But not the weekend he and six other members of John Calvin Presbyterian Church went to eastern North Carolina to hammer nails and fill cracks in new sheetrock, to rebuild homes for people devastated by the floods Floyd left behind.

Pictures?

Who had time?

But a newspaper photographer who’s taken pictures as long as Wayne can’t forget his camera completely, especially when the story is North Carolina’s most expensive disaster.

So, now and again during his two days in Greenville, he put down his hammer or his trowel and focused his camera and listened to stories of shock and sorrow, of high water and ruined furniture, of cars that will never run again and once nice homes that smelled of dank and dirty water and mold.

The stories were all around him.

And the message was always clear.

The flood is no longer on the front page every day. But every day those who lived through the havoc it wrought are struggling to put their lives together again.

People who lived in 400 houses in Greenville are still dislocated, their homes destroyed or heavily damaged or being demolished. Their belongings trashed. Their needs enormous.

And when seven John Calvin members drive nearly 250 miles to sleep in a church basement and spend their weekend working for three families in trouble, as people have done virtually every weekend since the flood ...

Well, Jacquelyn Rainey, Mary Dupree and Bobby Little can’t find words big enough to say what they feel.

The Tar River is 2 1/2 miles from Bobby Little’s home, but it rose eight feet in his neighborhood, covered the foundation of his house, rose a foot or more inside and pushed the mold up another three feet. That meant everything below four feet high had to be torn out and thrown away — walls, carpet, furniture, appliances, kitchen cabinets, clothing, books, toys, photograph albums, food.

But there was enough left worth saving — if someone could do the work.

Once volunteers removed trash that had once spelled home and cut away four feet of the sheetrock walls, more sheetrock could be put up, filled and painted.

But Bobby Little lost more.

A math and reading teacher for 20 years before he and a friend opened a second-hand furniture store nine months ago, he also lost his store and everything in it — and had no insurance.

And Wayne Hinshaw will never forget the look on Little’s face when the John Calvin crew walked into his house on Sunday morning to lend a hand.

Bobby was there alone, in a closet, filling joints with a broken plastic trowel, and when he saw that a crowd had come in, ready to help ...

“He was just elated,” Wayne says. “You’re in here working all by yourself and the whole world is out there, and all of a sudden nice people come in to help you.”

Of course, it wasn’t all of a sudden.

Hurricane Floyd smashed into North Carolina on Sept. 15, a Wednesday. The flood that followed inundated the eastern part of the state on the night of Sept. 16-17 — and people from all over the country have been coming to the aid of suffering North Carolina communities ever since, doing whatever they can do.

Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, landed in Greenville unintentionally, explains Janie Buck, a medical office manager, who’s become her hometown’s flood volunteer coordinator.

She works with GIFT — Greenville Interfaith Fellowship Team— started by Cornerstone Missionary Baptist Church, and it’s name is more than an acronym.

It means that everything anyone does, she says, “is a gift to the people of Greenville who need their help.”

And it was certainly a gift that flood waters stopped Graham in Goldsboro. He and volunteers were headed to Kinston with two tractor-trailers loaded with equipment to help people dry and repair their homes.

But they couldn’t go any further, so they stayed in Goldsboro three weeks because people there needed help, too, and then came to Greenville and stayed until they’d finished tearing out everything that needed tearing out, like the bottom half of Bobby Little’s walls.

And now that Graham’s gone because the tearing out’s done, he’s still spreading the word to other churches that Greenville has 400 homes that need to be repaired or replaced.

“And we’ve had volunteers from Ohio, Florida, Oregon, Cary, Monroe, Charlotte, Boone,” Janie says, “and Rowan County.”

Thyatira Presbyterian volunteers who went to Greenville suggested John Calvin lend a hand. And John and D.J. Whitfield, Carolyn Kester, Nancy Dane, Joyce Caddell, Laine Byers and Wayne Hinshaw did. They were joined when they got there by Terry Wood of Oregon and Chis Rodenbough of Madison.

Terry was in Iowa visiting his mother when he heard about the flood.

“He’s a painter,” Wayne says, “and he said he knew they needed help, so he came.” The first day, he got a permanent job painting and on weekends he volunteered, lived in his van and stayed until he left to spend Christmas with his mother in Iowa.

Chis is the teacher.

A builder first, he turned missionary, using his skills to help people struck by disaster — and the flood brought him to Greenville.

At the beginning, Janie says, “most anybody felt like they could come down and tear something out, but now people say, ‘I don’t know how to put up dry wall’ or ‘I don’t know how to paint.’ And I say, “God will show you exactly what to do.’ ”

“Actually,” Wayne says, “Chis shows them what to do. And then he comes back around to see if you’re doing it right.”

The John Calvin group got there late on a Friday night, dropped their bags in the extra fellowship hall in the basement at First Presbyterian Church in Greenville — one room for men, another for women, make-shift showers and an air mattress each — and at 8 the next morning were inside Johnnie and Jacquelyn Rainey’s house filling cracks in sheetrock.

That’s easier, especially on the emotions, than tearing houses out, Janie says.

“I helped do that,” she says, “and you’d see these elderly people who have worked all their lives watching you take everything out and throw it out by the road, and I would come home every night and cry. These people are too old to work. They can’t get a job, and I just felt like I’ve got to help where I can. I think that’s the thing everybody is seeing. And the people who came on the weekends — they can’t do enough to help the people.”

During two days in Greenville, the John Calvin volunteers put sheetrock in three houses and got them ready for the next step — and heard their stories, those flood stories that will never be forgotten.

The Raineys had a little flooding with the rain that came with the hurricane that Wednesday, but it cleared up.

“I remember thinking the worst is over,” says Jacquelyn, a teacher’s assistant in the Pitt County schools, “and that wasn’t so bad. The water went down, but on Friday, it started to rise, and I remember riding by the mobile home park that morning and they were helicoptering people out of there, and I said to Johnnie, ‘Do you think we could take a family in?’ People were literally lined up on the side of the road.”

Their house is on a slight hill and they never thought they, too, would be victims when the river rose.

But by supper time, everybody was told to get out.

They left both their cars and drove out in her father’s van, which just happened to be there.

“It was like driving through a river,” she says.

And they didn’t see their own home again for a week and two days.

“It smelled like death and a fishery put together,” she says. “Everything that wasn’t messed up by water was messed up by mold.”

Now they spend every minute they can working in the house.

“You think you’re about halfway there, and then you look at everything that’s been done, and you think, good gosh!”

And they couldn’t be more grateful for people like the John Calvin group.

“God allows things to happen,” Jacquelyn says, “so He can come in and show what He can do. It’s been a beautiful experience. These are people that don’t know us. They came in and helped us, putting hands on, actually helping us rebuild our house. Everything happens for a reason.”

Mary Dupree’s house was next.

She lives alone and had no one to help her with the work that needed doing.

“But she was thrilled to death that she was finally seeing some work done,” Wayne says, and she left no doubt that she, too, felt what everyone was feeling.

“They all wanted to get back in their houses.”

Dark came before they got through there, so they went back Sunday morning after Janie Buck took them to see worst hit Pitt Street, only half a mile from where the Tar River crested at 30 feet. On Pitt Street the water was eight feet deep.

“The city’s utility plant was in that neighborhood,” Wayne says. “All their warehouses, electrical building, everything was under water. Janie Buck’s son worked for the utility department, and he had to take boats to get parts out.”

Most of those houses will have to be demolished.

After leaving the destruction on Pitt Street, they returned to Bobby Little’s home, which is in the same neighborhood with Jacquelyn Rainey and Mary Dupree.

Little was there, working by himself. But first, he told them about his own escape.

“I pulled out and got down the road maybe 500, 600 feet,” he says, “and the van cut off, and by that time, I was out of light. It was dark, and I heard the sound of frogs or snakes, and I put up the windows and sat there, hoping the van would start.”

Eventually it did.

But now, after the flood, his house isn’t the only problem. The flood did away with his business and it’s hard to get a job.

“When you put down that you were self-employed and you’re not working because of the flood, you get no job offers. They think that when you get yourself straight, you’ll be leaving anyway.”

So he works on the house and hunts for a job. And when those people from John Calvin Presbyterian arrived to help ...

“Man! they were heaven sent,” he says. “It’s hard now, but I’m not truly worried because I know it’s going to all work out. In the end, everything will be all right. That’s what keeps me going. I know God’s looking after us. I feel like as long as I put forth the effort and try to do all I know and all God wants me to do, things will be OK.”

When the Salisbury crew left late Sunday afternoon for the trip home, they were tired and sore and stiff — but satisfied.

“We were all glad we went,” Wayne says, even if they had all worried whether they’d be able to do the job they were assigned.

“We were kind of hoping we would paint. All of us knew how to paint. But none of us had ever done anything like that before. At first, we thought we’d need sledge hammers because we’d be tearing out walls, but we didn’t take any sledgehammers. We took all our paint supplies, but we didn’t use any of that.”

But by the time they got to Bobby Little’s place, Wayne says, “We were 24-hour experts, and he was asking, ‘How do you do this?’ and ‘How do you do that?’ ”

They told him.

“When you put eight people on a job,” he says, you learn a lot. Fast.

“In the beginning, we had oodles of volunteers,” Janie Buck says, “but now the numbers are beginning to drop off. Many came to tear out. We need more volunteers to come to restore. Do we have enough? No. Volunteers come on the weekends, but they can’t come during the week, and there’s still so much to be done.”

And will be, she believes, for at least a year.

Nothing matches the need.