Dead Letters: Where They Hold It

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

My editor called me into his office in the summer of 1948 and told me to find a town in New England that held a lottery every June.

I asked him what sort of lottery.

He said the sort where the whole town comes out to the square on a fine morning and draws slips of paper from an old black box, and the family that draws the marked slip, somebody in that family is chosen, and the town does something to the one who is chosen. He said he wanted me to find the town and knock on a few doors and come back with a piece about it.

I told him there was no such town. He said he knew there was no such town. He wanted the piece about the looking.

So I looked. That is the part of this I can account for, because I did it with my own two feet and a company car. I drove up through Vermont and across the top of Massachusetts, and I stopped at feed stores and filling stations and one library that was closing for the day, and I asked the same question in the same flat way each time, the way you ask after a road. Was there a town up this way that drew lots in June. Gathered the whole place in the square and drew slips out of a black box.

I got three kinds of answer, and I have thought about the three of them for a long while since.

Most people didn't know and didn't care to stand there working it out. They told me they'd never heard of such a thing and went back to what they were doing, and those were the ones I liked.

A few laughed. They caught it right off, the way you catch a man telling a tall one, and they laughed and said that was a good one and who had put me up to it. Those were the easy ones too, the ones who knew a story when it walked in wearing a hat.

And then there was a third kind, and there were more of them than I was ready for. They got interested. A man at a counter in a town I won't name set down what he was holding and leaned toward me and asked how far it was. Asked which direction. Asked whether a man had to be from the town to stand in the square or whether they let strangers watch. He wasn't laughing. He wasn't frightened. He wanted to know where.

A woman outside the closing library told me they did not do that sort of thing here. She put the whole of her weight on the last word and left the rest of the country standing out past it in the dark.

I never found the town. There was no town to find, and I had known that before my editor finished his sentence, and he had known it before he started. He ran a little joke piece about a reporter sent to find a place that wasn't there, and it got a laugh, and that was meant to be the end of it.

It was not the end of it, because that same June a magazine had printed a story called "The Lottery," by a woman named Shirley Jackson, and the story was exactly the thing my editor had sent me to look for. An ordinary town on a fine morning. The square. The black box. The slips of paper. And the family that draws the marked slip hands up one of its own, and the town takes up stones, and that is what is done to the one who is chosen. Three pages. A clear and sunny morning in the story, the grass green, the children filling their pockets with stones while the men stood talking of planting and tractors. Nothing in it rose above a neighborly murmur until the first stone was in the air. That is the part people forget when they call it a horror story. There is no horror in the weather. The weather is the finest morning of the year, and that is where she keeps it.

Jackson lived up in North Bennington, in Vermont, which is to say she lived in the country I had just finished driving through, asking my question.

The mail came. It came in a quantity the magazine had not seen before for a piece of fiction, and it did not slow for weeks, and a good deal of it was forwarded up to Vermont in bundles she had to go to the post office to collect, until she stopped wanting to go. She counted the letters afterward. She said that of better than three hundred she could find, that first summer, thirteen that spoke to her kindly, and those, she said, mostly from people she already knew. The rest ran from puzzled to vicious. But that is not the part that has stayed with me.

The part that has stayed with me is that the first thing so many of them wanted to know was not what the story meant. It was where.

Where are these lotteries held? What part of the country? Could a person go and watch? One man wrote from somewhere out in California that he had read of some queer cults in his time but that this one bothered him — bothered him, you understand, because he took it for an account of something that was being done, and wanted to know where it was being done, and I would not swear he didn't mean to go.

I read that, when it was printed years later, and I put the magazine down on my knee, and I sat a while.

Because I had been there. Not in her mailbag. On the roads. I had gone out and taken by automobile the same census she took by post, up and down the same stretch of New England, and I had gotten back the same count she got. The pleasant ones who'd never heard of it. The ones who laughed. And the ones who leaned in over a counter and asked a stranger, with no more heat than if they were giving him the way to the next town, where a man might go to watch his neighbors stoned to death in a public square.

Jackson said once that she thought the letters showed people to be gullible and rude and afraid of being laughed at. I think she was being kind to them. I think she looked at three hundred letters and thirteen of them decent and chose the softest true thing she could say out loud, because the harder true thing was standing right behind it, and she had already put the harder thing in the story and watched the country write back to prove it.

I never found the town. I want that on the record, since this is the column where I tell you what I failed to get.

It is the letters that make it hard. She kept them. Pasted them into a scrapbook and kept the scrapbook until she died. Three hundred of them, and thirteen kind, and the first thing so many of them wanted, before they wanted the meaning, before they wanted anything at all, was to be told where.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.