…the tank was never a tank. The camp belonged to a man named Osmo Hakkarainen, and his son, who is eighty-one now and lives in Marquette, drove up and met me at the property and explained it in about four minutes. The mines went down in the fifties and there were families in Baraga County that winter with nothing, and Osmo, who had a little money and no gift for talking to people, bought coats. Wool coats, work coats, whatever the store in L’Anse had. He put a septic tank in the ground behind a camp nobody used and capped the inlet and made himself a dry, mouse-proof, hundred-and-twenty-gallon closet out of it, and for about eleven years he ran the plainest charity I have ever heard of out of a hole in the ground.
You went to the camp. You took a coat. You did not have to see him and he did not have to see you, and no man in that county ever had to stand in front of another man and say what he needed.
He died in 1971. Nobody emptied it, because nobody but his son knew what it was, and the son was in the Army until ’74 and by the time he came home the whole thing had gone quiet under the tar.
We took the coats out and laid them on the grass, and the two of us stood there and counted them like it mattered. Sixty-eight.
His son has them at his house now. He’s giving them away.
