After the Storm

67 They All Come Back O nce after college, when I painted houses for a living in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, waiting impatiently for my girlfriend to graduate, I showed up for one of our jobs and ran into a longtime friend of my parents. He was an old neighbor from the house in Alvamar, a nice man we knew before things went to shit for our family. He asked how I was doing and I stood there in my paint-spattered pants and told him of my plans to travel to Costa Rica and then settle, for no good reason, in Flagstaff, Arizona. He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “You’ll come back. They all do.” I shivered, recoiled, and stammered something in response. It felt like a cult leader advising me against leaving the flock. But really he was just voicing the expectation that many people have about Lawrence; it is a place of refuge, a place to run away from the coming storm. It’s a nice place. A good place. And the assumption is always that, like Dorothy, anyone who leaves Kansas wants to come home again. For many of us, it’s just not that simple. I came home to Kansas in June 2007, six weeks after the May 4 f5 tornado that destroyed Greensburg, Kansas, my father’s hometown. It was Father’s Day weekend when I landed in Kansas City. Back in California my wife was pregnant with our second child and watching her aunt fight and fade from aggressive cancer. This was one of the first times I’d been back to Kansas in a while. I hadn’t lived there for over a dozen years, and though it was hard for me to admit sometimes and even harder for my family to accept, I never really had a strong desire to return home—mainly because home had never left me. The Kansas I know is like a long novel I finished years ago and of which I remember every word. It was a great story, filled AFTER THE STORM STEVEN CHURCH colorado review 68 with wonderful characters and compelling plotlines, but it was epic and psychologically cumbersome and in many ways, mostly fiction. The truth is that I came home to be with my dad because I wanted to spend time with him, because I thought I should help my aunt pick through the mess of her house in Greensburg, but also because I thought the trip might help me understand something more about the legacy of apocalypse in my life or at least why I can’t seem to get The Day After out of my head, why I can’t leave the long novel of Kansas behind. I came home to find a new story. I knew ahead of time that most of Greensburg had been rendered into piles of rubble, including the small office behind the bank where my grandfather practiced law for nearly seventy years, as well as the home where my father and his two sisters were raised, the same house where my grandparents always lived, the ice cream parlor downtown where a man named Shakey used to make us fountain drinks. All of it gone, crumbled, as if a bulldozer had run amok through the town for weeks. Elsewhere the tornado raised roofs, lifted houses up, and dropped them back down a few feet away; it just obliterated others, scouring them down to their foundation or concrete pad. Dad drove me around and showed me some of the homes he had built when he worked for a local carpenter in high school, most of them still standing at least, with the one exception being the carpenter’s own house. A mobile home park on the south side of town was blown into pieces, and everywhere you looked their aluminum siding wrapped around tree trunks like hard bedsheets. Smaller chunks were sunk deep into the wood like blades. My aunt waited out the storm in her basement, emerging in the dark to find chaos and confused, dazed citizens wandering the streets. Everything gone. The storm was the kind of tempest that...