A Letter to God

The story begins by placing us somewhere very specific and very lonely. Lencho's house stands on the crest of a low hill, and it is the only house in the entire valley. From up there he can see the river and, closer at hand, his field of ripe corn dotted with the flowers that always promise a good harvest. Nothing in this opening is decoration. The isolation matters, because it tells us that when trouble comes there is no neighbour to turn to. The ripeness matters, because it tells us the crop is finished growing and is simply waiting to be gathered.

The one thing the earth needs is water. Lencho, described as a farmer who knows his fields the way a man knows his own hands, has been reading the sky all morning. He is not hoping vaguely for rain; he is expecting it, and he says so aloud to his wife before the meal. When the first big drops begin to fall he goes out for no reason except the pleasure of feeling the rain, and when he comes back in he talks about the drops as though they were coins falling from the sky — the big ones ten-cent coins, the small ones fives. This is the mood the author builds carefully in the first half: a man who is poor, but who is about to be paid.

Notice how the author gives us Lencho's expertise before giving us his faith. He predicts the weather correctly. He knows what his soil needs. He is not a foolish man, and the story is careful to establish that, because the ending depends on us taking his mind seriously. A reader who thinks Lencho is simply simple-minded will misread the last paragraph completely.

The family is sketched in a few strokes — his wife preparing the meal, the older boys working in the field, the smaller ones playing near the house. They are ordinary, and their ordinariness is the point. This is a household whose entire year is standing out there in that one field.

The turn is sudden and the author does not soften it. A strong wind begins to blow and, along with the rain, very large hailstones start to fall. Lencho, who moments earlier was standing in the rain with pleasure, now watches his field being destroyed. All the story gives him to say is that things are getting really bad and that he hopes it passes quickly — an ordinary, helpless sentence, which is far more affecting than a speech would have been, because he can see everything and stop nothing.

The imagery here is worth slowing down on. The hailstones are said to resemble new silver coins, and the boys run out into the storm to collect what the story calls frozen pearls. This is the same coin image from the previous scene, but inverted. Earlier the rain was money falling into the family's pocket. Now the sky is throwing down something that looks like money and is in fact ruin. The author has used one image twice to carry two opposite meanings, and that reversal is the engine of the whole story.

When it stops, the field is bare. The narrator says the field is white, as if covered with salt, and that not a leaf remains on the trees. Lencho himself, standing in the middle of the ruined field, tells his sons that even a plague of locusts would have left more behind than this. Everything the family owned for the coming year has been erased in an hour. The corn is destroyed, the flowers are gone from the plants, and Lencho's soul, in the story's phrase, is filled with sadness.

Then comes the sentence that sets up everything after it. That night, Lencho thinks of only one hope — help from God. He has been taught since childhood that God sees everything, even what is deep in a person's conscience. So he does not despair, and he does not go looking for a moneylender. He reaches for a pen. What is remarkable is that the story never once mocks him for it.

Be careful with a phrase you will see in many guide books. The story calls Lencho an ox of a man, working like an animal in the fields, but still able to write. That sentence is about his body and his labour, not about his belief — the story never uses the words 'faith like an ox', so do not put that phrase inside quotation marks in an answer. What you can say is that the ox comparison fits his faith too, and most readers extend it that way. An ox is strong, patient and completely reliable; it pulls in a straight line and does not stop to reconsider. Lencho's belief has exactly those qualities. It does not waver when the crop is destroyed, it does not require evidence, and it never occurs to him that it might be misplaced. Note also that 'an ox of a man' is a metaphor, not a simile — there is no 'like' or 'as' in it.

What makes Lencho interesting as a character is that his faith is entirely practical. He does not pray for comfort, or for strength, or for the storm to be explained. He works out what the family needs in order to survive until the next harvest, arrives at a figure, and asks for that figure. He wants one hundred pesos: enough to sow the field again and to live on while the new crop grows. This is a man treating God as a reliable correspondent who can be written to, given the facts, and expected to act.

His confidence has a source, and the story states it. He had been taught that God sees everything, even what is deep in one's conscience. If God can see into a conscience, then God can certainly see a ruined field. Lencho's reasoning is internally consistent. Given his premise, writing the letter is the sensible thing to do.

This is why the ending works. If Lencho were merely gullible, the last paragraph would be a joke at his expense. Instead, the story spends its middle section showing us a man of sound judgement whose one unexamined belief is enormous and immovable — and then shows us what that belief does when it collides with an act of ordinary human kindness.

On the Sunday after the storm, at daybreak, Lencho writes his letter. He carries it into town himself, writes 'To God' on the envelope, puts a stamp on it and drops it into the postbox. An employee who works as a postman finds it and takes it to his boss, laughing, because in his whole career he has never come across that address.

The postmaster is described as a fat, amiable fellow, and his reaction is the hinge of the story. He laughs too — but then he becomes serious, and the story tells us why. He is struck by the writer's faith, and he does not want to shake it. He remarks that it would take real faith to write to God like that. What he decides next is the most generous thing anyone in the story does: rather than let the letter go unanswered, he sets out to answer it himself.

He cannot manage a hundred pesos. He gives part of his own salary, asks his employees to contribute, and several friends of his give something as an act of charity. Between them they gather a little more than half the sum — seventy pesos. He puts the money in an envelope addressed to Lencho, and signs the note inside with a single word: God.

Two things are worth noticing. First, the postmaster's motive is not amusement; the story is explicit that he acted so as not to shake the writer's faith. Second, the story never shows him considering an explanation. He could have written a note saying that human beings had sent the money, but the moment he signs it 'God' the kindness becomes anonymous — and that anonymity is precisely what causes the trouble in the final scene.

The following Sunday Lencho comes to ask whether there is a letter for him. There is, and he takes it. The story notes that he showed not the slightest surprise on seeing the money — such was his confidence — but that he became angry when he counted it. God, in his view, could not have made a mistake, nor could God have denied him what he asked for. So the missing thirty pesos must have gone somewhere. There is only one place they could have gone.

He goes straight to the window, asks for paper and ink, and writes again. He tells God that he has received only seventy of the hundred, asks for the rest to be sent, and adds one instruction: do not send it through the post office, because the employees there are a bunch of crooks. Then he seals it and posts it, and the story ends.

The irony is dramatic — the reader knows what Lencho does not. We watched the postmaster give up part of his own pay. We watched him press his staff for contributions. Lencho accuses of theft the exact people who emptied their pockets for him, and he does it in complete sincerity, without malice, as a simple deduction from a premise he cannot doubt.

What makes the ending more than a joke is that Lencho's logic is flawless. If God sent the money, and God does not make mistakes, then someone in between took the difference. Every step follows. The conclusion is monstrous only because the first premise is wrong — and that is the story's real subject: not whether faith is right, but what unexamined certainty does to the people standing nearest to you. The men who helped him will never be thanked, and will never know they were suspected.

Lencho is a hard-working farmer with real skill. He predicts weather accurately, understands his soil, and calculates exactly what his family needs to survive the year. He is also stubborn, literal-minded and incapable of doubting what he was taught. His faith gives him something valuable — he never collapses into despair, not even on the night his year's work is destroyed — and it costs him something too, because it makes him unjust to good men. A balanced answer about Lencho should hold both of those together rather than choosing one.

His anger at the end is not greed. He asked for a specific sum for a specific purpose, and thirty pesos short means the field cannot be fully resown. He is a man doing arithmetic about survival. What is missing in him is any capacity to imagine that the world might work differently from the way he was told.

The postmaster appears briefly and carries the story's moral weight. He is amiable and cheerful, and his first response is laughter — which the story does not treat as a fault. What distinguishes him is what he does after laughing. He recognises that a stranger's faith is a fragile thing and decides it is worth protecting, then pays for that decision out of his own salary and spends his standing with colleagues and friends to make up the rest.

He is also, quietly, the character who receives nothing. He gets no thanks, and by the end he has been called a crook by the man he helped. If the story has a hero, it is a minor official who will never be told he was one. Between the two of them the story sets its central contrast: a man who believes in a help he cannot see, and a man who quietly provides the help and makes sure he is never seen.

Faith. The story neither endorses nor ridicules Lencho's belief. It shows what it does: it carries him through a catastrophe without breaking him, and it also makes him incapable of seeing the people in front of him. When you write about this theme, resist the pull to a simple verdict. The story is interested in consequences, not in judgement.

Irony. There are two kinds here and it is worth being able to tell them apart. Situational irony: Lencho prays for rain and the rain destroys him. Dramatic irony: the reader knows the postmaster sent the money, and Lencho does not. The ending is dramatic irony, and naming it precisely is stronger than describing the plot again.

Kindness that goes unrecognised. The postmaster's charity is real, costly and completely invisible to the person who benefits from it. The story quietly asks whether that still counts. It clearly thinks it does — nothing in the telling suggests he was wrong to give.

Technique. Watch the coin imagery, which appears twice and reverses meaning: rain as coins falling into the family's pocket, then hailstones as new silver coins destroying everything. Watch the animal comparisons, which give Lencho strength and stubbornness at once. Watch how short the final paragraph is — the author does not explain the irony or comment on it, and that restraint is why it lands.

A practical tip for answers: name the device and then show it working. Do not write only that the story is ironic. Write which kind of irony, at which moment, and what the reader knows that the character does not. An answer that quotes the moment and explains the gap is doing real analysis; one that only labels the story ironic is not.