The Untold Legend of How Santa Discovered His First Sleigh
Photos by Bo Willse
CHapter 1 - SUSPICION
The first time the sleigh moved, he thought his girlfriend was playing a joke, again. And yet he had only been gone a second, and she was down on the first floor of the Mill where she was shoving bags of buckwheat around to make room for the holiday rush. But the sleigh had moved (or maybe it had just shifted?) and no one else had been around – which returned him to the unpleasant notion that Manor Mill was filled with ghosts. That was what everyone had been telling him, at least.
He was Nik Lausen, which is to say he always introduced himself as, “Nik. Nik with a K” because everyone misspelled his name, and, as an orphan, he had no means to double check that. He just knew he was Nik, without the C, as if, like himself as a baby, the letter had been dropped off and forgotten. And he had become fairly certain that Lausen was handed to him just because the Church’s orphanage was mostly German Protestants and that was probably somebody’s last name, the surname of someone somewhere far away – because who around a place full of locals like Monkton would want to be connected to a child they knew wasn’t theirs?
Nik brushed some flour off his apron and pulled a red scarf around his neck - he liked red, and ever since he told his girlfriend Sarah that he liked red, all he got was red. “Well,” she said, “you never say you like anything!” That was true. He liked to acquire things, but he liked giving them away even more.
In this sense Nik was a skilled hustler, and contrary to most hustlers, he had a uniquely good heart. He acknowledged this with some pride about himself. St. James Church down the road from Manor Mill had raised him, and he became the orphan who seemed to have the best things around him. Ironically, Nik had little interest in those very things he hustled -- largely toys, or an extra cookie after dinner, or a better blanket during nap time. But he found himself on the receiving end. Perhaps it was because he had those full cheeks and forgiving eyes, but it was also because in any mix of things – say newly-donated toys in the oversized chest in the church lounge – he zeroed in on the best items more quickly than everyone else. He was faster and more discerning. And he could always trade up with ease if on the occasion he missed:
“Did you mean to pick a hobby horse without a tail?” He might ask, eyeing the better of the two in a companion’s lap.
“Tail?”
“Yes, it’s missing a tail. Like this one, see? It dangles and you can flick it when you’re bored” And he’d hold his high, hiding the cracked back leg.
“Oh.”
“But the one you have is nice, too.”
“Yeah.”
This reverse positivity was a great tactic that was always quick to land. Before long, as in this instance, the dialogue would end: “You want to trade?”
It would not be long, though, before Nik would hand the upgraded horse to someone else without much thought. “Here,” he’d say to whomever was nearby, “I think you’d like this.”
Meanwhile, as kids around him got adopted or moved, he also found himself immersed in the creation of new things. He liked to muse over the wooden tools, knocking them together or fashioning new ones out of a tub of wooden cylinders, triangles and rectangles that had been sanded down by the local woodworker who tended to smile at him faintly, which, even after Nik realized were just scraps from his other projects, still made him feel special. He enjoyed receiving gifts. Over time, as he reflected — and he had lots of time to reflect — he realized again it was less about the gift, and more that he was the one chosen to receive it, and no one else. And that was a special thing.
He was also a hustler in that he seemed to have a knack for finding advantage, and he also had a personality that children, and later adults, seemed to be very comfortable – if not relieved – to confess their small sins or share their faults. He was a good listener, and, while sitting cross-legged opposite someone, he’d ask simple questions, like “Did you do something wrong?” and pretend to write it down. The irony that he was in a church and had created his own elementary school confessional only came to light years later when someone asked him about “the list” of who was good and who was bad.
If he wanted to win, he almost always did. Even chess, which he never understood fully, had much opportunity to recognize when players grew anxious or impatient with anticipation (his best strategy: sit, do nothing, and watch his opponent), in which case it meant there was something worth paying attention to, and a counter offensive was only a matter of discovery.
Some of these memories were bouncing in his head as Nik walked down the three heavy flights of stairs of Manor Mill to see Sarah. The machines and straps were whirling with noise and cranks and gears, a cacophony of sound that Nik had grown to love, the machinery just doing things, making things. He looked out the windows as he made his way down. He loved that there was fresh snow on the ground, enough to cover the grass, with only a few steps and coach marks to disrupt the plane. A heavy snow also meant horse-drawn sleighs, which he liked to watch slip across the ground. He imagined sleighs without horses so that you’d see just the lightest of tracks, leaving the layer of snow almost completely intact.
“I know you think I’m crazy. But the sleigh moved.” He said to Sarah. “I swear there’s a ghost.”
“Yeah. You’re crazy.”
“No, it did. It moved. I know because the back rail was just over the largest plank, and then it was beyond it. But I could also see it in the wood shavings. It moved!”
Nik already knew Sarah wasn’t going to be convinced, and as the morning progressed, he started to convince himself once more that he simply was wrong. He would come to learn, though, that the problem wasn’t to figure out if the sleigh had moved, but when.
Chapter 2: Awareness
As November ripped into the warmer fall weather that October had left, Nik was certain the sleigh kept moving – ever so slightly – but he kept it to himself and shrugged it off. Manor Mill was an old building, winds blowing through the back barn were strong, and, who knows, perhaps an animal knocked into it poking around. After all, the barn was generally wide open to the forest out back. None of these explanations truly convinced Nik, but they buried his uncertainty long enough for him to carry on.
It wasn’t until the sleigh moved twice in one day — and both in the afternoon — that Nik decided paid closer attention to the wood shavings that were scattered across the floor. As he had been busy hand planing a new railing for a flight of steps leading down to the basement, there was plenty to move around and he piled them a bit higher than other areas of the floor. While Sarah loved a neat workspace, Nik liked the scattered chaos of a workshop in motion, the smell of sawdust, and the sign of a lot of activity. As he piled the shavings a bit higher around the sides of the rail, Nik thought about his day. It had been a good one - Sarah was in a positive mood from a group of children stopping by to carol; he had given the Miller a new apron, even though Christmas was right around the corner; and he had finally fixed the heavy basement door that had been bugging him. All together, the day was fulfilling, and while Nik wasn’t the kind of person to be bothered about whether he was happy, an outside observer might think he was a man who had been filled with a bit of joy.
The next day, a cold winter front had plunged temperatures and Nik and Sarah shivered together just inside the front door, puffs of their breath fogging the inside panes; Manor Mill was a drafty place. They had work to do, and moving around would warm them up, but it was quite pretty outside with the snow calcified on the surface, glittering in a low bright sun. They both were transfixed on a squirrel that hopped across the snow without leaving any prints.
Perhaps it was the peacefulness of that moment, or that Sarah took his hand, her face reddened from just being outside, but for whatever reason, he felt suddenly compelled to confess to her: “It moved again.”
“Huh?” She said, snapping back into the moment.
“The sleigh. It moved. I could see the track in the wood shavings. And it moved. Seriously. Something’s up.”
Sarah was not one to roll her eyes, but huffed slightly. “Huh?” She said again. “Allright, Nik. So now what do you want to do about it?”
Nik wasn’t entirely sure. She leaned over, shorter than he, and kissed him. “I believe you.”
An idea struck him at that moment as he stared at a pile of scrap red oak boards left over from a repair to the hoop that covered the mill stones to keep flour from getting everywhere. “Anyway,” he changed the subject. “I figured I’d build some toy trains out of that wood and give it to the Church.” Nik had a gift for building things, one he had been tuning since he was a child, and could already picture how he would plane the boards and use the augur to make holes for the axles, and shape the wood to look like a steam engine on the York railway. He already imagined using some old rivets to connect up a few cars. The kids could paint them!
“Oh,” said Sarah, adjusting to the conversation. “That sounds great.” Sarah’s head was in a different place at this point, and had turned away to start resetting the bags of grain and the last containers of honey for sale.
Nik will often think about this very moment, not Sarah becoming distracted, but the energy that infused him when he had decided in his head that he’d be making toys to give away, like a spirit, shaped of light, had landed next to him and stepped into his body.
And when he went upstairs up to the back of the mill, the sleigh had moved a full foot from its mark.
Chapter 3: Confirmation
It was an early morning, mid week, before dawn. A humid warm front had started to pick up the snow into a foggy mist and Nik had a full day ahead tending to the equipment. The Miller was out again this week, traveling up north to pick up a few varieties of grain to try grounding and selling locally. The Miller was an entrepreneur, though not one with quite enough focus to see ideas all the way through – but his periodic success would occasionally deliver for him. He had tried selling cloth sacks of flour that held just a pound, which took more time with the machines and led to more waste as they filled them, but nonetheless seemed to sell faster and at a higher price. It also allowed the miller to experiment with grain varietals - different kinds of rye and buckwheat — to see if the more experienced bakers would gravitate towards Manor Mill and not others.
In any event, the Miller was gone for the day, Sarah had left to visit with her mother in York, and Nik was alone. There was much to get done and he was lost in prioritizing just where he would start.
Nik must have missed the first rap at the door because the second was close to thumping, the small bells bouncing off the side in loud discordant rings. He bounced down the steps and opened the door.
A mother, crying, cradling a small child who was limp in her arms, came pushing through past him. “Please,” she stammered. “Please help.”
Nik, shaken into the present moment, pushed some boxes and crates away, grabbed a large empty sack and laid it on the ground, motioning to her to rest her child on it. He closed the door as she set the boy down carefully, shoved some clean rags nearby into a smaller sack and set it under his head as a pillow. The boy’s face was flush.
“He fell,” she said. “He ran after me and grabbed hold of a tree and just started climbing. He didn’t realize how slick the branches were, they must have frozen overnight after the thaw. His name is Benjamin.”
All Nik knew about medical attention was what he had observed over the years, first at the orphanage, and later around the mill, which is to say, not much. He held Benjamin’s arm, which was warm but limp and looked at his small face, breathing slowly. A small trail of blood dripped down around his ear from a scape on the side of his head, but there was otherwise no visible injury.
“He seems ok,” Nik tried to assure the mother. “He may have just knocked himself out.” She explained the fall again, how he slipped and bounced against one limb, trying to grab another, but then fell from the lowest branch. There was a layer of snow, which helped, but the ground was still hard. The boy moved his head slightly, which filled both of them with a sudden moment of relief. “Yes,” Nik repeated. “I think he’ll be okay.”
Upstairs, Nik prepared some tea and tried to recalibrate his day as he tended to the boy and the mother, who was still shaken. She had been traveling from Virginia, was staying at the Monkton Hotel for the evening, and was due in Wilmington a day from now, though she was not sure about the train schedule. The boy had woken up, and was groggy. He was small and just about to turn six, and said he liked trains.
“Trains, huh?”
“Yeah. Trains.”
Benjamin and his mother stayed for the day, as Nik checked in on them and stayed close to the boy while he recovered from what appeared to be a minor concussion, and as she walked back to the train station to figure out her ticket. Nik watched him rest calmly and was glad to see him walking around when he woke back up. He said his head hurt a little, but he was cheery and well-behaved.
“Come up here,” Nik motioned, and the two climbed the steps, which seemed oversized for the boy’s small legs, and they walked into the small woodshop in the back of the Mill.
Nik’s carpentry skills had become quite exceptional as the years passed since his days at St. James, working with the wood blocks and pieces that were handed to him. He was deeply at home with the array of chisels and planes that he had hanging and stashed in various places, and could join two pieces of wood together in a way that required no metal fasteners. He almost never marked the wood where his tenons or mortises would be, and rarely had to do things twice – and if he did it was because he changed the design in the middle of the project.
They walked into the shop together, and Nik stopped in his tracks. The boy knocked into him, uncertain what had just happened. Benjamin looked up at Nik, intuitively trying to discern the problem from his expression, which was studied and focused. “Huh,” Nik said.
The sleigh had moved well over a foot – Nik did not need the markings of the tape to know that, and it was clear to him that the back had also moved more than the front, cocking it a bit to the left and running it out of parallel with the back loft wall. “Huh,” he said again, approaching the sleigh. Benjamin had lost interest in Nik’s reaction and ran up to the sleigh, climbing in it. “Horses?” he asked.
“No,” said Nik as he ran his hand along the front rail of the sleigh. “No horses.” He could have sworn the sleigh felt warm to touch. Benjamin frowned but continued to scramble around the sleigh, leaving Nik in his thoughts trying to rationalize what had just happened, coming up remarkably short of any possible explanation, then alarmed by Benjamin’s sudden question: “Does it fly?”
Nik smiled and nodded. “Yes, perhaps it does,” enjoying the boy’s imagination. Then he turned to the pile of wood scraps, picked up his coping saw and clamped up a piece of white pine. “So you like trains, right?”
Benjamin nodded, climbing out of the sleigh and over to Nik’s workbench.
As Nik got to work, his hands reaching for tools quickly like a surgeon with no time to spare, Benjamin stared in wonder. He saw a blur of movement, almost impossible to see where both hands were at the same time. And it seemed the train was appearing from the clamp like a sculptor building out of a block of clay.
And then, a thump! Nik’s hands stopped, Ben, startled, turned around and they both knew what had just happened. The sleigh had moved. Nik wasn’t sure what had made the sound, but there was no escaping it had come from the sleigh. It almost seemed like the sleigh had been picked up and dropped down.
Ben looked at the sleigh, then looked at Nik, and then back at the sleigh. As if by second nature, Nik continued to turn the auger, not looking at the hole he was drilling that would hold the front axle for the train. He just stared at the sleigh, turning the auger, and Ben kept looking back and forth. The slight strain of the wood responding from the sharp bit of the auger was the only sound in the room.
And then, as the auger’s bit cleanly broke through the other side of the wood, and Nik, still not watching his work, felt the release and pulled the auger bit out blindly, the sleigh moved, ever so slightly.
Nik set the front of the train down and grabbed the caboose, clamping it quickly, barely looking down, and started up the auger again holding both handles perfectly straight and at a right angle to the wood. He turned quickly, and the sleigh moved, just slightly, as if a tiny, but strong string connected his hands in motion to the back of the sleigh.
This continued for a few minutes. As Nik built and and started to assemble the small wooden train, the sleigh would shift, and Nik became wary that if he stopped making the train or doing whatever it was that he was doing, the sleigh would never move again. But soon he had finished the parts and he had to set down his tools. The sleigh stayed still, and Nik began to assemble the train, a few axles and the wheels, which fit snugly together. Benjamin was wholly enraptured in Nik’s work as the front engine came together with three axles, unperturbed by the sleigh’s motion, as if it was just something that happened in the shop.
Nik rolled the engine on the workbench, demonstrating it to Benjamin, and then handed it to him. “The Monkton Express,” said Nik, feeling a sense of joy as he watched the boy smile.
As Benjamin took it from Nik’s hand, marveling over the detail and rolling the wheels with the palm of his hand, the sleigh rose from the floor, levitating. Nik stared over Benjamin’s head whose back was turned to the sleigh, and watched, as if a ghost was walking through.
And it was at that point some deep emotional moment hit him, a connection to the boy, the sleigh, the wood around him. He was filled with light and energy. The sleigh dropped softly to the ground.
A door closed and Sarah and Benjamin’s mother walked in. “Ben!” the mother said, running to him.
Sarah looked at Nik, quizzically, sensing something had just happened. “You ok?” said Sarah.
“Yes,” said Nik. “I think I figured something out.”