Winesburg, Ohio
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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 Wines-
burg, a black-toothed old woman who raised chick-
ens, and with her he lived until she died. He had
been ill for a year after the experience in Pennsylva-
nia, and after his recovery worked as a day laborer
in the fields, going timidly about and striving to con-
ceal 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 your-
self," 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 loneli-
ness and his waiting. Lighting a lamp, Wing Bid-
dlebaum 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 unbe-
lievable 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.
PAPER PILLS
HE WAS AN old man with a white beard and huge
nose and hands. Long before the time during which
we will know him, he was a doctor and drove a
jaded white horse from house to house through the
streets of Winesburg. Later he married a girl who
had money. She had been left a large fertile farm
when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and
dark, and to many people she seemed very beauti-
ful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she mar-
ried the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she
died.
The knuckles of the doctor's hands were extraordi-
narily large. When the hands were closed they
looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as
large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He
smoked a cob pipe and after his wife's death sat all
day in his empty office close by a window that was
covered with cobwebs. He never opened the win-
dow. Once on a hot day in August he tried but
found it stuck fast and after that he forgot all about
it.
Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doc-
tor Reefy there were the seeds of something very
fine. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods Company's store, he
worked ceaselessly, building up something that he
himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected
and after erecting knocked them down again that he
might have the truths to erect other pyramids.
Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one
suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the
sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees
and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster
with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed
scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of
paper became little hard round balls, and when the
pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the
floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another
old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree
nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor
Reefy took from his pockets a handful of the paper
balls and threw them at the nursery man. "That is
to confound you, you blathering old sentimentalist,"
he cried, shaking with laughter.
The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the
tall dark girl who became his wife and left her
money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious,
like the twisted little apples that grow in the or-
chards of Winesburg.
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