The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  The companionship filled the silences. “Kurt’s the type of person that if I need somebody to talk to,” Tom said, “I can’t sleep nights or something, I can always pick up the phone and say, ‘Kurt, I need somebody to talk to.’ He’s the type of person who will sit and listen, maybe for two or three hours and not say a word. Just let me ramble on about my business, my life.”

  In crisis, Tom and Kara also talked more. Stress and loss bend and break some families, and forge others more strongly. The Kings grew closer, opened to each other, uncovered their fears. “When the kids go to bed, eight-thirty, nine o’clock,” Tom said, “we’ll set there and talk for hours.… Before, I never talked to anybody, you know. I kept everything inside and just let it gnaw at me. And with Kara … I’m not afraid to let my emotions show now. It makes no difference if somebody sees me crying, because that’s how I feel, you know. This is me. If you can’t take me for me, then you better look the other way, because this is the way it is. I got feelings, and I’m gonna show them and make no bones about it. Oh, we got a great relationship now.” Tom wiped his whole face with his hand, beginning at his forehead, ending at his chin.

  To m and Kara took in animals: not only her four-hundred-pound pet pig, Emma, but also three ferrets that a relative had kept in squalor, and a couple of dogs and rabbits; Tom later added goats and two steers. He and the boys built pens and a toolshed.

  Kara dove into books and pamphlets about cancer, but Tom just felt dumb around doctors, who “use words this long,” he griped, holding his hands two feet apart. It is a common complaint that deters many people with little education from seeking timely medical care. “I come home and I say, ‘Now, do you understand what he said?’ She’ll say, ‘Well, pretty much of it.’ ‘Well, I think we probably ought to sit down so you can explain it to me, because I don’t understand it.’ ”

  Mostly, his angry sense of inferiority just smoldered, but it flared into the open when Kara needed a donor for a bone marrow transplant. Her case was nearly hopeless, but doctors were working hard at it nonetheless. To m offered to be a donor, not understanding that only a blood relative’s cells stood a chance of being compatible. He was told dismissively that it wouldn’t do any good to test him. Why? Tom asked indignantly. Because he’d have only a million-in-one possibility of matching, the doctor replied. “Wait a minute!” Tom remembered himself saying. “We’re talking about my wife’s life! Even if I don’t match with her, somewhere down the line, somebody does match. If I can save somebody else’s life, that’s fine.… If she has to have a donor from the bank, I can give it back.” He ordered the doctor to “explain this to me in language that I understand.”

  “Does this situation make you mad?” the doctor asked.

  “No. It pisses me off,” Tom retorted.

  “I guess I know where you’re coming from,” the doctor conceded. “Maybe we should test you just for your own mind.” They did so, and there was no match. One of Kara’s sisters, Kris, made the donation.

  “What a great day,” Kara wrote in her journal. “I went shopping and had some energy.” It was dated February 8,1998, the first entry in a spiral notebook filled with badly spelled musings written almost entirely in pencil. Many were done as letters to God—in gratitude, in appeal, in desperate pleading for survival. “So, God,” she concluded that first evening, “please bless Tom, Zach, Matt, Katie & myself—long life, Love, Happiness, laughter, and to always be close to each other and thank you for Today. Amen. Kara.”

  Her delights were simple. It was “a wonderful day” when “Tom Bill & virginia went and picked me up a dual range stove, good deal $50.00 bucks—the left front burner don’t work but it’s better than only two burners and one oven,” or when “Tom made Brownies and apple cinnimon muffins for Head Start, & Zach made a date cake—it all sold. I bought Tom a waffle maker for Valentines, he got me a nice slinky nighty. We gave the kids $5.00 a piece.”

  As the pain of her cancer spread, though, and the money problems worsened, she recorded days of distance from Tom, thinking he’d be better off with her dead. She lost her temper with the children, and she started drinking a lot of Canadian whiskey and ginger ale. On February 19: “Well, I had a most awsome day. I love life, thank you God for all my days. I know all well that I’ve been indulging in Booze but it does help and that’s no excuse but I do feel I need it.” That night she was up again and again, and at 4:30 a.m. finally mopped the floor because she couldn’t sleep. On February 20: “Well, it’s been a day—a good one only because I’m alive. … I had to get physical with Zach, push him into the wall and grab him, punish him to his room, for dumb shit, he didn’t like the kind of ice cream we had so he got tough with the freezer and Matt, so I got tough with him, and I had to smack Katie on the lips for baby talking.” On February 23: “I don’t know what my problem with the booze is lately But hey—I can’t help it. I need a fix I guess.” On February 26 she wrote that Kurt had fallen behind on payments he owed Tom for work. “I’m a booz a-holic—god— Tomorrow I’ll regret this. I’ll have the shakes. I’ll feel guilty—but the shakes is what gets me. But like Tom says—whatever works.” By the end of the next day’s entry, as she drank and wrote, her handwriting grew indecipherable. On March 5: “Zachary and Matthew got excellent report cards so we are going to give them each $10.00, I’ve been feeling really depressed lately … Tom and I need to talk more—I love the fact that he is in and is my life.”

  Because she was scheduled for the bone marrow transplant, she feared that she would miss “all the colors of Spring the Brilliant yellow— Sapphire Green—so Green that it takes your breath away.” The transplant was delayed, but the spring passed with her journal closed. In late May, after nearly two months without an entry, she scribbled: “Sorry God that I haven’t written for a very, very long time.” The following day, from the hospital: “I’m in shock and denial, I don’t want to die, I have been through to much and gone to far to die now.”Two days later, May3o: “The Doctors all have me for dead, But I guess that’s okay—no more suffering.… My mother showed up today. I asked her to leave.” And on June 3: “It is Tom’s B-day—he is doing awful—he is having massive panic attacks, I was upset with him last night because he smacked the Ball out of Zach’s hand right in the parking lot in front of a lot of people…. I have lumps everywhere. I have cancer in my uturus—great huh? … I don’t want to die, for God sakes—I want to live, please let me live please?”

  After Tom took her in the rented truck to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston for her transplant, he made the two-hour drive as often as he could, on Kurt’s credit card. Helping Tom seemed as natural as breathing. “His heart’s absolutely in the right place, but he just got left behind a little bit,” Kurt said. “You don’t mind bending over backwards to help a guy who’s as nice as he is.” One day, Kurt’s helping hand was gently, seamlessly supported by a salesman at Dartmouth Motors, a dealership at the end of Tom’s road.

  “I think it was the first Sunday she was down in Boston,” Tom remembered. “I had spoke with Kurt, and Kurt had told me, ‘Go down to Dartmouth Motors,’ he says.” Again, Kurt was planning to rent a truck for Tom, but the dealer’s last one had already gone out. So the salesman “went and cleaned out his own personal Blazer,” Tom said.

  “Here, take this,” the salesman offered. “Kurt and I already set it up. Bring it back when you get back. It’s full of fuel.”

  “I said, ‘Well, when I bring it back it’ll be full of fuel,’ ” Tom reported. “And it was.”

  On July 3, the day after Kara received the transplant, she wrote; “God please bless Tom, Zach, Matt, Katie, and a special Blessing for me, Kara, and thank you for yesterday. And God, Bless Kris for what she has done for me, Amen. Kara.” Three days later, she wrote in a fragile hand: “Well I’m going to Bed soon so god Bless Tom, Zach, Matt, Katie and expecially myself. And god thank you for today. Please god reach out and for me and heal me. Please—so thank you for Today and Amen. Kara.” It was her las
t entry. Five days later, Tom’s adoption of Zach and Matt became final.

  On the afternoon of July 12, Kara’s thirty-third birthday, the doctor called and urged Tom to get to Boston as soon as possible. How about early tomorrow? Tom asked. “OK,” the doctor said, “the earlier the better.” Tom called Kurt. “He made some phone calls, and then the salesman from Dartmouth Motors says to me, ‘When do you need it?’ I said, ‘I need it before six o’clock tomorrow morning.’ ‘Come on down,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you there. I’ll meet you there at five-thirty.’ He opened the door at five-thirty and handed me a set of keys. I said, ‘Where do I sign?’ He said, ‘You don’t. Get out of here. Go.’ ”

  Tom walked into Kara’s room by eight o’clock, “and they were in there working on her then. And the doctor come out and he said, ‘She wants to see you.’ I said, ‘OK.’ I said, ‘How does it look?’ He shook his head. So I went into the room, and she reached out to take my hand, and she had her hand like this, so I reached out and took her hand. She had her cross around her neck, her earrings and her rings in her hand, and she dropped them in mine.” His voice broke, and a long silence embraced his tears. “And I said, ‘Kara, no matter what happens today, I will love you forever.’ She nodded her head, she dropped everything in my hand, squeezed my hand, and she was gone.”

  He drove home in the brand-new borrowed Blazer and told the children face-to-face. He put her wedding ring on a chain around his neck, and continued to wear his own. She never saw the blooming roses he had planted outside her bedroom.

  Tom and the boys made a sign, printed in red, and hung it on three poles over the garden:

  To My Loving Wife and Mother and our best friend Kara P.S. We love you

  The sign was still there the following summer, but the garden had grown shabby with weeds, the rosebushes needed pruning, and the surrounding grounds had filled up with a junkyard full of rusting machines that embarrassed Zach and Matt when the school bus stopped in front of their place. It was as if everything they had ever owned had been put in their yard. There were four lawn tractors, one of which worked when you held a pair of scissors across the solenoid contacts. The others were useful sources of cannibalized parts. There were two or three rototillers, a couple of lawn mowers, and a weed whacker. A propane tank lay on its side, a picnic table was smothered in junk, and an old wooden wheelbarrow with a spoked wheel was missing one side. A camouflaged metal canoe lay upside down in an aluminum rowboat filled with fishing poles and tackle boxes. An orange traffic cone stood at the edge of the woods behind the trailer, and up among the trees was an assortment of scrap metal pieces, a metal tank, cans, bits of plastic bags, and a pile of old tires. The clothesline sagged under the weight of many pairs of jeans and work pants, and a pile of chicken wire had been cut into sheets for fencing.

  Tom and the boys had built a toolshed and a small shed for April and Sylvia, the goats; the rabbits, named Cinnamon, Spice, Licorice, and Minnie; and William, the guinea pig. They had erected the frame of a small barn for the steers, Jesse and Jake. No two boards, cut at their sawmill, seemed the same width, and hardly any were the right length. The fences were random: A single strand of electrified barbed wire kept in Emma the enormous pig, another stretch of fence consisted of incomplete boards that looked like useless crusts of bread. The goats were enclosed in chicken wire, and a gate, made of a leftover door sawed in half, leaned at a rangy angle against a splintered post that wasn’t sunk far enough into the ground to keep it upright. Zach and Matt alternated days doing the chores of feeding, which took about half an hour.

  Up a dirt road toward the back of their land was a treasure trove of old stuff, most of which had been there when they bought the property: a pile of railroad ties, three snowmobiles, a school bus with half the back missing (Tom planned to put a drying kiln for boards on the back of the bus), five trucks and several old cars, and a big yellow tractor named Frankie with a bulldozer-sized blade against a pile of roots and dirt it had been pushing when “something clogged in the gas tank,” Zach said.

  It might have looked like a junkyard, but really it was like living in the middle of a grown-up’s playground where nothing much worked but you could have a lot of fun fixing things. And that was the way the children were learning—the way Tom had learned, by getting their hands dirty, by making things work, by caring for animals, by taking responsibility. The boys were active in 4-H, where they had won awards, and Zach had cut a sculpture with a chain saw that he’d bought for $5 at a yard sale. He had set a log on end, drawn an outline, and carved a bear with a long snout and two pointy ears. For entertainment, he said, they fished for catfish in Rand’s Pond and hunted for rabbits and partridge. A friend who shot deer but didn’t eat them supplied them with venison in the fall. What else did he do for fun? “Weed whack!” he exclaimed.

  Inside, the trailer had descended into chaos. Zach and two cousins were frenetically working their way through a huge pile of dirty dishes in the sink, probably several days’ worth. The bedrooms, strung in a row along a back corridor, were jam-packed with dirty clothes covering beds and floors. But doing laundry was not a priority: Tom and the boys were about to go haying at a farmer’s who, in exchange, let them have some of the hay for their animals.

  The boys, in seventh and eighth grades, did their homework at the scuffed oval kitchen table, which was littered with stuff and located at the vortex of the household. The bedrooms, small and messy, were sanctuaries for diversions, especially for Matt, the younger, who liked to listen to the radio and fool around. When their phone was cut off after Tom failed to pay the bill, Matt’s teacher couldn’t call, so she sent a note home; it hung around Matt’s room for months, unseen by Tom, who exploded when he saw Matt’s miserable report card: E in English, E in Science, D in Math, D in Social Studies. Then, Tom went into school, asking the homeroom teacher, “Why wasn’t I told about this before?”

  Matt hated school. Zach liked it. He proved to be a good artist, and as he went through high school, he began to think about architecture. At the end of his junior year, I asked Tom if he thought that Zach would go to college. “I think he’s already applied,” Tom said. “Zach,” he called, “what colleges did you apply to?” Zach had not applied, of course, because it was too soon; he had little idea how to go about it, and Tom, for all his love and support, would not be able to give him any knowledgeable help.

  The years after Kara’s death had plunged Tom into periods of depression, joblessness, and even alcohol. That summer, he couldn’t drive logging trucks for Kurt because he didn’t have a baby-sitter for Kate. When school started in September, he got a $6-an-hour job with a log yard measuring the board footage of loads delivered by truckers for sale and milling. He discovered one day that the yard was taking his measurements, rounding them off lower, discounting good-quality red oak and ash, then selling the wood at high prices for veneer, and “putting the screws to the loggers,” as he described it. “The biggest mistake they made was lettin me in on it. Three-quarters of the people around here that are loggers are my friends, you know, so me and management didn’t see eye to eye.” He confronted the foreman.

  “That’s our business,” the man said. “You just do your job. We’ll pay you for it.”

  “No,” Tom said, “because at one time, I was on the other end. I know what it feels like.” He thought about it overnight, and at noon the next day he quit. “This is what’s happenin’ and I don’t like it, and I’m not working here under false pretenses,” he quoted himself as telling his boss. “I try to be a man of my word. I stake my reputation on it, being a man of my word. If you find something wrong with that, time for you and I to part company.”

  Few Americans have the luxury of acting on such principle, and Tom didn’t have it either. He went to work part-time for Kurt fixing equipment, but it barely paid the bills. While the rest of the country was gripped by the impeachment proceeding against President Clinton, Tom let it all pass him by like a great storm beyond the horizon of his con
cern. “I don’t do politics well,” he said simply. By February he had full-time work for another logger, making $300 to $350 a week. He loved being in the wintry woods all day. “Right now we’re cutting a little bit of hardwood,” he said, “mostly rock maple, some cherry, a lot of white birch, and then we’re cuttin’ pine besides. So we average a couple load of hardwood a week and two, three load of pine. I’m at his house by eight o’clock, clearin’ the woods by eight-thirty, and I’m usually home by three-thirty, four. We put in a good day, yet we don’t kill ourselves either. Works.” He was again on the other end of the log yard business, and he watched the measurements closely. No problems.

  “We’re doing OK,” Tom said. “We’re doing OK,” and he rubbed his face with his hand. “Yeah, yep. So. Ain’t gettin’ rich, but. If I can keep a thousand, fifteen hundred in the bank, that way I know if something happens I’m covered for a month, anyway.” But then the logger ran out of wood, and Tom was jobless for four months. He started drinking. He let his friendships lapse. He left the TV on all the time, to fill the emptiness.

  Into his life walked “Mary,” a brassy, plainspoken woman his age, tall and strapping, who fancied herself a rescuer. “The place was a mess,” she said. “Books all over, laundry all over. He was a shell of a man. He wasn’t working, he’d stopped caring. We both talked and we both cried together.” Her yellow hair was in a tangle, her face pleasant, seasoned, almost hard, but she was lovingly firm with the kids, tough and warm, motherly, demanding. She replaced the disconnected phone with another, under her name. When a technician arrived to cut off the electricity because Tom’s late payment hadn’t shown up in the computer, she insisted that they check, and the power was off for only two and a half hours.