“It was like a freight train,” she says. “It was just mammoth.” She told Charlie to grab Michael and get to the basement. A tornado’s coming, she yelled.
“You could tell,” she says. “You could just hear it.”
Charlie grabbed Michael and Sue grabbed Matthew, and they ran toward the root cellar. Charlie and Michael made it. But just as Sue was getting to the stairs, with Matthew pressed against her chest, the tornado struck the house.
Something hit her and Matthew from behind and sent them to the ground. Sue stayed crouched on her knees, holding her son beneath her, as the storm destroyed their house.
“Matthew never cried,” Sue says.
When it was over, she rolled onto her back and heard Matthew take a single breath. She’d been taking EMT classes and recognized the breath as her son’s last.
“I knew he was dead,” she says. “I knew that was the end of life.”
We sit for a few seconds in silence, her words hanging between us. She looks at me, and a small sad smile spreads across her face. I know this smile. It’s one that’s practiced across the passage of time, one meant to soothe a listener more than oneself.
Crouched around the body of her son, the crashing of wind and wood and glass settling to silence, Sue felt the rain: fat, quarter-size drops falling from the wide-open mouth of sky where the roof of her house had been. The temperature had dropped about thirty degrees, and it was cold.
“You couldn’t hear anything,” she says. “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. It was pitch black.”
In a great white flash of lightning, she noticed her finger was hanging by a small thread of skin. At the restaurant, she points to what remains of the finger, her middle left, cut down below the first knuckle. Too concerned with keeping her son safe, she had felt only a pinch.
She would find out later that a piece of flying debris from the house, likely part of a door, had struck Matthew in the head. The night of the Barneveld tornado, when Sue Clerkin lost her youngest son, she was just twenty-four years old.
In the early hours of morning, the sky dark and the power out, the residents of Barneveld walked around what was left of their town. They searched the foundations of their homes, crumbled to dust, calling out for family and friends, searching for lost pets and any clothes they might put on. They walked barefoot, in pajamas and T-shirts and underwear. Some wore black garbage bags to fend off the rain.
Sue’s husband, Charlie, had glass in his feet and a hole in his shorts as they walked through the rubble to what was left of the fire station. Michael walked with them. They carried Matthew, and they handed his small body over to the EMTs. Al Wright sped him away to the hospital. Charlie’s mother, Joyce, meanwhile, was looking for her daughter Lori. She searched the ruins of the town but couldn’t find her anywhere. Sue was taken to another hospital, so Joyce and Charlie followed behind. Joyce wouldn’t find out until the next morning that Lori was in the same hospital where Al had brought Matthew.
The tornado sucked Lori out of her car. She’d been hanging out with her friends at a restaurant in town and had run to her car when the wind picked up. A two-by-four crashed through the sunroof and tore through her arm. She was swept through the windshield and thrown a block away. Her nose was gone and her arm was badly injured; she had a dislocated shoulder, a broken collarbone, and two broken wrists. She was in the hospital for weeks and had nine surgeries over several months.
“We almost lost her,” Joyce says, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.
Along with Matthew, eight other people died in the tornado, including a teacher, several farmers and military veterans, and an eight-year-old girl and her parents. Most of the people who died lived in the same area, a brand-new subdivision where Joyce’s two sons had homes.
“We were very fortunate and very blessed,” Joyce says. “We could have lost most of our family.” She gets up at one point during our conversation and shows me a picture of Matthew. Like so many other photos that were lost in the storm, this one was found miles away. In the photo, the boy is blond and beaming.
“Our little towhead,” Joyce says, smiling, and holds out the picture for me to see.
When Sue got out of the hospital, her mother drove her around town. For the first time, she was able to see the damage in the daylight.
“There was this smell,” Sue says. “Some combination of dirt and gas. Like burnt dirt.”
Back in Al’s shop, we talk about his experiences in the days that followed the tornado.
“Well, you’re kind of numb, you know?” he says. In the weeks after the storm, the EMT service stayed busy. They got a lot of stress-related calls, Al tells me. When I ask if he felt stress too, he hesitates.
“Well, I guess I did,” he says eventually, repeating the words. “Our church uptown was destroyed. We had to tear that all down.”
We talk about the debris that was found across the state—that people hiking in Blue Mounds had found photos, birth certificates, and other papers and objects they sent back to town. Al shows me an invoice pad, says he received invoices in the mail that were found fifty miles away. Checks, bills, letters, and a Barneveld State Bank pouch were found more than a hundred miles away, and heavier materials like plywood and aluminum siding were found along an eighty-five-mile path. A gas can from Randy Danz’s Auto Service turned up in Green Bay, 175 miles from Barneveld.
This strange and sporadic path of belongings left in the wake of the storm spurred a landmark study on tornado debris led by a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin. Even Ted Fujita himself, after whom the tornado scale is named, traveled to Barneveld from Chicago to tour the wreckage.
As we talk about this, Al remembers something. He walks over to a storage closet and pulls out a gray metal box.
“This was my time clock,” he says, “of when the power went off.” The box has a clockface on the front of it, stopped at 12:48. He’d kept it at the old mill, and he’d found it among the rubble. I tell him I’ve always wondered what time the tornado actually hit, that I’d read conflicting accounts. For a long time, I believed it was just after midnight.
“That’s it,” Al says, tapping a finger on the clock. “That’s when it happened. And it’ll never be plugged in again.”
Barneveld began to rebuild. In the following days, with the threat of more storms not yet passed, residents and volunteers—including bands of Amish and Mennonite farmers from the area, who came in from across the state to help—worked from sunrise till dark. They picked through the town and nearby fields, salvaging what they could. Trucks hauled away heaps of rubble to be burned in a nearby rock quarry. The Red Cross sent in food and donated clothes. Barneveld was declared a federal disaster area by President Reagan, and FEMA sent mobile trailers in which homeless residents could live. The bank set up shop in a trailer too. While the post office had been destroyed, the postmistress, Marie Dimpfl, whose house had been spared, dug through the mail that was left, stuck an American flag in her yard, and kept the mail running out of her garage. A couple who was supposed to get married on the Friday after the tornado hit got married on Saturday instead; the wedding was held in a country church outside town rather than their own, which had been destroyed. Two days after the tornado, a pregnant woman whose house was gone gave birth to a baby girl. On the remains of a wall where the implement had been, someone had spray-painted the words WE’RE NOT GIVING UP, WE’RE GO ON. Someone had corrected it, spraying an ing above the word go. A farmwife named Betsy Thronson set up a soup kitchen in an industrial garage in town; she borrowed equipment from the school and cooked for days, then weeks, then months, often putting in twelve-hour days to feed the town. On breaks from cleanup, it was where people came to eat; it would eventually become a restaurant, where people continued to gather for years.