The Raffle I Let the Con Man Run

Lanny’s mouth moved, and the smile came back. It was thin and gray and about half the size, but it came. “I would be honored,” he said.

Two hundred and eleven people who had every reason to go home angry got in line to buy tickets.

I do not think they were buying a chance at the jar. I think they were buying their evening back.

The gate, counted out on a folding table by three women who had been schoolteachers, came to eleven thousand two hundred and sixty dollars.

Casimir Prochnow drew the ticket. He is ninety-three, the oldest member of Post 6931, a Korean War man who still comes every Veterans Day in his full uniform, with a cane in one hand and his cap squared on his head.

Two members helped him to the table. He closed his eyes, as I had asked him to, and reached into the clear bowl with a steady, spotted hand, and the whole room could see exactly where it went.

He came out with a thin white ticket. He handed it to the one man in the building I had asked to read it.

Lanny Spangler unfolded it with two fingers. He held it up to the light. He leaned toward the microphone, and the hall went so still I could hear the refrigerator in the kitchen.

“Five thousand,” he said. “Four hundred. And twelve.”

For a moment nobody moved. And then Lanny Spangler did a thing I do not think he had done in forty years of drawing tickets.

He looked up, and I watched him find the one table he had been trying all night not to look at.

Zadie Gerdes had her purse open on her lap. She had one ticket in her hand, held up close to her glasses, and she was reading it the way a woman reads a telegram.

“It is mine,” she said softly, to nobody. Then louder, to the room: “It is mine.”

The sound that came out of that hall I cannot describe. Two hundred people stood up at once.

Somebody started to clap, and then everybody did, and old Casimir Prochnow put his cap over his heart and wept without any shame at all.

Lanny carried the jar to her table himself. He did not hurry and he did not smile. He set it in front of her and stepped back, the way you step back from an altar.

“Mettie,” Zadie said, “bring me your book.”

I brought her the spiral notebook with the forty-one names. She put on her reading glasses and licked her finger and turned to the first page, and she began to read.

“Lyle Dettmer,” she said. “Sixty dollars.”

She counted it out of the jar onto the tablecloth. Then she called the next name, and the next, and one by one forty-one households came to the third table from the stage and held out their hands.

The farmer who had put in four hundred for his wife’s medicine. The brothers who split a hundred. The widow with her Bible.

A woman too embarrassed to give me a figure came up last, whispered a number, and Zadie counted it out without a word.

Hiram Pfannenstiel was thirty-eighth. I had written down a hundred and eighty dollars next to his name. He walked up with his cap in his hand, and he did not take the money right away.

“Mettie,” he said, in a voice so low I almost missed it. “I was wrong. I am sorry.”