Hands

Sherwood Anderson's short story "Hands" in his collective work Winesburg, Ohio is similar to Anne Taylor's "Teenage Wasteland" with the appearance of characters who becomes dangerously involved in young boys' lives. 

Let's get straight down to the nitty gritty: Cal Beadle of "Teenage Wasteland" is a predator. Is Wing Biddlebuam of "Hands" also a predator or does his naivety betray him? 

Like a vampire, Cal feeds off the teenagers who trust him-- collecting them at his home, influencing them to defy authority, leading them away from their families and school lives and toward expulsion and violence--all the while getting some undefined satisfaction out of his actions. And although "he didn't start it," Cal ultimately participates in picking his student Donny's bones clean. Wing Biddlebaum's case is trickier. The men of his town exiled him because they believed he was a pedophile for always having his hands in his students hair or about their shoulders (Anderson 13). Like,  Donny's mother Daisy suspected Cal of inappropriate intentions at the end of "Teenage Wasteland," the schoolboys' parents suspected a predatory nature of Wing Biddlebaum.

Both Cal and Wing Biddlebaum were in respectable and trustworthy positions--Cal is a tutor with "significant experience in psychology" (Taylor) and Biddlebaum was a schoolmaster--which made each man's contact with young minds convenient and less questionable. Both utilized these positions to exact his own influence on his subjects. Cal influenced his teens to replace all authority figures in their lives with Cal and Biddlebaum influenced his students to dream. In addition to using their positions to carry out their respective agendas, Cal used the metaphorical molestation of manipulation to win favor while Wing actually used his hands to "carry a dream into the young minds" (Anderson 13). 
However, although Wing touched these boys, did he molest them? 

The quotation "Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousled heads" (Anderson 12), describes the man's bizarre behavior, but does not reveal any truly inappropriate touching. The narrator states that the tragedy that ends in a whole town's implied accusation that Wing is a pedophile, illustrated best when Henry Bradford beats the schoolmaster and exclaims "I'll teach you to put your hands on my boy, you beast" (Anderson 13), derived from "a half-witted boy of the school" who "became enamored" and made "strange, hideous accusations" about his schoolmaster. The suspicious parents in this case work off of lies and facts construed by the context of lies (that Biddlebaum had actually touched the boys), while Daisy's suspicions derived from evidence gathered over a period of months. First, Cal seized more and more control over Donny's life. Then Donny revealed that a number of Cal's students had been expelled, removed by their parents, and one had been knifed. Finally, Donny was expelled. Facts and experiences led Daisy to suspect Cal of wrong-doing, but lies and misunderstanding led people to believe the schoolmaster had committed wrong.

Niether Cal nor Wing Biddlebaum are molesters in the literal sense. That Wing "did not understand what had happened" to result in his exile (Anderson 14) suggests that Wing is innocent of deliberate predatory actions. Meanwhile there is a whole list of evidence suggesting that Cal's predatory actions were deliberate, as detailed in above paragraphs. Overall, it appears that Wing is just a sad, innocent and deeply misunderstood man, not unlike Lenny from Of Mice and Men who's hands unwittingly crushed the life out of a woman. 

The one bit of evidence that throws Wing's innocence into question, however, coincides nearly word for word with the last piece of damning evidence against Cal. "Although he hungered for the presence of the boy...his hunger again became part of his loneliness and his waiting" (Anderson 14). A predator, like Cal and his smile of hunger, starves for some life force to latch onto. A predator, like Cal, waits longingly but patiently for the weak to stumble across him. Without that little phrase, Wing Biddlebaum may be unquestionably innocent of his crimes. With it, everything about him is thrown into question.