"
Wash Williams, the telegraph operator of Wines-
burg, was the ugliest thing in town. His girth was
immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble. He was
dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the
whites of his eyes looked soiled.
I go too fast. Not everything about Wash was un-
clean. He took care of his hands. His fingers were
fat, but there was something sensitive and shapely
in the hand that lay on the table by the instrument
in the telegraph office. In his youth Wash Williams
had been called the best telegraph operator in the
state, and in spite of his degradement to the obscure
office at Winesburg, he was still proud of his ability.
Wash Williams did not associate with the men of
the town in which he lived. "I'll have nothing to do
with them," he said, looking with bleary eyes at the
men who walked along the station platform past the
telegraph office. Up along Main Street he went in
the evening to Ed Griffith's saloon, and after drink-
ing unbelievable quantities of beer staggered off to
his room in the New Willard House and to his bed
for the night.
Wash Williams was a man of courage. A thing
had happened to him that made him hate life, and
he hated it wholeheartedly, with the abandon of a
poet. First of all, he hated women. "Bitches," he
called them. His feeling toward men was somewhat
different.
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