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maybe 11:00 p.m. or midnight. I had just turned eleven years old and was already in bed, but he came into the kitchen, took his seat at the kitchen table, and put his head down to rest. My mother turned around to the counter to fix him a plate of supper. When she came back with his food, he was dead. He had an insurance policy of $1,000, which left my mother enough money to give him a decent funeral and burial and not much else.
    With her husband dead, my mother moved us all back to Rich Square, and she went to work as a nurse for a chiropractor in town. She would head to work in the morning when we went to school, and then come back around 5:00 or 6:00 to make sure we all had something for dinner. She tried to make sure we always had some meat, and I remember when we had enough spare butter to spread right onto our bread, that was a good day.
    I was a troublemaker, and my mother was a strict disciplinarian. All through my childhood, I would just give her fits by acting up in school and running around town. Her favorite punishment was to sit me in a chair and not let me move or speak until she said I could go. She would leave me there for hours. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I started smoking. One time, I absentmindedly pulled a pack of out my shirt or jacket and—I wasn’t even thinking about where I was—started to light a cigarette inside the house. My mother popped me in the face so fast it wasn’t even funny.
    I am sorry for all I put her through, but I never once doubted that my mother loved me as much as a mother possibly could. I don’t know if it was because I was the oldest son, or if one of the signs of being a good mother is that you convince each of your children individually that he or she is the favorite one, but she always made me feel like I was special. For example, at school they would sell ice cream cones for a nickel during recess; money was always tight in my family, but, whenever she could, my mother would slide me an extra nickel so I could get an ice cream cone.
    A few years after my father died, my mother married Dan Casper, a divorced man who drove a truck for the state penitentiary in a nearby town. He had divorced his first wife after he found her in bed with another man. He was a good enough man and treated my mom well, so we had no problems with him, though the family’s finances never improved and we always scraped to survive. When I was fifteen, they had a daughter, whom they named Brenda, bringing the family total to eight children. I always felt a special closeness to my littlest sister. Since I was her big brother, she thought I was the greatest thing. When my second-youngest sister, Pat, was born, I was ten or eleven, so the last thing I wanted to be doing was holding and cuddling a baby. But by the time Brenda came around, I had changed my thinking. When I would come home, Brenda would see me and scream and climb into my lap. It broke my heart every time.
    School and I never got along well. I did not like it, and I wasn’t particularly good at it. I was always very good at a lot of stuff that they didn’t teach in school—working on engines, doing carpentry and electrical work, and fixing things—but numbers and letters just never came easily to me. And even though I was a small guy, I was unusually strong and athletic for my size. One time, when I was a young teen, I picked up the transmission casing of a 1952 Ford and threw it on the back of a pickup truck all by myself—a feat that earned me my nickname, which I kept my whole time in Rich Square: Super (as in Superman). By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I knew I would not be finishing high school, but unfortunately for me, you couldn’t leave school until you were sixteen, so I suffered through as best I could.
    I filled my time out of school working. I worked down at the grocery store every weekday afternoon for $7 a week, and during the summers I would mow lawns. Whenever I got an extra fifty cents in my pocket, I