After the storm, do you fight or falter?

STATE Rep. Dennis McKinney knelt on the concrete slab where his one-story brick home once stood. It’s gone.

So is his pickup, part of his wheat crop and a lifetime of family mementos.

“We can rebuild this,” said McKinney, 46, a tall, rangy man whose family has worked the land here for four generations. “This is Kansas. This is home.”

Ten blocks away, Larry Rogers and his sister Wanda Mott take a break from combing through the remains of their cafe and gift shop, and wearily glance around the once-bucolic downtown.

It looks like someone has taken a giant scythe and cut down the Kiowa County seat. All 1.5 square miles of it.

All but one of the town’s 11 local churches have been obliterated. The single-screen movie theater and soda shop? Gone. The police and fire department? The hospital? Destroyed. The schools? Ripped apart. The town’s sole stoplight? Lost in the rubble.

For Rogers and Mott, whose parents moved here nearly three decades ago, the loss is overwhelming. The siblings’ houses were destroyed, as was the home of Mott’s daughter. Their shop, a two-story building known for its collection of antiques and rooms decorated with Christmas merchandise year-round, is a mountain of crumbling brick. Much of that collection -- the candelabras from the 1800s, a velvet fainting couch from the 1930s, the animatronic Santa from a Macy’s window display -- is crushed.

Rogers plans to leave. Mott is wavering.

“The town is telling us, ‘In two years, Greensburg will be back,’ ” said Rogers, 47. “Two years? We can’t wait two years. If you don’t have a job, and you don’t have a home, it’s over.... All we can do is grieve and move on.”

But a tearful Mott doesn’t know what to do: “I don’t know what to think. I don’t know whether I’m staying or going. I barely know what day it is.”

In the 10 days since the tornado hit, this southwest Kansas community, once united by faith and family, has begun to splinter. Some, like Rogers, feel hopeless and fear something has been lost forever.

For families like the McKinneys, the disaster only strengthens their belief that Kansans are too stubborn and too tough to let a storm -- even one this devastating -- turn Greensburg into a ghost town.

GREENSBURG was a quiet village in a deeply religious stretch of Kansas, located about two hours west of Wichita. Roadside signs in the town’s outskirts asked whether drivers remembered to pray, and Sunday mornings usually generated rush-hour traffic.

Like much of the Midwest, Greensburg’s population has been aging. More than a quarter was 65 or older, according to 2000 U.S. census data. The town was also shrinking, as young people left in search of work in urban centers like Wichita and Kansas City, Mo. Its population peaked at about 2,000 in 1960. At the time of the tornado, the town had about 1,400 residents.

Rogers and Mott followed their parents to Greensburg in the 1990s, eager to live in the same town. They soon were charmed by the shady elm and cedar trees, planted when the town was founded in the 1880s, that surrounded modest farmhouses and elegant Victorians.

Greensburg prided itself on being self-sufficient. It owned and operated a power plant. It had its own hospital. The streets were safe: Children could wander at night, and parents could call them to supper by hollering out a kitchen window.

Despite a sluggish economy, there were jobs: Greensburg was home to several oilfield supply companies, and it was also a long-standing hub for wheat and milo farming.

Rogers and Mott embraced the town, named after a flamboyant stagecoach operator, along with its quirky tourist attractions: the world’s largest hand-dug well and a 1,000-pound meteorite.

They took over a building that had been a hotel in the 1900s for stagecoach travelers. Main Street Cafe and Candies was part restaurant, part gift shop. It offered ornate flower arrangements for brides, antique hat stands for collectors and hand-painted barn signs for interior decorators looking for a touch of country chic. Business boomed, particularly during the holidays, when shoppers from around the Midwest would wander through the extravagant Christmas exhibits and stock up on candy canes, ornate wreaths and singing Santas.

Rogers said his decision to move came the morning after the storm, when sunlight showed the magnitude of the destruction. How, he thought, could he rebuild both a house and a business?

Sitting on a pile of bricks that had once been the facade of their shop, Rogers and Mott wondered whether federal aid or insurance money could help them restore their business. Perhaps they could scour EBay to replace some of their antiques, or work with other dealers to restock their supply of holiday decor.

“But is anyone going to be around to buy them?” asked Mott, 56. “There are no businesses here. No jobs. No one will have salaries. Who’s going to have the money to pay for luxuries?”

Rogers shared those concerns.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I don’t have the energy to even try to figure out how.”

The pair decided to salvage as much from the shop as they could, and start scouting for a new location elsewhere in Kansas. They dug through the shop’s rubble for six days, hauling out crates of garlands, stacks of farm advertising signs, and mirrors whose ornate wooden frames only required a bit of polishing. Even the urns holding their parents’ ashes, stored in the back of the shop, were miraculously untouched.

Rogers thinks he’ll stay close. Perhaps he’ll move near friends in Coldwater, about 25 miles to the south, or Kinsley, about 27 miles to the north.

For Mott, who enjoys living in the same town with her daughter Missy, and her two grandchildren, the decision is less clear. Missy, 36, and her husband, Shawn, want to stay. The children love their school and Missy doesn’t want to uproot them, even though classes next year will likely be held in mobile trailers. Mott’s husband, Jerry, 55, was already back at his job as an agronomist with Archer Daniels Midland Co., whose local operation is running.

At first, Mott said, she focused on saving the family business in part to avoid making any decisions about the future.

But then Mott turned her attention to her house -- a turn-of-the-century, 19-room mansion with a ballroom on the third floor and a wide porch. The storm tore the building from its foundation, turned it sideways and slammed it into a neighbor’s home. Both buildings collapsed.

“It hit me today, the wall of realizing how much is gone,” Mott said. “I don’t know if I can handle staying.”

Dennis McKinney has spent the last few days combating such sentiments. Some friends and neighbors, particularly the younger ones who were leaning toward rebuilding, were easily convinced to remain.

Deciding to stay brings practical and emotional fallout, even for a family as determined as the McKinneys.

Dennis’ daughter Lindy can’t wait for school to start so she can be reunited with her classmates. But the 14-year-old prefers to spend her days on her grandparents’ farm, rather than come into town, because she can’t bear to see the damage. Since the tornado, she doesn’t like being alone at night. Dennis’ wife, Jean, eager to design a new house, has found herself exhausted by the overwhelming list of things to do.

“I keep trying to start one thing, then go on to another,” said Jean, 46. “I can’t seem to keep any continuity on anything I’m doing.”

DENNIS had weighed the pros and cons of staying. It will take months to rebuild their home, and years to reestablish the town’s basic business infrastructure. There will inevitably be problems with the insurance company. Finding reliable construction crews will be difficult.

But there are three things that Kansans don’t do: They don’t turn their back on family. They don’t turn their back on God. And they don’t turn their back on their town.

McKinney’s great-grandparents first plowed fields here in the late 1800s, turning the soil into fertile waves of wheat.

The family has weathered big storms through the years. They all agree, though, that this one felt far more ominous than any in the past: When the tornado siren was sounded at 9:25 p.m. on May 4, it was so dark outside that McKinney could barely see the outline of his white pickup truck parked in the driveway. Then, hail -- “some the size of hen’s eggs” -- crashed through the windows.

Jean was out of town, chaperoning a school field trip. Dennis shouted for Lindy to get into the basement and hide under the stairwell. He picked up his laptop, which held the family’s financial records, and headed downstairs.

It was one of the largest tornadoes in Kansas history: a 1.7-mile-wide funnel cloud that traveled 22 miles, and was on the ground for 62 minutes. The tornado hit Greensburg at 9:45 p.m. The National Weather Service estimates that it took less than 10 minutes for it to traverse the length of the town and level it.

McKinney said he knows the emotional toll on his friends and neighbors promises to last far longer.

Now, his phone constantly rings. Neighbors. Friends. Coworkers. All asking about his losses, and tapping his Rolodex for help with theirs. They know he has connections all over the Midwest from having been a state representative for 15 years.

He answers their questions. When given the chance, he lobbies them -- sometimes subtly, sometimes not -- to stay in Greensburg.

When one neighbor asked how he could locate a plow, McKinney pulled phone numbers for equipment dealers. Then, he talked about how great it was that the town’s grain elevator survived the storm. With the wheat harvest about to begin in the next few weeks, he pointed out, that could help make it easier for farmers who belong to the storage cooperative to get back to work.

“You’re staying, right?” McKinney asked.

One morning last week, as McKinney walked around his property with insurance adjusters, a reporter called with questions about his meetings with city leaders. What was the latest?

The news wasn’t great, McKinney replied. Mayor Lonnie McCollum couldn’t say when the basic necessities -- water, electricity, sewage -- would be restored. Right now, McCullom was more focused on figuring out where to park the hundreds of mobile homes being delivered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Not that the mayor has a cushy place to crash.

“He’s sleeping in a friend’s pickup,” McKinney told the caller.

Despite the hardships, some see opportunity.

Community leaders hope to build the rural town of their dreams, one where the amenities of a big city -- high-speed Internet access for everyone, environmentally friendly utilities driven by solar and wind power -- could be available. The American Institute of Architects has offered its services to map out plans to turn this into a green-energy hot spot.

“People are saying that it could be everything we’ve always loved about Greensburg, but even better,” McKinney said. “The future’s very bright. You just have to be able to see it.”

p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com