This is Part 2 of a continuing story about my house meeting a rather large tornado.

for Part 1 -- The Tornado, click here.

Part 2 -- The Trip to RoEllen

Let me backtrack a bit -- let's leave the Explorer idling in Tommy's driveway for a minute with "Midnight Rider" cued up and ready to play -- in order to explain a couple of humorous aspects in the back story that I completely ignored earlier. Immediately after digging herself and my sister out from under the chimney, my mother made her way to the unmolested farm across the road from our house. Amazingly, the farm's rotary telephone was working fine, no problems. (God bless South Central Bell!) After some rudimentary first aid from Old Man Viar and his wife (I honestly believe that his first name was "Old Man" -- even his wife referred to him thusly) my mother asked for the phone to let her family know what had happened. Bloodied from the bricks and totally disoriented from the experience, she could only pull one phone number out of her head. She steadied herself, dialed extremely slowly (rotary, after all) and waited for the phone to be picked up. Yep. She called her nephew, Todd.

Here's what's amazing about this: at this time, my mother and my uncle Tommy talked on the phone twice a week, AND he's had the same phone number since 1977. Also, because of the long distance charges from my dorm (coupled with my incredible lack of money) my mom actually called me -- dialed my number -- at least once a week. Did she call Tommy? No. Did she call me? No. She called Todd. She had never spoken to Todd using the phone before . . . what's more, Todd and his wife Tracy had only lived in their house about a month, so their phone number had recently changed. But Todd's house phone was the only number her leaky mental Rolodex could produce after a live burial at four in the morning. Mom called him and asked him to contact Tommy and me.

Todd expressed his concern for their welfare, hung up, and called Tommy. No answer. He called his brother, Tom Jr., who tried calling Tommy's cell phone. No answer. Tommy was dead asleep, and my aunt Carole (who would normally shout him awake like a good Marine roommate) was up in Tennessee visiting her ailing sister. Tom and Todd conferred and decided they had to go to Tommy's house to wake him up. Yeah, to Tommy's house, where he slept with weaponry.

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Todd and Tom arrived at Tommy's (alliterative, isn't it?) at about 5:45 Eastern, scarcely forty minutes after the tornado. They rang the doorbell; they knocked on the door; they shook the garage door. No answer. At this point, Todd mentioned that the downstairs window over the living room couch had a rusty catch, and if they felt lucky they could probably break in. Tom expressed reservations -- my uncle is a gun nut, after all -- but Todd assured him that he had entered the house late at night many times during his teenage years by using that very window. Go underage drinking! Woo-hoo!

Todd slipped the catch, lifted the window, and fell into the house with Tom following close behind. Both of them have spoken of the profound terror they both felt as they made their way up the staircase, each of them yelling like an idiot: "Dad, it's us, your sons!" "Ha-ha-ha! Don't kill us, father!" "We love you, don't bust a cap in us!" and so on. When they were about halfway up the stairs, my uncle Tommy emerged in his pajamas with a Glock tucked in the waistband . . . he looked at Todd and said, "I knew it had to be you, you're the only one who has ever entered the house through that window."

"WHAT?"

"Don't pretend you didn't used to sneak in that way all the time, youngster."

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Tommy asked if I had been called -- I had not, but he didn't know that yet -- and neither Todd nor Tom knew, so he decided that I must be informed quickly. But how? He didn't have my phone number.

Oh, but he had Jami's.

(For more information about the crazed year of 1997-1998, click here.)

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Jami was getting ready to go into school that day. She had finished her student teaching the previous semester and was employed as a substitute teacher by the Lake County (FL) School District.

So, here's the scene: the phone rings at Jami's house at 5:56 AM. She's in a bathrobe, applying mascara, when her mother runs into the bathroom.

"It's Brad's uncle Tommy. There's been a horrible occurrence."

So Jami goes to the phone, only to hear Tommy say: "Jami, it's Tommy. A tornado has struck and destroyed Marsha's house in Dyersburg . . . there are four total dead. I've got to get in touch with Brad immediately, and I need his number. Now."

Jami reads off the number, and asks, "Is there anything I can do?"

"You can pray." CLICK.

Now, did you notice anything missing in their conversation? Like, perhaps, reassurance that my mother was alive? Jami was led to believe that I had unexpectedly lost my mother and sister just three years after the shocking death of my father. She did not find out until lunchtime that my mother and sister had survived. My family? Overly dramatic? Naaaaaah.

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Back to the Explorer . . . (finally!)

I hopped in, buckled up, and we were on our way. There were two vehicles in our mini-caravan: one aging Ford Explorer (with Tommy, Tom Jr, and me) and one brand-new Ford F250 Super Duty (Jamie Rice, Todd.) We fueled up at QuickTrip, made our way to I-75, and headed north.

There was an undue sense of tension in the Explorer as we headed for Tennessee. We shared few smiles, exchanged few wisecracks, and generally indulged in great deal of negative speculation about the extent of the damage, both physical and emotional. Who knew what to expect? I cannot fully express the dread that completely filled me -- I supposed (not unwisely, as it turned out) that this experience would be the most traumatic of my mother's life, even more traumatic than my father's death, or that time that she saw Barry Manilow at Mud Island.

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Because of the vagaries of scheduling, the loading of the cars, a short lunch break, and atrocious traffic, we did not make it to Nashville until 3:45 PM. Traffic -- it was horrible, absolutely the worst I have ever personally experienced on I-24 between Chattanooga and Nashville. There was a point where I personally believed that we would just have to pitch our tents on Monteagle and wait everybody out . . .

Funny thing, coincidence. You'll note that I marked our arrival time in Nashville as 3:45 PM . . . how can I be sure of the exact time, you ask? I had finally -- haltingly -- voiced my fears to Tom and Tommy about Mom's mental health around Murfreesboro, some thirty minutes before we arrived in metro Davidson county. To their credit, Tom and Tommy tried to allay my fears. Honestly, though, who could have? My dread had grown into a tangible thing, with weight and dimension. Just as we entered metro Nashville, I had finally gotten around to expressing my greatest fear to them, a fear I had suffered from since my father's death four years previously: does God mean, somehow, to punish our family?

Now the coincidence: Tommy immediately poo-pooed the suggestion, and he offered up advice that under other circumstances would be very sound. He said, "You're just feeding off of the negativity surrounding this tornado. You need to take your mind off of it -- it's not healthy to brood about a situation where you aren't even sure yet of the details." To aid me in doing so, he clicked the radio on, and we enjoyed about two verses of a country song before the Emergency Broadcasting System tone sounded. All we could do was look up and stare at each other as the announcer breathlessly described a tornado supercell that had formed a funnel cloud in downtown Nashville at ". . . 3:45 PM on the DOT!" According to the announcer, all of the windows in her studio had just exploded into shards of flying glass, and she was uncertain how much longer she would be able to broadcast, if at all. She was able to exclaim, "This is the same supercell that devastated Manila, Arkansas and RoEllen, Tennessee, earlier today, taking the lives of at least two Tennesseans . . ." Then there was a burst of loud static, and the radio station no longer transmitted. Shocked, all three of us turned toward the downtown area where we could barely see the top of a funnel in the distance. Cars all around us pulled off the highway into the median, the guardrail area, anywhere, looking for a place to hide. As Tommy began to accelerate, weaving in and out of the sporadic stalled traffic on I-440, hoping to get us out of the path of this tornado, Tom Jr. turned to me, and in complete seriousness, said, "Holy [expletive], maybe God does hate you."

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Part 3 later . . . here's the bell. I hope I'm not being too annoying with the updates . . . now that GACS has internet again, I promise to work on the next posting tomorrow. . .