Prologue

It dropped out of the sky at 3:41 p.m. central daylight time on Friday, May 10, 1963, into a field in southeastern Oklahoma eight miles west of Tishomingo. It was so big you could have seen it from Tishomingo if it hadn’t been dark as midnight there, hailing hunks of ice the size of hockey pucks. But you could see it from Madill, eleven miles away. Well, the top of it anyway. And the monster super-cell thunderstorm that birthed it, you could see that for more than a hundred miles in every direction.

It didn’t look like a tornado, though. At well over a mile wide, it looked like a bubbling black wall, like a curtain coming down onto the stage after the last act of a play.

If there’d been anybody nearby to see the behemoth descend out of clouds the greenish-purple of a day-old bruise, they’d have stood there gawking, wondering what in the world … ? But there was nobody around to see it touch down and chances are they wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale if there had been.

The field it landed in was full of old corn stalks from last summer, dry and brittle. Farmer died and nobody’d got around to plowing them under. The twister sucked the stalks up, thousands of them, and the top ten inches of the dirt they’d been growing in. Turned the wall a rusty brown color as it rumbled across the prairie toward the stampeding herd of Black Angus cattle in the next field.

It gobbled up the cattle, too, all eighty-eight head of them. Lifted them up and slammed them into the ground over and over before it finally spewed their mangled corpses over the next two and a half miles of prairie—tangled up bodies impaled with dry corn stalks. Bloody porcupines.

Skinned porcupines. The hide had been sucked clean off every last one of them.

The brownish-black wall turned then, headed northeast toward Graham.

Monday
May 6, 1963
Graham, Oklahoma