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north of Skidmore, and Tony and Mabel, like her parents, became tenant farmers, living in two-or three-room houses and working long days in the fields. Soon after the McElroys came up from the Ozarks a farmer hired Tony at a dollar a day because he had four healthy-looking sons and they could help clear land, cut hay, and plow fields. Tony was a good worker and was always willing to help, but he talked a lot and his loud mouth sometimes got him in trouble. Mabel had put on a little weight by then, but she was still attractive.
    Ken McElroy spent the first thirteen years of his life as the child of a tenant farmer, living in someone else's house, working somebody else's land, subsisting at near-poverty level in a large family continuously struggling for economic survival. The bitterness of these years never left him.
    Ken was never Tony's favorite child. (Years later, Tony would list for a Skidmore banker which of his kids were okay and which ones to stay away from, and he always put Ken in the latter group.) Timmy, born two years after Ken, made things even worse. Timmy had a sweet disposition from the beginning, and he fit right into his role as baby of the family. Although Ken and Tim were close for a while because of their proximity in age, Tony's preference for Tim, who would grow up to be the ideal son, was always evident and eventually created a distance between them.
    In the mid-1940s, the McElroys bought the old farmhouse and 175 acres on Valley Road. The house was always jammed with people. Three of the married children moved in, and at one point, eighteen people were living in the two-bedroom house. Ken and Timmy slept in one bed next to two boys in another bed. The house was usually a mess, mud tracked everywhere, clothes strewn about, dishes stacked in the sink. Mabel worked twelve-hour days keeping house, cooking, canning, and butchering animals, but the only one who really helped her was Timmy. Ken and most of the other children came and went and didn't pay much attention to her. The yard was filled with broken-down automobiles, junked equipment, and hunting dogs in cages and on leashes.
    Tony yelled at his children to discipline them. When Ken was young, Tony yelled at him a lot for not doing things and for doing the wrong things. But Tony spared Timmy, who had a knack for doing the right things -like feeding the pigs or sweeping the floor, and staying on the good side of his parents. Ken never did any chores, and as he grew into his teens, Tony backed off him altogether and let him do whatever he wanted. By the eighth grade, Ken essentially did as he pleased.
    Except for his sister Dorothy, who seemed to care for him, Ken's brothers and sisters-even the older ones-tended to leave him alone. To the extent that Ken modeled himself on anyone, it was on an older brother who was a serious troublemaker and who supposedly went to jail for stealing corn.
    During the winter Ken would skate on a creek, from his farm to school, checking his traps for opossum, coon, and beaver on the way. More than once, he showed up smelling strongly of skunk. His fifth-grade teacher, a strict disciplinarian, would take him to the basement and attempt to get rid of the pungent odor by washing his hands and face using cleaning fluids on his clothes. Sometimes the smell was so bad she had to send him home.
    Ken seldom went to school that year, and when he did show up he had never done his homework and displayed little interest in what was going on. The teacher considered him an attractive boy, but his good looks were ruined by the perpetual sneer on his face. He didn't say much, but to her his sullen manner said it all.
    Ken kept to himself, never mixing with the other kids, and seldom participated in any school activities. After school, when other boys played football or went to the cafe to shoot pool, Ken went off alone to trap and run his dogs. He was strong, though, and could have been a superb athlete. In choose-up football games