When her hands were not hard from the endless housework, they were swollen and red like boiled beef, what of the washing.

And there was his sister Marian.
She had worked in the cannery the preceding summer, and her slim, pretty hands were all scarred with the tomato-knives.

Besides, the tips of two of her fingers had been left in the cutting machine at the paper-box factory the preceding winter.

He remembered the hard palms of his mother as she lay in her coffin.

And his father had worked to the last fading gasp; the horned growth on his hands must have been half an inch thick when he died.