Amber. So the holiday was a bit melancholy for all of us as Sarah and I mourned our first Christmas without Catherine. By the end of the night, filled with a glorious turkey dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy and cheese covered cauliflower and too much spiked eggnog, I fell asleep with my head on Melanie’s lap, her fingers stroking and combing through the hair on my head, and Sarah asleep on my lap; the three lost shepherds.

After the holidays I began to look for work. I wondered what sort of work I would be able to find with my undocumented status. I was worth little more than an illegal immigrant. I had no skills to speak of when it came to manual labor. Sure I had assisted my father while he did electrical wiring when I was a boy but I had learned very little besides pulling wire and installing receptacles. Furthermore, it was such hard and grueling work and I watched my father get zapped with electrical current on many occasions and although he took it like a man I could tell by his grimace that the experience was not a pleasant one. But truthfully there were few options. I could go back to guarding Melanie but that whole affair was a time bomb waiting to explode.

I scoured the newspaper for labor ads and called one after another from the house phone that Melanie had put in her name (the apartment was also leased in her name as were the other utilities). As I phoned potential employers I disregarded all of the companies that had receptionists to answer their phones. I knew that those companies were too big to consider paying me under the table. When I ran out of ads from the newspaper I scoured the phone directory. I dialed number after number until I heard a grungy sounding workman-like voice.

“Tony’s Electric.” It sounded to me as if I had called him on his cell phone as I heard noises in the background (the shrill high pitched squeal of a circular saw and the pounding of a hammer) that indicated that he was at a construction site.

“Are you hiring?”

I heard an extended breath, “I might need a laborer.” He said with a Bostonian sounding accent.

“How much does it pay?”

“How many years have you worked in the trade?”

“Four summers…with my father.” “Maybe ten bucks an hour for the right person.”

“Can you pay cash?”

“Are you from the labor department? No, I can’t pay cash.”

“I really need the job.”

“When can you meet me? I gotta see if you got what it takes.”

“What does it take?”

“Hard work. Show up on time. Don’t ask, just do. That’s what it takes!”

I met Tony at a fast-food restaurant about twenty minutes from my house. He was a large hulking Italian man with a wide squat nose and a broad bull face. He had dark skin and a husky build. I was immediately intimidated by him. My interview consisted of Tony grabbing my wrists and looking at my “pussy” hands and telling me that I wasn’t cut out for the kind of labor he needed; to which I replied with a tone of desperation:

“I need the job.”

“What are you, like forty? You said you worked two summers with your old man. I thought you was a kid. Don’t you have nothing you know how to do at your age?”

“Four summers…and I’ve been away.” “Ohhh no! I don’t hire ex-cons!” He said, rolling his eyes, and he abruptly stood up and started to walk away.

I reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. When he turned back toward me I thought he was going to clump me on the head. I timidly spoke, “I wasn’t in prison.” He brushed my hand from his back like he was shooing away a fly, “I’m an alcoholic. I was drunk for most of the last twenty years but I’ve been sober for over a year.” I felt bad for telling such a blatant lie, but I couldn’t very well tell him the truth.

“Why do you want to get paid under the table?”

“I got an ex-wife who will garnish my wages for alimony if she finds me. At ten bucks an hour I’ll barely make enough money to feed myself.”

“I got one a those too!” he said pursing his lips and furrowing his brow in an exaggerated sympathetic frown.

“A what?”

“A ex-wife.” He shook his thick head indicating that he thought he was about to make a huge mistake, “In cash the job pays eight-fifty an hour. If you can’t make it to work on time I’ll can ya. If you’re lazy I’ll can ya too. Give me your phone number. I’ll call you tomorrow at seven in the morning with an address. I start at eight. Don’t be late. And no drinkin. I smell alcohol on your breath and I’ll can ya too.”

He turned and left and that was the end of my interview. I was so giddy that I had landed a job and that I could continue to survive that I hurried home and I took Sarah out for an ice-cream sundae, the first splurge since we had arrived in Kansas.

The work-days were long and the work was hard but I made enough money to pay my bills. And Tony, despite his direct and hardnosed approach, was a nice guy. He said that he had worked by himself for ten years until I called him. “You caught me on the right day.” He said. He had received a few dozen phone calls a year from people looking for work but I was the first he had hired. He didn’t want to run a company, he said, he just wanted to do what he knew how to do and get paid for it.

He hadn’t initially intended to teach me anything. He figured he would just use me to run for tools and to be an extra set of hands, and by the looks of his hands, hard and course and nicked and scarred in so many places, he needed an extra set of hands; but he took a liking to me and he started to show me how to fish wire with fiberglass rods; that is long plastic sticks the thickness of a pencil screwed together. We would drill a hole in the floor and shove the rods into the wall and then we would cut a box out where a receptacle would eventually go and we would retrieve the rods and pull the wire up to our opening.

Tony also showed me how electricity is constantly seeking the ground, literally, and how the electricity chases the ground through the filament of a light bulb and down to the grounded wire and in so doing heats up the filament until it glows. He showed me how to bend metal tubing into nice neat shapes and to connect the tubing with threaded connectors and to insert them into junction boxes where we would eventually pull our wires together and tie our circuits with red and yellow wire- nuts. He showed me how to land the wires inside of an electrical breaker-panel and to tie them into circuit-breakers and grounded bars. He showed me how the wires had to have neat bends so that the work would be distinguishable from amateur work. He taught me how the different size breakers corresponded to different thicknesses of wires; how amperes were the equivalent of heat and that thicker wires could handle more heat and so they were protected by the breaker according to how much heat the wires could tolerate; if the wire got too hot the breaker would sense too high a temperature and shut the electricity off to that wire. Tony showed me how to tie an electrical service into the service lines coming in from the street. He touched the energized wire with his tongue to show me that it wouldn’t hurt me so long as I was not grounded, and then he crimped the wires together using a large crimping tool and some butt-splices; hollow aluminum tubing used to join the wires together. For the most part, though, I did the grunt work. I pounded copper colored eight foot ground rods into the hard earth with a sledge hammer and I pulled wire and crawled into tight soot filled attics and drilled holes. In short, in just a few months I had learned enough to get hurt working by myself, but I had absorbed enough knowledge to warrant a raise to nine dollars an hour cash.

I was a fast study and I came to enjoy doing the electrical work with Tony. I appreciated the satisfaction of being able to look back at my work and actually seeing the fruit of my labor, a feeling I never quite felt while pushing paper. I even enjoyed the physical workout and I started to develop a toned physique. I also began to have aspirations of being able to do some of the more complicated tasks without supervision; and Tony let me try tying an electrical panel on my own. When I was finished he told me what a good job I had done, but then went on to critique my work pointing out some small mistakes I had made and showing me how I had to really tighten the screws that held the wires so that they didn’t come loose; “Loose wires cause fires!” he said looking into my eyes with a dire expression. Still I was as happy as a schoolboy to get a pat on the back and to accomplish what at one time seemed like an unachievable task.