Chapter 52

I was thirty-four years old and had never once seen a tornado in the great state of Mississippi. Heard about a lot of them, of course, and saw the tremendous damage they could do—highways littered with overturned cars and uprooted trees, downed power lines, roofs torn right off otherwise intact houses. But they had always passed us by. We’d had a few close calls. When I was twelve, the Lann’s house about a mile down the road had been utterly flattened, and Victoria Lann, one of my best friends since first grade, had died, along with her mother and younger sister. A few years ago, an EF5 had blown through and devastated Smithville, a town not far from Tupelo, before cutting a swath of destruction right across the state line into Alabama. And of course, everyone knew about the great tornado of 1936 that had devastated Tupelo itself. For all that, I had never seen an actual tornado, much less been in one.

“Papaw!” I shouted, barging into his room.