Making Good on a Promise

It was just 2 p.m., but the sky was black when Stan Flint heard the crash.

Hurricane Katrina was storming along the Gulf Coast, and even here, 100 miles inland, the wind was uprooting what it couldn’t flatten.

Stan was huddled with his wife and two children when the wind reached for the giant oak in his yard. It was an old tree, 80 feet tall at least, and Stan had been telling his neighbor for months that he’d take it out. Katrina got there first.

The wind yanked the oak up by its roots and dropped it on the house next door.

Stan ran outside. Shouting for his elderly neighbor, he clawed through the rubble. He found 80-year-old Mary Jane Pingrey in a corner chair. The fire department helped him pull out her body and Stan drove it to the hospital himself, in his Infiniti.

Returning to his frightened family, Stan kept thinking of the tree he had meant to cut down. Then his thoughts would turn to Katrina, on the coast. His mother and his five brothers lived in the hurricane’s path.

His youngest brother, Dallas, had built a three-story house right on the water in the small town of Gautier. Kenneth lived four blocks inland. Phillip, who had Down syndrome, was in a long-term-care center close by.

His mother, Fannie Lee Parr Flint, lived in Gautier too. She still owned the house where they all grew up, but she was in a senior center now, her emphysema so bad she needed oxygen day and night.

Lee Wayne, the oldest, lived about 20 miles north of the beach in the rural community of Barton. The only brother not in Mississippi was Ronnie. He lived an hour’s drive west, just off the Louisiana coast.

Ever since Hurricane Frederic battered the Gulf Coast in 1979, the brothers and their parents had a pact: They would stick close.

They had made it through Frederic in the family house in Gautier. When the roof started to lift, they tried to leave for a shelter, piling into a pickup, three to a lap. They turned back when they saw a funnel cloud. They later learned that the shelter they were headed to had collapsed, killing those inside. The family house survived.

“After that, the family attitude was: We’ll always stay together,” Stan said.

He wanted to be together now.

But he had his own family to think about. While he had been driving Mary Jane’s body to the hospital, another neighbor had taken in his shaken wife and their children. They were in the neighbor’s kitchen, drinking tea, when they heard a second crack.

Another tree had toppled -- this time on the Flints’ house. It smashed through the dining room and the kitchen and tore off half the roof.

Stan sent his wife and children to the safety of a cousin’s home farther north, where lights and phones still worked and the water was still on.

Then he tried to find out what Katrina had done to the rest of his family.

*

Stan, a lean and rangy 53, works as a political lobbyist and consultant. He has connections all over this capital city, but by Tuesday he realized that none of them had the answers he needed.

Did Momma have enough oxygen? Was Dallas OK? Where was Phillip? Were there still nurses around to help him if he choked on his food?

Stan dialed every relative he had on the coast. The lines were down.

He needed to get home.

His friends told him he was crazy to think of driving south. Looters were running wild. He’d run out of gas. He’d be arrested.

“My family needs me,” Stan said. “Everybody’s hurting. And when we hurt, we seek each other out.”

He heard through his political connections that a contractor with the Federal Emergency Management Agency was coming into Jackson to drive south with supplies. He made plans to caravan behind.

By Wednesday afternoon, Stan had bought the last 17 bottles of water from the local CVS pharmacy. He filled a cooler with supplies scavenged from the few stores open in town: a spare oxygen tank for his mother, Fig Newtons, toilet paper, a cantaloupe, turkey sandwiches, a bottle of vodka. He added a propane stove and seven bottles of beer.

Then his cellphone started ringing.

Patchy service had been restored. His brothers were checking in.

Lee Wayne called to say they’d found Phillip, stuck in a shelter without power. Lee Wayne promised he’d go get him.

He called back a little later to say he’d rescued their 78-year-old mother as well. He’d taken her out of the storm-damaged senior center and made her comfortable in his house.

Stan was accompanying FEMA personnel to a meeting at Jackson City Hall when his brother Dallas called.

In a flat voice, he told Stan: “It’s all gone.”

“What do you mean, it’s all gone?” Stan asked.

“That’s it,” Dallas replied. “There’s nothing left of my house but the pylons. When can you come home?”

“I’ll be there by tonight,” Stan promised.

*

Just before 7 p.m. Wednesday, fortified with a plate of barbecued pork, Stan drove a rented SUV onto Highway 49, heading south.

Right outside Jackson, he noticed a line of cars two miles long waiting for gas. That was the last open business he’d see. Everything else was dark -- boarded up or blown over by Katrina.

Convoys from various power companies rumbled past, headlights glowing. There had to be hundreds of them, all driving south.

To keep awake, Stan told the reporter accompanying him about the crawfish boils the family used to have on the coast, with great vats of fresh-caught shrimp.

He talked of the old family house on Bayou Pierre Street: That was where they’d gather for Sunday meals after church -- fried chicken and three kinds of pie. After lunch, Phillip used to dress up like Elvis, in a black wig and sunglasses, and entertain them with a hip-shaking “Hound Dog.”

Their daddy, a former sharecropper, ran a union for shipyard metalworkers; he kept an office in the house. His name was J.W. Flint, but everyone called him The Ole Man. When he died in a car accident in 1981, they even put that on his tombstone: The Ole Man.

Stan talked about the tree out back where he prayed after his father was killed. And the living room where all the brothers huddled under mattresses as Hurricane Frederic rattled the roof.

“It’s so hard to think that it’s gone,” Stan said, his voice scratchy with emotion.

Trees were down everywhere. Broken-down cars lined the highway, scores of them, out of gas. Stan drove past a red pickup with Louisiana plates. The bed was crammed with suitcases, coolers and blankets. Two pairs of feet, limp with sleep, hung out the back.

The air smelled of pine sap and burned wood.

Stan tried not to look at all the damage. Forcing himself to stay chipper, he told funny stories about his family, eyes fixed on the highway.

Once, he spotted a gas station that looked as if it might be open, so he slowed. A dozen camouflage Humvees were parked near the pumps. A GI shook his head and waved Stan on.

At Hattiesburg, he tried to exit but ended up in front of a roadblock. SWAT officers with rifles stood guard in front of an orange barricade.

“Move this car or I’ll move it for you right now!” one shouted.

Stan was so flustered, he couldn’t work the switch to roll down the window. “But I’m going to the coast,” he stammered.

“Get on the right road!” the officer yelled.

Stan turned around, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his arms shook.

Nearly three hours into the journey, he was heading south on Highway 63, looking for the turnoff to Lee Wayne’s house. Flashing his high beams, he swerved around downed branches. He kept slamming the brakes to squint at every street he passed.

“I can’t tell where the dang-gum road is,” he cursed.

All the signs had been blown away.

At last he found the turn, and rattled up a long gravel driveway to the 45-acre estate owned by his oldest brother and his wife, Shirley.

Katrina had knocked over trees and sheared the roof off a neighbor’s barn, but Lee Wayne’s sprawling one-story house was intact. There was running water. And a generator provided enough power to run a portable air conditioner in Momma’s room -- and to keep the Michelob Ultras cold.

Lee Wayne was in the garage fiddling with the generator when Stan pulled up. Two dogs started barking, announcing his arrival. Stan walked straight toward Lee Wayne and embraced him, wordless.

Then Lee Wayne whispered, “Welcome home.”

On the back porch, Dallas’ oldest daughter, Rachel, 22, was flipping through several dozen photos she had dug out of the rubble of their house.

The house itself was gone. All the houses along the water had vanished. The only thing left were the pylons that had kept them above sea level. Bleached and jagged, they looked like bones.

Seawater had damaged the salvaged photos so the faces were hard to make out. They reeked of sewage, but Rachel clung to them.

She brushed off the mud and studied the faded images: Her brother Hayden’s kindergarten graduation. Her best friends relaxing at a spa.

“Are you OK?” Stan asked her, reaching down for a hug.

Rachel shook her head no.

*

Ever since the hurricane, relatives from all along the Gulf Coast had been making their way to Lee Wayne’s house, drawn by the need to be together.

Nephews and cousins in cutoff shorts and sweaty T-shirts wandered through the kitchen. A TV was on, playing local news, and from time to time someone would sit down and watch. But mostly, they talked, quietly and somberly, clasping hands, patting shoulders, hugging.

When they were tired, they sprawled on the floor, grabbing a sofa cushion, an air mattress and a blanket.

Stan’s face relaxed.

“There’s no me. There’s no ‘I want to sleep in the comfortable bed’ or ‘I want that extra sausage.’ We have to come together to ... survive,” he said.

He was wearing a rubber bracelet, bright pink, which he had found on a debris-strewn beachfront street. It said “strength.”

“I think I’ll wear this for a while,” he said.

*

On Friday, Stan woke up early on the black couch in the TV room. The floor was wall-to-wall family.

Through the windows, he could make out Lee Wayne’s pond, and the clotheslines Shirley had strung up among the downed limbs that littered the lawn. Hummingbirds chirped.

On a green towel by the china cabinet, Dallas’ children had laid out a few treasures they had saved from their wrecked house: a Raggedy Ann doll, a beaded necklace, a bottle of Black Rage nail polish and a bottle of So Pink perfume, nearly empty.

Stan took off his glasses to rub his eyes. His face was rough with gray stubble.

“I was just thinking about what happened back in Jackson,” he said. “I was thinking about digging through that house and reaching out and rubbing that lady’s arm, and it was so cold, so very cold. And then I was looking at my family, here and alive. And I can’t help but cry....

“The idea of asking why is as irrelevant as asking why a bear catches a fish in a river,” he said. “It is what it is.”

Later, he and Dallas drove to the family house. It was quiet as they navigated the wreckage of Gautier. Shredded lingerie and children’s dolls hung from tree limbs. A purple cable-knit sweater was wrapped around a fence post. Diesel fuel shimmered on top of the marshy canals that wound through the neighborhood.

The house where they had eaten so many Sunday dinners was destroyed.

Katrina had ripped off the doors and blown down most of the walls. Stan stood there for a moment, looking out across the lawn at the shed he and his brothers used as a woodworking shop.

Then he stepped in through a gaping hole where the sliding glass doors used to be.

Fiddler crabs scuttled across the floor. Stan turned in a slow circle.

“That’s where my dad gave me hell for coming home late and hung-over once,” he said, pointing to the ruined office.

He turned back to the living room. “This is the room where we survived Frederic,” he said.

Stan didn’t spend long at the house. He wanted to drive back to Jackson to see his wife and children, who had returned. He had promised to pick up some supplies too -- clothes for Dallas, medicine for Momma and more fuel for the generator.

Stan plans to come back today so he and his brothers can pick through the debris of the family house. He hopes they’ll be able to salvage a few things. If not, at least they’ll be together. The wrecked house, he said, doesn’t matter.

“It’s just nails and studs.”

Times staff writer Stephanie Simon in Denver contributed to this report.

*

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