Hands

In a small town called Winesburg, in Ohio, there was a little old man called Wing Biddlebaum. He lived alone in a small house near the edge of town. He was very shy and very nervous. He lived in Winesburg for twenty years, but he did not have friends. People called him 'the town mystery'.

Only one person was his friend: George Willard, a young man who worked for the town newspaper. Sometimes in the evening George walked out to Wing's house, and they talked. With George, Wing was a different man. His quiet voice became loud. He stood up straight. He talked and talked.

But Wing had a problem: his hands. They never stopped moving. They were quick and nervous, like the wings of a bird in a cage — that is why people called him 'Wing'. He was afraid of his own hands. He tried to hide them in his pockets or behind his back. When he talked, he hit the table with his fists, because that made him feel better.

The people of Winesburg liked his hands for one reason: with them he could pick more strawberries than any other man in the town.

George wanted to ask about the hands. Why did they move like that? Why did Wing hide them? But he did not ask, because he respected the old man.

One summer afternoon, they sat on a grassy hill. Wing talked like a man in a dream. "You are destroying yourself, George," he said. "You want to be like the other people in this town. You listen to them and you copy them. You must forget all that. You must dream."

For a moment, Wing forgot about his hands. They came out of his pockets and rested on George's shoulders. "You must begin to dream," he said again. His eyes shone.

Then he lifted his hands to touch the boy's hair — and suddenly his face was full of fear. He jumped up and pushed his hands deep into his pockets. There were tears in his eyes. "I must go home. I can't talk any more," he said, and he ran away down the hill.

George sat there, surprised and a little afraid. "I will never ask him about his hands," he thought. "There is something wrong, but I don't want to know what it is."

Here is the story of the hands. Twenty years before, Wing was a young teacher in a town in Pennsylvania. His name then was Adolph Myers. He was a good teacher, and the boys in his school loved him. When he talked to them, he touched their shoulders and their hair. It was his way of talking. It was gentle, and the boys learned to dream.

Then one boy in the school — a boy with a strange mind — began to have dreams about the teacher at night. In the morning, he told the dreams as if they were true. He told lies. The people of the town heard the lies, and they believed them. Other boys said: "He put his arm around me." "He touched my hair."

One afternoon an angry father came to the school and hit the teacher again and again. "Keep your hands off my boy!" he shouted. That night, twelve men came to the teacher's house with lamps and a rope. They wanted to hang him. But he looked so small and white and frightened that they let him run. Then they were angry with themselves, and they ran after him and threw sticks and mud.

Adolph Myers ran away in the dark. He found a new name — Biddlebaum — on a box at a train station. He came to Winesburg and lived there for twenty years, working in the fields and hiding his hands. He never understood what had happened. But he was sure of one thing: the hands were to blame.

That night, after George went home, Wing ate a little bread and honey. Then he saw some crumbs on the clean floor. He knelt down under the lamp and picked them up, one by one, very fast, with his nervous fingers. He looked like a priest at prayer.