Winesburg, Ohio
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porter 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 Bid-
dlebaum, 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 rick-
ety 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, for-
ever 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 amaze-
ment 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 Bid-
dlebaum 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 re-
newed 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 al-
ready grotesque and elusive individuality. Wines-
burg 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 over-
whelming 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 after-
noon 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 incli-
nation 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 pic-
ture 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 a
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