The Working Poor (32 page)

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 last 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:

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 concern. “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.

That was long enough, though. “I’m gonna be self-sufficient by next fall,” Tom declared solemnly. He and the boys had started work on a dilapidated “barn” for two steers. “I’m gonna raise my own pork, raise my own beef. [Mary] wants to put some chickens in. I’m looking for a diesel generator. There are a couple of emergency generators from Fort Dix, New Jersey. For $1,000. It needs to be rewired.” He shrugged as if that were an easy chore. When he laid out his plans, he got a clipped tone of false confidence in his voice, as if he knew that he was saying what he wished, not what would be. Three years later, he was still hooked up to the power grid.

Mary knew about depression; she was on medication. Was he taking anything for his? “Well, Jack Daniel’s,” she said. “It wasn’t prescribed, but that was his own prescription. … It was his birthday, and I planned a nice birthday cookout for him, and he decides to start drinking at nine-thirty. So he was drunk by noon.” But now it had been four months without a drink. “He’s behaving himself,” she went on. “The last time he went on a drunk I dumped his bottle down the sink, and he hasn’t bought any since…. He deals with reality…. He’s finding his match when it comes to being a jerk. I’m not scared of him.”

How about therapy? “The heaviest thing in the world to pick up is that phone,” Tom said. Maybe Mary was his best therapy, because she pulled him out of the paralysis that characterizes depression. He looked for work and found a job with Davey Tree company, under contract to trim branches around power lines. “It makes me feel good that I can go out there and swing from a tree for nine hours a day and walk home at night and say, yeah, a day’s work…. There’s things that I can do now that a year ago I wouldn’t think of doing because I didn’t think I was physically up to it. It don’t bother me to strap that saddle on my ass now and head up that tree and spend eight, nine hours up there. Go up the tree, trim it out, go back down.” He was teaching Matt, and they were trimming trees on their
own land. Somewhere along the way, Mary moved out to her own place, and they continued to see each other, but not at such close quarters.

Tom was laid off the next winter because of too much snow: eight weeks without work. He got a job welding fuel tanks for $10.50 an hour and was then laid off from that, too. In the summer he planted sixty-five acres of sweet corn for a farmer and helped with tomatoes and pumpkins; he was paid $300 a week and all the vegetables he wanted. After the farming season he went back to work for Davey Tree, but they wouldn’t let him climb once he turned fifty because insurance wouldn’t cover him. So he had no winter work except side jobs cutting and selling firewood. He did some maple sugaring and then got a job maintaining factory machinery at LaCrosse, a boot manufacturer, for $10.50 an hour. It was inside work, and he knew that pretty soon he would start to pace again.