Once upon a time there lived, in the village of Pigsweat, an old one-armed shoemaker named Oval Krnzt. Other than his lack of a particular extremity, you would find nothing terribly unusual about Oval that a little Duco Brand household cement couldn’t fix. He made a honest but modest living — enough to pay the rent on a small two-room apartment (one room was the bathroom; the other was a linen closet) plus enough left over to cover the insurance on his wheelbarrow and to buy an occasional stinkweed bouquet for his heart-throb, the darling Linde Faireflop, whom he courted on alternate Tuesdays.
This day being an alternate Wednesday, Oval was tired, bleary-eyed, and broke, following his very recent date with darling Linde. He cast a dejected eye at his breakfast — scrambled cardboard with boiled-leather tea — and wondered what on earth his miserable life was coming to.
You see, upon coming home from his pleasant date on Tuesday evening, he had stopped in at his workshop, just to check on things, and discovered an unsettling fact. The pair of boots he’d made for the Sheriff of Quirtbutts were both left-footed.
Being one-armed, Oval had to sit at his workbench backwards to make right-footed shoes, and quite naturally, his mind had been occupied yesterday by his upcoming evening date with Linde — and he had plainly forgotten to turn himself around when he made the second boot.
This was most unfortunate. The Sheriff of Quirtbutts had offered a high price — and had paid in advance — for a pair of snake-skin boots to wear to the King’s disco party. A party taking place this very evening.
The Sheriff was well known for his inventive ways of torturing children who showed up a minute late for school. Oval had heard rumors about a tailor who made the Sheriff a pair of velvet trousers, but forgot to put in the zipper. To make a long story painfully short, the Sheriff had his deputies sew the tailor’s fingers together with silk thread.
Oval stood up and flushed the remainder of his breakfast, and then walked into the linen closet to fetch his shoemaker’s apron. As he stepped outside, he wondered whether he had enough snake skin, and enough time, to make the right-footed boot, and avoid the Sheriff’s despicable wrath.
Outside, the sky was a shimmering blue, except for a small gray cloud that seemed determined to hang right in front of the sun. The neighborhood housewives sat on their doorsteps, sharpening their bread knives and keeping an eye on the young girls who played ‘Jump Over the Dog-Doo’ in the quaint cobblestone street.
But Oval was oblivious to the joy around him. He was imagining the Sheriff’s deputies driving cobbler’s nails into the soles of his bare, arthritis-prone feet.
(Nor did he happen to notice darling Linde disappear around the corner, arm-in-arm with Flute Gnortwhistle, the village flour-bleacher.)
He told himself he didn’t care a bit if that little gray cloud hung in front of the sun all day long. Which was just as well, since it did anyway.
He hurried down the cobblestone street, and as he passed the village well, he heard what sounded like a tiny, distant voice calling, “Help! I’m down here! Help!”
Momentarily forgetting his unfortunate situation, Oval poked his head into the mouth of the well. He felt a cool, refreshing gush of moldy air, and heard the same tiny voice. “Help! I’m down here!”
“Who are you?” asked Oval, in a confused tone.
“It’s me, the Wishing Spirit. You know, the guy who grants your wishes when you toss a penny into the well. Help me get out of here!”
“But I don’t understand,” Oval protested. “Why in heaven’s name would you want out of the well? Isn’t that your job? To grant wishes?”
“Well, it’s like this, pal. I’ve been down in the moldy well for five hundred and twenty-seven years, and I’ve finally got enough pennies saved up for my retirement. I’m going to find myself a nice well somewhere in the South Seas. Tahiti, maybe. I’ve heard good things about Tahiti. But I need help getting all of my pennies out of the well.”
So Oval, simple soul that he was, picked up a rope conveniently lying nearby, and lowered it down into the well. He felt a tug on the rope, and with his one arm, began hauling up the bags of pennies, one bag at a time. (We can imagine how his arm felt after about two hundred bags.)
Finally, he hauled up the Spirit Himself, who looked remarkably like a miniature version of Theodore Roosevelt.
“You haul a pretty mean rope for an old one-armed cobbler,” remarked the Spirit.
Oval blushed and pulled his cap lower over his eyes.
The Spirit crossed his arms and smiled. “You look like a man who could use a Wish-Granting. Go right ahead, old buddy, and make a wish. Nothing’s too difficult to be granted, in my book, after five centuries at the bottom of a well. Wish for anything at all. Go ahead…”
Oval took an enormous swallow and blinked his bleary eyes in disbelief. Then he looked down at the two hundred bags of pennies and realized that this Spirit probably knew what he was talking about, considering his popularity.
The first thought to hit him was: How wonderful to have two arms! He could row a boat. Play piano. Operate an Etch-a-sketch. Send a message using semaphore.
He could finally hold darling Linde in a full embrace.
Then his next thought: Imagine if he were able to court darling Linde every Tuesday!
But those pleasant thoughts were suddenly pushed out of his mind by the dark memory of the two left-footed boots he’d made for the Sheriff of Quirtbutts, and all at once he could feel cobbler’s nails being driven into the soles of his feet.
An unspeakable rage rose up in Oval, like a clogged toilet overflowing, and he imagined the cruel Sheriff laughing at him, as the deputies prepared the nails.
Blood rushed into his face, and he heard himself screaming. “I wish the Sheriff of Quirtbutts was a pile of Dog-Doo!”
The sudden outburst caused the Spirit to stumble backwards, breathless. But he quickly recovered his composure, and his breath, and then mumbled a mysterious limerick, stuck his finger in his nose, and announced: “You wish is granted. Thanks again for the help, pal, and if you’re ever in the South Seas, look me up.” Then he and the two hundred bags of pennies walked on down the road. (Yes, the bags walked. Don’t ask me how.)
Oval stood there, still shaking with rage, but five minutes later, he found himself sitting on the rim of the well, wondering what in heaven had just happened. He finally concluded that the whole thing had been an hallucination. Too many late nights in the workshop, smelling glue? Then he remembered the Sheriff’s boots, and rushed down the street towards his shop.
As he rounded the corner, he saw all the Sheriff’s deputies prowling around his workshop door.
“The end is at hand,” he whispered despairingly to himself.
Then… he noticed that the deputies were not exactly prowling around, waiting. They were, in fact, grumbling, and scraping their boots on the cobblestones, as if trying to wipe something off their boot soles.
“What the hell!” Oval heard one say. Another echoed, “Damn dogs!” And a third muttered, “Time to get some new boots!”
Then, one by one, they wandered off in the direction of Quirtbutts. (That is, to the northwest.) Apparently, they had forgotten completely about the Sheriff’s existence.
Lucky old Oval Krnzt rushed into his shop (stepping carefully, of course) and set right to work earning money for his next stinkweed bouquet for darling Linde.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.