wind was just screaming, but he got the car under the carport before the hail started down. It was like God had waited until John was safe to really start the storm. I put on some coffee, and we waited it out in the basement, curled up together on the old loveseat. I was pregnant with David at the time. John and I would be long dead, I thought, before another storm like this hit the valley.
♦
Pastor Matt came back up from the church he’d started in Virginia to do the funeral. He told us the early Christian martyrs believed that when they suffered, Christ suffered with them, and so it was with us. “We can do all things through Him who gives us strength,” he said, but I thought his words fell flat. I wanted something more, some assurance that the clouds would clear, that the sorrow would burn off like the dew. He should’ve spoke about deliverance. Instead, he told us that God appeared to Job in the form of a whirlwind. A whirlwind. He crossed a line there, I thought. With Karla’s body tucked away in the earth and her soul at home with the Lord, I had hoped we could all begin limping toward closure.
♦
If you wanted to be pessimistic about it, you could say that Karla’s whole life had been one long string of tragedies. Her father was a drunk, lazy and abusive, but out of the picture, thank God, before Karla started elementary school. Her mother worked the day shift at Tip Top Dry Cleaning and the night shift at Denny’s. The old townhouse they lived in was only a block from the church—this was before we put up the big building out on New Scotland Road—but her mother never attended our services.
She did, however, drop Karla off at the church Wednesday nights on her way out to Denny’s, and the charity she wouldn’t accept from us we lavished on her daughter. Pastor Matt—he was our youth pastor then—took her under his wing and added her to his running, shouting, screaming flock. She was a fair-haired wisp of a girl, with pale blue eyes and a ten-gallon smile that barely fit her face. A beautiful child.
She was too shy to talk to boys, or most anybody else for that matter, but she took to Meg Metzger, Walt and Connie’s girl, and pretty soon the two of them were inseparable. There wasn’t a moment when they weren’t whispering and giggling to each other, and for a lot of us, myself included, the first time we actually heard Karla’s voice was when she read the scripture at Meg’s funeral: “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away. May the name of the Lord be praised.” That was when Walt finally broke down and wept there in the front pew. Meg was killed in a car accident coming back Route 11 from the drive-in up in Newville with one of the Sanford twins. A drunk driver. Both he and the Sanford boy walked away from it, and for a long time after that I wouldn’t let Jonathan or even David stay out past ten-thirty.
♦
The Metzgers loved Karla like she was their own child, and they made up their minds to send Karla to college with the money they’d saved up for Meg’s education. In the fall, Karla started commuting to Shippensburg University, studying to be an elementary school teacher.
A year later her mother came down with cancer, lung cancer of all things, and Karla dropped out of school to work fulltime so her mother could quit Tip Top and focus on her treatment. For our part, we took up a collection each month especially for the two of them, and, of course, we prayed, for strength and peace and presence and healing, and Pastor Lehman visited with Karla’s mother every Thursday. The men of the congregation saw to it that her grass got mowed, and the rest of us made sure that Karla and her mother stayed well fed.
But when it’s lung cancer, there’s not much that can be done, and when the Lord called her mother home, Karla took it hard. We saw her less and less at Sunday service, and then not at all. She might even have gotten into drugs, but I can’t say that for sure. What’s known is that she fell in with a bad crowd. The next time we saw her, she was pregnant, only just starting to show and with no man in sight. Some EMT from Waynesboro, I heard.
The Metzgers offered to raise the child for her, but she politely declined. She looked pale and thin and older than her years, but she’d made up her mind to raise the child herself. The baby was a gift is what she told us. It was the pregnancy, I think, that brought her back to God.
The child was supposed to be a girl. Karla was going to name her Meghan, after Meg Metzger, but seven months into the pregnancy the child died from complications and was stillborn. I remember Pastor Lehman made the announcement about it just before the morning prayer, and I felt sure, in my heart, that Karla would disappear again. In fact, at the time, I very much wanted her to disappear, to leave the church and never look back. There was a candlelight vigil for the child and then a funeral, and we all made casseroles and cakes and jellos, but nobody knew what to say. It wasn’t right what the Lord had done—or, at least, it seemed so to me. I don’t know what I’m saying here.
The thing is, Karla didn’t disappear. On the contrary, she didn’t miss a single Sunday service. She was always there, fifth pew from the front on the left, immovable as an anchor. It was like she’d made up her mind not to be broken again. Or maybe it was that she had been broken so completely that she could not be broken anymore. Her pieces were too small.
♦
It was about this time that I took up the position of Assistant to the Church Secretary. It’s minimum wage, a high schooler’s job really, but I like it. I fold bulletins, type up the directory, water Pastor Lehman’s plants. It gets me out of the house in the evenings when John comes home and sets up his laptop on the kitchen table like a dividing wall. Sometimes I imagine I smell a young woman’s perfume running like fingers through his hair. Sometimes I want to ask him why he isn’t finishing his work at the office.
Instead I go into the church at night when it’s quiet and still, and I listen to Delilah on the radio while I slip inserts into the bulletins. There’s rarely anybody there that late at night—I have my own key now—and for a while I thought the space was my own. Then I began to notice Karla’s car out in the lot every night, parked near, but never next to, my old minivan. She was quietly letting herself into the church and praying alone in the nursery. It was a sight. Sometimes she would weep while she was kneeling before the cribs. I know because now and then I would look in on her. With her pale skin lit up red from the glow of the exit sign she looked almost like a painting of Jesus praying in the garden.
I never interrupted her, never prayed with her, never rested my hand on her shoulder or stroked her hair or held her the way I would have if she’d been one of my boys. She obviously wants to be left alone is what I told myself. It was such a strange thing to do.
But it must have been that God was carrying her though, because it was almost miraculous the way she bounced back. Three months after she’d buried her daughter, she started teaching Sunday School and volunteering with the youth group. She signed up to help in the nursery—that surprised a lot of us—and pretty soon she was also volunteering at Pregnancy Ministries and talking about going back to school to do a degree in social work. And all the while she was still working fulltime at the mall. She’d become like a person turned inside out, radiantly selfless, like a fire or a light bulb. So bright you can’t look directly at her, I used to say. Look at her too long and you’ll hurt your eyes.
♦
The clouds in the sky that afternoon were liquid grey, like back muscles beneath a man’s skin, and the haze of a downpour in the distance had us scrambling to get all our covered dishes and crock pots out of the pavilion and into the church gymnasium. The forecasters said the storm would pass north of us, but that didn’t stop the rain from coming down in sideways sheets. We were told later that that was why we didn’t see the tornado form in the field down the road. When it’s raining, sometimes you can only see them with radar.
All the men had their puppy-dog faces pressed against the window glass in the lobby, bats and gloves piled beside them, and I wasn’t going to pay them any mind except they were pointing at something over the cornfield, some strange swirling flock of birds. Afterwards we realized they weren’t birds at all, but shingles and cornstalks.
When Karla pulled into the parking lot, the headlights on her car were fuzzy from the wind and the rain. She took the closest stall she could find, a good fifty or sixty yards out. She must not have realized there was a tornado. None of us did. When she finally popped out of the car, we could barely see her through the rain and there’s some disagreement among those of us who saw as to whether or not Karla could have escaped had she turned and run right when she stepped out of the car and saw the tornado crossing New Scotland Road—because she must have seen it then, or heard it at least. It really did sound like a freight train.
Two or three of the younger men say she could’ve made it, but I don’t think so. Most of us who saw say Karla didn’t have a chance. She looked back at us, gauging the distance, I think, and then she turned toward the whirlwind. She stood there for a moment with the wind whipping her hair, and she stepped forward to meet the storm, calmly, almost confidently, as if her whole life had been only a long preparation for this one moment. I didn’t see her get lifted up or knocked down or struck by Ralph Farley’s truck, and I wonder if things would be different if I had. Karla just stepped forward and then the rain got too thick. That’s all. She disappeared, and then someone—not John—grabbed my arm and took me down to the basement and probably saved my life. The storm shattered all the windows in the lobby with metal bars it wrenched from the playground equipment.
♦
Karla’s in the ground now, buried in a plot between her mother and the daughter she’d wanted so badly. In the weeks and months ahead we’ll limp our way toward closure. I’m confident of that. It may take people like the Metzgers and myself and Ralph Farley a little bit longer than the rest, but sooner or later things will settle back into normal. The clouds will clear. The sun will rise again. It will all be well, by and by.
♦
And yet, when John is asleep and I close my eyes to pray “God, save my marriage,” all I see is Karla, Karla stepping into the whirlwind and vanishing as if she were only slipping behind a curtain. The image burns sharp and clear, like a candle in a cave, and it keeps me awake at night. ♦
Ryan Rickrode 