The Working Poor (31 page)

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.’ ”

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?”