RAINSVILLE, Ala. — Moments after a tornado roared through here, Corey Plunkett and his wife, Lindsay, looked out across the green field where their trailer had been and saw an alien wasteland of twisted, shredded debris under the blackened sky.
The next day, they sorted through the fragments in the bright sun: ripped photos of strangers; a piece of someone else’s mattress; someone else’s medicine. When the wind blew, shards of fiberglass from someone else’s house stung their faces.
Everything was someone else’s; their belongings were mostly gone.
On the third day, near midnight, an exhausted Corey Plunkett sat at his parents’ trailer and checked his e-mail. There was a new message.
“My name is Charlie Thompson,” it read. “My wife and I live in Hixson, TN. We found a paystub in our front yard that the tornado carried in. . . . Is this you? Await response.”
Alone in the quiet, the tattooed, bearded 25-year-old cried and then began typing.
In the days since one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history pulverized the South, one peculiarity has distinguished the event: not just the vast scale of destruction but its randomness, the rearranged landscape it left behind.
The tornados not only obliterated miles of forests and neighborhoods but also flung a truck onto a rooftop, a wedding veil into tree limbs, a lamp into a refrigerator. A million smaller fragments, the details of lives, were swept into the sky and carried perhaps hundreds of miles in different directions.
• • •
In the green field, Corey and Lindsay Plunkett tried to make sense of things, starting with the idea of nothingness.
“First, it was like, I wanted to brush my teeth, and I had no toothbrush,” Corey Plunkett said, tossing a piece of siding off a heap. “I wanted to shower. No shower. Wanted to shave. No razor. Nothin’. You never feel so helpless in life as when you don’t have nothin’.”
“Then I got this e-mail, and it hit me,” he said. “I was like, ‘My stuff is all over the world.’ Just floating out there.”
Personal things, such as tax returns or the sparkly halter top Lindsay wore on their first date. Underwear. His four spiral notebooks of poems and regrets he called his “notebooks of thoughts.” It made him feel slightly uncomfortable imagining who might have them, how they might read words he had meant for his wife or his daughters, or just for himself.
He wondered about Charlie Thompson, who held a piece of their life in his hands. Who knew their address. Who could surmise that Corey Plunkett worked at a carpet factory. And, of course, that he made $360 gross a week.
This stranger, who knew nothing of them only a few days before, now knew some of their most intimate details.
They began exchanging e-mails. Corey sent short ones: Thank you so much for finding me, and God bless. Charlie sent long ones. In his third, he offered an explanation for the tornado and a kind of confession.
“It’s just the way things go in this imperfect world,” he wrote. “It’s hard, I know. But it’s only a test. I fail these tests every day.”
On the day of the tornadoes, Charlie Thompson had stood on his front porch, his wind chimes making music.
The storms had been coming in waves, bending tall oaks and old pines, then giving way to a lull, then whipping up again. During a lull, Thompson called to his wife, Melissa, who is 43 and had a stroke last year. She rolled her wheelchair to the small wooden porch. A thick fog was blowing toward Hixson, pouring over ridges and finally across their neighborhood.
“Then we looked up,” said Thomp son, a tall, heavyset man in his 40s with thinning blond hair in a ponytail. “And there was all this debris. It was all just fluttering down like confetti.”
The next day, Thompson walked the property, picking pieces of pink insulation and roof shingles from wet grass.
“It looked like a trailer had been blown to pieces,” he said.
He began looking for clues, to see how far it all had all traveled. He spotted the pale green paper.
First, he thought: “My God, this has come all the way from Alabama.” Then: “Gosh, I wonder if this person is OK.” Picking it up, a thought more uncomfortable set in. “I wonder if I’m holding a dead man’s property.”
He walked back inside. He got on the Internet, found Corey Plunkett’s e-mail address and sent the first message.
The night Corey’s reply arrived, something like elation washed over the little cottage.
Melissa Thompson rolled her wheelchair into the bedroom and arranged three cardboard boxes, one of them with an envelope at the bottom. The couple filled them and mailed them to Rainsville, Ala.
• • •
On the sixth day, Corey Plunkett was sitting with his dad, who also works at the carpet factory, and his mom, a retired 911 operator, in their trailer.
Corey and his dad, a quiet person who keeps his hands in his jeans pockets, had gone fishing the day before, although it was too windy.
“My wife’s dad gave me a fishing pole,” Corey was saying. “He didn’t go out and buy a pole. He gave me his own.”
“That tells it,” his dad was saying, when the delivery truck pulled up.
In the early afternoon, the delivery man hauled three boxes onto the back porch, 70 pounds total, and stood there a moment with Corey and his dad.
“Well,” the delivery man said. “Y’all have a good day.”
In the living room, Corey used a knife to open the boxes.
He pulled out Heather Thomp son’s dolls, and Melissa Thompson’s blouse and Charlie Thompson’s shirts. He pulled out new toys for his daughters. He pulled out razors, and a brand new Crimson Tide cap, which the Thompsons knew Corey would like because they had found photos of him on the Internet wearing one.
“I needed a hat,” Corey said to himself, not realizing.
He emptied the boxes until the only thing left was the plain white envelope, “Corey” written on it in cursive. He opened it.
There was no note inside. No pay stub. Instead, there were $20 bills, which he fanned out and counted, $160 in all. He was quiet.
“Oh, Corey,” his dad said.
Corey Plunkett stared at all the belongings of strangers that were now his own.
