The Stranger Who Paid Our Winters

What we did with it

I could have stopped there. It would have been enough, maybe, to bury him well and cry at the graveside and let the story become one of those things old-timers tell at the counter. But Walt did not stop, not for thirty years, and I decided the least his town could do was not stop either.

The envelope had gone silent when Walt died. That first winter without him, I paid the propane accounts out of my own pocket, quietly, the way he taught me, because the Hendricks furnace does not care whose money keeps it running. But I am seventy-two years old and I do not have thirty more winters in me, and I knew that when I went, the warmth would go with me the way it had almost gone with Walt.

So we made it bigger than one person. We made it bigger than one envelope.

The town set up a fund. A real one, with a name and a board and a coffee can at the counter of my store for anybody who wants to drop a few dollars in. We did not name it after Walt. He would have hated that, and anyway it was never his to be named after. We named it the Vaczy Fund, after the boy on the mountain, after EDWARD J. VACZY on the granite slab, because he was the one who asked, and Walt was only ever the hands.

Every November, on the first cold Monday, I put a plain white envelope on the counter of Bellamy Hardware. I put in what I can. And all through the fall, folks come by and add to it, the ones who have it giving so the ones who do not can stay warm, and most of them do not sign their names because that is how Walt did it and that is how it is done now. The propane company in Fremont knows to call me. The Hendricks widow gets warm. The Vaczy kids get warm. Whoever is cold in Halvorsen this winter, and there is always someone, gets warm, and they do not have to know who, and they do not have to ask.