The Drunk

The story of the fair took three days to cross the county and the rest of his life to stop following Wayne Granger, and on the third night of it, he did what he had been doing since October: he went to the liquor store.

He had stopped pretending it was a vow. The vow had broken in October, on the night Lana married Reece Calder, and Wayne Granger had discovered, at forty-nine, that the thing he had been afraid of for twenty-one years — the man he became when he drank — had not gone anywhere. He was still there. He had just been waiting.

The man who came out of the liquor store that December night was not the man who had gone in. He was the man from the tent in Wendell County: loud, aggrieved, certain that the world had wronged him, and full of the particular courage that comes from having nothing left to lose.

He did not go home to the two rooms over the hardware store. He went, instead, to the office building on Main Street where Orrin Petty kept the books for the county — Orrin Petty, who had managed the elevator yard for Wayne for six years before Reece Calder had come, and who had been let go without ceremony, and who had never forgiven it, and who had stood in the back of the courthouse and paid Maud Trumbull's fine and carried the story of the fair down the street with his own two hands.

Orrin Petty was a thin man with a small face and a long memory, and he was at his desk in the county office when Wayne Granger came in out of the December night with the folder of letters under his arm.

"Petty."

"Mr. Granger." Orrin Petty did not stand up. "I heard the news. I'm sorry."

"You're not sorry," Wayne said. "You've been waiting for it for six years. I know you have. I know what I did to you, Petty. I know you think I ruined you. And you're right — I did. I fired you because I was ashamed to have a man who knew the books better than I did. That was the truth of it. I've been telling myself it was about the numbers, but it was about the shame."

Orrin Petty sat very still behind his desk. He had never heard Wayne Granger say the word shame about himself. Nobody in Haysville had.

"So you've come to apologize," Petty said.

"I've come to ask a favor," Wayne said. And he put the folder on the desk. "These are letters. Love letters. I wrote them to a woman in Reno twenty years ago — the woman who married Reece Calder. She asked me for them back in the spring, and I wouldn't give them up, because I thought they were the only honest thing I'd ever written, and I couldn't bear to part with the proof of it."

"Why are you giving them to me?"

"Because I can't take them to her myself," Wayne said. "I can't stand in front of that woman and hand her the letters of the man I used to be. I'd burn them before I'd do that. But they're hers. They were always hers. So I'm asking you — you, of all men — to do me the one decent thing I've never done for you. Take them to the house on the hill. Give them to her. Tell her I'm sorry I kept them past the season they were meant for."

Orrin Petty looked at the folder on his desk, and he looked at the ruined man standing in the light of his lamp, and he said, "I'll take them."

Wayne Granger left the county office and went back into the December night, and the cold hit him, and the liquor turned in him, and by the time he reached the two rooms over the hardware store he was the man from the tent again — not the man who had asked for the favor but the man who had sold his wife — and he sat on the edge of his bed with the bottle, and the dark came in through the window onto the alley, and he did not sleep, and he did not know, until morning, what he had done.

Orrin Petty did not take the letters to the house on the hill.

He carried them, instead, to the hotel bar, where the men of the town gathered on winter nights, and he stood at the bar with the folder in his hand, and he held it up, and he said, in his thin flat voice: "These are love letters. Written by Wayne Granger, the mayor who sold his wife at a fair, to the woman who married Reece Calder. He gave them to me to deliver. And I've decided the whole town should hear them first, because a man who sells his wife and calls himself a king owes the town that heard him crowing the truth of what he's worth."

The bar went quiet, the way the courthouse had gone quiet. And Orrin Petty opened the folder, and he began to read.