Santa and the Bad Man Behind Blue Eyes

For over seventy years, a sweet tradition has been observed in this region. Every year, the “Santa Train” snakes its way through the steep ridges and hollows from Pikeville, KY down to Kingsport, TN, stopping along the route at several locations. Santa Claus rides the train, and from the back of the train he throws candy, winter clothing, toys, stuffed animals, and other gifts to the children who await the train. The tradition started all those decades ago as a way to bring Christmas to the wretchedly poor children of isolated hamlets of Appalachia, and through the years has featured a special guest to ride with Santa and help distribute gifts. The special guest is usually a country music or bluegrass celebrity; in recent years, Patti Loveless (who had a hit with the song Santa Train) and Ricky Scaggs have ridden with Santa. This year the special guest was bluegrass legend Marty Stuart.

Since one of the Santa Train’s stops is very near our home, my wife and I decided to go meet it and try to catch a glimpse of Mr. Stuart. We’ve long been fans of his, having first seen him live many years ago at a huge concert at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, where we also saw Ray Price, Dwight Yoakam, Asleep At The Wheel, and several other acts. We used to watch Marty’s tv show when it was still in production, and we have a strong appreciation for his musical virtuosity. He was tapped at age 13 to tour with the legendary Lester Flatt, and later toured with Bill Monroe. Marty Stuart stood toe to toe with musical giants years before he could legally drive a car.

The rain and the fog were both heavy yesterday. We were a bit late getting to the train stop and didn’t get a look at Marty Stuart, though one of the photos I took, if enlarged, shows him hovering in the shadows of the club car behind members of this band as the train prepared to pull out. We had already been planning a trip down to Kingsport to do some weekly shopping, so after the Santa Train departed, we headed on down into Tennessee and ran some errands and got a bite at a local downtown pub. About the time we were paying our check, the Santa Train was due to pull into the final stop, so we put up our hoods and opened the umbrella and went on over, heads lowered under the steady rain. The train pulled in, Santa got off and made his way through the crowd and hugged several kids and posed for photos, and then the emcee announced Marty Stuart.

Marty is famous for his elaborately styled head of hair, and I imagine his decision to wear a hat was helped along by the fact that had his hair gotten wet on the seven-hour Santa Train tour, he would have presented a sorry sight. He opted for a Russian fur hat — a novel choice. The hat and his dark, square glasses made him look like a Ukrainian mob boss. But he and his band were in fine form, and the short set they played in the downpour was good and tight. Marty’s band was short one member, his drummer “Handsome” Harry Stinson being absent due to his mother’s death. The newest member of the Fabulous Superlatives is multi-instrumentalist Chris Scruggs, grandson of bluegrass titan Earl Scruggs. And “Cousin” Kenny Vaughn was on hand to play guitar, a treat for me. Kenny’s stoic-but-spacey expression and lanky frame have long made me think of him as the Ace Frehley of country music.

So Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives did their short set on a soggy stage in front of a drenched but appreciative crowd of kids and their parents, and we slogged our way back to the car and finished our shopping and returned home. But all through the evening, all through the misty remnants of that particular Saturday, I kept thinking about the Santa Train and the kids that surrounded it, reaching their hands up to catch what Santa and his helpers threw to them.

I thought about the poverty of so many of the children and their families. Before going to that first train stop, I had assumed that the current day’s Santa Train would be a symbolic gesture, a sentimental nod to the old days when the kids actually needed the toys and clothes and gifts dispensed from the jolly man in the red suit. But once we were in position at the train, I had time to look at the crowd and to watch their actions.

And yes, some of the kids and their families were indistinguishable from the folks you would see at the shopping center or the churches. But an awful lot of them had that look, the look I remember with sour clarity. The hungry eyes, the desperate, fixed gaze, the glow of prospect in the eyes, the prospect that something good might happen today. The mamaws wearing sweatpants and Walmart knockoff Carhart jackets with their cigarette-creased faces and bad dental work and bony hips, picking their way carefully across the rocks in the train tracks, cawing at their grandchildren, “Dalton, waitaminnit or I’ll snatch you back in that car and take you to the house!” The papaws consoling the little red-eyed girls, stroking their ponytails with reddened, work-rasped hands, whispering, “Honey, hit’s alright, Papaw’ll git you a backpack like that kind you wanted. Santy couldn’t throw that far — hit’s Papaw’s fault the other youngun got to it first…” And so many of these grandparents raising their children’s children, because the parents are in jail or rehab or parts unknown, and thank you, Captain Meth and Colonel Oxycontin, for your many blessings. The uncles and brothers with Burley bulges in their cheeks and hands clasped before them on the hoods of cars as if in prayer, skinny hips jutted out behind them, free feed-store caps pulled low on their heads in the soaking rain, watching their young charges with cautious devotion and that canny bitterness of men who have been lied to since day one.

Lied to. Oh, yes. Their preachers have told them that if they do right, things will get better. And they go down the mine every morning and come home every night with black faces and sprained fingers, and they collapse in exhausted heaps in their financed recliners in front of financed flat-screens and sip Mountain Dew while their loser-ass cousins draw disability and sell their pain pills for profit and try to keep track of their burner phones’ ringtones and get profiled as victims and heroes by the Yankees who run the local news media. Then Sunday morning the working men sit in the butt-cupped pews and listen to the preachers lie to them some more, but they can’t stay away because they might not be able to spell pariah but they sure as shit understand the concept and its killing implications. So they sit there and act interested, and later in the line leading outside to freedom, they grin at the preacher’s thin jests and try not to act gleeful as they stride to the twice-financed vehicle that will take them back home for an afternoon of television and intentional amnesia.

And they’ll watch their children, the very children that reached worshipful hands towards Santa and Marty at the train stop, the children they’re too tired to spend time with. They’ll watch them as they head off to schools that indoctrinate them against their own people. Perhaps some of the men are perceptive enough to realize that their children will be taught to grin when they are insulted by people who hate them and their kind, that they will learn to hate their own culture and heritage and history, that they will be conditioned to stand by passively while their ancestors’ names and deeds are obliterated by the burning, burning hatred of those who will replace them. Oh, yes, replace them, and the children will hear good church folk say “We deserve to be replaced,” and say it with smiles like mules eating briars, And the children will watch the preachers take the offerings and send them to faraway lands to prove how much the little church loves Jesus, but they will also notice that the church never tells Jesus to love them here and now in their smoky single-wides, love them with their ramen noodles and canned ravioli, love them with their government laptops and poison, poison, poison coming down into the hillside houses all the time. The men will watch, and they will notice, and they will burn, but their tongues were long ago stilled by the same fears that will hobble their children, and the women will watch, and they will cry their secret tears, and there will be many nights in the airless bedrooms that they almost, almost talk about it together, but they will put it off until they are raising their own grandchildren, and they will wonder what they did to deserve the hatred of the entire world, and what they did to deserve the neglect of the church that cares for everyone else, and what they did to deserve the silence pounding down from the skies above them, the skies that drop the breezes that carry the train whistles through their windows at night, the trains that bear the coal that their daddies and papaws chipped from the face of the inner earth, the trains that might bring Santy Claus and some sanger next year before Thanksgiving.

I love those people and their wary eyes. I love their children and their reaching arms. I love their pathetic gratitude. I love their musical accents. I love their resolute faces under hardship and privation.

But I do not love the ones who neglect these little ones. The ones who ignore them and mock them and their parents and their culture and their way of life. I do not love them. And I am far from indifferent.

What am I thankful for this year? I am thankful that I am not indifferent to those who hate the ones I love. I am informed by the world around me that my blue eyes are proof positive that I am a bad man. So be it. Their mockery sits gently on me, because I am much more of a bad man than the ones who scorn the little children at the Santa Train can imagine.

~ S.K. Orr