HANDS
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house
that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of
Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously
up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded
for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of
yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway
along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers
returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths
and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy
clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted
to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and
protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road
kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face
of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin
girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair,
it's falling into your eyes," commanded the voice to
the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands
fiddled about the bare white forehead as though
arranging a mass of tangled locks.
Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a
ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as
in any way a part of the life of the town where he
had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of
Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George
Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the
New Willard House, he had formed something like a
friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the
Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he
walked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum's
house. Now as the old man walked up and down on the
veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was
hoping that George Willard would come and spend the
evening with him. After the wagon containing the
berry pickers had passed, he went across the field
through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail
fence peered anxiously along the road to the town.
For a moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together
and looking up and down the road, and then, fear
overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the
porch on his own house.
In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum,
who for twenty years had been the town mystery, lost
something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality,
submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the
world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured
in the light of day into Main Street or strode up and
down on the rickety front porch of his own house,
talking excitedly. The voice that had been low and
trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure
straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fish
returned to the brook by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the
silent began to talk, striving to put into words the
ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during
long years of silence.
Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender
expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to
conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back,
came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery
of expression.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their
restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings
of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some
obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands
alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away
and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive
hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields,
or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.
When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum
closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or
on the walls of his house. The action made him more
comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the
two were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump
or the top board of a fence and with his hands pounding
busily talked with renewed ease.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book
in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many
strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a
job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had attracted
attention merely because of their activity. With them
Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and
forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They became his
distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also
they made more grotesque an already grotesque and
elusive individuality. Winesburg was proud of the
hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which
it was proud of Banker White's new stone house and
Wesley Moyer's bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won
the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.
As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to
ask about the hands. At times an almost overwhelming
curiosity had taken hold of him. He felt that there
must be a reason for their strange activity and their
inclination to keep hidden away and only a growing
respect for Wing Biddlebaum kept him from blurting
out the questions that were often in his mind.
Once he had been on the point of asking. The two were
walking in the fields on a summer afternoon and had
stopped to sit upon a grassy bank. All afternoon Wing
Biddlebaum had talked as one inspired. By a fence he
had stopped and beating like a giant woodpecker upon
the top board had shouted at George Willard, condemning
his tendency to be too much influenced by the people
about him, "You are destroying yourself," he cried.
"You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and
you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others
in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate
them."
On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried again
to drive his point home. His voice became soft and
reminiscent, and with a sigh of contentment he launched
into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost in a
dream.
Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for
George Willard. In the picture men lived again in
a kind of pastoral golden age. Across a green open
country came clean-limbed young men, some afoot, some
mounted upon horses. In crowds the young men came to
gather about the feet of an old man who sat beneath a
tree in a tiny garden and who talked to them.
Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. For once he
forgot the hands. Slowly they stole forth and lay upon
George Willard's shoulders. Something new and bold came
into the voice that talked. "You must try to forget all
you have learned," said the old man. "You must begin to
dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the
roaring of the voices."
Pausing in his speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked long and
earnestly at George Willard. His eyes glowed. Again he
raised the hands to caress the boy and then a look of
horror swept over his face.
With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum
sprang to his feet and thrust his hands deep into his
trousers pockets. Tears came to his eyes. "I must be
getting along home. I can talk no more with you," he
said nervously.
Without looking back, the old man had hurried down the
hillside and across a meadow, leaving George Willard
perplexed and frightened upon the grassy slope. With a
shiver of dread the boy arose and went along the road
toward town. "I'll not ask him about his hands," he
thought, touched by the memory of the terror he had
seen in the man's eyes. "There's something wrong, but
I don't want to know what it is. His hands have
something to do with his fear of me and of everyone."
And George Willard was right. Let us look briefly into
the story of the hands. Perhaps our talking of them
will arouse the poet who will tell the hidden wonder
story of the influence for which the hands were but
fluttering pennants of promise.
In his youth Wing Biddlebaum had been a school teacher
in a town in Pennsylvania. He was not then known as
Wing Biddlebaum, but went by the less euphonic name
of Adolph Myers. As Adolph Myers he was much loved by
the boys of his school.
Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of
youth. He was one of those rare, little-understood
men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a
lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under
their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of
women in their love of men.
And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet
there. With the boys of his school, Adolph Myers had
walked in the evening or had sat talking until dusk
upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream.
Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders
of the boys, playing about the tousled heads. As he
talked his voice became soft and musical. There was a
caress in that also. In a way the voice and the hands,
the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the
hair were a part of the schoolmaster's effort to carry
a dream into the young minds. By the caress that was in
his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those
men in whom the force that creates life is diffused,
not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt
and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and
they began also to dream.
And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school
became enamored of the young master. In his bed at
night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning
went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange,
hideous accusations fell from his loose-hung lips.
Through the Pennsylvania town went a shiver. Hidden,
shadowy doubts that had been in men's minds concerning
Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.
The tragedy did not linger. Trembling lads were jerked
out of bed and questioned. "He put his arms about me,"
said one. "His fingers were always playing in my hair,"
said another.
One afternoon a man of the town, Henry Bradford, who
kept a saloon, came to the schoolhouse door. Calling
Adolph Myers into the school yard he began to beat him
with his fists. As his hard knuckles beat down into the
frightened face of the schoolmaster, his wrath became
more and more terrible. Screaming with dismay, the
children ran here and there like disturbed insects.
"I'll teach you to put your hands on my boy, you
beast," roared the saloon keeper, who, tired of beating
the master, had begun to kick him about the yard.
Adolph Myers was driven from the Pennsylvania town in
the night. With lanterns in their hands a dozen men
came to the door of the house where he lived alone and
commanded that he dress and come forth. It was raining
and one of the men had a rope in his hands. They had
intended to hang the schoolmaster, but something in
his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their
hearts and they let him escape. As he ran away into the
darkness they repented of their weakness and ran after
him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of
soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster
and faster into the darkness.
For twenty years Adolph Myers had lived alone in
Winesburg. He was but forty but looked sixty-five. The
name of Biddlebaum he got from a box of goods seen at a
freight station as he hurried through an eastern Ohio
town. He had an aunt in Winesburg, a black-toothed
old woman who raised chickens, and with her he lived
until she died. He had been ill for a year after the
experience in Pennsylvania, and after his recovery
worked as a day laborer in the fields, going timidly
about and striving to conceal his hands. Although he
did not understand what had happened he felt that the
hands must be to blame. Again and again the fathers of
the boys had talked of the hands. "Keep your hands to
yourself," the saloon keeper had roared, dancing, with
fury in the schoolhouse yard.
Upon the veranda of his house by the ravine, Wing
Biddlebaum continued to walk up and down until the sun
had disappeared and the road beyond the field was lost
in the grey shadows. Going into his house he cut slices
of bread and spread honey upon them. When the rumble
of the evening train that took away the express cars
loaded with the day's harvest of berries had passed and
restored the silence of the summer night, he went again
to walk upon the veranda. In the darkness he could not
see the hands and they became quiet. Although he still
hungered for the presence of the boy, who was the
medium through which he expressed his love of man, the
hunger became again a part of his loneliness and his
waiting. Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum washed the
few dishes soiled by his simple meal and, setting up a
folding cot by the screen door that led to the porch,
prepared to undress for the night. A few stray white
bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the
table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to
pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by
one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of
light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked
like a priest engaged in some service of his church.
The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out
of the light, might well have been mistaken for the
fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade
after decade of his rosary.
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