The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  She remembered him telling her: “I counted. Your children said they loved you twenty times.”

  Her anger suddenly cracked. “I broke down, and I cried.”

  The family that the driver so admired was unlike anything that Kara had known in childhood. She had been neglected by her mother and molested by her father, also a truck driver. “I can remember eating dog food when I grew up, rabbit pellets,” she said, “and I’ll be damned if my kids will ever have to go through that—going to school and having my teacher wash me up and bring me clothes. My parents just didn’t care. My father was an alcoholic, my mother was an alcoholic.” Still, as her father lay dying of cancer, she granted his wish to have his gravestone taken from the top of Cat Hole Mountain, where he could always be found, gun in hand, on the first day of deer season. “So we went and got this humongous piece of marble, white marble,” Tom remembered, “and it had one flat face on it, and we got together and we bought this bronze plaque to put on this stone.” Kara did not sever family ties easily.

  She had repeated her family pattern by marrying two alcoholics in a row. Her first husband, the father of her two sons, Zach and Matt, “used to smack me around and break my teeth,” Kara said. Her second, Tom King, plunged into her life after his wife threw him out and he rented a room from Kara and her husband. One day, when Kara’s husband “came home all messed up, started to beat on her,” Tom recalled, “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And the next thing I know, we’re all out in the street…. The last thing I heard him say when we walked out the door was, ‘You want that bitch? Take her.’ ” So the two wandering souls found an apartment and took each other in. “For four and a half, five months, we lived a purely pla-tonic relationship, we split the apartment: She paid her half, I paid mine. And then we just kind of fell in love. Been that way since.” They married four years later, after their daughter, Kate, was born.

  Tom liked Jack Daniel’s, even a shot or two for breakfast with his coffee. Kara worked on him lovingly, steadily, and finally got him into Alcoholics Anonymous. “I never missed a day of work,” he insisted, but “in the evening, it was bad, and one night we set down and she said, ‘What are you gettin’ out of it?’ She said, ‘If you think about it, you’re sick and tired of waking up sick and tired.’ ”

  Tom was forty-six, Kara was thirty-two, and they both looked older still. He smoked Marlboros. Sometimes he wore a black bandanna covered with little skulls and crossbones, or American flags, tightly tied so that his hair, long and stringy, hung back out of the way below his collar. Lean and muscular, his arms were covered with tattoos. One said, “Love.” Another read, “Tom -n- Kara.” He had a gentle smile and a quiet resilience. When you asked him how things were, he’d always say, “Good,” even when they weren’t, and then he’d rub his whole face with his hand, as if to wipe away the worry. But he was also willing to admit that he was scared, and even to cry. Together, he and Kara found a mutual blend of vulnerability and strength.

  They both worked for U-Haul, she behind the desk for $6 an hour, he as a mechanic for $7. “We were doing fine,” she said defiantly, as if to restake her claim to a modest victory that had been stolen from them. “We didn’t have credit cards. We didn’t owe anybody money.” They lived frugally, met their bills, and managed to save a little every month. At work, Kara felt confident enough to cloak herself in a little too much integrity. “I’m a very honest person,” she declared. “They said you had to down a truck that came in with bad tires, so I’d do that, and [later] I’d see they’d rented it.” When her manager once instructed her to rent out a truck with nonworking headlights “in the daytime,” she refused. “They were very unhappy with me,” she bragged. She did not get raises. Her applications to become a manager were ignored. Then, after being granted a week off so her son could have surgery on a cleft palate, she returned to find someone else in her job.

  Finding other work proved difficult. Because she had epilepsy, Kara was not supposed to drive, although she did anyway at times; otherwise, she would have felt chained down in a rural area without much public transportation. She eventually managed to qualify for a Social Security disability payment of $484 a month, which covered nearly all of the $500 rent on their old house. But the downward spiral continued. Tom wasn’t getting along well at U-Haul either. The defective rental trucks were causing him headaches, generating late-night phone calls for emergency repairs. The managers were “kids” in their twenties with no hands-on skills, he complained. After three years without a raise, he got fed up, quit, and went to work driving a truck to and from Massachusetts for a vegetable farmer in Claremont, New Hampshire.

  The next blow fell: Kara was diagnosed with an aggressive lymphoma. The prognosis was poor. Without financial means, her best prospect for treatment was to become part of an experiment, “a guinea pig,” she said. She began chemotherapy for free in a clinical trial at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. If sheer determination could ever defeat a disease, she knew that her iron will would be victorious. “I am gonna get through all this,” she declared stubbornly. “It’s gonna be a long hard haul. I’m gonna go out and help people. I’m gonna tell these young women with babies that they don’t have to get beat up.”

  Their rental house had a faded joy, its pale blue-green wood and red trim dulled by age and hardship. Anyone walking in through the cluttered back porch met a wall of cloying air thick with the odor from a big round kerosene heater in the middle of the kitchen floor. Kara was at the table. She had wrapped her bald head in a turquoise scarf. Her appearance mortified her sons, who didn’t want her to visit their school. She shared their embarrassment, mixed it with a terrible anger, and justified her shame and rage by keeping on display a framed picture of herself with her long, flowing hair. In her eyes, the camera had caught a hint of laughter then. Now, against her gaunt face, they were fiercely bright, pleading, proud.

  She had come to feel the mockery of chance, and she couldn’t help a wry smile as she told the sour story of her prize at the Cornish fair. New England still loves those quaint country fairs full of wholesome Norman Rockwell faces from communities gathering to see who has baked the best pie, who can eat one fastest with her hands behind her back, who can win a fire department raffle, and who can throw a ball and hit a plunger that will dunk a favorite son into a soaking pool. At the Cornish fair, Kara bought a raffle ticket for a dollar. In the thirty-one years of her life, she had never won a thing. This time, miraculously, her name was drawn for a fat pig named Emma. “I was amazed!” she declared.

  But to a star-crossed family, even a delightful trophy can bring misfortune. Tom and Kara housed Emma in a pen at a friend’s house. Then the friend’s dogs got in, chewed her up, and got Tom thinking that he should build a pen at his place. He called his mother, who had a covered pickup truck, and they got Emma. Tom rode with the pig in the back. A sad comedy followed, one familiar to New Hampshire, where signs warn motorists of the danger. A moose stepped into the road, a car in front of them slammed on the brakes, Tom’s mother plowed into the car, and Tom was bounced around inside the back of the truck like a piece of popcorn. The local hospital’s emergency room checked him out, sent him home, and made an appointment for him with an orthopedist a week later. The orthopedist discovered that his back had been broken.

  To m King worked with his hands—that’s all he knew how to do. He had grown up in the family’s cordwood business; his mother had driven a bulldozer in the woods. In tenth grade he’d gone across the Connecticut River to Vermont to live and work with a farmer and continue school, “and then the school system in Vermont found out that I was out of state, so they decided that they was gonna charge me tuition,” he recalled, “and I said, ‘I think I learn more on the farm than you people can teach me anyway,’ so I just quit school and went to work on the farm.” He got his G.E.D. later, in the army, which sent him to Vietnam—an experience that he believed led him to alcohol.

  He couldn’t think of any jobs that his G.E.D. had help
ed him get. He romanticized his way of learning: from using his hands, he said, not from reading books, which he could not do well in any event. “I can stand there and listen to an engine run and pretty much tell you what’s wrong,” he said. “A lot of that’s from being around the old guys. Back when I got into the field, you didn’t have these guys with electronic equipment and that stuff. You had those old boys out there and you’d turn it over; they could tell you why it didn’t start or why it didn’t run just by listening to what it was doing. I pretty much learned from the ground up.”

  In other words, Tom was an outdoor man with the wrong skills and the wrong temperament for a desk job. He’d worked in three or four factories, “and after a while they tend to get small,” he observed. “You tend to pace.” So, he didn’t have a lot of job options. In constant pain, he was now confined to the dingy couch in his living room staring at the unrelenting idiocy of daytime television. Like many people with back injuries, he found himself lured by the mirage of SSI, or Supplementary Security Income, the disability payment administered by the Social Security Administration. It helps many and teases many others who hope to qualify. Since his wife was getting it and now he too was disabled, he applied. “I wasn’t asking for it to be total,” he said. “Partial would be fine with me. I don’t want nothing for nothing. I didn’t apply for it permanently, just to help me get back on my feet.” If he could find a light, sit-down job, he feared, it would undermine his claim that he couldn’t work, but as his back slowly healed, he looked a little anyway, in vain. It took Social Security a full year to deny him benefits, on the ground that he could lift ten pounds and stand for more than twenty minutes—not enough to get him work as a mechanic, just enough to disqualify him for assistance.

  They had no money. Their savings account, a couple of thousand dollars, had disappeared. Kara owed her lawyer $600 for her divorce. With her former husband in prison, she wanted Tom to adopt Zach and Matt, but she needed $100 to file the papers. Scratching together nickels and dimes, “it took me a year to come up with $100,” she said mournfully. “I don’t even have $5 today to put gas in my truck to go to the doctor.” Most painful was her inability to give to her children. “I have three of the most wonderful children in the world, and as a parent you like to reward them. It kills you when you go into a store and see a little item for $1.99 and you can’t get it—a cap gun or something. It kills you. Last year Christmas was the worst Christmas of my life. My kids got three gifts. I didn’t even want to wake up that morning.… They were OK with it. They were happy.” She did not give anything to Tom, and he did not give anything to her. Except the most important thing. “If we have nothing,” Kara said, “we have each other.”

  Kinship can blunt the edge of economic adversity. When a grandmother takes the children after school, when a friend lends a car, when a church provides day care and a sense of community, a parent can work and survive and combat loneliness. One December, Mark Brown, the manager at Claremont’s Wal-Mart, mentioned to a meeting of employees that one of them was in need, “without telling them who it was,” he said, “just telling them there was somebody here who wasn’t gonna have a good Christmas with their kids.” They took up a collection. Digging into their pockets, the underpaid workers produced a pile of dollar bills that added up to three or four hundred for the anonymous colleague—and one of those who chipped in a few bucks was the needy one herself.

  That was kinship in its broadest meaning, extending further than blood and tribe into a larger affinity and commonality. It is a safety net that improves the material dimension of life; for those who have that network of connectedness and caring within a family and beyond, the brink of poverty is a less dangerous place. In a list of all the factors that make an economic life successful, all the hard skills (such as reading, math, typing, handling tools, reasoning) and the soft skills (such as punctuality, diligence, anger management), kinship stands prominently among them. Its absence facilitates collapse. Its presence can slow the decline, as the Kings discovered.

  They could have been called “deserving poor,” that condescending label sometimes used to contrast such folks with the mythical “welfare queens” of right-wing fantasy. There was nothing lazy about Tom and Kara, and they weren’t looking for handouts. They were hardworking and honest, and they thought the responsibility for their welfare rested not with the welfare system but with themselves. They played by the rules, and what happened to them was not their fault, unless their relative lack of schooling could be considered their own failing. When their reverses piled up one after another, they had no defense.

  In desperation, and against their proud principles, they finally applied for welfare and found a few other important strands of the safety net: Medicaid to pay their medical bills, $269 a month in food stamps, and a Section 8 housing subsidy covering their entire rent. They were led through much of the bureaucracy by Nancy Szeto, a case manager who had also grown up poor and proud, and saw much of herself in Kara. Through the private agency where she worked, Partners in Health, Nancy got Kara some free epilepsy medication from pharmaceutical companies that donate drugs—usually when they’re nearly outdated. Kara reluctantly accepted vouchers for their daughter from WIC, the federal government’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which could be turned in at the supermarket for milk, eggs, juice, cereal, and peanut butter.

  The Kings also entered the economic realm of barter, a common substitute for money among the poor. Tom took his final pay from the farmer he’d worked for in vegetables instead of cash. “Vegetables do me more good than the money right now,” Tom told him, “ ’cause I can go home, and I can can, and I can freeze. ‘No problem,’ he says. ‘Tell me what you need, come get it.’ ”

  Barter became a balm of giving and friendship. When a friend with a roadside stand brought them corn and tomatoes, Kara asked how much he wanted, and he said: “Oh, nothing. I know where you are if I need a favor.” Without being asked, Kara did him the favor. Fighting the deadening fatigue from the chemotherapy and the advancing cancer, she worked at his stand.

  “He’d give us a fifty-pound bag of potatoes, corn for canning,” she explained. “We never exchanged money.”

  Their drafty house was heated mainly by a woodstove in the basement, and as autumn deepened and the nights grew cold, Tom and Kara felt the dread seeping into them, the fear of New Hampshire’s winter. There was no money for wood. Their rooms were permeated by the sickly smell of kerosene heaters. And then, a friend of Tom’s named Kurt Minich, who owned a small logging company, dumped a truckload of logs in the yard and asked nothing in return. As Tom’s back pain eased, he offered Kurt some mechanical work on his trucks, performed as gingerly as he could. Kurt accepted, favor for favor, and the family got through the winter.

  As word spread of the Kings’ plight, so did the community’s generosity. The Women’s Auxiliary of Concord raised $450 to get dentures for Kara. The next Christmas, “the visiting nurses, the school, fire department all donated all kinds of stuff to us,” said Tom. “People you never thought about having a heart or feelings, you know—and at Christmastime it was like a steady flow of people coming in here. I mean, with boxes and boxes of gifts.”

  All of the outpouring warmed Kara but also tilted her balance sheet, she felt, putting her in a state of incalculable debt. “I would accept it, but I would feel compelled to do something in return,” she declared. “For example, [we] delivered over seventy-five food baskets last Christmas in order to receive one. In order to receive, you have to do. I can’t take something. I have to feel good about it. I have to feel I’m worthy of it.”

  Therefore, noticing on their many visits to Valley Regional Hospital how ill-equipped the waiting room was for children, Tom and Kara had Kate reach into her meager collection of toys to pick some dolls and other playthings to donate. Tom made a wooden toy box for the waiting room. “We wood-burned it and stained it and washed up all the dolls,” Kara said. “When my kids
go there, they have something to do. So we compensated that way.”

  Kurt became their centerpiece of friendship, offering everything from work to counseling. “He’d come here in the morning,” Tom remembered, “and say, ‘What are you doing today?’ ‘Nothing, really.’ ‘Well, come on, get in the pickup, let’s take a ride.’ And we’d go driving around on back roads and look for timber lots. Just to get me out of the house.” When Tom’s back was well enough to do a little driving, Kurt hired him for a couple of days a week to cruise wood lots and mark boundaries so the loggers could come in and cut. Then he coached Tom through a study guide so he could get a license to drive a logging truck. Then, when the house Tom and Kara rented was being sold and they had to move out, Kurt sold them eleven acres and an old, pale green metal mobile home on easy terms: $30,000 down, paid for out of $36,000 that Tom had just received as an insurance settlement for his injuries, plus $5,000 that Tom paid gradually to Kurt in cash and labor over the next several years. The sense of ownership buoyed Tom’s and Kara’s spirits, and they went to work putting down roots. They planted a vegetable garden. He put in rosebushes for her to see from her bedroom window. He laid ambitious plans for expanding the trailer. He borrowed a portable sawmill from Kurt, installed it in the back lot, and worked with his sons to cut trees and make boards of various widths, which he hammered together using his crude carpentry skills to add a back porch and other ungainly appendages.

  Kara deteriorated. She needed treatment in Boston, but Tom had no reliable way to get her there. The ’86 Bronco he’d bought had 230,000 miles and simply wouldn’t last the trip, he was certain, so Kurt slapped down his own credit card and rented a truck for him. “Every time Kara goes in the hospital,” Tom said, “Kurt calls me, ‘You know, if you can’t work today, don’t worry about it. Take care of what’s at home first.’ ”