ATKINS, Ark. – On Southeast Fourth Street, everyone steps outside as the storms come. When no one saw the Cherry family this time, people assumed they weren’t home.

And for as long as he lives, James Dillion will wish he’d checked.

Strong thunderstorms aren’t uncommon as the seasons change in north-central Arkansas, but last week’s storms gave Dillion enough pause to call his wife and tell her to come home. They picked up two neighbors and drove up the road to another neighbor’s tornado shelter as the sky grew worse.

It wasn’t until the nine inside shut the shelter’s door that Dillion’s wife, Ann, made the horrible realization that the Cherry family might be huddled in their manufactured home.

As the storms came in Tuesday, though, no one saw any of them.

“I look out and the tornado was right on top of us. We slammed the door on it and I knew they were in that house,” James Dillion said.

Ann Dillion, 62, began to feel her heart beat strangely and felt pain in her chest as she wept. It would turn out to be the first sign of a major heart attack.

The noise subsided. The shelter door opened to a dark sky and a path of destruction across the fields.

And the Cherry home simply was gone. All that remained of his neighbor’s home was the concrete slab and an exposed water pipe, still flowing after the storm.

Rain began to fall as the survivors called out for the Cherrys. They found Dana and Jimmy Cherry in Dillion’s pasture, about 150 yards from their home. It took searchers until long after nightfall to find Emmy.

James Dillion stood in front of his own single-story ranch home as contractors put up framing next to it Friday. Doctors sent his wife to the Arkansas Heart Hospital in Little Rock, about 60 miles away southeast of Atkins. Ann Dillion received several stents and seemed to be doing well.

Yet James Dillion couldn’t help but think back to the Cherrys. James Dillion put his arm around one of Dana Cherry’s sons, offering to do anything.

For now, rebuilding his home of 30 years occupies him. A short distance away, a 20-foot pile of debris smoldered in his pasture.

A backhoe lifted up chunks of what used to be the Cherrys’ home, exposing the glowing core of fire within. The bucket dropped a large chunk onto the pyre, sending gray smoke into a clear blue sky.