TALES OF CHESTER, my husband’s recollections of his childhood, continues here with his memories of his neighbors, the Weirs.

Weiry, as in “weary,” that’s what we called her, had slicked-back gray hair and a face very much like Renner’s, only puffier with prominent swellings beneath the eyes. She looked like a man, and she had the most unusual walk. With every other step, her head would drop a foot or more, so that if she were walking on the other side of our hideous wooden fence, you would see her head appear and then disappear in a dolphin-like rhythm, as she walked to the end of the yard to water her tomato plants.

After the fire at Renner’s, which happened when I was ten, I began spending more time with the Weirs, who inhabited the ground-floor apartment in the red-shingled building on the north side of our house. Their place was across an alleyway that was so narrow you could shimmy up to the roof by bracing your hands and feet on the brick walls on either side. Their lives had been far different from Renner’s.

We often said that if Weiry had gone on that old TV show, Queen for a Day, she would have walked off with the studio. We watched Queen for a Day every afternoon. Three women chosen from the audience would tell horrible stories about the abject state of their lives. The audience would vote for the most-pathetic case, the results tabulated on an applause meter. They applauded hardship. The winner got crowned by the host, Jack Bailey, and received a gown and a Speed Queen washing machine.

No one we saw could match Weiry.

She had once had money. Now she and her husband were on welfare. Weiry’s peculiar walk was the result of a childhood accident. She had wooden legs. I had ceased to think about her wooden legs until the afternoon that I found her dozing on her davenport in the living room. Her socks had sagged to her shoe tops, and I saw what looked like a cylindrical wooden birdhouse above her right ankle.

She told me that when she was 11 she was playing in a freight yard in Marcus Hook. She hopped on the back of a train. It put on its brakes, she fell off, and the wheels rolled over her legs. For her troubles, the company that owned the property awarded her a substantial settlement, which she received when she reached adulthood.

She did not invest wisely.

She took to the horses, unsuccessfully for the most part. Although she did win big one afternoon. She never forgot that day. She was luxuriating in the purchase of a brand-new hat, of which she was mightily proud. The inaugural outing, however, was quickly ruined when a bird relieved itself directly over her head. She was understandably bitter, however a friend advised her that if she didn’t get mad it would bring her luck. She took the advice, and damned if the friend wasn’t right. She won. Big.

She learned a valuable lesson that afternoon. Eventually she would learn a harder lesson: No matter what rituals you observe or how much you bet, no horse can outrun illusions. Her settlement money evaporated.

The Weirs were poor but principled people. In the City of Chester they had taken the ultimate path less-traveled. They were Democrats. It wasn’t impossible to be a Democrat in Chester, just extremely difficult. Democrats made Don Quixote look like an incurable realist. The city and whole county was run by a man named John McClure and one of the nation’s last great Republican machines. In a town that lived on heavy industry, the term machine was appropriate and well-understood. You were part of the works or you weren’t, and almost everyone was part of the works. It ran smoothly through the prosaic acts of functionaries whose interventions were vital to day-to-day existence.

They got your jobs. They got your kids out of jail. They fixed your tickets.

They came to collect on Election Day. A fleet of station wagons prowled the county to offer rides to the polling places. On a day when the bars were closed by law, the wagons were stocked with whiskey and beer, amenities impossible to underrate in an era when Prohibition was still a fresh memory. They won local elections by 25-to-1 ratios. They were never satisfied. They wanted to win 25-to-0.

They did not give up on the Weirs. The Weirs had a large poster of a Democratic candidate for City Council in their front window. It made everyone decidedly nervous, including the Weirs.

The poster came down one day, to everyone’s relief. A car miraculousy appeared in front of their apartment. It was theirs to keep. A bigger miracle followed. Art Weir got a job.

Art was going to work for Sun Oil. It was not a patronage job per se, however the company was run by major Republican contributors and allies of John McClure. Sun Oil, along with Sun Ship and Scott Paper, also run by Republicans, were the Big Three. If you got hired by one of them, you had more than a job. You were set for life. Barring a felony or a sudden burst of honesty toward a supervisor, you could not be fired. Your pension grew day-by-day as the river of time flowed over your life. If you were sick, a hospital bed was cleared out for you. To go from welfare to Sun Oil was the equivalent of receiving a surprise inheritance from a wealthy uncle whom you had assumed barely knew you.

Art had not worked in several years. He had driven a truck for the Rumford Construction Company until he had an accident that Weiry, his spokesman in all important matters, insisted was not his fault. It didn’t matter. He was laid off, and with a bad heart no one else would hire him. Since then the Weirs had lived resourcefully.

They were both chain smokers. To afford this habit, they sent away for a red metal rolling machine with a hand crank and a leather belt. They bought Zig Zag rolling papers and Bugler tobacco, which cost ten cents a pouch. Art was a master roller. He knew exactly how much tobacco to stuff into the rolling trough. The tiny tongue in his toothless, lip-less mouth appeared to have been made for licking the sticky ends of the paper that he inserted into the trough. After he forced the crank across the belt as though he were throwing a switch, a perfectly formed cigarette would roll off the machine. Later, borrowing an innovation from my mother and father, Art’s masterful saliva and artistry were replaced with an artist’s brush dipped in a shot glass that held a small quantity of water.

I could watch Art roll cigarettes for hours, however the Weirs had other things to do. They constantly drank coffee, which they made in an old-fashioned percolator. Since the percolator was so small, they had to make a fresh pot almost every hour. They also liked to eat brown ‘n’ serve biscuits with their coffee. I would help make them. I loved smashing the container against the table edge, wringing off the cardboard, placing the fleshy quoits on a baking pan and watching them swell and tan in the oven. They were delicious with thick pats of government margarine. I don’t doubt that they would have been wonderful with real butter, but it seemed as though God made government margarine just for brown ‘n’ serve biscuits.

For that’s what the Weirs used. They had five-pound packages of margarine marked “U.S. Department of Agriculture.” They had enormous tins of peanut butter and lard with the same markings. When John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, I heard on radio that his first official act was not a memorable one: He signed a bill to increase surplus-food rations. This was big news to the newly minted Republican Weirs.

Weiry gave me my first lessons in agriculture.

Outside of a narrow flower bed well-tended by my mother, our yard varied from jungle to dust bowl, depending on the weather. In this it was like the other yards that abutted our property. Now that Renner was gone, the adjacent yards were full of weeds, debris and mad dogs that angrily resented your presence near their property lines.

Weiry’s yard was the exception. It was flawless, like Renner’s in its heyday. The perfect lawn was framed by flower beds on either side and rows of generous tomato and cucumber vines against a cyclone fence. I had no idea that tomatoes and cucumbers grew on vines. I assumed they came from the Edgemont Beef, the local supermarket.

In June, the tomato vines sprouted yellow flowers, and in August they swelled with green tomatoes that took on a slight blush before Weiry placed them neatly on the sill of the screened window to ripen. They were better than any tomatoes I have ever tasted.

She would harvest her cucumbers around the same time, but they didn’t require ripening. She would peel them, dig grooves into the edges with a fork and then soak them in a solution of vinegar and sugar. Under no other circumstances could I consider cucumber a snack food.

Some people plant vegetables for recreation or to embellish meals. The Settines, for example, grew mint for their iced tea. The Weirs, however, were welfare farmers; they needed the food.

Art’s job would change their lives. No longer were they drinking coffee to pass time; the caffeine heightened their awareness of the new era of good fortune. No longer were they staring vacantly over the steamy liquid; they were gazing into the future. For the poor, fantasizing about spending money they don’t have is an unstoppable impulse. For the Weirs, that money was imminent, and it gave the impulse an electric urgency.

Art left for work on a white-hot August Monday. He drove to the Marcus Hook plant in his new car, a black-and-white Plymouth with fins.

He came home three hours later in an ambulance.

When I saw the flashing lights I ran to the Weirs. Art was sitting at the kitchen table. His face was ashen, beyond ghostly. Weiry did the talking. It was 110 degrees. He had to lift barrels that even muscle-bound men in their 20s were struggling to lift. He passed out.

Art did not go back. He never worked again. He seamlessly resumed the welfare life: rolling cigarettes, drinking coffee and eating brown ‘n’ serve biscuits. In his spare time, he fixed my bike or silently peered out into Madison Street from the dark screen on the bedroom window.

It was a natural and dignified life. The landlord, a man named Bill Orfenick, appreciated their tidiness, their meticulous care of the yard, and the small improvements they continually made: coats of paint, the tightening of screws, the replacement of worn linoleum.

Each month the government kept providing their staples, the large boxes of powdered milk, the packages of margarine and the large tins of lard and peanut-butter.

The Weirs had no use for the latter, except as barter. The Weirs liked their beer when they could get it. They didn’t have it often because they couldn’t afford it. Once a month, Weiry would trade the peanut-butter tin with my mother for four quarts of beer. The Weirs didn’t drink like most people in the neighborhood for whom alcohol was part of their physiologies and personalities. The Weirs luxuriated in their beer. They would stare at the heads and admire the miniature bubbles rising in the glasses. They sipped and they glowed and they laughed. The beer wore away whatever hard edges came with welfare. I was used to watching alcohol transform personalities like a toxic serum. In the Weirs, the changes were benign.

Except for once. I had walked into their kitchen to feel a residue of a quarrel in the air. My unannounced presence had resulted in a ceasefire. “That’s enough now, Art,” Weiry said gently. Art’s anger had not quite dissipated, however. His ghostly complexion turned red. His fist pounded the table. “You was nothing when I met you,” he said heatedly. Weiry burst into tears. “Stop it, Art, stop it. Not in front of him.”

“Won’t you have a cup of coffee,” she said to me, still sobbing. I excused myself.

When I visited the next day, the anger had lifted from the kitchen. A pot of coffee was percolating. Art was rolling cigarettes. An unopened package of biscuits lay on the table. I smashed it on the edge of the table, and pulled a pan from the drawer beneath the oven.

The following month, Weiry showed up in our house with the tin of peanut butter, and my mother gave her four quarts of beer. Later that day the phone rang. My mother answered. I could hear Weiry laughing hysterically.

“Get over here,” she said with nary a trace of desperation. “My damn legs fell off.”

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