My grandmother liked flowers. I used to collect morning glories from the vines that grew up along the high fencing behind the garage. In the salad days, when my grandfather ran the prosperous Chevrolet dealership, he constructed a concrete tennis court behind the garage. There was a patch of grass back there that Cousin Eustace also cut, and from there I could collect wildflowers to add to the bouquets of morning glories I presented to my grandmother. Even if you got them into a glass of water, they were only good for a couple of hours. Having seen Jack Buffmeir raise vegetables, I planted nasturtiums and petunias, but just as the seedlings began to sprout, Eustace would hack them down with the push mower. My grandmother refused to intervene, since mowing the lawn seemed to be my cousin’s only reason for being. Cousin Eustace was a diabetic, only a few years older than myself, but as my mother had dropped him on his head as an infant, he was feebleminded in a more straightforward way than Jack Buffmeir. I’m fairly sure that any psychiatrist worth his salt would have diagnosed Jack as a paranoid schizophrenic with a propensity to manic depression. This was particularly evident when he started in on a food jag. His views shifted.

Pretty soon peaches were just okay, but the real healing miracles involved carrots and foods with violent colors like eggplant, green and red peppers, tomatoes, and watermelon. The peach, the mainstay of his diet, well, cut into one and what did you see but anemic yellow flesh. Jack started eating carrots like there was no tomorrow. He also went to the library and brought home an exotic book about yoga in which very thin, dark, little people twisted themselves into knots, their faces composed into visages of radiant inner peace.

There was a punching bag in the basement of the store. It was an inflatable speed bag that hung from the ceiling. One morning Jack set to work on the bag at five A. M., shortly after my grandmother opened up. I could hear the bag popping from my bed on the second floor. Since my father was a professional boxer, the sound of the bag filled me with the hope that he had sobered up and come to pay a visit. When I got my clothes on and rushed down to the basement, Jack Buffmeir was doing a headstand in the rag bin, a small closet where my grandmother tossed the gunnysacks the red and white potatoes from Idaho were shipped in. Jack’s face was redder than a fire hydrant. I said, “Where’s my dad?” But then I looked at Jack’s knuckles and saw that they were scuffed raw. Oyster must have mistaken my intentions, for he rushed me and began ragging my pantlegs. Jack said, “Oyster, leave off!”