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With a big if meatless meal and a pint of vodka in him, Hank said goodnight to the farmers and went to the barn to sleep. His two passengers accompanied him. Hank lay down on the hay in a stall.
"Your Shininess," he said to the Woodman, "I've not had a chance to ask you just how you got your, uh, present form. I know what you told my mother. The story is that you were in love with a young woman, but her mother did not want her daughter to marry a woodchopper. She wanted her to marry a rich farmer and town counsellor, even though he was fifteen years older than the daughter. But the daughter preferred you. So the mother got a minor witch, an old woman named Mombi, to put a spell on you. Is that right so far?"
The Winkie king sighed, and he said, "That's what I told your mother."
"Is this Mombi the one who's allied with Erakna?"
"Yes. Though ‘allied' isn't the correct word. Mombi is a subordinate. She's not Erakna's equal."
"O.K. Got you. Anyway, my mother said that you said that the spell worked this way. First, it made your ax slip while you were cutting wood, and it cut your right foot off."
"That's what I told your mother."
"But you had an artificial foot made and went right on cutting wood. And your girlfriend still insisted on marrying you."
"Those were my words."
"The next time that the ax slipped, it cut off your right leg."
"Halfway down the thigh. I knew then that the ‘accidents' were no accidents. How could an ax do that? It would have to be directed by someone, a witch or wizard. I knew that someone did not wish me well, and it didn't take long to figure out who that one was. I accused her mother, but she denied it. So I went to old Mombi and accused her, but she denied it. I would have gone to the police then, but her mother would have been involved, and she would have been hanged with Mombi. My lover could not endure that. She begged me not to tell the police, and she promised that she'd get her mother to call Mombi off. She'd marry me right away, too, and then there'd be no reason to keep the spell on me. So I said I'd keep quiet about it.
"Why would Mombi be executed?" Hank said. "The Munchkins were ruled by the East Witch then. She wouldn't care if there were other red witches."
"Wrong. She didn't want any competition at all, red or white."
"Baum wrote that the woman's mother had gone to the East Witch and promised her two sheep and a cow if she kept you from marrying her daughter. That isn't what Dorothy told him, but he either forgot the details or else decided to streamline and modify the story. Anyway, the East Witch would not be bribed by two sheep and a cow. That'd be too paltry a sum. And animals just can't be given away to others, as we do on Earth. They have rights. Baum overlooked that. Also, if the East Witch had wanted to get rid of you, she'd just have you killed. None of this slow amputation stuff."
"It was Mombi, not the East Witch who put the spell on me," the Tin Woodman said. "But the East Witch would have enjoyed the, as you put it, slow amputation stuff."
"Baum wrote that, the first time the spell worked, it made the ax slip and cut off your leg. So, he said, you went to a tinsmith and had him make you a new leg of tin. Just how would the tinsmith attach the leg to your body? With a pin through the hipbone? Even if he could do that, you couldn't use the leg except as a crutch. And it would have been useless since it would have bent at the knee. You couldn't have walked with it, let alone chop wood and carry the wood."
The Scarecrow said, "I admire, the way you use your brains, Hank. You're very logical."
"Thank you, Little Father. So, Baum wrote that the loss of your leg didn't stop you from working or from courting the old woman's daughter. But the East Witch continued the spell. The ax chopped off your right leg. Very neat. But painful, I would think. And how did you survive these amputations? You were alone in the forest when these ‘accidents' happened. You must have lost a great deal of blood. It was a wonder you didn't die. Who found you, applied a tourniquet to your stump, took you to a doctor? How long were you in a hospital?"
The Winkie king did not reply.
"And then, according to Baum, the ax cut off your arms, one after the other. By that, ‘one after the other,' he must have meant that there was a considerable time between the severing of one arm and the next. But, surely, you would have known long before that the ax was enchanted by a malevolent witch or wizard. You would have refused to use that ax. In fact, you would have given up using the ax or any dangerous tool.
"So, Baum wrote, you replaced your arms with tin ones. But you would have been able to use these even less than you could use the legs.
"And then, here comes the most unbelievable part, the ax slipped and cut off your head. But, so Baum said, the tinsmith happened to come along, and he made you a new head out of tin!"
"Thinking logically, I would say," the Scarecrow said, "that you would have been dead, Niklaz. The tinsmith could have done nothing for you."
Hank looked surprised. He said, "Is this the first time you've thought about his story?"
"Oh, no! I'm just making some comments. Bolstering the structure of your logical questioning."
"Well," Hank said, "then comes the next event. The ax is supposed to have slipped once more and cut your body into two equal parts. Again, the tinsmith came to your rescue. He made you a torso of tin and attached your other tin parts to it. But you did not love the girl any more because you did not have a heart. You were a hollow man in more ways than one."
"Not really a man," the Winkie king said.
"Yes! Baum was writing a children's book, so he could not have said anything about your lack of genitals. I doubt that he even thought of that. My mother hadn't, not when you told her your story. She was only eight years old.
"Baum said that, once you were in your tin body, you were in only one danger. Your joints might rust. So you kept a full oilcan in your cottage, and you oiled the joints when you thought it was needed. But one day you were caught in a rainstorm, the joints rusted, and you couldn't move. You stood there in the woods for a year until Dorothy and the Scarecrow came along and oiled the joints. Nonsense! Tin wouldn't rust that fast, if at all."
"Very good," the Scarecrow said.
"Baum also said that you had a lot of time to think while you were frozen with rust. You had time to decide that the greatest loss you had known was not losing your sweetheart. It was losing your heart. When you were in love, you were very happy. Love was the greatest thing in the world, and I won't argue about that. To love, you had to have a heart, and you vowed to go to the Wizard Oz and ask him to give you one.
"After that, you'd ask your sweetheart to marry you. Now, I ask you, what kind of marriage would that be? A tin man, no flesh-and-blood organs whatsoever, married to a flesh-and-blood woman? Did you really for a moment think that she'd marry you? Or, if she did, that the marriage would last?"
"Of course not," Niklaz said.
"Well, then, did you really go to Oz to ask him for a heart? Did you need a heart? That is, did you lack kindness and tenderness and compassion and empathy?"
"No."
Hank turned to the Scarecrow.
"Did you really go to Oz to ask him for brains because you thought you needed them?"
"Oh, yes!" the stuffed thing said. "I was stupid; I knew it; I wanted intelligence more than anything."
"But you had it from the begi
"Oh, no! I didn't know anything! Well, very little, anyway."
"You confused lack of knowledge and experience with a lack of intelligence," Hank said. "Well, O.K., so you weren't lying when you told my mother why you wanted to see Oz. But King Niklaz..."