What interested me most about Jack was his black-and-white bull terrier, Oyster, a rarely seen breed of dog, then as now. I coveted the dog, but Oyster would rarely give me the time of day. As far as Oyster was concerned, his oddball master was the sun, moon, and stars. With a full-time religion like Jack, the dog did not have any time for little boys.

Jack could play the fiddle, and when he was in good humor, he liked to dress up in his white suit and play “Turkey in the Straw” at the back of my grandmother’s store. In the middle of the song he would set the fiddle on the pop case, pull out a soup spoon, and cavort around dancing as he clapped the spoon against his cheeks. He would pick up carving knives from the meat block and flash them around with the authority of a samurai warrior while clog dancing in his two-toned brown-and-white shoes. Meanwhile, Oyster would do back flips, roll over, and dance about on his hind legs with Jack. There was no television, and people found their entertainment in peculiar ways.

All you had to do to get a meal or a place to flop from my grandmother was to offer to pluck the “clinkers” from her coal furnace down in the store basement and haul them out back to the barnyard. A mental defective, hobo, or dangerous bum off the streets could come in and accomplish bed and board for this small chore. Boy Cleatus, a black of fifteen, used to do the job for a quarter. The clinkers were heavy sizable things, like fossilized starfish. How the little pellets of coal clumped together during incineration was something I never understood. Whenever Boy Cleatus got in trouble with the law and was sent to the reformatory in St. Charles, the clinkers were mine to haul for no quarter. Since the firepit was small, I often opened the furnace door and poked at these spiky formations. When the bulk of the fuel had burned, they became hollow, like fragile shells, and it was fun to mash them down before I threw more coal into the pit. The cold clinkers from the bottom of the ash pit I put in a laundry tub and carried out back. It paid to wear gloves when handling clinkers, although I seldom bothered; I mainly wanted to get the job over with as soon as possible, so I tolerated minor burns and ashen splinters. I learned to shovel coal and haul clinkers at an early age, but Jack Buffmeir, who lived scot-free in the shack, never dirtied his fingers in this fashion.