because folded on top of what my uncle had welded under his own truck was a photograph of him in a red suit and a white beard, and it cracked thirty years of my family wide open.
The box held a Santa suit. Rolled up careful, the velvet gone thin at the knees, a real beard yellowed with age. A pair of round glasses. And a stack of composition books, and when I opened them I understood what I was looking at, and I had to sit down on the cold garage floor.
They were route books. Names and hollows and dates, thirty years of them. Every one a family in the Pikeville hills that had nothing, a mine widow, a laid-off man, a house full of kids and no work. And beside each name, what he left. A ham. A coat. Shoes, sizes and all. A twenty tucked in an envelope. Toys, listed by child.
My uncle was the one they called the Coalfield Santa. Thirty years, every Christmas Eve, somebody in a Santa suit left food and coats and toys on the porches of the poorest families in the county, knocked, and was gone into the dark before anybody opened the door. Nobody ever knew who. It was a mystery the whole county loved, argued about, gave up on. And it was my uncle, the plainest man alive, lunch pail and VFW and church on Sundays, who welded a Santa suit under his truck so his own family would never find it and make him stop, or make it about him.
The last composition book had a note in the front.
I came up out of that mine alive when better men did not, and I asked the Lord what it was for. This is what it was for. Do not tell them it was me. A gift with a name on it is just a trade. Keep it a mystery. Let the little ones believe.
Do not tell them it was me. Thirty years he kept that, the biggest, brightest secret a man ever carried, welded under a rusting truck, and he took it to his grave rather than take a word of credit.
I have thought hard about his note. He did not want to be known. But he is gone now, and the Coalfield Santa cannot ride anymore, and I could not stand for those hills to lose him entirely.
So here is what we did. We did not put his name on it. Instead, a group of us, quiet, took up the route book where he left off. This past Christmas Eve, somebody in a red suit left food and coats on the poorest porches in Pikeville, knocked, and was gone before the door opened. The mystery rides again. The little ones still believe.
My uncle welded his whole enormous heart under a truck and told nobody. I am not going to tell them his name. I am just going to make sure the Coalfield Santa never stops coming, which is the only thank-you that plain quiet man would ever have wanted.