Come one, come all, the travelling execution show has come to town! This one promises to be especially delicious, filled with the pomp and spectacle and suspense that any ticket-buying audience rightly expects of good, clean entertainment.
There will be good food; the owner of Little Cee's pizza parlour has sought assurances from the powers that be that she'll be able to deliver pizzas on the big day.
There will be ample public transportation; special buses will shuttle crowds between the three most exciting staging areas, Vorhees and Fairbanks Parks, to the US Federal Penitentiary Prison. (OK, not the most colourful name for a circus locale, but let us not be cranky at a time like this.)
There will be costumes: Tshirts are being sold that read "Hoosier Hospitality. McVeigh/Terre Haute/ May 16, 2001, Final Justice." There will be props; already on the approved list are Bibles, candles with wind protectors, mobile phones, pagers and soft, roll-up signs.
There will, of course, be entrepreneurship. As parking is limited, some folks are negotiating deals with television networks to lease out their land for cars and trucks. Needless to say, all the hotels in town are booked.
And there will be suspense. Will the man being executed turn to taunt his audience? Will he, in his last moments, show remorse for his crimes or will he die as he has lived, hated and hateful?
Finally, the big day will be nearly an official holiday. Some 16,000 students will have the day off school.
On May 16th, 32-year-old Timothy McVeigh will die by lethal injection here in Terre Haute, Indiana.
He will become the first man to be executed by the federal government since 1963. He will die in a place where Middle America hardly gets more middle.
With a population of 61,000, Terre Haute is almost comically middle American. Essentially a plateau alongside a river and a prairie, the place was founded in 1816 by guys with names like Hyacinthe Lasselle and Cuthbert Bullitt.
Its industries were farming, milling and pork-processing. A familiar sight back then, say the town's historians, was "the droves of corn-fattened hogs being coaxed and prodded along city streets toward the numerous slaughterhouses lining the river".
The civil war put an end to Terre Haute's slaughtering business, and over the next century it became known as a centre for coal mines, ironworks, breweries, prostitution and political corruption, not necessarily in that order.
Terre Haute didn't really mean to get back into the commerce of killing this year. The tourist board doesn't even mention the federal prison.
Or, as Assistant Police Chief Jeff Trotter told the New York Times, "We're not proud of that fact that the federal government decided they're going to house the death chamber here. We're going to make the best of it."
(He added: "I just want us to go back to being a normal, midwestern, second-class city. No more foreign-press interviews.")
Housing and executing a man such as Timothy McVeigh defy all the rules, however. Who could have planned for such a thing?
Timothy McVeigh was once a pretty good boy, served in the military, was decorated for his service to his country during the Gulf War.
He was a patriot, too, so much so that he chose April 19th, the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired in 1775 as the special day to kill 168 innocent people in Oklaho ma.
Using agricultural fertiliser, McVeigh made a bomb that reduced a federal office building in Oklahoma City that day to rubble.
Aside from the 168 people killed, a number that included many children in the building's daycare centre, some 500 more people were injured, many of them maimed for life.
McVeigh was irritated with the federal government, in possession of a long list of complaints.
The bombing was his way of expressing his feelings. In interviews since, he has expressed no regrets. He has used the military term for such things, calling the people who died "collateral damage".
Now the families of the victims want to express their feelings, too, so some 250 of them have won the right to watch McVeigh die via a closed-circuit televised webcast that will broadcast to Oklahoma. The McVeigh webcast is the hottest ticket in the US right now.
Back in Terre Haute, preparations continue. The nuns of the Sisters of Providence, a Roman Catholic order, will open their chapel on the grounds of St Mary in Woods College for a public prayer service. They will pray, says Sister Joan Slobig, for McVeigh and his family and also for the families of the bombing victims.
As for everyone else - the people watching this spectacle, the merchants who will profit, the pizza-makers and bustakers, the journalists only "doing their jobs", the television executives angling for their ratings - who will pray for them? For us? Will you?