On a warm April evening in tiny Simonton, Texas, Jill Norwood is driving home from T-ball practice with her sone Graham, 8, and daughter Joy, 4. Joy needs to go to the bathroom, keeps saying she can’t wait, so Jill begins to pull the dark green, nine-passenger Ford van under the shade of a large tree. The children are chattering and teasing each other, as brothers and sisters do, Graham in his dark baseball cap, Joy in her pink stretchy pants and top.
It is dusk. There are no street lamps to illuminate the deserted, two-lane country road. Unseen, a weather-beaten pickup truck without lights is approaching.
Because of limited space on her side of the road, Jill has pulled the van onto the opposite shoulder. Joy suddenly pops open the passenger-side door and, confused
about which side of the road they’re on, bolts right into the truck’s path. The truck slams into the little girl, hurling her body 80 feet through the air. The truck never slows down. It keeps going and disappears down the dusty road as Jill races to her daughter, lying in the road. Joy’s shoes have been knocked off. Her bladder has burst. Jill starts to cry.
“I am holding my tiny little child and I am wailing,” she remembers, dabbing tears as she recalls the tragedy. “Wailing like I had read about in the Old Testament. I am kneeling beside the van and I am holding her, and rocking back and forth, and I’m wailing. I felt her leave.”
Jill calls her husband, Grover. By the time he arrives, it is dark, and the night is lit up like a war zone with emergency vehicles everywhere. Joy is being airlifted to a hospital. Soon, all that is left are the police chalk marks where her body had lain. She died at the scene, a death with ironies, surprises, and lessons of loss and forgiveness impossible to imagine, and perhaps not of this world.
Simonton is two towns, really, symbolized by two churches that serve the area and the surrounding communities of Fulshear and Wallis on the flat Texas plains outside Houston. The churches stand about half a mile apart on a winding country road called FM-1489, flanked by woods and open pastures and farms growing mostly rice and corn. One church is what the locals call “country big,” 150 feet by 90 feet, with a towering white steeple that dominates the landscape. It can hold 350 people and does so every Sunday. Everything about the church is white, from the paint to the Agapanthus flowers to the congregation. The other is “country small,” with a tiny steeple but no bell. The bell was stolen years ago by drug addicts hoping to pawn it, and disappeared. Locals call this one the “welfare church.” If people sit close together, it can hold 50 to 60. For years, these two churches divided rich from poor—blacks from whites.
Until Joy’s father, Grover Norwood, brought them together.
Grover was the son of Wiley Norwood, a former military man who contracted tuberculosis during World War II and moved his wife and two sons, Grover and Steve, from city to city in the late ’40s and ’50s, searching for a cure. “I was in 12 different schools before ninth grade,” Grover recalls, “following Daddy from sanitarium to sanitarium.”
Grover Norwood, now 67 with salt-and-pepper gray hair, says all that moving around taught him three things: That you have to make friends fast, that you have to cope with sudden change, and that you “never give up.” He took those lessons with him to Vietnam in 1970, where he piloted nimble forward-air-controller spotter planes on more than 200 missions into the most dangerous battle zones, coordinating the rescue of American troops pinned down by the Viet Cong. During his 13 months of service, he was awarded two Silver Stars for valor.
“The piles of soldiers’ bodies in Ban Me Thout, the smell of the crematorium—a horrible, haunting smell that somehow let you know it was human before you even saw the bodies—those things still sometimes make me cry,” Norwood says.
Photo: Jack Thompson
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