Vilonia reels from storm

VILONIA — As women swept glass, leaves and tree limbs off the wood floors of barber Mona Peach’s cedarlog home Tuesday, men outside sawed down branches from trees that a deadly EF 2 tornado had ripped from the earth.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Peach said, she was standing on her two-story home’s front porch looking at the clouds when a “tornado sat down on us.”

“Everything was swirling, and I ran” toward the basement. The strong winds blew out one window, then another, pushing her down the stairs.

In the darkness of the basement, she “looked up, and the house just raised up off the foundation and sat back down,” Peach, 51, recalled.

All the while, she was on the phone with her sister, Vaiva Pack, who said she could hear Peach screaming and praying.

“I’m Assembly of God,” Peach said, smiling, “so, we do pray loudly and in tongues. This time, it was in straight English.”

Peach wasn’t hurt in the storm. But the second-generation-owned barbershop that she operated next door is no longer there. Three barber chairs, one heavily damaged, sat in front of her house along U.S. 64 in Vilonia, where other homes and businesses also were heavily damaged.

Peach teared up as she said she had practiced her trade for 35 years as “an old-style barber” who shaved men with a straight razor. She took over the business from her mother, who ran a beauty shop there.

Her house was too damaged to survive the storm, she said, but she intends to rebuild the barber shop.

“We will start over,” she said.

After all, she’s started over before.

“I quit drugs, alcohol and tobacco six months ago,” she said.

Still, the storm is the toughest challenge she’s faced yet, she said as she stood in her kitchen, where a collection of crosses adorned one wall.

“I won’t be defeated,” she said, mentioning her trust in God. “Look at all my friends and family.”

Indeed, more than a dozen friends and relatives helped Peach sort through the debris Tuesday.

“This is her family and her church family,” said John Wimberly, youth pastor at First Assembly of God in Vilonia.

The tornado hopscotched as it ravaged houses and businesses along U.S. 64 and elsewhere in the Vilonia area but left some places intact, such as the small Beryl Cemetery and the flowers marking graves.

At the 8 Mile Store, a service station and convenience store about halfway between Conway and Vilonia, two police officers directed traffic Tuesday near the road leading to the devastated Black Oak Ranch Estates area.

All four people killed in Faulkner County died in the neighborhood filled with mobile homes and a few houses.

The store was bustling Tuesday with cars, trucks and emergency vehicles surrounding it as weary rescue workers and homeowners stopped by for some lunch or a cold drink.

“Any damage to your home?” a deli worker asked a customer who replied softly.

“Sorry to hear that,” the worker said.

Farther east on U.S. 64, a tractor-trailer rig lay overturned beside the highway, its heavy cargo scattered about. Downed power lines and trees robbed of their branches and leaves leaned against houses, barns, yards and roads.

Lorean Shaw, 86, sat quietly in a sport utility vehicle as her relatives salvaged family pictures and other belongings.

Shaw, 23 family members and friends, and her 11-year old great-grandson Kaleb Shaw’s Shih Tzu, Smidgeon, had found refuge the night before in a grass-covered storm shelter beside what used to be her mobile home.The door had rotted off, so Shaw’s adult grandsons turned a piece of plywood into a makeshift door.

“It took all me and my three brothers had to hold the door shut,” Dustin Shaw said.

Justin Shaw said his grandmother cried when “she heard us say, ‘There went the trailer!’”

“We were all praying,” Justin Shaw said. “Everybody just started praying” out loud.

The Shaws weren’t able to get Kaleb’s other dog, Otis, into the shelter. But when they emerged, the pet “walked up to the storm cellar,” Justin Shaw said.

Kaleb, wearing a red Vilonia Eagles T-shirt, was among a few family members who lived with his great-grandmother. He said he was upset by the loss of their home and another item.

“I’m missing my guitar,” he said. “We haven’t found it.”