There were cases of cereal, toilet paper, coffee, Campbell’s soup, Dinty Moore beef stew, sardines, potted meat, SOS scrubbing pads, and various and sundry goods. I ran about pell-mell looking for the animal, but it seemed to have vanished. Several days later I saw her purring in contentment on the white batting that insulated the coal furnace. The cat, which had given birth to six kittens my grandmother later drowned in the cistern, nonetheless found a home in the store as a mouser. Like Oyster, she spurned my attempts to befriend her.

Then a more hopeful time arrived. Jack Buffmeir saw an osteopath who convinced him to become a full-out vegetarian. The diet produced instant and miraculous benefits. Buffmeir left off wearing his dandy suits and plowed an additional two-acre garden behind the shack. He claimed he felt like a new man and would talk endlessly about the virtues of organic produce to anyone who would stand still and listen to it. Not only that, he put Oyster on a vegetarian regime and claimed that the luster and sheen on Oyster’s harsh black-and-white coat was a result of nutrients from the life-giving soil. The earth was rich and productive Illinois black topsoil and under the blazing sun and with an attentive watering schedule, Jack grew tomatoes, rhubarb, potatoes, corn, peas, carrots, and beans. Once these were in the ground he began tending to the trees on my grandmother’s property, trees he had planted earlier in life under my grandmother’s instruction. There were fruit trees and a couple of black walnuts, an arboretum of sorts, albeit long neglected.

Buffmeir believed in the healing properties of nuts, which were rich in proteins. He also stepped up his egg production, selling what he didn’t eat at my grandmother’s store. These were in the milk and butter cabinet with a small sign in front of them that read JACK BUFFMEIR’S MAGIC EGGS, FRESH DAILY. The eggs, which had brown shells, were fertilized by the fuckingest rooster on the south end of town. They cost a nickel more per dozen than regular eggs, and my grandmother was constantly besieged with questions about exactly what was so damn special about Jack Buffmeir’s eggs. Jack said that he fed his chickens a special vitamin-enriched diet. I heard claims that they were good for your hair and nails and could even cure baldness. Even though Jack had no woman he produced a convincing argument that the zinc in them improved flagging sex lives. I didn’t precisely know what a sex life was, but one day Jack grabbed me in a headlock and gave me a Dutch rub that really hurt, saying that if I wanted to grow big and slug home runs I should eat two of his eggs for breakfast every day. I was used to eating Dolly Madison chocolate doughnuts dunked in coffee for breakfast, but soon I had my grandmother frying egg sandwiches for my lunch.