Authors: Harry N. MacLean
Q (for Quentin) Goslee has lived all his life on the land his great grandfather bought two miles east of Skidmore. If a storm wakens him in the night, as it did when he was a boy, he might step out on the east porch to feel and smell the air. Or he might lie in bed and listen to the currents of the winds as they bend and twist the tree limbs, lash the rain against the house, and rattle the windows. He knows which hills are likely to run first and where the gullies will form. And he knows that if the wind picks up another notch, he will find broken limbs on the tall walnut trees behind the house. He knows without thinking where he is in the planting, growing, or harvesting cycle and what each hundredth of an inch of rain will mean to each of his crops at a particular moment. The loamy soil is a part of him like his skin or his hair, and he knows how it reacts to the sun and wind and water the way he knows the feel of the summer sun on the back of his neck or the sting of a February wind in his eyes. Q might well have sprouted from the dark soil himself, perhaps as a walnut tree in the heavy timber to the north or a stalk of corn somewhere on the fifty acres sloping gently west to the hedge trees. When he was young, Q told his wife Margaret-who already knew it-that he couldn't even stand to think about living anywhere but on that piece of land.
Route V is one of two roads linking Maryville and Skidmore. A narrow blacktop with no shoulders, it twists and turns over the hilltops and through the troughs. In the spring and fall, after a heavy rain, tractors and combines track mud from the fields and dirt roads onto the highway, creating slicks that send unwary vehicles sliding into ditches and fence posts. One hundred yards before V intersects with 113 to enter Skidmore from the east, a well-maintained gravel road cuts south from the blacktop. Called the Valley Road, it runs straight for about a mile, through pasture lands and fields of beans and wheat and past white frame farmhouses, then curves east. Two miles further, the road passes the place where Ken McElroy grew up and learned to hunt coon.
Ken Rex McElroy was rarely called Kenneth or Rex or Ken Rex; to his friends he was Ken, pronounced something like "kin," or Kenny. To everyone else he was McElroy. Ken McElroy was not quite a month over forty-seven-years old when he died on the main street of Skidmore. At 5 feet 10 inches and 230 pounds, he was grossly overweight, but except for a huge gut, he was mainly solid flesh. His shoulders were broad, he had a massive, barrel chest, and his arms were thick as tree trunks. His hair was naturally a dark brown, but he had dyed it pure black for years. (Alice Wood had seen pictures of him when he was younger with brown hair and a pencil-thin mustache.) He always kept it oiled and slicked back, 1950s style.
McElroy was dark complected, attributable no doubt to the fact that his father's mother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. His eyes were dark blue, sometimes blue-black. (Many people in Skidmore recall him as having pitch black eyes and being well over six feet.) He had a broad forehead and heavy black eyebrows, and his eyes were set far apart. When he looked straight ahead, only the bottom three-quarters of the irises were visible, leaving white quarter-moons beneath. When he was young, girls saw his eyes as "sexy, but kind of cold"; when he was older, they became "icy black eyes that could see into your soul." Full, wide sideburns reached just below his ears, almost even with the corners of his mouth. Thin lips, like a slash below the prominent nose, turned down at the corners, the left side turning up slightly when he smiled. In his younger days, he was a handsome, almost dashing man, but in middle age his huge belly threw him out of proportion, making his legs seem almost a little too short for his body. And his face had become fleshy, a bit loose in the jowls.
McElroy had several tattoos. On his lower right forearm was a tattoo of a cross, and within the cross were the letters MOM (or WOW). The fingers of his right hand bore the name KEN. On his upper left arm was scratched the word LOVE and beneath that was a dagger inscribed with the name JOAN. On the back of his left hand was written the word OLETA, the name of both his first wife and his second child by his third wife.
McElroy took pride in his appearance. When he left the farm, particularly if he was going to town, he usually cleaned up, combed his hair, and put on good clothes-dark knit slacks and a western shirt or a nice T-shirt and cowboy boots. He was never seen in public looking dirty or wearing seedy clothes. He wore many of his shirts loose to conceal a .38-caliber pistol in a leather holster, custom designed to lie flat on his rib cage beneath his left armpit. Even in the winter he seldom donned a coat, and he never wore a hat.
When he wasn't angry, McElroy was usually soft-spoken. He could sit unnoticed at a bar in Maryville, talking so low the waitress would have to lean over to hear him. When he played pool, he usually won, and he always graciously bought the next game. But he seldom laughed. When he did, in the words of a family member, it "was from the outside, not the inside" there was never a belly laugh, just a ha, ha, ha, and then it was over. McElroy moved slowly and deliberately, with a heavy person's easy grace. When he stepped out of his truck, his head would turn slightly in several directions as his eyes flicked about, automatically scanning his surroundings. Outside his home ground, Ken moved about with even more caution, always very aware of everything around him. Until the very end, he sat in the taverns of Maitland, Graham, and Skidmore facing the door, with his back to the wall.
McElroy was happiest at a coon dog meet or trading hounds at a friend's house or just telling dog stories and drinking Jack Daniel's at the Shady Lady bar in Maryville. His skill as a dog handler and shrewdness as a judge of dog flesh was legendary among coon hunters and dog owners. He bought and sold dogs over the phone without ever laying eyes on them, sometimes at $200 or $300 apiece. He could control one of his hounds with a slight wave of his hand or a nod of his head.
Until the court ordered him not to carry firearms in the fall of 1980, Ken McElroy never went anywhere without a gun, whether it was a pistol in the shoulder holster, a shotgun in the window rack of his pickup, or both. But nobody remembers ever seeing him in a fist fight.
Across the Missouri River from St. Joseph, the land flattens out as though a huge steam roller had once run over it. This is the beginning of the great Midwest, cattle country, where the plains stretch far over the horizon and are broken only by occasional rises and clumps of cottonwood trees. Barbed-wire fences and telephone poles cross dry creek beds and stitch the endless windswept prairie. About seventy-five miles southwest of the river is Topeka, Kansas, and twenty or thirty miles south of Topeka is the tiny cattle town of Dover. Like Skidmore, Dover was once a thriving community, but now only a post office, a few stores, and 125 people remain. Here, on February 28, 1897, Mabel Marie Lister was born, third of five children of Oliver and Isabelle Lister. The Listers were tenant farmers, hired by the year, the season, or the month. They moved from ranch to ranch, living in little shacks without electricity or water, earning barely $30 a month. The Listers were good people who just never managed to accumulate much money.
On June 6, 1910, when she was just fourteen years old, Mabel Lister married twenty-year-old Tony Wyatt McElroy from nearby Shelton. Tony ("Tone" to his family) was known for his hot temper and terrible cursing. As a young man, he made moonshine, drank too much, and got in fights, usually over women. He was boisterous when sober, but he became downright quarrelsome when he drank. Tony farmed a little, but he mainly made a living with his wagon and horses. He hired out to haul hay for people and, when times were good, worked for the county cutting ditches and scraping roadbeds. He owned good horses and wagons and fine harnesses of oiled leather with shiny rings.
Mabel gave birth to a boy, on February 26,1911, only two days before she turned fifteen. Hershel was the first of sixteen children Mabel would bear, losing a set of twins along the way. Seven boys and seven girls were spaced almost evenly over a twenty-eight-year span of child bearing. Ken Rex McElroy was born on June 16, 1934, followed by the last child, Tim, born on June 1, 1936. Mabel worked hard feeding and raising her steadily increasing brood, always without running water or electricity. She baked bread every day, hung endless lines of wash in the backyard, and took her turn in the fields. The family was poor then, as it would be poor up to the last few years, but the children were always clean and presentable.
Times were tough in eastern Kansas in the predepression twenties, and somewhere around 1926 or 1927, Tony and Mabel packed up the family and set out for southern Missouri, ending up in the Ozarks. In the town of Lamar, they rented a four-hundred-acre farm and planted corn, and by early July the crops were doing well. But two rainless weeks of burning sun and hot winds destroyed the entire crop, and the McElroys went under.
The complete loss broke Tony. Eventually, he went back to road construction, working temporary jobs in small towns in southern Missouri and eastern Kansas, all the while having more kids and all the while staying dirt poor. The family wandered up to Quitman, a small town six miles 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 during recess, no one could ever bring him down, and he could toss a basketball across a court as if it were a baseball.
His teacher found him mean and hard to control. He seemed to think he could do anything he wanted to, that he need not obey her or anyone else, and she couldn't do a thing about it. She held him back in the fifth grade twice because of his truancy and poor grades. By the time he made it to sixth grade, he was the biggest kid in the class, looming three or four inches over the others. The kids in school learned early to stay away from Ken. One former classmate explained it this way: