The Santa Who Came by Sleigh

Vern lives four miles north of town on the gravel, on the place his grandfather homesteaded. He is 70, a widower like Dad, and he raised Holsteins until his knees gave out.

Now he keeps a few beef cows and two black Percheron geldings, full brothers, twelve and fourteen years old, that he drives in the county fair parade every August and hires out for hayrides in October.

He was in the barn when I pulled in, forking hay into the manger. The horses stood with their big heads down in it, and each of them must have weighed close to nineteen hundred pounds.

They had feet the size of dinner plates and they made the whole barn floor feel small.

“Joanie,” he said. “Leon all right?”

That is what everybody says now when I show up somewhere without calling. Leon all right. I told him Dad was fine.

Then I told him about the text, and I read it to him off my own phone, because Dad had forwarded it to me that morning with no message at all, just the text.

Vern leaned on the fork and did not say anything for a while. One of the horses blew out through his nose, a long rumbling sound, and shook his head so his halter rattled.

“Kids don’t want a Santa who shakes,” Vern said finally, like he was tasting it.

“That’s what it says.”

“Huh.” He forked another pile of hay. “I shake. Shook since I was sixty. Doc calls it essential tremor. Don’t stop me driving these two.” He set the fork against the wall. “What time’s the party?”

“Two o’clock, the thirteenth.”

“Then we hitch at one,” he said.

He said it the way you say the sun will come up. I had not even asked him. I had come out there meaning to ask, and I had my whole speech ready in the car, and I did not need any of it.

He walked me around the side of the machine shed and hauled the big door back on its track. Inside, under a canvas tarp, was a two-seat wooden sleigh his grandfather bought in 1938 from a farm sale in Minnesota.

It had two bench seats, high curved sides, and steel-shod runners. Vern had taken it apart and redone the wood himself in the winter of 2019, oak and ash, and it was the most beautiful thing in that shed.

“She hasn’t been out on a real street in years,” he said. “Town plows Main Street down to the blacktop, mostly. We’d need a snow.”

“Vern,” I said. “I don’t want to wreck her party. I’m not trying to shame anybody. I just want Dad to ride down Main Street one more time where people can see him. And whoever wants to come see him can come.”

“Main Street’s a public road,” he said. “Horses got as much right to it as anybody. More, if you ask the old-timers.” He shut the shed door. “You let the kids decide, Joanie. Kids always know which one’s the real one.”

I told Dad that Sunday, over cribbage at his kitchen table.

He did not say yes right away. He sat there with his cards fanned out in his left hand, the right one resting flat on the table to keep it still, and he looked at me over his gold-rimmed glasses for a long time.