The Untold Lie

Ray Pearson and Hal Winters were farm hands employed on
a farm three miles north of Winesburg. On Saturday
afternoons they came into town and wandered about
through the streets with other fellows from the
country.

Ray was a quiet, rather nervous man of perhaps fifty
with a brown beard and shoulders rounded by too much
and too hard labor. In his nature he was as unlike Hal
Winters as two men can be unlike.

Ray was an altogether serious man and had a little
sharp-featured wife who had also a sharp voice. The
two, with half a dozen thin-legged children, lived in a
tumble-down frame house beside a creek at the back end
of the Wills farm where Ray was employed.

Hal Winters, his fellow employee, was a young fellow.
He was not of the Ned Winters family, who were very
respectable people in Winesburg, but was one of the
three sons of the old man called Windpeter Winters who
had a sawmill near Unionville, six miles away, and who
was looked upon by everyone in Winesburg as a confirmed
old reprobate.

People from the part of Northern Ohio in which
Winesburg lies will remember old Windpeter by his
unusual and tragic death. He got drunk one evening in
town and started to drive home to Unionville along the
railroad tracks. Henry Brattenburg, the butcher, who
lived out that way, stopped him at the edge of the town
and told him he was sure to meet the down train but
Windpeter slashed at him with his whip and drove on.
When the train struck and killed him and his two horses
a farmer and his wife who were driving home along a
nearby road saw the accident. They said that old
Windpeter stood up on the seat of his wagon, raving and
swearing at the onrushing locomotive, and that he
fairly screamed with delight when the team, maddened by
his incessant slashing at them, rushed straight ahead
to certain death. Boys like young George Willard and
Seth Richmond will remember the incident quite vividly
because, although everyone in our town said that the
old man would go straight to hell and that the
community was better off without him, they had a secret
conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired
his foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing
they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery
clerks and going on with their humdrum lives.

But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet
of his son Hal who worked on the Wills farm with Ray
Pearson. It is Ray's story. It will, however, be
necessary to talk a little of young Hal so that you
will get into the spirit of it.

Hal was a bad one. Everyone said that. There were
three of the Winters boys in that family, John, Hal,
and Edward, all broad-shouldered big