Anderson, Sherwood. “Hands”

HANDS



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 loosehung 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 school-master, 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 school-master, 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.