Faith’s story

I won’t tell you my name, because Mr. Blinken says if I were identified, then someone could identify everyone in the canyons. I’ll give no name because I don’t want a false name over my words, that’s all. I appreciate that he encouraged me to put my story on his site.

I’m a white woman, 47 years old. I was born in Oakland, but when I was 6 my family moved north. I went to school in a small town down in the valley and married a man from the canyons, his family’s only son. I moved up here when I was 17. My husband worked for his father and ran the business after his father’s death.

My husband was killed four years ago when his mini-excavator rolled and he was crushed. He never wore the seatbelt because he had to get in and out so often. We couldn’t afford a shovel man so he had to do everything himself. A shovel man might have saved his life, but he was alone.

I am ashamed to admit it to myself, but I thank God he went quick, in the woods where he was doing what he loved, and where he didn’t make big medical bills.

We had money in the business, and a little life insurance, that’s all. The shock of my husband’s death was followed by a second big shock: the business my husband and his father had worked so hard on, that we had always thought was worth hundreds of thousands in equipment and good name, was almost worthless.

We had two good men, they finished the job they were doing, and I had to lay them off. I couldn’t keep the business going, so I tried to sell it, and then, the equipment. The longer it sits in the yard the less it is worth, I sold what I could. No one local could use much of it, and it costs a fortune to come up the canyon to get the heavy equipment. I even had to sell one piece of equipment by the pound, for scrap.

I had always felt well off, at least for the people in the canyons, but when I looked at the books I realized it was the work of the men in the family that was valuable, that’s all.

It was their sweat, taking the small jobs where it’s hard to turn a profit, side hill jobs like the one that killed my man that bigger outfits wouldn’t handle; it was their keeping old worn out equipment going by working on it as they used it, doing the work of three county workers; it was the drops of their sweat that made us well off. It was odd it took so long for me to know that, seeing how much if it I washed from my husband’s clothes, day in and day out, and how familiar it was to me. I could smell him on me from his morning hug long after he’d gone to work. There is still a hint of it on the clothes in his side of the closet.

Some people say the government doesn’t do anything for you when your husband dies, but that isn’t so. They gave me hours of distraction from my grief, filling out forms, waiting on hold, demanding decisions I had no idea how to make. They charged well for their services through the tax I paid on the money I didn’t actually have.

My 22 year old son came to know the government, too. His response to my attempts at getting him to take responsibility for some of the work at the business was to get busted for giving pot to minor girls. Here is what he came to learn about the justice system: there is no human thing in your story that can resist the force of the machinery of justice. He did what they said he did. He admitted it when he explained that one of the girls was a younger sister of his friend who was in Iraq. He’d known them forever. He thought she was probably about 18. He didn’t exchange drugs for under-age sex, he didn’t use drugs to rape her, they were just doing each other favors. One of the girls already has a kid and a husband in drug court. It wasn’t like he was dealing, they just smoked a couple of joints and he gave them a couple for the road, that’s all.

The people at the county have a hard time proving their case with really smart, really bad criminals. It is expensive to actually investigate a crime. When someone is stupid enough or honest enough to admit what they’ve done, the machinery grabs them like a pole stripper grabs a pine and shears the limbs and bark.

It happened at a time when there was already not enough money, I couldn’t get him a better lawyer or do more than weep as I waved goodbye to my son.

When all is said and done, I’m left well off by local standards: I own the house and if I can get a loan to tear down my husband’s shop, because it is below "code" and I can’t afford to fix it, I can sell the piece of land above the river that’s been in his family since 1897. In a year there’ll be a nice, new, big house and a retired couple from the city will enjoy the view. I’ll send half the money to my husband’s sister, who lives in Arizona. I have the life-insurance, which isn’t big enough to do much with, but which provides a little interest. I’m trying not to spend it, but things happen. I’ve been given a job as a waitress by a friend with a local café, I have to wait for tourist season, that’s all.

I’m not telling this to make anyone feel sorry for me. To be honest, I had a lot of help from friends, from people at the church, from my daughter. They lifted me up when my knees buckled. I can’t imagine what I would have done without their help. But they all have their own problems, and my daughter has a husband and two kids in elementary school down in the city. People have to go home. Besides, some folks don’t have much kin or a church.

No, the point is this, and it is for men as well as women: You have no idea how alone you’ll become if just a few key people disappear from your life. Nothing you’ve done before, none of the hard work, none of the taxes, not even the stone deep grief and desolation you feel will buy you out of it. The equipment dealers will pick your corpse to rags and bones, and the government will come for the rags. The hard work you do buys your comfort for that moment, that’s all.

There’s nothing we can do about it, just the best we can. Don’t let it be a shock, that’s all.

That’s my story so far, but not the end of it. I believe that things will get better. That’s what Faith is, the courage to believe that things can get better.

That might be a name I could write my words under: Faith.