The Letters

The first letter was dated January 14, 2003, and it was the letter of a man who had never been loved and did not know what to do with it.

Lana — I am writing this in the room I rent on the second floor of the Arlington, and outside the window the snow is coming down on the casino lights, and I have been in this town four days and I have not once gone down to the tables. That's not the kind of man I am. But I have been to your shop twice, and I have bought two things I did not need, and I have stood at the counter both times and watched you hand change to other people, and I have gone back to my room and thought about the way you gave me my change — the way you looked at me, not at the register — and I have decided that a man who has never once been looked at that way owes it to himself to write it down.

I am a grain dealer from a town you have never heard of, in a part of the country you have never been. I came west because the business needed a man in the desert states, and I found you on the second day, and I have spent the last four days being a man I did not know I could be. I am not a poet. I am not a talker. I am a man with a ledger and a temper and a history I don't talk about. But I have written this letter, and I mean every word of it, and I am going to put it in my pocket and come to your shop tomorrow and give it to you, because I have learned that the only way to be the man you want to be is to start being him.

At the bar, a man laughed. Orrin Petty read on, unbothered, turning the pages with the careful slowness of a man who knows he has an audience.

The middle letters were the ones that hurt. They were the letters of the spring, written when the man in Reno had believed that love was a kind of arithmetic — that if he said the right things and meant them hard enough, the sum would come out right. They were full of plans: a house, a life, a future. They were full of sentences that began "When we're married" and "After the season turns" and "The first thing I'll do when I get back." And in the reading, the men at the bar understood what the letters really were: not love letters at all, but the letters of a man building a life in words because he had never learned to build one any other way.

The last letter was dated June 4, 2003, and it was not addressed to Lana. It was addressed to no one. It was the letter Wayne Granger had never sent, and it was the truest thing he had ever written, and when Orrin Petty reached it, his voice changed, because even Orrin Petty, who had carried the folder down the street to hurt the man who had fired him, was not prepared for what the letter said.

I am not the man you think I am. I am the man I became after a night I can't undo. If you knew the whole of it, you would not keep this letter. You would burn it. But I am going to spend the rest of my life being the man this letter believes I am, and I wanted you to have it as a kind of promise: the promise of the man I mean to be, not the man I was.

The bar was quiet now. The men who had laughed were not laughing. The man who had read was not reading anymore. He stood with the letter in his hand, and the winter night came in through the door behind him, and no one in the room could think of anything to say that would not sound like a confession of their own.

It was Dwight Pellow who broke the silence. He had come in off the street, late, looking for the man who had once employed him, because the town had been talking about the letters all evening and Dwight had known, the way he knew the weather in his boss's face, that the letters had not been meant for the bar.

"Petty," Dwight said, very quietly, "you've done a bad thing."

"I've done a true thing," Orrin Petty said. "There's a difference, and it's the difference between a man and a king."

"You've read another man's heart to a room full of men," Dwight said. "And you've done it to hurt him. That's not a true thing. That's a mean thing wearing true's clothes." He looked at the letter in Petty's hand. "Give me that. All of them."

"I won't."

"Then I'll take them from you," Dwight said, "and I'll tell the whole town you read them to the bar, and they'll know you for what you are. Or you can give them to me, and I'll take them to the woman they were written to, and you can tell yourself you delivered them."

Orrin Petty stood at the bar with the folder in his hand and the whole room watching, and he did the only thing left to him: he handed the letters to Dwight Pellow, and he walked out into the winter night, and the men at the bar let him go, and no one in the room ever spoke to him again about that night.

Dwight Pellow took the letters to the house on the hill, and he gave them to Lana Calder at the door, and he told her where they had been read and by whom, and Lana Cutter — who had married the man who had taken the harvest king's throne, and who had believed, until that night, that her past was a private room with a locked door — stood in the doorway of the house on the hill with the folder in her hands and the winter wind coming up the slope, and she did not weep, and she did not rage. She went very white, and she went inside, and she closed the door, and Dwight Pellow stood on the porch for a moment and then went down the hill to find Wayne Granger, to tell him what the town had done with his confession.

He found the two rooms over the hardware store empty. The bottle was on the nightstand, mostly full. The bed was cold. And on the floor by the window, in the man's own hand, there was a single page, written in the dark, in the hours before the town had finished reading his heart aloud:

They say a king is carried through the fields and then burned, because the season that made him can unmake him. I sold my wife for six hundred dollars. I made myself a king. And now the season has come, and I am burning, and the worst of it is that I have burned other people's fields with mine.

Lana — I am sorry. I am sorry I kept your letters. I am sorry I gave them to a man who would read them to a bar. I am sorry I was ever the man who wrote the first one and never the man who sent the last. I am going away. Don't look for me. This is the only honest thing I have left, and I am leaving it where you will find it.

— Wayne