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