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Chapter One
In the deplorable little town of Tummudge there lived a boy named Sputz. The boy was long of both leg and arm, was amply blessed by freckle and mole, and did, of course, have a first name too, but such was the comical nature of his last that to all the other children in Tummudge, he was known simply as Sputz. When tales like this one are passed around campfires and out of the mouths of the wizened and into the ears of those that hear, they are knapped down to their most essential nature. So while you may consider it unfortunate that Sputz’s first name has been stricken away by the many years since his wandering, it is no less true.
In addition to his unfortunate name, Sputz was the recipient of a bushel of other misfortunes. I shall resist telling you of his many illnesses, or of his unseemly posture, or of his ability to be in the most unusual of places just at the most painful of times (such as knelt behind a cow when a cow is moved sit), indeed, I shall tell you none of that and instead allow it sufficient to tell you a few details of the boy’s parentage.
Sputz’s father was a fishmonger who lived nearly every hour of his life between the docks where he caught his fish and the markets where he sold them and the boy’s mother, a shrill and miserable fishwife, accompanied him in all his work. By any account, the fishmonger and his wife cared little for their son. Each day when they left their shanty hut to catch fish from the sea and peddle them at the market they said to the little boy Sputz, “Stay you put!”
But from the earliest age, “Stay you put!” he didn’t. The little boy Sputz was born of a mind to be somewhere other than where he was. If his mother placed him in the crib, he’d wrangle himself out of it and crawl for the nearest door only to be caught up and placed back and ordered to “Stay you put!” once more. When he was old enough to walk, his mother was so confounded by his wandering that she once tied a rope ‘round his leg and fastened it to the iron stove. The young Sputz, however, learned that old enough to walk was old enough to untie, and when his mother and father returned, they found the house empty of him and discovered the rope knotted to the leg of the family dog (who had stayed put).
Sputz’s mother cursed the walls and prayed to be delivered of her son’s wandering off and begged to be saved from his inattention to parental decree. She cried out against him that he was bewitched by sirens who called him away and she dreamed of the day when she’d be rid of him altogether. Sputz’s father paid no attention to his wife or his son because he was tired and age-bent and had no spare energy to nurture a worry over his son’s meanderings and even less to cross his unappeasable fishwife.
So the little boy Sputz went on through his early years with no encouraging word at home and when, upon his wanderings off, he found himself in company of other children he found no friend among them either. They pointed out his too long arms and teased that he should reach the sky to pluck them down a cloud, and they mocked his too long legs and his blessings of both mole and freckle-kind and said he might be part crane and hatched of a speckled egg.
Sputz learned to covet his own company more than any other’s and he became a creature of solitude and took his delight in straying out of places he most ought to be and into places newly found. As he wandered the tenement streets of Tummudge and lurked in the corners and slunk through its tunnels and sewers and alleyways he heard folk talk of his strangeness and his affliction and in time he came to know a name for it.
Sputz first heard the word out of the mouth of a fancy-dressed woman as she proceeded home from market with a wrapping full of successfully mongered fish. He was crouched under a grate in the street that gave entrance to a fascinating nest of tunnelways when he heard her high-pitched voice from the street above.
“Lost him again, she has,” said the woman.
“Lost whom?” said a man walking beside her.
“The fishwife’s boy. Every Tuesday I purchase two whole mackerel and every Tuesday she moans and jabbers about her boy and how he never stays put. He’s got the wanderlust he does.”
Sputz had been just about to crawl down a freshly discovered new tunnelway when he stopped in his boots and considered the word. He tilted his freckled head to the side and mouthed the word to himself. Wanderlust. Yes, that was it. That was just precisely it. He had certainly got the wanderlust.
And that is the beginning of our tale.
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