Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school became enamored
of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things
and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange,
hideous accusations fell from his loosehung lips. Through the
Pennsylvania town went a shiver. Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been
in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.
The tragedy did not linger. Trembling lads were jerked out of bed and
questioned. “He put his arms about me,” said one. “His fingers were
always playing in my hair,” said another.
One afternoon a man of the town, Henry Bradford, who kept a saloon,
came to the schoolhouse door. Calling Adolph Myers into the school yard
he began to beat him with his fists. As his hard knuckles beat down
into the frightened face of the school-master, his wrath became more
and more terrible. Screaming with dismay, the children ran here and
there like disturbed insects. “I’ll teach you to put your hands on my
boy, you beast,” roared the saloon keeper, who, tired of beating the
master, had begun to kick him about the yard.
Adolph Myers was driven from the Pennsylvania town in the night. With
lanterns in their hands a dozen men came to the door of the house where
he lived alone and commanded that he dress and come forth. It was
raining and one of the men had a rope in his hands. They had intended
to hang the school-master, but something in his figure, so small,
white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape. As he
ran away into the darkness they repented of their weakness and ran
after him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud 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 Winesburg, a black-toothed old woman who
raised chickens, and with her he lived until she died. He had been ill
for a year after the experience in Pennsylvania, and after his recovery
worked as a day laborer in the fields, going timidly about and striving
to conceal 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 yourself,” 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 loneliness and
his waiting. Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum 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 unbelievable 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 beautiful. Everyone in
Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the
marriage she died.
The knuckles of the doctor’s hands were extraordinarily 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 window.
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 Doctor 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 orchards
of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is
hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by
the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities
where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books,
magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled
apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of
Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into
a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of
its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground
picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them.
Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon.
He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling
his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were
thrown away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind
the jaded white horse and went slowly along country roads. On the
papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.
One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many
of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth
clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the
little thoughts began again.
The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was in the
family way and had become frightened. She was in that condition because
of a series of circumstances also curious.
The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had
come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years
she saw suitors almost every evening. Except two they were all alike.
They talked to her of passion and there was a strained eager quality in
their voices and in their eyes when they looked at her. The two who
were different were much unlike each other. One of them, a slender
young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked
continually of virginity. When he was with her he was never off the
subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large ears, said nothing at
all but always managed to get her into the darkness, where he began to
kiss her.
For a time the tall dark girl thought she would marry the jeweler’s
son. For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked to her and
then she began to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity
she began to think there was a lust greater than in all the others. At
times it seemed to her that as he talked he was holding her body in his
hands. She imagined him turning it slowly about in the white hands and
staring at it. At night she dreamed that he had bitten into her body
and that his jaws were dripping. She had the dream three times, then
she became in the family way to the one who said nothing at all but who
in the moment of his passion actually did bite her shoulder so that for
days the marks of his teeth showed.
After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her
that she never wanted to leave him again. She went into his office one
morning and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had
happened to her.
In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who
kept the bookstore in Winesburg. Like all old-fashioned country
practitioners, Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held
a handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and
when the tooth was taken out they both screamed and blood ran down on
the woman’s white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention.
When the woman and the man had gone the doctor smiled. “I will take you
driving into the country with me,” he said.
For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor were together
almost every day. The condition that had brought her to him passed in
an illness, but she was like one who has discovered the sweetness of
the twisted apples, she could not get her mind fixed again upon the
round perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments. In the fall
after the beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor
Reefy and in the following spring she died. During the winter he read
to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the
bits of paper. After he had read them he laughed and stuffed them away
in his pockets to become round hard balls.
MOTHER
Elizabeth Willard, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and
her face was marked with smallpox scars. Although she was but
forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure.
Listlessly she went about the disorderly old hotel looking at the faded
wall-paper and the ragged carpets and, when she was able to be about,
doing the work of a chambermaid among beds soiled by the slumbers of
fat traveling men. Her husband, Tom Willard, a slender, graceful man
with square shoulders, a quick military step, and a black mustache
trained to turn sharply up at the ends, tried to put the wife out of
his mind. The presence of the tall ghostly figure, moving slowly
through the halls, he took as a reproach to himself. When he thought of
her he grew angry and swore. The hotel was unprofitable and forever on
the edge of failure and he wished himself out of it. He thought of the
old house and the woman who lived there with him as things defeated and
done for. The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was now a