The Sound and the Fury

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I grew up in Faulkner County in central Arkansas.

There was a time, when I was a teenager, that I liked to tell myself that the county was named after William Faulkner, a great novelist from Mississippi — but I knew (thanks to the Arkansas history class we all had to take in fifth grade) that it was really named after the man who composed "The Arkansas Traveler," which was the state song for about 15 years and has been the state historical song since 1987.

William Faulkner, with novels to his credit like "The Sound and the Fury," might be more appropriate today, considering the intensity of the tornado that ripped through the county yesterday and virtually demolished two towns, both only a matter of miles from my hometown.

My hometown, incidentally, appears to have been spared — but that wasn't the case when I was 5 years old.

I grew up in the country on a man–made lake. When my parents wanted to go out, they drove to Little Rock, which was about 30 minutes away, and, on that particular evening, they went out, probably for dinner and a movie.

There was a high school girl named Gail who lived about a mile or so down the road from us. She was the usual babysitter for my brother and me, and I remember that she came over to watch us. Not long after my parents left, the storm started to brew up. My family didn't have a TV in those days so we must have been listening to the radio, and we must have heard that a tornado was headed our way.

Gail called her father and asked him to come get us in his pickup truck. There was a storm cellar at Gail's house, and she figured we would all be safe there.

But we didn't get there in time for it to help us.

As we were heading to her house, I remember looking up through the windshield — and seeing the tornado pass directly over us. It is a sight and a sound I will never forget.

Another thing I will never forget is the scene at Gail's house when everyone was sure the storm had passed us. We emerged from the cellar, and Gail and her siblings ran around their yard, grabbing scraps of paper that were swirling around in the tornado's tailwinds. I don't know what they were — maybe mailing labels or envelopes or pieces of telephone book pages or something else — but Gail and her siblings were calling out names and places when they could read them.

That whole scene is a bit of a blur for me now. I remember a lot of noise — some of it was the wind, some was the shrieks of the young folks as they deduced that pieces of paper in their hands could tell them how far the tornado had traveled. There was so little that anyone knew in those first minutes.

In the background, I remember the sound of Gail's family's TV and the updates on the storm's destruction. If we had been in town, instead of cut off by a line of hills and trees, we probably would have heard a lot of sirens. It was a cacophony.

William Faulkner wrote about the sound and the fury; I heard the sound and witnessed the fury.

It was hilly country where we lived, and the tornado must have bounced around it because there was little, if any, damage out there. We got to Gail's house and joined the rest of the family in the storm cellar — but, by that time, the tornado had passed us, crossed over the hills and touched down in town, plowing through the heart of the community. There were many casualties and a lot of damage in town.

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Faulkner County was declared a disaster area after that tornado — and I have friends there who tell me that it probably will be declared a disaster area again.

The two towns that sustained the greatest damage and loss of life were Mayflower and Vilonia. Neither was very large when I lived there; I'm sure that little has changed, even though the town in which I grew up apparently has tripled, maybe quadrupled, in size since I was in high school.

If yesterday's tornado had hit my hometown, the loss of life probably would have been staggering, and the damage would have been almost incomprehensible. So I guess that is something for which we can be grateful.

But the damage and loss of life must seem incomprehensible to the residents of those two tiny towns as they try to carry on. A friend of mine says the estimate is that 85–90% of each community has been leveled.

Based on some of the pictures I have seen, that's probably correct. If you're reading this and, like me, you no longer live in the area — or even if you have no connection to the area and simply want to see what is happening there — you can see the latest photos and articles at the website of my hometown newspaper, the Log Cabin Democrat, which is offering unlimited access to its material.

Arkansans are tough, and they're accustomed to dealing with tornadoes. The healing process begins almost immediately. I am already hearing stories of examples of the can–do spirit I saw in action so many times when I was growing up, and I know the survivors in those two towns will rise above this.

They will mourn their dead and clear the debris, and that will be painful, but they will be all right.

They've done this before.

Stormy Monday

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Perhaps I am too quick to see the ironies in things. Maybe that is a hazard when one has been a journalist and a student of history most of his life.

Nevertheless, I do find it ironic that, two weeks ago, I wrote about my memories of the abduction, rape and murder of a sixth–grade girl in my home county 35 years ago — and, this week, the same small Arkansas town in which she lived was devastated by a tornado.

At the latest count, there were four people dead in that small town — Vilonia. To me, that is staggering.

Four fatalities in a given storm is a pretty impressive number just about anywhere, but Vilonia is merely a bump in the road by almost anyone's standards.

Even though Arkansas' governor says everyone has been accounted for and the death toll is not expected to rise, that many deaths in a place the size of Vilonia remains significant.

Ghost towns have larger populations.

It's been a long time since I lived in Arkansas. When I did, I seldom heard much about Vilonia — even when I grew up a virtual stone's throw from the place. Frankly, when I left there, if I had stopped to think about it, I would have said that I didn't expect to hear about Vilonia again — unless I moved back to Arkansas.

Since the internet boom, I have been visiting my hometown newspaper's website to keep up with the news, and, from time to time, I see Vilonia mentioned — in city council stories, in school board stories. But I rarely give much thought to it.

It is unnerving now, to say the least, to hear Vilonia mentioned on the national news and to hear the names of places I haven't thought about in years — except, of course, in the context of the memories of which I wrote two weeks ago.

Speaking of my hometown newspaper, I was visiting that site a little while ago, and I was looking at the obituaries — as I often do (it's how I have learned of the deaths of many of my old friends, teachers and others). I saw someone of whom I never heard before, an elderly lady who probably (although I don't know this for sure) lived most of her life in that little country town.

She died on Sunday. I don't know much about her. The obituary didn't mention her cause of death, but it did say there were many children and grandchildren, even great–grandchildren, who survived her.

The obituaries of the four tornado victims were posted on the website, too, but they died on Monday.

Those tornado victims, I think, will live on in Vilonia's collective memory as the casualties of Stormy Monday. I'm guessing that the lady who died on Sunday will be long remembered by her family, but not by most others.

When she is remembered, it may be in a kind of "She died the day before the Twister" way. Doesn't seem fair, does it?

I have empathy for both sides.

When I was 5, a tornado ripped through my hometown. At that tender age, I saw what nature could do. When its fury is unleashed, no man and nothing made by man can contain it. The stories of the destruction it left behind live on today.

As a child, I did something that I'm sure Arkansas schoolchildren still do. I participated in tornado drills. They were the same as the "duck and cover" drills that were designed to protect us in the event of a nuclear attack — but, by comparison, ducking and covering seemed more likely to save my life if a tornado struck.

Next week will be the 16th anniversary of my mother's death in a flash flood here in Dallas. She was a first–grade teacher so there were many children and their parents who were affected at the time, but that memory faded. By the first anniversary of her death, few people still spoke of her outside the family.

The storm itself is still remembered by some, primarily because of when it happened — Cinco de Mayo. But, if not for that, it might be forgotten by nearly everyone today even though nearly two dozen people in the Dallas–Fort Worth area died.

It happened about two weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing.

That's maybe the greatest of history's ironies — how some events are overshadowed by others. But that doesn't take anything away from their significance. One of my favorite writers, Mark Twain, once observed, "Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion, a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size."

Take, for instance, Nov. 22, 1963. History remembers that day as the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated — but it was also a particularly bad day for people who appreciate good and thought–provoking writing. C.S. Lewis, the author of the "Narnia" books, and Aldous Huxley, author of (among other things) "Brave New World," also died that day.

Lewis and Huxley were overshadowed at the time — and understandably so — by the events here in Dallas, but that certainly didn't lessen the loss to the written word.

It might have remained unnoticed by most, though, if not for Peter Kreeft's 1982 novel "Between Heaven and Hell" that explored a philosophical discussion between the three men in the afterlife.

That's another thing I've noticed about history. Sometimes scales that have been tipped noticeably in one direction for a long time may slip back into balance unexpectedly.

It's still true, though, that history repeats itself. Well, perhaps not word for word.

As Twain or Will Rogers or Artemus Ward or perhaps someone else said (I've heard it attributed to many people), history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes a lot.

The Death of Innocence

Today is an odd day for me, a day that brings back a mixture of memories.

It was on this day 35 years ago that a sixth–grade girl from a small town in my home county vanished in broad daylight. Her body was found a few days later. She had been raped, murdered and left in a stock pond.

Her name was Dana Mize. Few of the people I knew had any idea who she was — until she was abducted. And, initially, that was newsworthy because her father was a candidate for county office in the upcoming primary.

I never met her. But I knew people who knew her fairly well. Her family attended First Baptist Church in my hometown, and "FBC," as it was called, was the biggest church in town. Still is, I imagine. And the congregation always has been tightly knit. A few days ago, I mentioned this upcoming anniversary to an old friend of mine who was a member of that church at the time, and he said he remembered feeling a terrible sadness for the family.

That was the prevailing emotion — at FBC and throughout the county and its communities.

It wasn't long after she disappeared, though, that the whispers began. Her abduction, people were saying, had nothing to do with local politics. If it had, the abductor(s) almost certainly would have contacted someone with a demand that her father withdraw from the race or something similar. But no such communication had been received.

It must have been sexual, so the reasoning went — and, it turned out, the reasoning was right on the money.

I didn't want to believe that. I guess most of the people in the area didn't want to believe it, but I had to admit that it made sense.

It's hard to describe what a shocking time that was. One of the reasons why it was so shocking, I think, was the fact that my hometown was still somewhat innocent and naive when it happened. The place often seemed to exist in a bubble. For whatever reason, people in my hometown seemed to believe they were immune to the tragedies of the world.

That conviction never really made much sense to me because tragedies happened there all the time.

Before I was in grade school, a girl I knew was diagnosed with cancer and died a short time later. When I was in third grade, a classmate of mine died of leukemia. A few years later, the son of some family friends was diagnosed with a brain tumor. A tornado ripped through my hometown when I was 5 and leveled several homes (took a few lives in the process).

And those were just a few of the tragedies that touched me personally. In the years when I was growing up, there were other tragedies that affected other people — like any other place.

I guess what made the Dana Mize episode unique was the fact that criminal intent was behind it. The other tragedies could be written off as being caused by disease or random acts of nature or perhaps sloppiness or stupidity. But this was deliberate.

In a large city, the disappearance of a young girl — and the subsequent discovery of her dead and sexually abused body — wouldn't have raised any eyebrows in those days.

But it was different in my hometown. Everyone who lived there had to accept a previously unthinkable truth: Sexual predators must have been living among us, as they do in any other city or town — and, based on statistics, I can only conclude that some of the girls with whom I attended school must have been abused — by their fathers, by cousins, by family friends, who knows?

In my hometown of Conway, Ark., it seems to me that there must have been sexual predators around — even in that seemingly innocent time.

There was nothing terribly special or unique about my hometown. It was a town much like any other town, I suppose. It was mostly a blue–collar town in a mostly blue–collar county. I'm sure young girls were molested, abused, even assaulted there when I was growing up, but those cases were usually handled quietly, away from the public eye.

What did make the Dana Mize case unique was the fact that the perpetrator didn't live nearby. Turned out, he had flown to Arkansas from his home in New Jersey, committed the crime and flown back.

I still don't know what drew him to Mize's tiny hometown of Vilonia — which was much smaller than Conway. To my knowledge, he had never been to that area before.

I have tried, many times over the last 35 years, to reconstruct his movements, and I have tried to figure out how he could just stumble onto Vilonia. I don't know what the odds would have been, but I keep coming back to the idea that — somehow — he must have known that Vilonia was there.

His plane had to have landed in Little Rock. He could have rented a car at the airport and easily driven to Conway, which is along the highway outside Little Rock.

If the trail stopped in Conway, you could chalk the whole thing up to randomness, I guess. But Vilonia is one of those out–of–the–way country towns. You don't just stumble onto it. You have to be going there on purpose.

And the stock pond where the body was found was, as I recall, even more remote.

A complete stranger to the area would be almost bound to get lost after being, to say the least, distracted by a life–and–death struggle, either before or after the sexual assault, and a search for a suitably secluded spot to drop the body.

It seems likely to me that he would have had to ask for directions back to the highway. And someone almost certainly would have remembered giving directions to a disheveled stranger in a rented car whose clothes may have been dirty and/or wet.

Yet my memory is that the perpetrator did all this in a single afternoon, returned to the airport and caught a flight back to New Jersey — and he didn't ask for directions and apparently wasn't connected to the crime until a few days later, when he confessed to his psychiatrist.

He's still alive, I hear. He was convicted of capital felony murder, which often carries a death sentence, but his jury sentenced him to life without parole. He was 34 at the time he committed the crime so he is about to turn 70.

I've heard he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, the same mental illness that afflicts the man who shot Gabrielle Giffords back in January.

That would answer a lot of questions, I guess. But not all.

I suppose some questions will never be answered.