Lord of the Nutcracker Men (12 page)

Her anger had left her. She hummed as she worked, bending over the stove. The oven door clanked open, and I saw a sheet of browned scones that might have appeared there by magic. She plucked one out, split it and smeared it with butter, then thrust it into my hands. I had to juggle it from one to another, and nearly burnt my tongue when I took the first bite.

I walked to school through a land that was white with frost. Everything sparkled and glittered, and the air was as crisply cool as peppermints. It was the first wintery day, and the thought of that gave me a little thrill of
pleasure. In a few weeks Christmas would come, the war would end and my dad would be home.

For the first time in days I saw Sarah at school. I came into class a few minutes late to see her sitting at her desk. I sat down, reached forward, and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Hello,” I said when she turned around.

That look came back to her eyes, that same dark and terrible stare that she'd given me the last time I'd seen her. “Don't touch me,” she said, too loudly. Everyone looked at us; even Mr. Tuttle stopped pacing and stared toward us.

Sarah glared at me. “It was that game,” she said. “That stupid game.”

I didn't understand her then. But I knew exactly what she meant as soon as I went home in the afternoon.

Auntie Ivy was knitting her socks. “You look miserable,” she said.

I sat down and watched the wool twisting through her needles, knotting itself into rows of stitches.

“Was Sarah at school?” asked Auntie.

“Yes,” I said.

“The poor thing.” Auntie shook her head, but didn't stop knitting. “If it's any consolation, Johnny, her father wouldn't have felt a thing. It was sudden.” She glanced up as she tugged at her wool. “He was hit by a shell.”

Into my mind flew a picture of my wooden lieutenant, the mud from Sarah's boots spraying against him, flinging him sideways.
It was that game. That stupid game
.

Goose bumps came up on my arm. I rubbed them, but couldn't take the coldness away. “Auntie,” I said. “Do you think my soldiers might have killed him?”

She put her knitting down. “Your
wooden
soldiers?”

“Yes,” I said. “If we pretended one was him? If it fell and—”

“No!” she said. “Oh, Johnny, that's silly; that's nonsense.”

“Even if it looked like him?”

“Oh, goodness, no.” She sounded sad. “You can't take the world on your shoulders. Dear Johnny. You're so sweet, and so stupid as well.”

She dropped her wool on the floor and made me stand beside her. She touched my back with a cold, hard hand. “If you could wish someone dead, if you could really do that, I would have gone to my grave the first day you saw me.”

“But I didn't
wish
him dead,” I told her.

“Did you kill all those soldiers in the Honor Roll? Did you kill all the ones from yesterday, and the ones from the day before?”

“No, Auntie,” I said.

“Did you kill Murdoch Sims?”

“I don't even know him,” I said.

“You see?” Her eyes were nearly level with mine. They looked like old glass, all cloudy inside. “It had nothing to do with you.”

I went outside and sat under the beech tree. I looked at my soldiers strewn about, the wounded from my battle, the ones that Auntie's broom had scattered far and wide. Only the nutcracker men, deep in their trenches, were still where I'd left them. They had their backs toward me, their bayonets raised.
Those are very special soldiers, those
, my father had said. Mr. Tuttle had told me that they were almost alive. And who had said they had souls?

I found an old beechnut, softened by rain, and threw it at the little Germans. They were only wood, I told myself. That was all they were, just wood.

I threw another nut. It bounced over no-man's-land. I thought of the broken Pierre, shattered by a shell. I could see the pebble that marked his grave, and beyond it the ambulance that had come in the post as though to fetch him from the battlefield. I remembered my sleeping man, and the terrible shelter that my real dad had found during a trench raid that was so much like mine. A prickly feeling shot through me.

Suddenly the garden seemed haunted by all the things that I'd done, by the battles that I'd fought. I heard the patter of machine guns and the boom of muddy shells, the clear call of my little brass whistle. I heard Sarah shouting, her father laughing. Then I saw him in France. I saw him raising his hands as he heard the shell coming down. He must have known, for an instant, that it would land right beside him. He must have known that it would
splatter
him into pieces.

The prickly feeling got worse. I closed my eyes, but I couldn't shut out that picture of Sarah's dad as the shell came screaming down.

“They're only wood!” I shouted.

I crawled across the battlefield, searching for the little man with his tiny rifle. I picked up the soldiers one by one, pulling them from craters, from the roots of the tree. One was half buried, another head down in a puddle. My dad was wrapped up in the wire, a big coil of the string twisted around him, like a thing that a spider had caught.

Nearly all his paint was gone, and the little knothole in his chest looked bigger and darker. The split was a tiny
bit wider, a tiny bit longer. The dugout I'd made him was ruined, destroyed by the shelling or by Auntie's broom. So I put him into the trench with the others.

“He's all right,” said the bellowing sergeant.

But deep in my heart I was afraid for my dad.

The letter came in a special green envelope covered with postage marks. There was a note on the front that Dad had signed, saying it contained nothing but private matters.

Auntie tore it open. Right away the soldier tumbled out, the shovel in his hands. We thought he was digging trenches. We thought it was maybe my father, working through his period of rest. Then Auntie read the letter, and her voice grew fainter and fainter, until I barely heard the ending.

I stared at the soldier, at the shovel in his hands. He wasn't digging, but the blade was in the ground, and he was leaning on the handle. His head was bent down, and he looked terribly sad, all hunched at the shoulders.

Auntie Ivy looked at him, then burst into tears.

I went out to a garden that was still covered with soldiers. They lay on their sides and their backs and their bellies, a scene of slaughter that I would have loved at one time, but that now only shocked me.

I tried to pretend that my new man was just digging out trenches. He went to work with my other shoveling man, clearing the rubble from my battle. “Give us room,” he shouted. “Fritz has made a proper mess of everything here.”

But he leaned on his shovel, and I couldn't forget that he was really a grave digger. I moved him to the rear trenches, then farther back again. I moved him so far from the battle that he might have been in England.

Then I brought up the ambulance. It drove through the scattered men, stopping here and there as I piled the soldiers on top. I drove by mistake right over the messman, who tipped on his side, his arm reaching up. Again the ambulance stopped, but there was no more room on the roof.

“Never mind him,” said the driver. “That one's a goner.”

He started off; the motor puttered. He was nearly at Charing Cross when I heard the ring of a bicycle bell. It brought my head up with a start, that sound like the telegraph machine. My ambulance tipped over, spilling my soldiers.

The bell rang again, a little louder and closer. I thought of the postman pedaling along, carrying his message from cold Mr. Death.

I stood up. No one lived farther from Cliffe than Auntie Ivy. There was only empty road to the south, all the way to the railway station.

The bell jangled.

“Go past,” I said to myself. “Oh, please, make him go past. Don't let him stop here.”

But he did. The postman shouted out, “Hello!” and the bell jangled again. “Ivy! Hello.”

I got up from the mud, staggered and fell. My barbed wire snagged on my boot, and I kicked it off. I stomped over the battlefield, over the trenches; I ran from the garden, around to the front as Auntie Ivy came thumping down the steps.

In the middle of the road stood the old postman, holding his bicycle at a slant. In his hand was a sheet of paper the color of biscuits.

“Go away!” shrieked Auntie Ivy. She raced through the gate and battered against the postman. His bicycle crashed to the ground. “Keep going,” she screamed. “Go on!”

He caught her in his arms, the paper crumpling. “It's news,” he said. “It's great news.”

Auntie Ivy held on to his shoulder. She was crying.

“I'm telling everyone,” said the postman. “I'm making the rounds, and now I'm going to have the church bells rung.”

“For mercy's sake, why?” asked Auntie Ivy.

“A victory!” The old postman danced her in a jig. “There's been a great victory in France.”

I felt almost a shock. “Is it over?” I asked.

“No. Lord, no,” said the postman. “But we pushed the Germans back. All along the line.” He picked up his bicycle and rang the bell. Then he leaned across it and kissed my auntie on the cheek.

“Gracious,” she said.

“Must be off.” He swung his leg over the bar and went weaving down the road, giving his bell one last jingle.

Auntie Ivy looked at me. “You're white as a sheet,” she said. “It's all right, Johnny. It was only news.”

My knees were trembling. “Auntie,” I said. “I think I might have done it.”

“Done what?” she asked.

“The victory,” I told her. “I had a battle with my soldiers.
I pushed the Germans back, and now it's really happened. I think it's—”

“What rubbish!” she said.

“But, Auntie,” I said. “It happened before. When Dad went over the top my soldier did too.”

“This is nonsense,” she said. “This is utter nonsense.”

She started off toward the house, and I grabbed her purple dress. “Just listen,” I said.

“I don't listen to rubbish.” She knocked my hand away and kept on going.

“Auntie!” I cried.

“Those are wooden soldiers you've got in the garden,” she said. “Just little wooden soldiers.”

I ran in front of her, but she swept on by. Her shoes went thunk and thunk beside me. Again I grabbed her dress, and dragged her to a stop.

“Let me go,” she said.

“What if it's true?” I asked.

“Johnny Briggs, I thought you had some sense,” she said. “I thought you were smarter than that.” She wrenched her dress from my hands and thumped up the steps to the house.

I went back to the garden. My barbed wire was pulled away, a bit of trench ruined where I'd fallen. And there, smashed into the ground, was the little model of my father. As gray as the frost, his face stared up from the dirt.

“Oh, no,” I said. “No!” He looked like a corpse.

Far away, the church bell tolled. It was a single deep “bong” of a sound, softened by the distance. It tolled again, and then a third time, and I pictured that enormous bell swinging faster in its great stone steeple. I saw,
in my mind, the postman clinging to the rope, using all his weight to drag it down, letting it lift him up, clear from the floor. The bell tolled and tolled.

I dropped to my knees. I plucked the wooden man from the ground, but only half his body came away. The crack that had opened down his middle now split him into two.

I felt such a rush of dread that it made me almost dizzy. I snatched up the pieces and rushed to the house, shouting for my auntie. She came lumbering into the kitchen, and found me weeping at the door.

She stared at my hands and scowled. “Here I thought you'd gone and broken your arm,” she said. “And it's only a toy. What a fuss to make over a wooden toy.”

I held it out in my cupped hands. They were shaking, and the halves of the figure knocked together. “It's my dad,” I sobbed. “He's broken in two and I'm afraid he's dead.”

“Oh, Johnny,” she said. She put her hands around mine, her fingers like icicles. She squeezed very gently. “It doesn't mean anything. Really it doesn't.”

I sniffed and cried. “What if he's dead?” I asked. “What if I killed him?”

“You haven't.” She stooped down until our eyes were level. “Do you hear me? It's just a piece of wood. Nothing more than that.”

“I have to fix him,” I said. “Auntie, I've got to.”

“Then I'll get the glue pot.”

“Hurry!” I shouted.

It might have been the first time in her life that my Auntie Ivy sat down on the floor. With her dress all puddled around her, her legs tucked underneath, she
looked as though she
had
no legs, or as though she'd sunken through the floor. She put on her tiny spectacles and took the soldier from me.