The Lion was thrilled to hear the witch had been melted, and didn’t understand the part about the KGB, so once I flagged down a befuddled Winkie to fetch his key, he was pleased as punch.
“If only our friends, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, were with us,” he said, “I should be quite happy.”
Meanwhile, the Winkies were just about losing their shit. I hadn’t heard a single musical number the entire time I’d been in Oz, but I could swear they were just on the verge of breaking out into a chorus of “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.”
Several dozen of them had gathered in the courtyard. “From this day forward,” one of them decreed, “We shall keep this date as a holiday to honor the one who freed us from bondage. The Feast of Dorothy!”
“The Feast of Dorothy!” the others cheered.
“How about the Feast of Arabella?” I said. “I just like the sound of it better. And before you start with the merrymaking, do you think you could help us find our friends?”
The Winkies were more than delighted to mount a search party. I explained that one was a bundle of clothes tied to the top of a tree near where the flying monkeys had captured us, and the other was made of tin, and possibly laying in the bottom of a ravine.
They sent their brightest and fastest to comb the countryside, but it was slow going. Fortunately, the Witch’s castle was even more comfortable than our rooms in the Emerald City had been. Late on our third day, I was in the kitchen trying to explain to the cooks what a proper meat pie should look like (the closest they had come so far was sort of a pile of beef on top of a flaky pastry crust, which actually tasted pretty good, but would hardly travel well).
There was a sudden commotion out in the hallway. “We’ve found the Tin Man!” someone shouted.
I rushed out to greet them, and saw the Cowardly Lion bounding in from across the castle. Four Winkies tenderly carried the Woodsman in their arms, but he didn’t look good. His body was battered and bent, and his eyes were open, staring, lifeless. A fifth Winkie carried his axe on her shoulder, but the blade was rusted and the handle broken off short.
I struggled to keep my composure. “In Munchkinland,” I stuttered. “A tinsmith. A really good tinsmith…”
“Oh, we Winkies are famous for our smithery!” the woman with the axe said. “I’m sure we can straighten out those dents, and bend him back into shape again, and weld him together where he is broken! Give us time, and we shall mend him so he will be as good as ever.”
They set up shop in a big, yellow room in the castle, hammering and twisting and bending and soldering and polishing and pounding the hell out of the Tin Woodsman. It was not quick work, however. Three more days passed, and four more nights, until a Winkie messenger arrived with news of the Scarecrow.
“We’ve found the tree at last!” he said. “Alas, it is a very tall tree, and the trunk is so smooth that none of us can climb it.”
“Then I suppose I’ll have to chop that futhermucker down,” a familiar voice said from behind me.
The Tin Woodsman swept me up in a huge embrace, and he was crying, and I was crying, and the Lion appeared from somewhere and was also crying, and trying so hard to wipe the tears off the Woodsman’s face with his tail that it became sopping wet, and he had to go out and dry it in the courtyard. The Winkie Tinsmiths had done excellent work. Sure, there was a bit of rough soldering, and some sections of him looked a little patched, but if anything, it made him look rugged. His joints worked just as well as ever, and, more importantly, he was his same old tragic, emo self.
He went on for several minutes about how he had been certain that he’d been abandoned forever, and the very specific details of his imagined destiny, broken to pieces on the jagged rocks. “But listen to me,” he said at last, “wasting time when there is precious little time to waste! We must hurry to save our friend the Scarecrow, lest he should suffer the fate I have very happily avoided!”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Unfortunately, the trip was much longer by foot than by flying monkey, and it would take several days just to reach the Scarecrow’s tree. “I shall make the journey alone,” the Woodsman said. “For I can travel night and day without tiring, and cut the time in half.”
“We shall post footmen along your path, and keep them well-rested, so you shall always have a fresh guide to lead your way,” the Winkie messenger said. “The land around this castle has fallen to ruin, and in the bleak countryside it is treacherously easy to lose one’s way.”
The Winkies brought the Woodsman his axe—while the tinsmiths had been repairing him, other craftsmen had been polishing it, and fitting it with a handle made of solid gold. It was kind of nuts. Then he made his farewells, and there was nothing for the Lion and I to do but settle in and continue freeloading.
It was a terrible imposition.
After three full days, the Woodsman returned with the Scarecrow’s clothes (including, thankfully, his emptied-out face sack, which was somehow looked even creepier than when it was properly stuffed). Now all we could hope was that whatever enchantment had brought him to life was on the cloth, and not in the stuffing, which was long gone by the time the Woodsman had reached him.
The Scarecrow’s repairs were much quicker than the Tin Woodsman’s had been—we crammed him full of straw from the Lion’s bedding, and he bounded to life, good as ever. There were more hugs, more tears, and more wiping and soaking and drying of tails. The Winkies seemed every bit as delighted as the four of us were.
“Now may we begin the Feast of Arabella?” one of them asked.
“Yes, now you may begin the Feast of Arabella.”
The Feast of Arabella, I have to say, was raging. There was music, and dancing, and drink, and proper meat pies that put the original Munchkin delicacies to shame. I have no idea how long the revelry lasted, but at some point I collapsed, only to awaken the following morning and discover that the festivities were still going strong. The Scarecrow and Woodsman, as tireless as ever, had partied straight through the night.
They took a break to join the Lion and me at our breakfast, and the Woodsman sighed. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think I’d be content to stay in this castle forever.”
It was a really nice castle. I considered the prospect. There certainly wasn’t anything back in Calabasas that compared to this life of luxury, being waited on by grateful Winkies hand and foot. I thought about Madeline, though, and my Mom. The thing was, none of this quite felt real. And, although I loved my new friends as much as I loved the characters in a really good book, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that they weren’t real either. Not really.
The thought came with a pang of loneliness. “I think we have to go back to the Emerald City,” I said. “And make that Wizard pay up.”
“Yes,” the Woodsman said. “At last I shall get my heart!”
“And I shall get my brains!” added the Scarecrow joyfully.
“And I shall get my courage!” the Lion agreed.
And I shall get the fuck out of here, I thought. As much as I was going to miss the sporadic nice parts, it was time. “We’ll head out tomorrow morning.”
We informed the Winkies of our plan to leave, and they seemed genuinely heartbroken. The following day, they presented each of us with a gift. They gave Toto a golden collar, and me a bracelet studded with diamonds. They gave the Scarecrow a gold-headed walking stick, so he wouldn’t fall over so much, which was pretty thoughtful. And they gave the Tin Woodsman a silver oil can, inlaid with gold and set with all different kinds of precious jewels. (They seemed super into the Tin Woodsman.)
They gave the Cowardly Lion a gold collar that looked just like Toto’s but bigger, and by the look on his face I was afraid for a moment that he was going to bite one of them.
On the way out I swung by the kitchen to load up on snacks for the trip, and found the Witch’s weird golden hat in one of the cupboards. I’m not above a little casual looting, so I stuffed it into my basket on a whim.
And with that, we were off.