The Tinweed Man Read online

  As he walked toward the knife, another curious thought flowed into his head, fresh as a cool waterfall after the winter snow melts.

  “How’s it that you have such tasty lamb, here inside this tree, enough to eat for whenever you’re hungry, if you can’t find your way outside to catch such an animal?”

  In that instant everything disappeared: the fire, the stove, the lamb, the light, everything except the little girl. Only now she was hidden in darkness. He heard her there, somewhere inside the tree, although he couldn’t see her. She was just sitting on the floor, he imagined, possibly looking at her hands. That’s what he would’ve done if he’d been stumped by a question as magnificent as the one he’d just thrown at her. Then he heard it: a quiet sigh. She began to glow, a pale-bluish glow. It was a warm glow, but he didn’t feel any warmer.

  “You shoe is outside the tree. If you want it back, please, just get me out of here.”

  He shrugged his tiny shoulders, which was hardly noticeable because they were so little, and grabbed the knife by the handle. It felt good in his hands, like a knife he’d used many times. He pulled it out of the tree and began to hack away at the inside of the bark, until a small hole appeared and he could see daylight coming through. He’d been cutting in the exact same spot where he’d smeared his stinking excrement all over the tree. A bit of it stuck to his knife and the smell of it, as the wind blew through the hole, caused him to wish the lamb hadn’t disappeared. Even wood-smoke would have been nice at a time like this, anything to cover up the odor.

  “How’s it you can open the tree to let me in, but you can’t open it to let yourself out?”

  This was a good question, perplexing indeed! Jon Tinweed hadn’t experienced such profundity before. He was startled to his core by his own inner genius, which was a magnificent startle, because he’d hardly ever had any depth to himself at all.

  “My door lets people in. It won’t let me out.”

  She’d responded so clearly and cleanly that he felt a puddle of stupidity spilling out of every crack and crevice of his sordid life. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Better stick to the simple stuff, the stuff he knew best, he decided. If she wanted to have a new door in her stuffy old home, better get it done fast.

  He whittled here and whittled there, all the while whittling the door into a nice oval shape. Before it was done, he had one last question to ask her. It was this third question that really should have been left alone. He never should have even imagined he’d ask such a thing. But once he’d started riddling her, he could hardly stop.

  “How’s it you need my help at all, if you’re so magically powerful?”

  The words slipped out of his mouth, too late to take them back. Behind him he heard a sound so devastating that he curled up on the inside. As her scream expanded, echoing upward through the tree, it amplified, until it erupted out the top, frightening the birds a continent away. Like her voice, her shape also grew. Her shadow on the walls grew tenfold, flickering like lightning in the middle of a black night. She reached out to grab him and he shrank back.

  Just then, the door fell open. And Jon Tinweed slipped and rolled out. He got up carefully, afraid to look back into the tree. He knew she was angry at him, more than ever before. He cursed himself for asking too many questions, making a mental note never to do it again. But like most things in his little mind, the note blew away and was forgotten. Jon Tinweed reminded himself that he had a heart made of metal and had nothing to fear.

  He turned to the tree as she stepped out. Fully visible in the bright sunlight, he could see she was absolutely beautiful, a miracle come to life, the most stunning apparition he’d ever beheld.

  He bowed deeply to her. She turned here and turned there. Then she spoke.

  “You destroyed my property with your stinking shoe,” she said flatly. “Apologize.”

  Sorry, my dear one,” he said most sincerely and bowed again.

  “And there’s your shoe!” she said, pointing to it in the grass.

  He picked it up carefully, avoiding the remaining excrement dangling from the bottom. When he turned around to thank her, she was gone. Even the tree with the hole in it had disappeared. Little did he care. He was free. He had his shoe. It was time to move on.

  And what would he have told anyone about the experience, anyway?

  “Sure, Jon, we believe you. You met a wood nymph. And, by the way, how did all that shit get on the bottom of your shoe?”

  They’d say he’d imagined the whole thing as a means of dealing with his deep sense of inadequacy. They’d say he’d made up the story about a tree-gruel named Bart — who had ever seen one? — and instead just stepped in his own pile of fecal matter. And how would he respond to that?

  Although Jon Tinweed had a heart made of metal and overcame taunts from all corners of the world, inside, he was still sensitive. Sometimes he cried late at night when no one was around.

  Part Two: The New World

  Jon Tinweed placed his foot firmly on the path and stepped forward with dignity, as much as his tiny frame and grand shoes would allow. It was only by his deep courage and the sharp point of a knife in his back, that he made it away from the waterfront at all. Once he’d entered the trial, he saw it was harmless in the wood, although they appeared to be ominous from the safety of the shore.

  Jon Tinweed had stepped out into the wild with no intention of ever coming back. This was a long time ago, long before the second set of settlers ever arrived in the New World. Back then, the continental region we now know as North America stretched out, vastly uninhabited. You could walk for days without seeing another living soul. The trees themselves touched from branch to branch in such a great network that you might hardly ever get a glimpse of the sun when wandering mindlessly below the leaves, such as Jon Tinweed was doing now.

  This made it cool under the trees, and great for walking, even in the morning, when the day was getting hot, such as on a day like this when Jon Tinweed entered the woods alone. He couldn’t walk as comfortably as you might imagine, because he was still standing on his sea legs. He’d barely managed to scrape the money together to buy a voyage across the great ocean, hoping to avoid ever coming in contact the tree nymph again. He often had a sneaking feeling she might be following him everywhere he went.

  Before setting out on the tempest waters to the new land, he’d envisioned meeting a new kind of people there, a kind of peace-loving folk he could call his friends. He’d laid down to sleep the first night in the belly of the ship, only to rise in the morning to find the ship had already set sail, his hope of flipping off the Old World gone forever.

  Jon Tinweed had come to the New World with the first set of settlers. This wasn’t the second time, when settlers came over the ocean and had no idea how to survive. That was the time when indigenous people living nearby attempted to save these settlers from sure extinction by teaching them how to hunt and gather and make ends meet. Sadly, though, in return for this beneficial knowledge, the second settlers ran off the natives who had been so considerate to them, once the settlers got themselves established and the community began to take shape. Then, even though they thought they were getting well established, a kind of delirium set in and they wandered off into the mountains and vanished in the snow. They might have been in such a state of madness due to the eating of human flesh, but we won’t know much about that, because they don’t teach that stuff in school.

  This is before that wicked story ever happened. This is when the first settlers arrived in the New World by means of following islands both small and big, far to the north. It may be disputed by archaeologists and other quasi-scientists whether this really happened, that settlers actually came from the Old World to the New World long ago. But Jon Tinweed was one of these original settlers, a sturdy kind of people who already knew how to live in the wild, lessons learned long before they set out across the ocean. They weren’t so arrogant as to presume they could just figure it all out once they got there. At the
same time, while it might appear that Jon Tinweed was indeed pursing the goal of finding a new home, he was also escaping his problems of the past. He had no need to continue living a life where he was always fighting for a box to sleep in with a bunch of inconsiderate creatures. Damn those kittens!

  It wasn’t the first time Jon Tinweed had been outcast from society and it wouldn’t be the last. He’d left the Old World for the New World in a good mood, with high hopes of a better future, only to find that he didn’t really fit in with the crew aboard the ocean-bound vessel. The very moment they arrived on dry land, they set about sending him on his merry way. He was given little choice in the matter when he stepped out onto a trail that led him into uncharted territory.

  Jon Tinweed had a curious habit. He only cut his hair once a year. When he cut it, he cut it all off, clean and sober. This was quite an economical approach, he reasoned, although reasoning wasn’t his strong point. When the summer was building up steam, when the time of year was the hottest, he’d pay a barber to shave his head down to the bone. As fall approached, he’d get a little bit growing again, and then in winter, when the wind was cold, he’d have gathered enough hair on top his head to keep from freezing. In spring, his hair would get long, needing to be tied back so that it didn’t flop about in his face all the time. And then, come summer, just as soon as he began to sweat profusely, he’d have the whole mop totally scraped off once more.

  As the ship to the New World had set sail in the spring, just when the ice in the north was starting to break, his hair had grown longish. He had it tied back behind his head in a kind of horse-like tail. Giving little thought to the future, since he had little room for thought inside his little head, he’d assumed he’d find a barber somewhere on the other side of the great ocean. It never occurred to him that he alone might be about the only one desiring a haircut on those distant shores. The people who already lived there lived a rugged kind of life and found little need for cutting their hair—or wearing shoes—at all.

  He wondered where they were. He wondered if they really existed. He jumped along the path, scampering from tree base to tree base, in case he was attacked and needed to find shelter quickly. Jon Tinweed knew very little about much of anything, and he knew almost nothing at all about the nation into which he had just entered. He hoped he’d meet someone soon, for the day was growing hot and he was already a little hungry. For him, a little hunger was a lot. It amounted to a mountain of pain, yet he wasn’t about to knock on a tree and ask a local tree nymph for a bite of lamb.

  Recall that Jon Tinweed had come from a people who knew something about the wild. They had learned those hard lessons of survival, long before they ever started out on this journey into the New World. With this knowledge planted firmly in his head, it was natural for him to think that he could take care of himself through thick and thin. He plodded forward, with no regard to where he would sleep that night or what he’d find to eat. For a moment he almost felt invincible.

  That’s where he made his big mistake. He forgot one of the oldest rules of survival, that there is strength in numbers. There’s that other rule as well, the one that says you should always tell someone where you’re going before you head out alone into the woods, but that hardly applies here. Who would he have told? And would anyone have really cared?

  He grew so confident that he started talking to things, naming things, as if he were destined to be crowned king here one day. He had come from the Old World. How impressive is that on one’s resume? As he walked, he focused on what he saw as his natural right to take over the place. He spied a fresh piece of wood-sponge growing on a tree and broke it off and put it in his pocket. It might be needed at the most unexpected moment.

  “You, old tree, I name thee, Earwart,” he said, pointing to the towering oak. It swayed in the wind in gratitude, or so he thought.

  “And you, young beauty, shall be called from henceforth, Bellyblossom.”

  That one was a fragile purple flower. There were many young flowers like it along the trail at this time of the year and he took the time to name every one of them, being careful not to trample on any of them.

  Just then he came across a slug on the trail. A spirited mud-colored slug, with a fresh collection of slime on its underside, and bits of tree and trail dirt stuck inside the slime. He thought he’d step on it, but then quickly glanced around. No, there were no piles of fecal matter anywhere nearby. There was no tree about to envelope him. Although that event mentioned earlier had passed harmlessly, he’d learned from it to be more careful when alone in the woods. This just goes to show that even the shallowest person can fathom something beneficial out of the depths of their own ineptitude.

  “You shall be called Wigglethorn,” he said, pointing his finger at the slug’s bobbing head.

  It wasn’t exactly an Old World tree-gruel. It was more the New World type. Wigglethorn had a curious history. This slug had traveled nearly eighty kilometers in its lifetime. This was an astounding fact, considering slugs might move at no more than the ferocious pace of 10 meters a day. It had taken Wigglethorn nearly all of his reserves to travel this far. But in search of what? No creature living in the wild would set out on such an arduous adventure without a purpose in mind.

  It just so happened that Wigglethorn was heartbroken. He felt like his heart had been pulverized into a million little pieces, like the way they treat your kidney with ultrasonic sound when you have a kidney stone, where the stone is broken up and expelled the next time you urinate. But that isn’t a fact that matters at this time. The pain felt within his heart is just an expression used to point out how miserable Wigglethorn was inside without a partner in his life.

  What about the feelings of slugs? You see, there are many things in the natural world that the closed-minded scientific community has yet to acknowledge, like the fact that slugs have feelings. It’s one of the mysteries of life. It’s much like trying to measure the weight of the human soul. How can scientists declare that something doesn’t exist when they can’t even find it? The feelings of a slug are much like that of the human conscience, immeasurable, inexhaustible, and sometimes, when they are rude to strangers, simply inexcusable.

  Wigglethorn had not traveled eighty kilometers in a straight line. He had traveled in a circle, in search of someone of his liking to replicate with. All this talk about a broken heart and deep feeling of affection put aside, the act of replicating with another slug was something that really turned Wigglethorn on. As fate would have it, he couldn’t leave his own ecosystem. Wigglethorn was caught within the boundaries of his own limited world by forces far beyond his control.

  When Jon Tinweed almost stepped on Wigglethorn, the New World tree-gruel had almost completed his circuit, returning to the same spot from which he had begun. But instead of stepping on him, Jon Tinweed picked up Wigglethorn and began to play with him, like a kid might do when playing with jelly inside a plastic bag. It was quite comical, the way you could shake the poor creature and make its head swing around in circles. Around and around Wigglethorn’s head went, until he was nearly sick and almost expunged his stomach matter on Jon Tinweed’s hand.

  Without warning, a chorus of warriors stepped out of the woods and surrounded Jon Tinweed. They were tall and ferocious looking and had been observing Jon Tinweed playing with Wigglethorn with baffled expressions smeared across their faces for some time. Instantly, Jon Tinweed knew he was conquered. He had been king of the woods for only a couple of hours. This land was their land. All seven of them.

  Knowing he had little chance of escaping, he decided to go the diplomatic route. He offered the slug to the warrior standing closest to him. It was a cool toy to play with, and cheap.

  When it dawned on them that he might be a little thin in the head, they laughed so hard they nearly peed on themselves. This reaction, though clearly not threatening, left Jon Tinweed feeling somewhat confused. What was it they found so comical about playing with a slug in the woods? The more they laughed, the m
ore he smiled, and soon after, the little man began to feel quite buoyant. Meeting these fine country folk had indeed lifted his spirits. Might it be possible that one of them, in this distant place, could be in possession of the skills of a barber, and would he not kindly assist Jon Tinweed in cutting his hair? The little man thought he’d offer them his knife and mimic a haircut.

  They were laughing so hard that none of them saw him slip the knife out of his belt. It felt good in his hands, although it still reeked somewhat of shit. He’d never been able to fully remove the smell of his own excrement from the knife after the wood nymph had asked him to cut a door in her tree. He pulled his long hair up in the sky, reaching as far as he could, and then he pretended to swipe at his scalp with the glistening blade. They froze on the spot. Clearly his actions spoke louder than words. They were mesmerized as Jon Tinweed attempted to scalp himself.

  Little did Jon Tinweed know that these particular warriors had taken a vow of peacefulness. They had sworn to uphold a New Year’s resolution of the noblest kind. They were determined to treat strangers better this year. They would ask questions first and scalp heads later. To them, the little man was openly tempting them to break that vow. They wondered if he might be an illusion, a demon in human form. Some of them stepped back.

  The silence grew longer, stretching out like the shadows of the trees as the sun swung over their heads and down the other side. Nobody moved for what seemed like eons. Jon Tinweed took a wack at his own head and cut some hair lose. He offered the knife and the hair to the ring of warriors. One of them thought this might be a ritual that strangers from across the ocean practice when meeting new people. The warrior took the hair from Jon Tinweed and smelled it and almost gagged. He faked a smile and then threw the hair behind him.

  Another warrior, the one with leadership potential, understood at that moment what Jon Tinweed wanted. He approached Jon Tinweed and took the knife from his hand. He inspected it, running his thumb along the edge of the blade, impressed by the fine craftsmanship. It had been hardened in a forge over five thousand kilometers away by some of the best metal-smiths in the world. Slowly, without putting a single scratch in the skull of Jon Tinweed, he cut the little man’s hair, never releasing a single drop of blood. Some of the warriors, moved to the point of religious hallucination, began to weep. When the haircut was over, Jon Tinweed looked deeply satisfied with how life in the New World was turning out. He dropped Wigglethorn on the trail and let the tree-gruel get away unharmed.