“That’s where people would congregate,” Sue tells me. “That’s where the healing of everyone happened.”
Joyce, who housed both her sons and their families while their homes were rebuilt, remembers pulling dirty clothes and bedsheets from the foundations of her sons’ houses, taking them home, and washing them several times before they could be used.
“I remember we found Matthew’s blanket,” she says, not trying to hold back the tears now. “And I scrubbed that up.”
The sound of chain saws buzzed through the thick late-spring air. Debris was bulldozed, and construction began on new houses and apartment buildings. The roof of the school was replaced. Damaged farmland was tilled again, and crops were replanted. Houses, businesses, barns, and bars were rebuilt. The churches rose again. On the following Arbor Day, nearly a year later, Jerry and his classmates planted trees.
“All the trees you see?” he says. “We planted them. So when some of them get really old, I can say, ‘I planted those trees.’”
As I read old newspaper clippings about the tornado—along with a feature in People magazine from that summer—I see a particular narrative begin to emerge. Phrases and headlines like A town is reborn and Barneveld rises from the ashes appear again and again. The stories are often accompanied by an image that became iconic: the bell tower of the Lutheran church, standing solitary amid the rubble. At one point, I read an article in which a woman, whose farmhouse had been spared, is quoted as saying, “God was watching out for us.”
How strange, it strikes me, to say such a thing: as if God had chosen to save her while allowing others to die, that her home and family were deliberately spared while others were destroyed. It reminds me of a line from Twister, when Jo explains her obsession with tornadoes to Bill, the root of which lies in her own childhood: You’ve never seen it miss this house, miss that house, and come after you. And it reminds me of the Mount Horeb narrative, this idea that we were the ones who were saved.
Like Mount Horeb, Barneveld is a God-fearing town. Most of the people I speak to mention their churches, and many of the articles I read focus on rebuilding the town’s three chapels. Joyce tells me that in the wake of the storm, the town began holding ecumenical services—congregations from all three of the town’s churches gathering together for services while the churches were rebuilt. Today, the town’s congregations still gather for joint services for Easter and Thanksgiving.
Sue is the only one who doesn’t talk about church. She speaks about the funeral services for her son, which were held in Mount Horeb, and the cemetery out in the country where they buried him. No one I speak with mentions God directly. Only Joyce makes a direct reference to her faith, when I asked if she still got scared when it storms.
“I don’t,” she says, rocking in her chair. “I just pray.”
After Matthew’s death, Sue drank. She stayed out late. In fine midwestern tradition, she played bar-league softball that summer and stayed out drinking with her friends. I tell her I’ve done this, too, the way so many Midwesterners do. Here, where we’re never encouraged to talk about our problems, where we drink instead to deal with things like stress and death and grief—or, maybe more specifically, to numb it away. That summer, Sue would close down the country bar—the lights of the softball field gone dark behind it, nothing but corn beyond—and head home in the early hours of morning. She’d get a few hours of fitful sleep, then spend entire days at Matthew’s grave.
“I was just trying to survive in my own little world,” she says. Sue and Charlie eventually divorced. “They say the death of a child either makes or breaks a marriage,” Sue says. “And it probably didn’t break it, but it didn’t help it either.”
I wonder, when she says this, how the community responded—to the divorce, to the drinking, to the ways she wore her grief. I can’t help but wonder about a woman who falls apart publicly, and about what a small Christian town—which by daylight speaks of the importance of faith, of loving your neighbor—might think of her when the night comes down, what they might say to their own behind closed doors. In so many ways, it seems true that the town came together in the wake of tragedy. That they stood hand in hand and grieved together, then rebuilt their town. But what of a woman who wears her tragedy aloud? Who doesn’t hide it, like she’s taught to, and bury it in the rubble she’s meant to rebuild? Who, instead, holds the pain she’s supposed to carry alone out in the open—like an offering, like a stone she can’t cast off into the abyss—and asks for someone to take it? I ask her about this. After thinking about it for a while, Sue shrugs and smiles. It’s not a bitter smile, but maybe a little sad. It’s a smile that more than anything suggests acceptance, that a long time has passed, that in many ways she has moved on.
“I didn’t get that love thing from Barneveld like everybody says they got,” Sue says. “Maybe they did, but I never got that kind of love.”
But her family did come together. Throughout our conversation, Sue returns frequently to Joyce—who took her family in, who cared for them, who supported Sue while she was grieving.
“She’s like an angel,” Sue says. “She was a godsend. She taught me how strong of a woman she really is.”
Despite the divorce, the family is still close, and Sue and Joyce see each other often. They’ll gather just a few days after we speak for the joint birthday party of Sue’s two granddaughters—the daughters of her son from her second marriage.
Sue says she couldn’t talk to her own mother about Matthew’s death.
“My mother was a hard-core woman,” she says. “And nobody talks about it. You know, it’s like a sin to talk about it.”
I tell her I think this is a cultural thing, a midwestern thing. And maybe what I mean is it’s a class thing. It’s something I think about often, having grown up in a small town—where you do your best to hide your pain, where if you let it go a whole town will know. Talking about your problems, I think, is something reserved for the upper classes, the educated classes, for families in which a life of the mind is more important than a life of work, and of the body, and of the land. Where Sue comes from, and where I come from—generations of farm families with little money and many mouths to feed—we don’t have time for the kind of trouble that dwells in the brain or heart. We learn this from the stories of our forebears, who were more concerned with the kind of trouble a drought could bring or whether the crops would yield. We don’t have the tools—the language, the education, the resources—to say some things aloud, to deal in the daylight with our problems. So we keep them to ourselves, and we carry them with us.
“You just didn’t—” Sue stammers, trying to figure out how to say it. “You couldn’t show your grief. You couldn’t. They didn’t want to talk about it. You didn’t want to talk about it.”
For so many midwestern families, that very silence—what we like to call stoicism—means strength.
“It’s supposed to make you stronger,” Sue says. Then she quickly adds, “And it does make you stronger.” But in the end, she did talk about it—she went to counseling for eleven years. She can see the surprise on my face when she tells me this, even though I say nothing. She nods, an implicit understanding. Therapy is not only a rare thing where we come from but something that’s still stigmatized; it’s equated with narcissism, with frivolity, with weakness.