EGGLESTON -- For the first time in her life, Joyce Bryant was dreading the first day of December.

Dec. 1. The first birthday since losing six children in a September explosion at her sister's Michigan home.

And the day following her 20th wedding anniversary.

Joyce Oginsky, the youngest of a large Catholic clan of 10 children, and Mark Bryant, the second of his Southern Baptist family's three children, were married Nov. 30, 1985, when he was 24 and she was 21.

Joyce still tells people that Mark is the man of her dreams, just as she had told her mother after one blind date involving the card game Uno and homemade ice cream: "I'm going to marry that man."

From that day forward, her dreams had never changed.

"I just wanted to get married and have children. I just wanted to be a mom."

And the children soon came -- nine in all.

First Rebekah Marie. Then Kameron Elizabeth and Jonathan Caleb.

Followed by Joseph Thomas, Nehemiah Henry, Martha Grace (called Martina), Sarah Judith, David Kostanty and Isaac Jackson.

Each beautiful, perfect baby given a biblical name and a family name.

"Why so many kids?" people inevitably asked.

And Mark would remember his plans.

He and Joyce were going to wait five years after marrying before starting a family. But then -- just six weeks after their wedding -- Joyce called him at work shouting, "Guess what? I'm going to have a baby!"

Stupidly, he replied, "Do we need a second opinion?"

'Because he came'

Dec. 1.

Joyce Bryant arose at 5 a.m. and tiptoed down the stairs of her large Victorian farmhouse in Giles County, leaving her husband to another hour of sleep in the warmth of their bed.

In the chill of the morning, she left her husband's side to sit beside the heater in the dining room. Her thoughts today were of Joseph, the fourth of her nine children and the one whose birthday was easiest to remember.

"He was born the day after our anniversary."

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

As part of a family routine, Joyce Bryant spreads out photos of her children before she studies the Bible.

Want to contact the family? Correspondence to the Bryant family is being handled by Pastor Shahn Wilburn and Riverview Baptist Church. To learn more, see the church Web site: riverviewbaptistchurch.com. Write to the family in care of Riverview Baptist Church, 219 Big Stony Creek Road, P.O. Box 206, Ripplemead, Va. 24150 A selection of hymns as sung by Rebekah Bryant Photo gallery: See more photos of the Bryant family and hear Rebekah Bryant sing 'Amazing Grace' Video: Watch video of Mark Bryant (Requires RealPlayer) A letter from Dad: Read Mark Bryant's letter to his six deceased children A journey of healing

A friend had told her to eat hot fudge sundaes if she wanted to go into labor, and she had eaten one, and it had worked.

Joseph was the only one of her babies who came screaming into the world. Later, she would appreciate the irony of that.

"Joseph -- out of all my children -- was the mildest."

He would have been 11. If Rebekah were here, she would make cheesecake, Joseph's favorite. Mark would bring home a balloon bouquet.

The celebration wouldn't quite achieve the magnitude of last year's traditional 10th birthday milestone, when Joseph had gotten a big surprise party and a treasured Michael Vick football jersey.

It was that jersey he was wearing on Sept. 11, when he was buried alongside Rebekah, Nehemiah, Martina, David and little Jackson.

Joyce Bryant placed her Bible on the new, round dining table that had replaced the mammoth rectangle where her family of 11 used to sit as they shared meals and studies and noisy chatter.

Opening it, she prayed for the words she needed to face this day.

The holy book took her to Psalm 16:

"Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge. ... Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. ... You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore."

Despite the ache in her throat, she smiled. What a comfort, she thought, to know that her children were joyful in the presence of the Lord.

Joseph -- Joyce's early bird, the boy who often joined her in morning meditation to cuddle as his siblings slept -- would celebrate this day with God.

God.

It isn't just a word.

God is real. God has never left her, not in her painful days, not in the shadow of night.

God is here, and God is there.

Right there with her children, face to face.

The sun began to rise, chasing away the darkness and casting beams on the vast lawn where Joseph and Nehemiah had played soldiers, digging foxholes in the earth.

Dec. 1 was here, and she would face it.

Tomorrow, she and Mark would take Kameron, Caleb and Sarah to get the Christmas tree.

"I have more reason to celebrate Christmas this year than any year before. Because he came. Christ really came."

'We need to pray'

In rural Michigan, where Joyce was raised with her nine siblings, the roads are flat and straight. You can see for a mile.

As she sped with her sister, Lorrie Kuchar, to the site of the explosion, Joyce could see what lay a mile ahead.

The flashing red lights of ambulances. The frantic movement of men in coats and helmets. The black wisps of smoke.

But she could not see her sister's house.

The house where she had left her children -- just an hour before -- was gone.

Joyce's own childhood here had been happy. As the baby of the large, close-knit family, she had surprised everyone by being the only one to move far away -- to Virginia -- and to have the biggest family.

"We used to call them the von Trapps," Lorrie recalled.

Despite being 10 years older than her sister, she considers Joyce her best friend. Every year, Lorrie would visit Virginia, and every year Joyce would come back to Michigan to stay at Lorrie's house.

When Joyce and her von Trapps were in town, everyone in the family stopped what they were doing and planned their time around the visit. Cousins and family friends would come to see the children. Tables would be laid. Parties would break out.

When Joyce loaded up eight of her nine children and headed to Michigan for the Labor Day weekend, Lorrie knew "she drove all the way up hoping for a wonderful time with us."

Mark Bryant and 17-year-old Kameron had stayed in Virginia so that Kameron could do some work for a class at New River Community College. The two planned to drive up later to join the rest of the family.

The other Bryant children were at Lorrie's house with an 18-year-old family friend, Joseph Moore, when the explosion happened.

Joyce had put Jackson, David, Sarah and Martina to bed early. The older ones were watching a ballgame on TV.

The first 911 call came in to the Shiawassee County Central Dispatch at 11:42 p.m. on Sept. 3. Soon, calls flooded the office with reports of a blast that shook the entire area.

Lorrie and Joyce were five miles from the house, helping their sister Judy to bed.

Judy Oginsky, 47, is unable to walk without assistance since having back surgery that injured a spinal nerve and left her with extremely limited mobility.

Every evening, Lorrie made the 12-minute drive to Judy's house to tuck her in. She was happy this night to have Joyce's help. It's much easier with two people.

Lorrie's cellphone rang just as she and Joyce were saying good night to Judy.

"That's my children, wondering where I am," Joyce groaned good-naturedly.

On the other end of the phone, Kathy Van Loon, another sister, broke the news:

"Lorrie, where's Joyce? There's been a terrible tragedy at the house. The house blew up with all the kids in it."

And so Lorrie and Joyce headed to the site of the explosion.

Lorrie advised her little sister: "Joyce, first we need to pray. We're no good to anyone if we don't first turn to God."

'It's a miracle'

Joyce graduated from Corunna High School with Scott Johnson in 1982. A year after graduating, Johnson joined the Corunna Volunteer Fire Department.

"I stayed here in my hometown," he said. "I had heard Joyce had moved out of state, but I didn't know where she went."

Now the fire chief for his southern Michigan town, Johnson's department was the first to respond to reports of an explosion at the nearby Caledonia Township. He felt the boom even before the calls started.

The sight that awaited him at the accident scene was, in his words, "just devastating."

"There was nothing left of the house. It was just scattered all over."

The only thing his crew could do when they arrived was begin a search-and-recovery effort. He didn't yet have an exact count of the number of people in the house, but his expectation of finding any survivors was nil.

For Joyce -- who arrived to a spectacle of complete chaos -- seeing Johnson's familiar face was the first of many blessings at the moment of her greatest despair.

She remembers running to her old friend and frantically asking, "How many? How many did you bring out? How many are alive?"

"I don't know, I don't know yet," was all he could manage to say.

"We've had some bad accidents but nothing of this magnitude," Johnson would later acknowledge.

And investigators would speculate that Lorrie's lovely Cape Cod could have been destroyed by a silent, undetectable gas leak. Now, it was nothing more than splinters.

Caleb's screams pierced Joyce's ears.

As a mother, she was used to screams. The wailing of a child who had fallen. The shriek of one with a cut.

But the sound Caleb made as he stared blankly while being whisked into an ambulance on a stretcher was harrowing. He was in shock, and his skin was scorched.

She put her face an inch from that of her 14-year-old son. "Caleb, I'm here. Mommy's right here. I'm here, son."

Then she got into the ambulance and methodically began answering the questions rescuers needed for Caleb's medical records.

Realizing that Caleb wouldn't be ready for transport until the medics had him stabilized, she hopped from the ambulance and ran to see about her other children.

How many? How many were alive? She had to know.

Finally, it was her sister Kathy who told her.

She very calmly held up two fingers and said, "Just two, Joyce."

"Go get in the rig with Caleb."

Six of Joyce's children were dead. Some were sleeping peacefully in bed, and some were gathered around a TV set when the blast occurred, catapulting them from the house. Their recovered bodies were intact.

It would be a short while later at the hospital before Joyce would know that it was Sarah, her 6-year-old, who was fighting for her life. The little girl had a hole in her lung. Both collarbones were broken, as well as a shoulder bone and the tibia in her right leg. When Joyce was allowed to peek into Sarah's room, she saw that her daughter's face was gray.

But she was alive.

"It's a miracle, truly a miracle," Johnson said, "that anyone survived."