When I was a child, I had nightmarish visions of the fire-and-brimstone Hell that I’d heard described by scary preachers determined to save souls. When I learned about the New Madrid geological fault, which was near where I lived, in Mayfield, Kentucky, I added earthquakes to the mix. I imagined this fiery chasm in the field just across the highway, where the sun set. In that field now lies the rubble of the candle factory that was smashed when the maelstrom of tornados spiralled through western Kentucky two weeks before Christmas.
The Mason family farm, where I grew up, is sixteen hundred feet, as the crow flies, from Mayfield Consumer Products, the candle factory where dozens of workers were trapped and nine people died. The storm’s death toll in Kentucky as a whole has reached at least seventy-six. I am stunned. When such grief and heartbreak happens so close to home, it is personal. Even though I don’t live there now, I’m rooted there. It is the place I know best.
The candle factory wasn’t there when I was growing up. But when I was about fourteen, in the mid-fifties, a motel sprang up on the corner where our road met the highway. It was such an exotic place that it replaced my fear of burning brimstone—whatever that was—with dreams of travel and adventure. A girl named Marlene, who was a couple of years older than me, lived at the motel with her parents, and her daddy built her a little frozen-custard stand next to it. To live in a motel and have your own custard stand would be idyllic, I thought.
Eventually, the motel became a shelter for homeless men, and today it is the House of Prayer. The parking lot of the House of Prayer was where the media vans gathered in case there was a dramatic rescue at the candle factory. Cadaver dogs were on duty.
When a long-ago professor of mine learned that the name of my home town was Mayfield, he laughed. “That’s absurd,” he said. “It’s too poetic. A May field. Tra-la-la.” He was an English professor and everything had metaphorical meaning for him, I guess. It’s ironic that Mayfield will now forever be a symbol of catastrophe.
The tornado travelled more than two hundred miles. It hit Mayfield at about 9:30 P.M. on December 10th. Electricity and water were knocked out, vehicles strewn around the landscape. First-light drone footage of the wreckage showed chaotic scenes of twisted metal and trash and shattered lumber. I couldn’t even identify the remnants of the buildings in downtown Mayfield. A friend who had served as a diplomat in Afghanistan told me that the scenes looked even worse than a war zone.
I live far away now, in the center of the state, and I have not yet gone to Mayfield to see the aftermath for myself. The authorities discouraged disaster tourism. “They don’t want lookie-loos,” my sister LaNelle said. She lives in Paducah, twenty-six miles north of Mayfield, but she told me that she was going to meet our brother Don at the farm. He lives a couple of miles away and had reported some damage to the already deteriorating buildings on the property.
When I imagine the tornado’s path, I can’t help picturing the area as it was when I lived there. The twister started in Arkansas, to the southwest, travelled to the candle factory, and then ripped along U.S. Highway 45, the same route we always took into town. The feed mill where my father and my grandfather did all the farm business was less than a mile along the way. The railroad track, which once ran from New Orleans to Chicago, lies parallel to the highway. In 1896, a set of quintuplets was born near the feed mill. The quints were such a phenomenon that every train stopped there so that passengers could see them. I once wrote a novel inspired by the tragedy of those babies. They were part of my world, my landscape, my history.
Next, the tornado crossed what we always called the “overhead bridge,” which passed between what used to be the Black neighborhood and Dunbar—the former Black school.
The tornado then slammed into the courthouse, toppling the clock tower and leaving a cylindrical hole in the building and piles of bricks. Those bricks were the walls of the courtroom, which had glorious wooden fixtures. When I researched my family history for a memoir, I paged through the old county-clerk books and found accounts of births, marriages, and deaths, with surprise tidbits that fired my imagination.
The county jail, next to the courthouse and partially underground, was hit, too. Some of the prisoners had been on work release back at the candle factory.
You know this kind of town—picturesque, with classic Victorian architecture and a central square. You know it from movies and old radio shows or sitcoms, or from the Thornton Wilder play “Our Town.” The town is neat and symmetrical. The streets are on a grid, with the courthouse at the center and the high school straight down a tree-lined boulevard.
At one time, the “court square,” as it is called, was home to all the basic little stores that the community relied on. The wallpaper-and-paint store sold books and school supplies. The jewelry store had a clock on the sidewalk permanently set to the hour when Abraham Lincoln died. There was the Rhodes-Burford furniture store, Lookofsky’s sporting goods, the Vanity Shop. In the tornado footage, the Hall Hotel is the “tall” building (four or five stories) still standing in a sea of rubble. For years, my uncle was Santa Claus in the little red house that appeared every December in the courthouse yard.
Farmers came to town on Saturdays to swap stuff and to socialize. My grandmother always dressed up when she went to town, in a hat and a presentable dress, not a work dress. Going to town meant ice cream at the soda fountain, greasy hamburgers, Coca-Colas. The two theatres, the Legion and the Princess, were near the square. People always said that they were “going to the show.” As long as I lived there, I never heard anyone call it “the movies.”
The tornado made me recall my days as a soda jerk at the Rexall’s, across from the courthouse. The drugstore was the happening place in the fifties. I worked school nights, five to eight-thirty, for fifty cents an hour, fixing grilled-cheese, chicken-salad, tuna-fish, and pimento-cheese sandwiches. I made milkshakes, banana splits, and sundaes. I didn’t have a custard stand of my own, but the social life at the drugstore—boys, flirting—was almost a compensation. The most interesting customers, though, were the eccentrics and the drugstore cowboys who hung out and shot the breeze. I remember Colonel Millsap, a well-known local figure who always dressed in a military uniform of one sort or another. In the afternoons, his job was to pick up the national-news headlines, which the local radio station printed on a yellow telegram-style sheet of paper, and deliver them to local businesses. At each business, he would stop to describe the dangerous missions he had been on that day. He had just flown in from Berlin. Or Paris.
A guy known as Hi Ki always brought his own banana-split dish to the soda fountain. That was stranger then than it would seem today. But my favorite local character was Lon Carter Barton. He was a popular Mayfield High School history teacher who kept in touch with many of his students for decades after graduation. He was an esteemed local historian and storyteller, avowedly provincial. Lon Carter, as we often called him, lived in the second-oldest house in town, with twin maples in front. He knew everyone in town and everything that had happened in Graves County during the Civil War, like the time General Grant passed through Mayfield and down what is now U.S. 45 on his way to the bloody Battle of Shiloh. Every year, Lon shepherded a group of seniors to the battlefield there. His favorite movie was “Gone with the Wind.” He must have seen it dozens of times.
For all his restraint, Lon nevertheless courted the outrageous. I believe he was the only person in the county to own one of those fifties hardtop convertibles, a Ford Skyliner. It was a spectacle when the top went up or down. On one occasion, a hypnotist came to perform in town and somehow Lon Carter was on the welcoming committee. Not only did he agree to drive this man around the court square in his Ford convertible, he was persuaded to do this blindfolded and while letting the top down. Mid-spectacle, halfway through the ride, the top got stuck. That evening, I found myself on the stage at the theatre, volunteering to be hypnotized. (I was eager, being an avid reader of “The Search for Bridey Murphy.”) The hypnotist was supposed to put me into a trance. When he failed to do so, he whispered to me to pretend.
Lon Carter Barton, who was for a time the Democratic state representative from the district, once told me what had happened before dawn on the morning that the high school was integrated, in the mid-fifties. He said effigies were hung from the trees in front of the school. The authorities immediately removed them and hushed up the incident, he claimed. Lon Carter introduced me to people like Jenny Wilson, whose parents had been enslaved. (She was the youngest of their children, born late in their lives, she told me.) Another Wilson from town, Ellis, left Mayfield to go to art school, and became an important painter of the Harlem Renaissance. But he was not celebrated in western Kentucky in his lifetime. In the eighties, one of his paintings, “Funeral Procession,” became familiar to America from its position on the wall of the Huxtables’ living room, on “The Cosby Show.”
The movie adaptation of my novel “In Country” was filmed in Mayfield, in 1988, and some scenes took place with the courthouse in view. Many local people participated, and the Hollywood presence was a sensation. The director, Norman Jewison, said at the time that he had to film it in Mayfield, because it was the only place where he could find the people in my story. After the tornado, Rebecca Reynolds, a writer friend of mine who had a small role in the movie, noted on Facebook that the film “may now be the only way to see what our town used to look like.” When I read her comment, I started to cry.
I moved away from Mayfield when I was eighteen, for school and adventure, but I always came back at least twice a year. The family farm, a mile from town, was my anchor. Each time, I returned with a new perspective. I was sensitive to how Mayfield had changed, and of course I changed, too, so I was always seeing it anew.
Mayfield (and the farm culture I grew up in) has been my resource for fiction for many years. I have tried to record what I hear as poetry in the sound of the speech of western Kentucky, an agricultural region that radically shifted to industrialization. In one short story, I describe a truck driver, Leroy, looking at the courthouse square of his fictional town: “The farmers who used to gather around the courthouse square on Saturday afternoons to play checkers and spit tobacco juice have gone. It has been years since Leroy has thought about the farmers, and they have disappeared without his noticing.”
Now the place itself seems gone.
When LaNelle went to Mayfield to check on the farm, she also wanted to see the Ice House Gallery, where she has sometimes exhibited her paintings. The Ice House, a compact brick building, dates back almost a century. I remember home delivery of blocks of ice in the forties. She e-mailed me that evening:
At the farm, she found that our prized ancient oak, its roots repeatedly damaged as the road was widened, had succumbed. She saw probably a dozen fallen trees on the property. “Most of them are rotten,” she wrote. “The big tree was hollow. . . . The barn collapsed. The corn crib is in a pile.”
The house was already in disrepair. It was originally my grandparents’ house, and my parents and I lived with them until I was four, when my parents built a little house in the woods. That house was torn down, about twenty-five years ago. “The damage is overwhelming,” LaNelle wrote. “The house lost a section of roofing. The deck collapsed. Sections of siding are gone.”
On her way back to Paducah, she drove past the candle factory. “Nothing there except scrap metal,” she wrote. “It’s hard for me to find words for what I’m feeling. Just empty.”
The wall of what was the Rexall’s where I worked has a mural now that reads “Mayfield. More Than a Memory.” If Mayfield is more than a memory, what is it?
There won’t be much of a Christmas in Mayfield this year for a lot of people who have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their family members, their pets. The candle-factory workers don’t have jobs. They’re angry and worried. Many people have been relocated to unfamiliar places for the holidays, and perhaps indefinitely. It will take a long time for them to settle into new jobs, new homes, new lives.
But a spirit of generosity and kindness prevails. Within hours of the disaster, help began flowing in. People all over the country packed their vehicles with supplies and headed for Mayfield. The fairgrounds, where I used to go to the harness races with my granddaddy, filled up with supplies. Pallets of water. Pet food. Bedding. The pavilions were stocked with clothes, toiletries, food, and medicine. Corporations sent food trailers.
John Calipari, the coach of the University of Kentucky’s basketball team, got the nonprofit Samaritan’s Feet to donate ten thousand pairs of shoes, and he led a telethon effort that so far has raised more than four million dollars.
“A young man came up from Nashville with a large grill and started cooking for people,” LaNelle texted me. “Not a cook, doesn’t have a restaurant, wanted to help.”
In my family, we are not going to do Christmas the usual way. “I’m too sad,” LaNelle said. She will be taking toys to kids in Mayfield. Don and his wife will be helping distribute dinners to people sheltering in the hotels.
I can’t shake the images of the candle-factory workers trapped under concrete slabs; of the gaping hollow where the clock tower once was; of the terror of the nursing-home patients, who huddled under blankets at the nurses’ station and survived; of my cousin’s house, twirling a hundred and eighty degrees, the foundation a lazy Susan; of the mighty oak tree, down; of the lost, bewildered animals.
But, in a photo my sister sent me, there is the pear tree beside our house, intact. In late October, it was loaded with beautiful pears. I brought full bags home with me.
