The post office on Fourth Street smelled of paper and floor wax and old coffee, the same smell it had held when I was a girl and my father brought me in on Saturdays to sort the rubber bands. The clerk who had spoken to me on the telephone was a heavy, kind woman named Dolores, and when I came through the door she was already waiting by the back counter with a gray plastic bin in her arms. She set it down between us with great care, the way you set down a sleeping infant. “This year so far,” she said. “Three hundred and eleven. Your dad would have started in October.”
I lifted the first letter out. It was written on a sheet of lined notebook paper in pencil, and the writing slanted upward, as a child writing in a hurry will. Dear Santa. My name is Caleb and I am seven. I do not need a lot. My mom works at night and she is tired. Could you bring her a warm coat? Her old one has a hole. And if you have any left over, I would like a ball. I read it standing at the counter with my hand against my mouth. Dolores handed me a tissue from a box that she clearly kept for this.
“We had a system,” she said. “Your father went through the whole bin on a Sunday, with a yellow pad. He marked the ones that were real needs, not wishes. Then he went shopping. He kept the receipts in a coffee can, and he wrote the cost of each one on the back of the letter. Every year he spent about two thousand dollars of his pension.” She shook her head slowly. “I told him he should let the church help. He said the church would put its name on it. He said the children should believe it was Santa.”
A man who gives in secret leaves no monument, only a hundred children who still believe in something good.
I did not know how to start. I am a bookkeeper, not a hero. But I sat down at the break room table with a legal pad and a pen and began, one letter at a time. By ten o clock, I had a list of forty one families I could help directly, and a hundred that I could not afford. I called my brother in Denver and told him what I was doing. He was silent, and then he said, “Put me down for five hundred.” I called a neighbor. I called the ladies at my church. By the end of the day, six people had pledged money, and a seventh had offered a truck.
That weekend, a miracle happened that I did not understand at the time. The word got around. A man from the hardware store came in with a sack of work gloves. A bakery sent boxes of cookies. A woman dropped off forty brand new winter coats, tags still attached, because her husband had owned a clothing store that closed. The break room table was buried. Dolores and two other clerks stayed past closing, wrapping gifts in brown paper, and a retired mail carrier named Hector showed up in a Santa hat just to carry boxes.
We found out later that most of the town had known all along. Hector said it plainly, wrapping tape around a box of mittens. “Everyone in the carrier room knew,” he said. “Your dad made us promise. But when a man gives a hundred kids a Christmas every year for thirty years, people notice. We were just waiting for someone to ask.” I laughed, a wet, astonished laugh. All those years, the most generous man in town had thought he was alone in it, and the whole building had been quietly keeping his secret and holding its breath.
We delivered the last parcel on the twenty third of December, in the snow. I drove the old Buick of my father, which smelled of peppermint and engine oil, and I carried a box up the steps of a gray duplex on Mill Street. A tall, tired woman in a worn parka opened the door. Behind her, a small boy in pajamas stared up at the box with huge brown eyes. I said, “Package for Caleb. From the North Pole.” His mother opened her mouth and nothing came out. She took the box, and she put her arm around the boy, and I could tell she was holding something in with all her strength.
Inside, among the other gifts, was a warm wool coat in a size ten, dark green, and a red rubber ball. On the tag, I had written in the block capitals of my father, which I had practiced for three days, Merry Christmas from Santa. I stood on the porch in the snow until the door closed. Then I got in the Buick and put my forehead on the steering wheel and cried for ten minutes, for the man who had done this thirty years, and for the fact that he had never once been thanked.
On Christmas Eve, Dolores called me at home. She said that a letter had come to the post office that morning with no stamp, left in the slot. It was addressed to Santa Claus, North Pole, and it was in the looping handwriting of a woman. She read it to me over the phone. Dear Santa, my son got a coat for his mother and a ball for himself. I do not know who you are. But I know you are somebody real, because I saw a pair of old fingerprints on the tape. I would like to thank the man who taught you how to do this. He must be very proud.
I have kept that letter. It is framed on the wall over my desk, beside the photograph of my father on the steps of the post office in 1989, in his uniform, with a grin like a boy. This year we have a committee of sixteen. We call it Operation Santa, since that was the old name, and we run it from the back room of Fourth Street. The bin has become four bins. We answer every letter that is a true need, and we sign them the same way he did. Nobody has ever found out who Santa is, and that is exactly how it should be.