Reparations, Part I

Tom McCue rose and stretched hard, trying to work the stiffness out of his neck and back. At 52, he was hardly the oldest man on the construction site, but the others had worked hard all of their lives and were fit and muscled. Tom had been behind a desk for decades. He looked around the quiet room: four other men, all much younger, still slept. Tom longed to lie back on the narrow cot where he’d slept. It hadn’t been comfortable, but it was better than this cold half-darkness, and better still than the prospect of another day at hard labor. If he’d been working only on his own account, Tom might well have slipped back into bed. But Tom wasn’t just working to live. He owed a man $800.

He sank to his knees next to the cot and offered thanks to God—thanks that he had found work and that the work was difficult and caused him pain. He offered thanks for a safe place to sleep, and thanks that the place was uncomfortable and deprived him entirely of privacy. His stomach rumbled as he headed out into the chill morning air, but he ignored it. He had, literally, not a penny to his name, and dinner at the shelter was nearly eleven hours away.

At $12/hour, with taxes taken out, it would take three paychecks to pay back the $800. Construction workers, he knew all too well, made far more than $12/hour, but at his age and with no experience for decades, he’d had trouble even getting on as a laborer. He’d had to plead with the foreman, a kid barely older than his daughter, and admit that he was in debt and living in a shelter. The kid had taken pity on him, but with a kind of contempt in his eyes that was painful to see. Undoubtedly he thought the worst, because how could a man be flat broke and have no work experience at his age? Undoubtedly, the young man thought that he’d been in prison, or that he’d lost everything to drugs or alcohol or gambling. Tom didn’t explain, though the temptation was strong. He only thanked the man sincerely and accepted the pay he offered.

When the crew broke for lunch, Tom sat quietly by himself. Hungry as he was, he was grateful for the chance to rest his aching body. He didn’t have a watch, but he knew it must be near noon, and that they had four hours or more left to work. He tried to do the math in his head: about twelve hours so far, at $12, was $144. But then taxes would take a bite out of that—probably 15%. About $14 and then half of that—so he’d made almost $125. He found that encouraging and daunting at the same time, and had to force his mind away from the days when he’d had more than that in his wallet at any moment. Once upon a time, not long before, he’d have been able to pay that $800 with a check or a credit card or sometimes by reaching into the locked drawer in his desk for cash.

Tom’s life had changed a lot over the past few years. His daughter had married and moved away, and his wife hadn’t been far behind her. And then it had been just Tom and the Lord, and that had been okay, too. He’d worked and prayed, helped out with the food and clothing drives at the church, made donations, boated, gone to football games…life had been good. But then that $800 had begun to nag at him. At first, it was only in momentary flashes, and he toyed with the idea of doing something about it. Send the man a check. Send him cash. Deliver it, even, with apologies. But as time had passed, it had nagged him more and more, and the nagging started to change. The nagging started to point out to him that just giving back the $800 wasn’t enough.

Continue to Part II