A smile plays at the corners of the Rev. Ananias Green’s lips when he thinks of sitting on the Tennessee River in the 12-foot aluminum boat with his son Amos, sun shining, fishing poles dangling, comfortable silence unfolding.

Until two summers ago, that was the only way he wanted to think of 10-year-old Amos. When other thoughts tried to creep in, the bad ones, Green firmly shut an imaginary door in his mind.

For 33 years, the door remained closed.

It took a slight, soft-spoken young writer from New York to open it and painstakingly extract the memories of the night in 1974 when one of three tornadoes that struck Limestone County sucked the five members of the Green family from their homes, killing Green’s wife Lillian and fatally wounding Amos, who died days later.

Green granted Mark Levine’s request for an interview, and Levine made the Green family’s tragedy one of the central storylines in his book “F5: Devastation, Survival and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the Twentieth Century,” due in stores June 6.

“I would like for it to die out of my mind,” Green said at his home on Easter eve, giving only his second interview about the events of that night. His other sons, Titus and Ananias Jr., were seriously injured, and Green himself left for dead in Isom’s Orchard amid the rubble that was once his home.

“I felt like some things were tender,” he said. He made a motion encompassing his head. “I wanted to leave the tenderness where it was. I’m glad I waited this long. I can talk about it now.”

The words required in the telling, though, are hard ones, tragic ones — the kind that will bring even strangers to tears.

But Green hopes something positive will result.

“I’d like people to be aware of what can happen,” he said. “Don’t take anything for granted. Be aware and go to shelter. If one life is saved, that will mean everything to me.”

‘F5’

Type the words “1974 Super Outbreak” into the search engine of your computer and a list of dozens of Web sites appears. Read a few of the accounts and you’ll find, as in any accounts of disasters, they vary slightly. Death tolls may differ, as might the number of tornadoes that struck any one area, or the number of storms rated F5, but two numbers remain consistent: 148 tornadoes, 13 states.

Total death tolls across the states — with Xenia, Ohio, being hardest hit — vary from 315 to 350, with hundreds more severely injured and thousands of homes demolished.

Six storms that day were classified as rare F5s—the most deadly in intensity.