Winesburg, Ohio: The Untold Lie

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.

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.

With the money he bought himself a suit of cheap, flashy clothes.

Hal went to work on the Wills farm because there was a country school teacher out that way who had taken his fancy.

Everyone who heard of his infatuation for the school teacher was sure it would turn out badly.

Along the path to his own house he trudged behind his wife, looking at the ground and thinking.

When he came to the fence at the edge of the road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a pipe as he walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he thought or what he wanted.

He seemed to have lost his own sense of what had happened in the corn field and when he put up a strong hand and took hold of the lapel of Ray's coat he shook the old man as he might have shaken a dog that had misbehaved.