Lord of the Nutcracker Men (11 page)

Sarah rubbed her eyes, then took her hand away. She blinked, spilling tears on her cheeks. “He was dead when we got it.” Suddenly, she smiled. “Johnny, it was like he wrote it from heaven.”

She walked with me for a while, but very slowly. She was like a flower that was wilting; her shoulders slumped, her head drooped down. Then she stopped altogether. “I don't even know how he died,” she said. “I don't know what happened to him yet.”

Children rushed past us. A ball of slush plopped on the ground at my feet. A boy shouted, laughing, “Johnny's going to get maa-aaried!”

Sarah put her hand on my arm. “You don't think a shell hit him, do you?”

“Maybe.” I didn't know what to say. “Do you want to come to Auntie's after school? Do you want to play with my—”

“No,” she said. “I won't.” She backed away. “I wish I'd never gone there.”

“Why?”

She gave me a terrible look. Then she started crying again, harder than before.

“What's wrong?” I said.

She turned and ran. She fled down her trail of ragged footprints, past buildings that were shedding snow from their steep roofs, then round the bend at the edge of the
village. I could see the marshes beyond her, white and flat, and imagined her running across them, all the way to the Thames and on to London, on and on for as far as she could go.

I went on to school and sat behind her empty desk. Mr. Tuttle stood at the front of the room in his long black gown. “Children,” he said. “We should pray.” We bowed our heads and prayed for Sarah's father, for his soul. We prayed for Sarah, for her mother, for all of our fathers who were fighting in France. It was the first time I had done that in school, but it wouldn't be nearly the last.

That same day, in the evening, the lieutenant's name was in the paper. It was listed in the Honor Roll, in the section for the officers, in a little box shaped like a grave. Auntie Ivy pointed it out. “Killed in action,” it said beside his name.

“I met him,” I said. “I liked him.”

“I know you did,” said Auntie. There wasn't a bit of news or a single secret in all of Cliffe that Auntie didn't know.

“Then why did he die?”

“Who can say why?” She shook her head. “Not me, not you.”

Auntie Ivy made an enormous supper that night, a rabbit stew that she cooked in two pots. I didn't know why until we finished and she put on her coat and her boots.

“I'm taking some food to Mrs. Sims,” she said. “Would you like to come?”

“I was going to play with my soldiers,” I said.

But Auntie had already made up my mind. “No, I think you'd rather come with me.”

It was dark when we got to the farm. In the lane beside the house a lantern was burning, and in its yellowish glow a man was loading wood into a wagon bed. He stood on a pile of split rounds, pitching them up one-handed. His arm seemed to go round and round in circles, catching the wood and hurling it up. The lantern light shone on a hook that he held.

“That's Storey,” said Auntie, her voice dropping to a whisper. “He sells firewood around the village.” We passed him at a distance as we walked toward the farmhouse. I fancied his hook; it would be a splendid thing for climbing trees or plucking trout from rivers. But Auntie told me: “He lost his hand, you see. It was shot away in the Burma war, and all he's got is a claw.”

She walked away and I hurried up behind her. We climbed to the porch, but Auntie didn't knock on the door. She pushed it open and called, “Yoo-hoo!”

Shreds of paper hung above us, tiny scraps of blue and white and red. Warm air, tart with smoke, wafted out through the door, and the bits of paper rustled and coiled. The house felt empty, the air like its breath.

I could hear Mrs. Sims walking across the floor above us. Her voice quavered down: “I'll be right there.”

“It's only me,” said Auntie.

We walked right in, to a warm and smoky parlor. We stood on the hearth, warming our hands and our fronts at the fire.

“Those are the sons,” said Auntie, tipping her head toward a pair of portraits on the mantel. “There's just the two of them, no daughters.”

Mrs. Sims was coming down the stairs. Auntie bent
her head and whispered, soft as feathers, “Both the boys went to war. It was Murdoch who was killed.”

“Who's the other one?” I asked.

“Hush.”

“I know him,” I said. But Auntie Ivy had turned away to greet her neighbor.

I took the picture down. I held it out to Mrs. Sims who stopped in midstep. She stared at me from her black veils and her shawls. “Look. He's my friend,” I said, smiling. “He comes to the garden. I saw him just the other night.”

Mrs. Sims gasped. She touched her forehead, then crumpled to the floor.

“Johnny!” Auntie slapped me on the head. She went running to hold Mrs. Sims. “You wicked boy. That's Murdoch.”

For three days there were no letters from my father. I sat and wrote to him instead, even though it wasn't Friday.

Auntie Ivy came thumping up behind me. I tried to hide the letter, but she saw it and snatched it away.

“That's mine!” I cried.

She turned aside. It took her only a moment to read the letter, and a moment after that she was stuffing it into the firebox. “You're not going to worry your father with petty things like this,” she said. “Chipped a tooth, indeed.”

“I might have,” I said.

“You got just what you deserved.” She put the lid on
the firebox. “You might have stopped her heart; did you think of that? The state she's in, you could have killed her, Johnny.”

“But it was true,” I said. “That was my soldier in the picture.”

“A dead man?” she asked.

“Maybe Murdoch isn't dead.”

“Oh, Johnny,” she said, heaving a great sigh. “I'll tell you what happened, and then maybe you'll admit you were wrong.”

She sat and told me all about Murdoch. It was a cracking good story, but she made it sound as dull as a grammar lesson. “Murdoch's regiment attacked the Germans. They went out and came straggling back. There was no sign of Murdoch for three days, until he was found in a shell crater with a bullet in his leg. He was just four yards from his trench, but he lay there for three days. Then he was carried back to a dressing station, and his parents were sent a telegram saying that he was coming home. They were hanging streamers of bunting in the doorway—to welcome him back—when the postman brought the second telegram, saying that Murdoch had died of his wounds.”

“Was he a sergeant?” I asked.

“Yes, he was.”

“So was mine,” I said. “And I think mine was wounded in the leg, too. He couldn't walk very well.”

Auntie Ivy scowled. “Why won't you listen to reason?” she asked. “The next day an officer showed up at Storey's farm, carrying a little package. Murdoch's wallet and identification tag were in it.” Auntie Ivy put her fingers round her wrist to show me where Murdoch would
have worn his bracelet. “There were a few letters that he had written but had never got around to sending. It was so sad. Such a little parcel, but everything the poor boy owned.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.” Auntie leaned forward, and a look of kindness came to her face for the first time since she had slapped me. “Now don't you see that you have to be wrong? There's no way on God's earth that Murdoch could have come to the garden, is there?”

“No, Auntie,” I said.

“Are you sorry?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it's a little late for sorries.” She stood up, her chair squeaking. “You've put it into poor old Storey's head that his son is still alive. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

She didn't speak to me for the rest of that day. She ate supper in silence, then sent me to bed by pointing her finger.

The night was crisp and clear. By morning, I thought, there might be frost on the ground. I lay in bed and watched the moon come up through the branches of the beech tree. I heard the guns in France.

They were faint but furious, a steady drumming of low-pitched pops and puffs. It was strange to think that such a harmless sound meant that the ground was shaking where my father was, that all the earth around him would be churning like a stormy sea, and the air would be full of razors. I didn't know if the guns were German or British. For all I knew they might have been both,
firing together, hurling shells back and forth in the darkness, like giants playing at pitch-and-toss.

The moon was bright enough to cast shadows on my wall. The branches of the beech tree made patterns there, of loops and crosses, like the writing on my father's letters. I saw them, and thought again how long it had been since he had sent anything to me. I wondered if it was true what Auntie had said, if he was already rotting away on the inside, if he had already forgotten about me.

I got up and stood at the window. I looked toward France, or where I thought France was. The guns popped and puffed, but I couldn't see any flashes of light, or any sign that they were really there.

Below me were my wooden soldiers. The nutcracker men were hidden in the dark shadows of the tree and the wall, but the moonlight gleamed on my Frenchmen and my Tommies, as ghastly as the star shells my father had written about. I could see him in the garden, his model. It was tipped back in the trench, staring up at the sky, paler than ever in the white of the moon. The guns in France pounded away with their faint little thunder, and I thought that my real dad would be just like my model, wide awake, watching the sky.

I went down to the garden in my grandfather's robe. The mud had a thin, cold crust that shattered as I walked across it. My boots echoed the sounds of the guns.

All that night I shelled the German trenches. I bombarded the nutcracker men with pebbles and dirt and mud until my hands were black and stiff. The moon went down and I kept at it. The nutcracker men became real in my mind. They became the Hun, and I blasted
away with my shells, angry at all the things they had caused. They had driven me from London; they had taken my dad away and were rotting him inside; they had killed Sarah's dad and Murdoch Sims. And I punished them for all of that.

The eastern sky turned a dismal gray. Dawn was coming, and I launched my attack.

I whistled my Tommies over the top. I whistled again for my Frenchmen. My father and the dog-faced man, the sergeant and my messman, all my Pierres and all my Tommies rose from the mud two at a time. They gathered on the edge of no-man's-land, then marched forward in little bunches as I pushed them along.

It was hard in the darkness, all by myself. The battles had been fast and furious when Sarah had helped me. My army had stormed along then, but now it just plodded.

When the men reached the wire I stepped across them to the German line. Fatty Dienst peered over the parapet.
“Mein Gott!”
he said. “The Tommies are coming!”

The nutcracker men stood up to their guns. I hurled some dirt across them, moved the British forward, and let the machine guns open fire.

“Ratta-tatta-tat!” I swiveled the little Germans in my fingers, spraying the British with bullets. I knocked down the dog-faced soldier.

General Cedric stood on a bump of mud that covered a stone. “I can't see what's happening,” he said. “Are we winning?”

The British moved forward. My father slid down to a crater and up the other side. “Follow me!” he shouted.

The mud was frozen in clusters, in little honeycombs
of white and gray. It crackled under my boots as I moved back and forth from the Germans to the British.

“Whizz. Bang!” A bit of German trench collapsed. “Ratta-tatta-tatta!” The messman with his silly pots spun around and fell.

My father reached the wire. He hopped over it, then reeled in my fingers. “Come on, lads!”

The others stumbled up behind him, and past him, tangling in my bits of string. A few shells came down, shattering among the men. I whistled again, and the Tommies carried on, the sergeant at the front. They straggled across all of no-man's-land.

“Fall back!” shouted Fatty Dienst.

But the Germans held the line, because Auntie Ivy came and saved them. She rushed from the house in her nightgown, with a broom in her hand. “Who's there?” she cried. “Who's out there?”

It wasn't light enough that she could see me in the shadows near the wall. She shouted again—“Who's there?”—then came down the steps with her broom held up like a lance, ready to chase off whatever person or thing that she found.

I stood up. I felt like a soldier surrendering. “It's me,” I said.

“Johnny?” She didn't stop until she stood right in front of me. “Are you out of your mind? Have you lost your senses?”

“I was only playing,” I said.

“In the dead of night? In your pajamas no less?” She was even angrier than she'd been at Storey's farm. She swatted at me with her broom. “Shoo!”

I stood away, staggering over the battlefield. The broom swished past behind me, swished again, and mowed down a dozen soldiers. Auntie swept them away like bits of dirt, like rubbish. She sent them scattering left and right, then chased me back to the house.

I was shivering from the cold. Auntie Ivy stoked the fire until the stovepipe hummed. She heated a kettle and washed the mud from my shaking hands, from my face and my arms. She pulled off my boots and plunged my feet into a basin of steaming hot water. Then she wrapped me up in a tent of blankets, muttering all the time about the stupidity of boys.

“Thank goodness your mother can't see you now,” she said.

The steam and the blasting heat of the stove made me tired. I could have slept the day away, but it seemed that I had barely closed my eyes when Auntie shook me awake again. She pulled the blankets away, and sunlight hurt my eyes.

“You'd better get dressed, Johnny,” she said. “You'll be late for school if you don't get a move on.”