Year of Mourning: Storm-Devastated Family Rebuilt First, Cried Later : Aftermath: When a tornado churned across Indiana last June, their home was blown apart. Among the 10 lives lost was their baby son’s.

For a long time after Benjamin’s death, Tim and Donna Ray could not console one another. The tornado had exploded on them so suddenly--and taken so much.

Their trailer home was blown inside-out, its contents spewed over miles of country road. Their three young daughters were bloodied and bruised. And their 15-month-old son had been sucked from his mother’s arms into the vortex.

“Just like that, it was all over,” Donna said. “Everything was gone.”

A year has passed. The Rays have since built, month by month, a bittersweet life without Benjamin. Time has moved them along.

They now live in a white clapboard house on several acres along a rural road near the White River, a few miles from their old home and the fast-food restaurant Tim helps to manage.

Their new world is very much centered on the living, the laughter of Ginny, 8, Abby, 7, and Melissa, 4. They have chickens and ducks, rabbits, dogs and a pregnant cat. Soon Tim hopes to buy his daughters a pony.

“Losing our little boy, well, that stays with you,” said Tim, to whom the birth of a son had made his family seem complete. “But now--this is awful--sometimes it just feels like we never had him at all.”

Tim, 32, and Donna, 28, had no time to mourn Benny immediately after the storm. Tim had a badly broken leg; she had a fractured collarbone. Their battered daughters needed attention and some kind of temporary housing had to be found. A funeral was hastily arranged.

“I kind of had to force them to do something about burying my grandson,” said Donna’s father, Kenneth Tumey. “It was hard on them. Still, they couldn’t keep him in the morgue forever.”

In the hot days that followed the funeral, Tim lay on the living room sofa and wept. With his leg in a cast, he couldn’t work or help out at home, play with his daughters or take them to doctors’ appointments.

“And me,” Donna said. “Well, I kept my hurt inside. For a long time, I couldn’t talk to Tim about it. I couldn’t stop long enough to talk about anything. I just wanted to stay on the go all the time, stay busy, keep running. I knew if I stopped, I’d just break.”

Her hands were occupied with laundry, shopping lists, picking up after the girls. But self-reproach echoed in her head: If only she could have gripped Benny a little tighter in what was a losing battle against a 250-m.p.h. wind.

July, August, September passed. Tim tried, failed, tried again to reach Donna in all her confusion, rage and guilt. “I just didn’t want her carrying it around alone,” he said.

“So one day, we were in the car and he was practically begging me to talk about it,” Donna said. “And I just kept telling him I couldn’t, even though it was putting a strain on us at the time.”

Suddenly, finally, the tears came. He was crying, she was crying. Their girls sat quietly in the back seat. “It started the healing,” said Tim, reaching out to pull Melissa onto his lap one recent Saturday morning.

Friends and strangers have also smoothed their way back. People read of the family’s loss and responded with money, cards, Bibles, sympathy.

Tim’s co-workers at the Hardee’s restaurant collected clothing, household goods and cash for the family. A local hotel offered free lodging. A man of modest means whom the Rays barely knew gave them the 1977 Ford sedan that Donna now uses to get around in this quarry city about an hour south of Indianapolis.

One couple traveled miles to give them a microwave oven they had won in a raffle; someone else sent a blue mailbox with a red flag after reading that Donna craved reminders of a normal life.

Around the new year, the Rays started thinking about having another child.

“Kids are what we live for,” said Tim, who makes $20,000 a year stretch a long way for his girls. He draws them colorful pictures, takes them fishing, wrestles with them and applauds their artwork, their songs, their smiles.

“They don’t want to replace Benny,” said Karen Leonard, a close friend who drove up from her Florida home to be with the Rays after the tornado struck. “They know even if they have another little boy, it won’t be him.”

Relatives on both sides of the family cautioned the Rays about having more children even before Benny was born. Veterans of hard times, their parents know how tough supporting a large family can be.

“I raised six, and it’s a hard thing to do. I had to work two jobs to make ends meet and that can be rough,” Donna’s dad said.

After they got their little boy, the Rays agreed that Donna should have a tubal ligation. That their long-awaited son would be dead a year later was beyond anyone’s reckoning.

Doctors believe that, with luck, they’ll be able to reverse the sterilization. If it can’t be done, Tim and Donna are thinking they might adopt a child.

“Before Benny, we just wanted a little boy so bad,” Tim said. “Now we’ve learned it doesn’t matter, girl or boy. We just want a healthy child to hold.”

Benjamin Robert Ray was buried June 7, 1990, five days after the storm.

Thick, gray clouds shadowed the city that day. The limestone hills were green from rain. A train passed, its whistle whining.

It was an open casket, white and blue. A teddy bear was tucked into the satin lining beside Benjamin. His father was hobbled by the thigh-high cast he wore on his broken leg. A sling held Donna’s fractured collarbone, and fresh sutures showed on the deep gash beneath her thick, brown bangs.

“Lord, we are depending on you,” intoned the Rev. Elliott Perry, a family friend. The words and muffled sobs were lost on the Rays. Their heads were still spinning with the sound of thunder and the silence that came after the storm.

And there was that refrain, the one Donna first heard after the tornado as she dazedly came upon Benny’s limp body amid the debris: “That’s my son. That’s Benny. That’s my son, Benjamin Robert Ray.”

The name is now on a limestone marker in Beech Grove Cemetery: “Our little Benny.” The Rays moved their son’s plot last month to a peaceful, grassy spot where there is room for Tim, Donna and their daughters when the time comes.

Every so often, the girls ask about Benny.

“Can he hear us?” Abby asked her mother one day.

“Yes, he can hear us,” Donna replied. “He knows we’re here.”

But sometimes late at night, especially when it’s storming and she is curled up in bed, Donna frets about Benjamin outside buried in the dark, ungiving ground.

“I think of that grave now and wonder: Is he cold? Is he lonely?” Donna said.

“I’ve never let my kids spend the night away from home.”