A Letter to God

The setting of 'A Letter to God'

A single house on the crest of a low hill, the only one in the whole valley, looking over a river and a field of ripe corn. The isolation matters: there are no neighbours to turn to, so Lencho turns to God.

Why does Lencho call the falling raindrops 'new coins'?

To a farmer, rain on ripe corn is money in hand. He carries the comparison into detail, calling the big drops ten-cent pieces and the small ones fives, because the shower he had watched for all morning guaranteed the harvest.

'Frozen pearls'

The hailstones, named as the children saw them when they ran out into the storm to gather them. The phrase records the boys' delight in what was, to their father watching the same hail, the ruin of the family's entire year.

'The field was white, as if covered with salt'

The image of the cornfield after an hour of hail. Salt suggests more than whiteness — it is ground on which nothing will grow — so the comparison carries the barrenness of the loss as well as the look of it.

Why does Lencho say a plague of locusts would have done less damage than the hailstorm?

Locusts eat their fill and leave something standing. The hail stripped every leaf from the trees, took the flowers from the plants and destroyed the corn completely, so nothing at all remained to harvest that year.

'An ox of a man'

The narrator's description of Lencho: physically powerful and used to relentless labour in the fields. The sentence turns on a 'but' — he worked like an animal, but he knew how to write, and that literacy is what makes the letter possible.

Why does Lencho write a letter to God rather than simply pray?

He treats God as a correspondent who can be written to and who will write back, much as one would petition any authority able to help. The narrator stresses that he could write, and he uses that skill to make a specific, costed request rather than a general appeal.

Why did Lencho ask for exactly a hundred pesos?

It was what he calculated he needed: enough to sow his field again and to keep the family fed until the new crop came in. The figure is a working farmer's arithmetic rather than a wish for riches.

The postmaster

The fat, amiable official who laughs at the letter and then almost at once turns serious. He is the story's quiet moral centre: he spends part of his own salary and calls in favours to keep a stranger's faith intact, and never claims the credit.

Why did the postmaster decide to answer the letter?

He was struck by a faith he admired and did not share, saying he wished he had it himself. Leaving the letter unanswered would have shown Lencho that nobody was listening, and he chose not to let that happen.

How did the postmaster gather the money he sent to Lencho?

He could not fund it alone, so he asked his employees for contributions, gave part of his own salary, and obliged several friends to donate as an act of charity. Even then he raised only a little more than half the sum.

Why did the postmaster sign his reply with the single word 'God'?

So that Lencho would believe his request had been answered directly. Naming the real donors would have exposed the money as ordinary human charity and destroyed the very faith the postmaster had gone to such trouble to protect.

Why did Lencho show not the slightest surprise when the money arrived?

His confidence was complete. He had never entertained the possibility that the request would go unanswered, so the reply was simply the expected outcome of asking someone he trusted absolutely.

Why did Lencho become angry after counting the money?

Only seventy of the hundred pesos were there. Since in his mind God could neither make a mistake nor deny him what he asked, the shortfall had to be theft — and the post office was the only place the money had passed through.

What is the irony at the end of the story?

The post office staff gave their own money to help a stranger, and his reply calls them a bunch of crooks and tells God not to use the mail again. The people who behaved most generously are precisely the ones he accuses of stealing.

What two kinds of conflict does the story set up?

Humans against nature, in the hailstorm that wipes out a year's work in an hour; and humans against one another, in Lencho's unfounded suspicion of the very postal workers who quietly paid for his relief.

Is Lencho's faith admirable, or is it blind belief?

Both readings are supportable. His trust never wavers and it does bring help. Yet he never questions it, never asks who sent the money, and would sooner accuse honest men of theft than revise his belief — which is why the chapter invites words such as naive and unquestioning.

How does the postmaster's faith differ from Lencho's?

Lencho's faith is in God and needs no evidence to sustain it. The postmaster has no such certainty and openly wishes he did, but he acts, turning admiration into money collected from real people. One believes; the other does something about it.

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