ke that. Je's, I should say not."

So accustomed had it grown that it was not even thought of as
profanity.

If Buzz's family could have heard him in his talk with his street-corner
companions they would not have credited their ears. A mouthy braggart in
company is often silent in his own home, and Buzz was no exception to
this rule. Fortunately, Buzz's braggadocio carried with it a certain
conviction. He never kept a job more than a month, and his own account
of his leave-taking was always as vainglorious as it was dramatic.

"'G'wan!' I says to him, 'Who you talkin' to? I don't have to take
nothin' from you nor nobody like you,' I says. 'I'm as good as you are
any day, and better. You can have your dirty job,' I says. And with that
I give him my time and walked out on 'm. Je's, he was sore!"

They would listen to him, appreciatively, but with certain mental
reservations; reservations inevitable when a speaker's name is Buzz. One
by one they would melt away as their particular girl, after flaunting by
with a giggle and a sidelong glance for the dozenth time, would switch
her skirts around the corner of Outagamie Street past the Brill House,
homeward bound.

"Well, s'long," they would say. And lounging after her, would overtake
her in the shadow of the row of trees in front of the Agassiz School.

If the Werner family had been city folk they would, perforce, have
burrowed in one of those rabbit-warren tenements that line block after
block of city streets. But your small-town labouring man is likely to
own his two-story frame house with a garden patch in the back and a
cement walk leading up to the front porch, and pork roast on Sundays.
The Werners had all this, no thanks to Pa Werner; no thanks to Buzz,
surely; and little to Minnie Werner who clerked in the Sugar Bowl Candy
Store and tried to dress like Angie Hatton whose father owned the
biggest Pulp and Paper mill in the Fox River Valley. No, the house and
the garden, the porch and the cement sidewalk, and the pork roast all
had their origin in Ma Werner's tireless energy, in Ma Werner's thrift;
in her patience and unremitting toil, her nimble fingers and bent back,
her shapeless figure and unbounded and unexpressed (verbally, that
is) love for her children. Pa Werner--sullen, lazy, brooding,
tyrannical--she soothed and mollified for the children's sake, or
shouted down with a shrewish outburst, as the occasion required. An
expert stone-mason by trade, Pa Werne