Lord of the Nutcracker Men (10 page)

“Well, I put him in the garden,” I admitted.

“The figurative mud,” said Mr. Tuttle. “The corned beef, the cordite. The rigors of war. Tell me: has your father made any others?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Lots.”

“Do you think I might see them?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I was going to ask you to come.

” Mr. Tuttle was very pleased. He put Harry Black on his mantelpiece, among his Pickwick jugs and his statuettes. He didn't stand him upright, but set him on his side, and the little blacksmith suddenly looked more
comfortable. Mr. Tuttle sighed. “‘There lies a dead man, unwept …' ”

I recognized the quote and finished it for him. “‘Unburied.’”

Mr. Tuttle's eyebrows arched. “Johnny, you surprise me at every turn. You must be reading the
Iliad
.”

“I'm nearly finished,” I said. “It's rather good.

” “Rather good?” he said loudly. “It's
brilliant
. It's wonderful.”

We sat down and started our lesson. He picked up the story as the great armies of the Trojans and the Greeks were entrenched on the plains.

“They have clashed again and again,” he said. “They have each taken terrible beatings. And now, in the tenth year of this war, the soldiers of both sides—the Greeks and Trojans alike—pray for the same thing. For what?”

“Peace,” I said.

“Good, Johnny. And what happens? What miracle occurs?”

“A truce,” I said.

“What sort of truce?”

“They agree to stop fighting if one man from each army comes out to fight a duel. And whoever wins will win the war.”

Mr. Tuttle nodded. “And who fights this duel?”

“The men who started the war,” I said.

“Yes!” cried Mr. Tuttle. He joggled the table in his excitement, sending biscuits flying. “Paris and Menelaus. The very two princes whose petty quarrel started all these years of war now walk out to settle it. They toss spears at each other. They go at it hand to hand. Then
one of them captures the other, and the war is over, isn't it?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I think the gods start it up again,” I said.

“Those meddling gods,” said Mr. Tuttle. “The soldiers are homesick, scared and hungry. They want nothing else but the chance to go home. Yet the gods won't let them; they see to it that the fellow escapes, and they stir up the armies like hives of bees. Suddenly the war's back on, more savage than ever.”

He took a biscuit, and his eyes jiggled as he chewed. “So,” he said. “What do you think would happen in France if the British soldiers and the German soldiers agreed to end the war?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Well, think.” He dribbled crumbs onto his lap. “If the Germans got so sick of fighting one day that they shouted across to your father—‘Hello, there! Let's have a truce!'—what do you think would happen?”

“He would tell them where to get off,” I said.

Mr. Tuttle smiled. “Would he? There he is, living in mud, worried about the bombs and the bullets, battling the rats and the lice and thinking always of you, and someone is telling him that he can go home if he wants. Don't you think he'd do that?”

“I'm not sure,” I said.

“Well, I think he would,” said Mr. Tuttle. “I think every soldier would. On both sides, to a man, they would put down their guns and go home.”

“But they wouldn't be allowed to,” I said.

“Who would stop them?”

“The Kaiser. The King.”

“Ahh,” said Mr. Tuttle. “The gods would intervene.” He stood up, shedding the crumbs from his clothes. “You're quite right, Johnny. The Kaiser would never allow it. He loves his game of war, his men in their toy-soldier clothes.”

“Maybe the King and the Kaiser will fight it out in no-man's-land,” I said, and smiled to show I didn't really mean it.

“The King would give him a thrashing,” said Mr. Tuttle.

I laughed, and that pleased him very much.

“But you've come to the heart of it, Johnny. What Homer is saying is that all the world is a game for the gods. Whatever you do, whether you're sitting here now or playing with your soldiers, it's because the gods want you to do it. But in the end they'll trick you, for you can never win if you fight against gods.”

When our lesson ended that day I didn't feel in any hurry to go home. I sat in Mr. Tuttle's chair and told him how my dad was digging trenches for a rest, and how my mum had moved to Woolwich. Then
he
told
me
things about himself: that he'd taught in Cambridge at Trinity College and married a professor's daughter; that they'd moved to Cliffe because the weather suited roses; that the coming winter would be his seventh in the village. I became very fond of him that day. When it started to rain, first in drops and then in buckets, he grew worried for me.

“I wish you could stay,” he said. “But you'd better be on your way before this gets any worse.” He found an umbrella in his cupboard, and insisted that I take it.

The rain pelted down on the road, filling the ditches. It hammered on the umbrella until I could barely hold it upright. I felt like a Trojan being pelted by arrows, my shield above my head. I marched along through enormous puddles, the black clouds swirling close to the ground, stroking the trees with watery fingers.

I went straight to my garden. My little dad, paler than ever, lay up to his waist in water. I built a dugout that would keep him dry, then went to work on my trenches. The nutcracker men, on higher ground, were out of the rain, protected by the beech tree. But my British trenches were crumbling, so full of water that the wooden soldiers swam and the metal ones were close to drowning. Crouched under Mr. Tuttle's umbrella, I put it all in order. I dug channels to drain the trenches, then scraped away the ooze of mud that the water left behind.

I uncovered tiny snails and short, pink worms that wriggled in my fingers. And halfway down the line, I unearthed poor Pierre One, or the top half of him at least. His little wooden head jutted out from the wall of the trench, and I thought at first it was a snail's shell. But when I pulled him out, the mud tried to hold him in place. And he came free with a squelch and a pop: his head and arms, his shattered waist where Sarah's stone had snapped him into two. A worm wriggled away in the back of the hole, as though it had eaten the little man's legs.

I popped him on top of the ambulance, and the medic said, “I think he's a goner.” But I gave him a ride to the back, tipped him off, and pretended that doctors were fussing over him. “Where's his legs?” they asked. “If we had his legs we could patch him up.”

I couldn't remember where I'd put his legs. So the doctors said, “Died of his wounds. There's nothing we can do,” and I buried him there at the back. I stood up a white pebble for his gravestone, and the doctors said, “He was a good soldier. He was a brave lad.”

The new man was screaming.

His eyes were huge holes, his mouth like a wound. He seemed to be stretching his hands toward the sky, but
the way he stood—twisted at the waist—made him even more out of balance than Harry Black had been.

I remembered how the little blacksmith had looked more comfortable when Mr. Tuttle laid him down. So I put the new man on his back, on the tabletop, and I saw it was just the way he was meant to be. He lay in an arch, on his hands and his bottom.

“He's laughing,” said Auntie. But she didn't sound as though she believed it. The man was screaming as he writhed on the ground.

“Johnny, he's
laughing,
” she said, more sternly.

I stared at the figure, the most troubling man of them all.

“Do you see what it's like now?” asked Auntie. “Do you see what it's really like?”

“Why are you angry?” I said.

“I'm not,” she told me. “Not at you.” She reached across the table and patted my wrist. “Johnny, there are men who can go to a war and come home just the same as they were. But not your father. He's a toy maker, Johnny. He spends his life bringing pleasure to people, to children. The war will kill him.”

“Don't say that!” I said.

“Oh, on the inside,” she cried, and tightened her fingers around my wrist. “Johnny, I just meant on the inside. It will rot him away if it doesn't end soon. He'll be changed; he'll be different. He'll be hollow.”

She hadn't met the Highlander, but she might have been talking about him. He'd had no wounds, but something had torn him apart.

Auntie Ivy's thumb rubbed the backs of my fingers.

“Johnny, I'm sorry,” she said. “There's nothing wrong with your games if they make you remember your father. When James was a boy he did the same thing when his own father went to the war.”

“He played with his little gun,” I said, staring at my soldier. “He played Zulus sometimes.”

She laughed. “Yes, I was a Zulu once. Who told you about that?”

“The soldier,” I said.

“What soldier?”

I shrugged. “He came to the garden. He used to know Dad.”

“Everyone did,” said Auntie Ivy. “And everyone loved him.” She took her hand away. “Now go and play, Johnny.”

I didn't feel like fighting my soldiers. But I cleaned up the trenches and put the men in order. Then I made barbed wire from the twine that was left over from my Guy Fawkes guy, laying it out in coils across my noman's-land. I staked it down with twigs from the beech tree, going back and forth from the trenches to collect them by the wall.

On my third trip there I saw the sergeant watching me. He stood among the trees, in his khaki clothes, and all I saw at first was his face. “Hello,” I shouted, but he didn't answer.

I stepped closer, and his arms appeared among the branches. His uniform was tattered now, the collars frayed, the cuffs unraveled. He looked as though he'd walked a hundred miles, through mud and thorns, since I'd seen him last. “Are you all right?” I asked.

He still didn't answer. His mouth opened and closed, and he moved backward, slinking into the forest. Then
he turned and started to run, if you could call it that. He went away in a hobbling gait, with one leg stiff, until I couldn't see him anymore.

That night I dreamed about him. I saw him crossing a battlefield in that same hobbling way. I shouted at him, and he turned around. And his face was my father's.

It was snowing when I woke. I lay in my bed watching the flakes spiral past the window. I thought of it snowing in France, all of no-man's-land turning to white. I wanted to see my own battlefield looking like that, but by morning the snow had changed to rain, and there was only a bit of slush on the ground. I went off to school in my Wellingtons, the rubber soles squeaking with every step.

At the post office I met Sarah. She was slogging along, her feet dragging troughs in the slush. When I caught up to her she looked at me, and
her
face was different too. It was like Auntie Ivy's, wrinkled with worry.

“He died,” she said.

“Who?”

“My dad.” She sniffed, and started sobbing.

“What happened?” I asked.

Her lips quivered. Her breath hissed through her teeth. Every time she tried to speak she started crying instead.

I thought of her father. I remembered how tall he was, how
heroic
he was in his big coat and his polished buttons. I could hear his voice and see his smile, how happy he'd been in the garden. It seemed so real just then that I could remember the smell of the rain on his woolen clothes. It wasn't possible that he was dead, that he was gone—just like that—forever.

“Sarah,” I said.

“Yesterday,” she said. She sobbed and took a breath. “We got a letter from him yesterday.”

She clamped a hand across her face, across her eyes and nose. “He said he was happy. He said he'd been scared but he wasn't anymore. He told us not to worry.”