There Is Joy After Hardship
Buzzzzz… whirrrr—crack! Thud!
The old ventilation fan finally gave up the ghost.
The little materials storage room, no bigger than a hundred square feet or so, sank into complete silence.
It was a concrete box with no windows.
The fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling sputtered and flashed, throwing out an unstable, jittery glow.
Under that light sat a man at a battered desk.
Paul Hemsworth.
He was well past sixty now, his hair streaked with gray, his face carved deep with wrinkles.
He had once been the second-in-command at King Baboon Pipeline Services.
From the days twenty years ago, when the company had begun with a single worn-out truck and two landlines, to the point where it had grown into the leading pipeline company in western Texas, it was this man who had designed the entire distribution network.
The one who had welded pipe beneath the blazing Texas sun in midsummer, fixed frozen valves with bare hands in winter dawns, and spent sleepless nights poring over maps to build the dealer network.
The former president had always used to pat him on the shoulder and say, “If this company is my child, Paul, then you’re my right arm and my backbone. Without you, there’d be no King Baboon.”
Had fate followed its original course, he would have been promoted smoothly to vice president.
But everything went wrong after the former president collapsed from a heart attack.
Vernon Gruber, a finance director brought in from outside, cajoled the former president’s clueless family into putting him in the president’s seat at King Baboon.
Vernon had originally been a financial consultant at a major accounting firm in Houston, and to the family he had been branded as “the financial expert the old man trusted.”
Right after the former president fell, Vernon misled the family with falsified books.
The company had been in the black, but he manufactured fake losses and debts on paper to make the situation look dire, and the family, who knew nothing about management, could not read financial statements crowded with numbers.
Vernon exploited that ignorance.
He promised to run the company for a year without salary, then demanded a majority of the board’s voting rights and insisted that no personnel decisions be made without his approval during the period of “stabilization.”
The power of attorney was stamped, and at that moment Vernon Gruber became the owner of King Baboon Pipeline Services.
Contrary to his original promise to work for a year without pay, the very moment he took office he set his own salary at three times the former president’s, billed company vacations and yachts to the corporate card, and began siphoning off company funds through a shell company run by his brother-in-law.
Paul, one of the company’s founding pillars, was hardly going to sit still for that.
He criticized Vernon’s decisions point by point, and Vernon couldn’t simply throw him out.
Then the whistleblowing incident involving Liddle broke.
Vernon tried to fire him, and in secret Paul went to Vernon on Liddle’s behalf.
“President Gruber. I’ve come about Team Leader Liddle.”
“Director Hemsworth, is it? Sit down.”
“I’ll stand. I’ll get straight to the point. Please don’t fire Team Leader Liddle.”
“As if that were possible. He leaked confidential materials. He’ll be fired, of course, and sued as well.”
“I’ll take responsibility and step down to the back office. Just stop this.”
Paul was Vernon’s biggest thorn in the side, and an irritating holdover from the former president’s day.
If Vernon could get rid of Paul while letting the whistleblowing matter slide, wouldn’t that be a fine bargain?
He pretended to be reluctant and accepted Paul’s offer.
“Why sacrifice yourself for a mere team leader? Do you two share some special bond?”
“I made a promise to the former president. That pipes could be replaced, but people couldn’t. That the men who suffered together from the beginning would be protected to the very end. Instead of sending me to the back room, please don’t touch the team leaders who’ve been with the former president since the lowest rungs.”
“...How touching. Very well. To tell the truth, I had no intention of touching them anyway. What could a few team leaders possibly do?”
Vernon ground out his cigar in the ashtray, and for the next three years Paul had been trapped in the back room.
A white room with no window.
There was only a desk and a chair.
There, Paul had been assigned the task of proofreading Vernon’s autobiography.
No one could speak to Paul.
In the morning, when he came in to work, Vernon’s manuscript would be sitting on the desk; in the evening, when he left, he would place it in the hallway, and someone would take it away.
Employees who passed him in the corridor avoided his eyes, and at lunchtime, when he went to the cafeteria, people quietly got up and moved away.
Vernon had publicly announced that any employee who spoke to him would suffer career consequences.
Paul endured all of it.
Vernon’s autobiography was packed with shameless self-praise and exaggeration, while the former president’s achievements were subtly diminished or outright stolen and reassigned to Vernon.
But Paul had no authority to change any of that.
He silently corrected only the typos.
One day, the chance will come. A chance to set this company right.
That was the only reason he had been able to endure this hellish room.
Loyalty to the former president.
The determination to keep the company he had built with his own life, the workers, from being torn apart in the hands of some bastard like Vernon.
That alone had sustained him.
And now, at last, he had heard that the new owner had driven Vernon out.
But Paul knew one thing.
Just because Vernon had been thrown out did not mean he himself would be welcomed back.
From the new owner’s perspective, Vernon and he were probably just the same kind of obsolete back-room relic, destined for the scrap heap all the same.
Yes. From a new owner’s standpoint, that would be only natural. I’m just an incompetent old man who couldn’t resist Vernon at all.
So now Paul had already packed his things in advance.
A battered cardboard box sat on the desk.
Slowly, Paul reached out and picked up the stapler lying in the corner of the desk.
It had been issued to him by the general affairs department on his first day, twenty years ago.
The spring was so loose it could barely fasten paper anymore, just a lump of scrap metal—but Paul lifted it carefully and placed it into the box.
Then he looked at the photographs sitting in the middle of the desk.
There were pictures of Paul in his youth with the former president, and behind them were photos of the people who had started at the bottom with them, laying pipe, hauling materials, welding through the night.
Among them was Liddle Hiddleston, who now wore a team leader’s title.
Paul smiled as he looked at a photo of himself and Liddle from twenty years ago, the two of them with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders.
The Paul in the photo was pointing at a map of Texas, looking so confident he seemed ready to swallow the whole state.
But the Paul reflected in the glass of the frame was nothing more than an old man with gray hair and deep wrinkles.
Paul could not believe that the boastful young man in the photograph and the pitiful old man reflected in the glass were the same person.
“...”
With a bitter little smile, he pushed the frame deep into the box.
There was nothing else to take.
The fact that twenty years of his life could be packed into a single cereal box weighed on his chest.
Paul let out a long breath as he closed the lid.
The face of his wife, who had seen him off on his way to work that morning, came back to him.
“I just hope the new president gives you a severance package... though I suppose that’s too much to ask. He won’t have any obligation to clear your debts.”
And then, at that very moment—
Knock, knock, knock!
The sound of knocking shattered Paul’s thoughts.
He hurriedly straightened his clothes and wiped the wet corners of his eyes with his sleeve.
He did not want to show himself in a disheveled state on the way out.
“Come in.”
The old iron door creaked open.
A man in a sharp suit stepped inside.
Paul’s eyes widened slightly.
It was Liddle Hiddleston.
“You’d already packed your things, hadn’t you, senior?”
Liddle added, glancing at the battered box in Paul’s hands.
“Ah, no—I suppose I shouldn’t call you senior anymore.”
“...”
A dull ache throbbed somewhere in Paul’s chest.
So this was it after all.
Liddle’s words made the situation plain enough.
Not being able to call him “senior” anymore meant they were no longer coworkers.
He had heard the rumor that it was Liddle who had informed the company about Vernon’s dismissal.
And now, Liddle had probably come on the new management’s orders to inform him that he was being fired too.
Paul forced a gentle smile.
“That’s right, Liddle. I’m glad you survived. A capable man like you should be the one leading this company.”
“...”
“I should be going now. What did the new owner say? Where do I handle the severance paperwork?”
“...”
“Or... maybe there isn’t any severance. That could be it, too.”
Paul lowered his head.
Then Liddle asked, “May I ask you one thing, senior?”
“Hm?”
“Why did you keep it a secret all this time?”
“A secret? About what?”
When Paul asked back, Liddle finally burst, his emotions spilling over.
“About how you stopped my firing back then. About how you were covering for every single team leader from the founding days. About how you stayed cooped up in this room all this time just to keep them from being fired. Why did you keep it hidden from us, too?”
“Heh... and what would have changed if I had told you? It would only have made other people uncomfortable.”
Paul turned his face away with a bitter expression and went on.
“I’m leaving anyway. Don’t worry about it. I chose all of this myself.”
“Why do you keep saying you’re leaving? Where do you think you’re going?” Liddle shouted.
Paul turned back, looking confused.
Then Liddle shoved the door open with a bang.
“!”
Paul’s eyes went wide.
Out in the hallway stood a crowd of people.
There were the team leaders, including Liddle, all of them men who had spent the company’s earliest years alongside Paul.
They were also the people who had been able to remain here, unceremoniously spared from dismissal, because of Paul.
“No... why are all these people here?”
As Paul stared in confusion, Liddle took something out from behind him.
It was a nameplate made from the finest walnut wood.
King Baboon Pipeline Services CEO / Paul Hemsworth
A nameplate announcing that Paul was the company’s representative.
Paul’s pupils shook as if he had just lived through an earthquake.
“Wh... what is this...?”
The eyes of Liddle and the other team leaders turned red.
“The chairman of the parent company gave the order himself. He reviewed the personnel records, the old audit documents, and all the books Vernon left behind. He also told us that everything we were able to preserve until now was because of President Paul.”
“He... how could he... I don’t even know the man’s face...”
“This is what the chairman said.”
Liddle repeated the words he had heard from the new chairman.
“While the incompetent and corrupt wielded power, the one who resisted until the very end, the one who tried to protect the company even at his own expense. A person like that is the one qualified to lead this company. I know nothing myself, so I will entrust the company’s full authority to him.”
The moment Paul heard that, all the emotions he had kept bottled inside burst open.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Thick tears rolled down his cheeks and gathered at his chin before falling away.
He had thought nobody would ever recognize it.
The countless nights he had spent berating himself as a stubborn old fool, a failure of a man, flashed past him like scenes from a life already gone.
The days he had eaten lunch alone while staring at white walls, the humiliation he had never been able to confess to his wife, all of it had not been in vain.
Hot tears streamed down through the deep grooves of Paul’s face.
The team leaders hurried toward him as well, each one fighting back tears.
“Please let me take the box, President.”
“I’ll move you to the best office.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t help you until now, senior.”
“At last, this company has found its true master. It took far too long.”
Paul accepted the handkerchiefs they offered and wiped at his eyes, but he still could not stop crying, not even after soaking through every last one of them.
From inside the frame resting in the box, the young Paul of twenty years ago was smiling brightly at the man he had become.