In December of 1962, an eight-year-old boy named Billy Ray Tackett circled one toy in the Sears Christmas Wish Book with a stub of pencil, and on Christmas morning it was sitting on his front porch with a big red bow on the handle, and for sixty-four years he never found out who put it there.
He found out on a Tuesday in November, in the back room of an empty store on Main Street in Pinnacle Springs, Arkansas, because a woman he had never met called him and asked if he was the Billy Ray Tackett from Route 2.
"I am," he said.
"Mr. Tackett, my name is Carla Doss," she said. "My grandfather ran the Sears catalog store here from 1948 to 1979. We're finally cleaning it out. And I found something with your name on it."
Billy Ray was seventy-two. He had carried the mail on rural Route 2 out of the Pinnacle Springs post office for thirty-four years, the same route he had grown up on, through the hollows and up the ridges of the Arkansas Ozarks. He had retired in 2016. He still knew every mailbox on that route by heart. Every name. Every dog.
He had grown up in a two-room house at the top of Possum Ridge, at the very end of the route, Box 14. His father had left when he was five. His mother had raised him and his little sister on what she made sewing, and on a garden, and on the kindness of the church.
In the winter of 1962, his mother was sick.
She was sick in bed from October until March. Billy Ray never knew exactly what it was. He just knew she could not get up, and that it was his job, at eight years old, to haul the water and the firewood.
The spring was at the bottom of the ridge, a quarter mile down a steep path. The woodpile was at the edge of the clearing. Every morning before school and every afternoon after, Billy Ray carried water up the hill two buckets at a time, and firewood one armload at a time, in the cold, while his little sister kept the stove going.
His arms ached all winter. His hands cracked and bled.
The Sears Christmas Wish Book came in the mail that November, the way it did every year. The big fat catalog with the toys in the back.
Billy Ray did not circle the cap gun or the cowboy boots or the train set.
He turned to page 296 and circled a red steel coaster wagon. Steel body. Rubber tires. $12.95.
He did not want it for playing. He wanted it for the water. A wagon could carry four buckets at once. A wagon could carry a whole week of firewood. A wagon would mean his mother would stay warm and his little sister would not have to carry anything.
He knew they could not afford it. His mother had told him there would be no Christmas presents that year, only an orange each and some hard candy from the church.
He circled it anyway. He left the Wish Book open on the porch, under a rock, so it would not blow away.
Then he forgot about it.
On Christmas morning, he opened the door to bring in the firewood, and there it was.
A red steel coaster wagon. Brand new. With a red bow on the handle and a tag tied on with string.
From Santa. For the water.
Billy Ray stood on the cold porch in his socks and stared at it. Then he ran inside and woke up his mother.
She came to the door in her nightgown, holding on to the frame, and looked at the wagon for a long time. Then she sat down on the porch step, in the cold, and put her face in her hands and cried.
"Who sent it, Mama?" Billy Ray asked.
"I don't know, honey," she said. "I truly don't know."
She never did find out. She died in 1999, still wondering.
Billy Ray had used that wagon every day for six years. He had hauled water and firewood and groceries and his little sister. When he was fourteen, he had painted it again, the same red, because the first paint had worn through.
He still had it. It hung on two nails in the rafters of his garage, red, rusted at the corners, with the handle wrapped in tape.
And every Christmas for the last thirty years, without telling anybody, Billy Ray Tackett had bought a gift for one child on Route 2. A child whose family he knew was having a hard winter. He knew which ones. A mail carrier always knows.
He left the gifts on the porches before daylight on Christmas morning. With a tag.
From Santa.
He had never told a soul. Not his late wife. Not his children. It was the only way he knew to say thank you to a stranger.
The old Sears catalog store was a narrow brick building on Main Street, between the bank and the barber shop. In the old days, people came in to look at the catalogs and place orders, and the orders came by train and were picked up at the counter. It had been closed since 1979. The windows were papered over.
Carla Doss met him at the door. She was about sixty, in a sweatshirt and work gloves, with dust in her hair.
"I'm sorry to call you out of the blue, Mr. Tackett," she said. "But I think you'll want to see this."
She led him through the empty front room to a back office with a rolltop desk and a wall of wooden filing drawers. On the desk was an open ledger. A big one, green, with a cloth spine, the kind of order book catalog agents kept by hand.
The spine said 1962.
Carla turned to a page in December and put her finger on a line.
Billy Ray put on his reading glasses and bent over the desk.
Dec. 14, 1962. Steel coaster wagon, red. Cat. no. 79 N 2814. $12.95 plus freight. Paid cash. Deliver to Box 14, Route 2, Possum Ridge. Christmas Eve. Leave on porch. Do not give name.
Below that, in a different handwriting, in pencil, someone had signed the order.
Billy Ray stared at the signature.
He did not need to read it twice. He had seen that handwriting every working day for thirty-four years. On the old route books in the post office. On the back of the sorting case. In the margins of the county route map, where the old carriers had written notes about every mailbox on Route 2.
It was not a name. It was just two words, the way a carrier signs the back of a route slip.
Route 2.