Lord of the Nutcracker Men (16 page)

I flew it from the kitchen, running underneath it as it dipped and soared to the hall. Then it landed there, and waited as I put on my boots and my macintosh.

“Contact!” said the pilot. I spun the propeller. “Brrrrr. Brrrr.”

The aeroplane did a wingover through the door. It swooped down the steps and soared across the garden. The pilot was looking down, scouting the front for the big Christmas push.

I armed him with a dirt bomb, and he flew above the front. “I will try to hit their cheneral.”

But I was scared to drop bombs on the British. So the pilot missed, and his glob of dirt fell miles and miles behind the lines. Then he flew home, and I crouched in the mud to plan the Christmas attack.

General Cedric hopped forward. “Strengthen the trenches!” he shouted. “I think the Huns are coming.”

All that day I worked on my trenches. I fetched more butcher's string and doubled my coils of barbed wire. I kept thinking how the church bells would ring when Auntie Ivy's garden lay covered with all my nutcracker men. I would wipe them out in one huge attack, in a single rush on Christmas morning. My little wooden father would be right at the center; he would kill half of them himself, and my real dad would come home a week later, with medals all over his chest.

The orange cat went slinking past that afternoon, along the top of the wall. Thin as sticks, its fur matted, it sat at the corner where the sergeant had stood. It howled at me, but whenever I moved it darted away.

“Go on to Mr. Tuttle's,” I told it. “He'll give you cream.” Then it howled again, in such a sad voice that I couldn't bear to listen. So I chased it off with dirt bombs, and went back to planning my war.

The rain turned to hail. It sizzled through the branches above me, slashing down on my shoulders, on the back of my head, as I crouched over my wooden army. It filled the cracks among the stones of the wall, and it covered the ground with tiny pellets that sparkled and shone. And I kept moving the nutcracker men into their trenches, packing them shoulder to shoulder.

Then the gray sunlight faded, and the ground began to freeze. The British soldiers glittered under frosty coats, and I couldn't bend my fingers anymore. They clamped like claws to my nutcracker men. And when Auntie Ivy called me in, I stood up and left my shadow behind me. All the garden was white except for that spot where I'd crouched at the trenches, where the hail hadn't fallen.

“Why, you're frozen stiff,” said Auntie Ivy. “I forgot you were there, you poor thing.”

I had a bath—she made me do it—and sat in a swirl of steam as the ice melted from my hair. My teeth chattered; I shivered as each bit of sleet trickled down my back. Then I put on pajamas and huddled by the stove, wrapped in a huge towel, as Auntie Ivy brought me cocoa so thick that it stuck to my teeth.

“Oh, Johnny,” she said. “Why didn't you come in and get warm?”

“I didn't think of it,” I said.

“You could have caught your death out there.”

She felt my forehead, then banked up the fire. The kitchen grew sweltering hot. And she kept looking at me sideways. “Do you want to hear the last bit of it now?”

“Of what?” I asked.

“Your father's letter, of course.”

I sniffed. “Yes, please.”

She sat in the squeaky old rocking chair and put on her spectacles. The letter crinkled as she unfolded it. In a mumbly voice, she read very quickly down to the place where she had stopped.

I tightened the towel around my bare feet.

“Where's the tree?” I asked.

Auntie Ivy took off her little spectacles. “I don't know,” she said.

“Maybe it's in the storeroom.”

“Maybe so,” she said. “But I'm not sure we should put it up.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don't think you'd like it,” she said.

But nothing would do then except that I would see that tree standing in the parlor. I pestered Auntie Ivy until she caved in and said, “Oh, all right!” So up we went.

She knew right where it was, in a box inside another. The picture on the lid was faded and torn, but it showed a whole family sitting below a monstrous tree that sparkled with candles.

“It
is
splendid,” I said.

“Well, that's not quite how it looks,” said Auntie Ivy. “It's not so grand as your father remembers.”

We took the box down to the parlor, and my heart fell the moment that we opened it. There was a stick for a trunk, and bent wires for branches. Tiny glass ornaments rattled around in the bottom, along with half a dozen candles in little tin cups.

“Our father—your grandfather—bought this one year,” said Auntie Ivy. “He set it up on Christmas Eve, and we saw it in the morning. The candles were burning. And your father—he wasn't much older than you— thought it was the most magical thing he had ever seen.”

The trunk was only two feet long. It fitted into a little wooden tub painted the dull red of old bricks.

“The bristles are made of goose feathers,” said Auntie. “You'll see how it goes.”

We wedged the trunk into the tub, then stuck the branches on. They fanned out like spokes, in four layers growing smaller toward the top. The needles didn't look like feathers, or much like needles either. There were funny bunches of red berries at the tip of each branch, and the whole tree looked spindly and short.

“Your grandfather would set it on a stool,” said Auntie Ivy. “I suppose your dad's forgotten that, and remembers a tree that towered above him.”

“But wouldn't he know from later?” I asked.

“We only used it for two Christmases,” said Auntie Ivy. “Then your grandfather went off to that awful war in Siam, and he never came home from that.”

I picked the glass ornaments from the box. Auntie Ivy sorted through the candleholders.

“Does Mr. Tuttle have a tree?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “He'll be leaving soon, I think.”

“Leaving?” Her face fell. “Why on earth is he leaving?”

It amazed me that there was some local news she didn't know. I said, “His roses got damaged.”

“And he's leaving for that?”

“Because no one owned up,” I said.

She looked terribly sad, as though her world had ended. “I know they mean everything to him,” she said. “His wife's roses; she started them. He kept them going as though they were children she left him. But he can't go away.”

“He's already packing,” I said. “You know all those things in his house?”

“No,” said Auntie. “I haven't been to his house since his wife died.”

“But he lives just down the road.”

“And keeps himself to himself,” said Auntie. “Remember that day he came here, because you weren't in school? That was the first time in seven years. He's lived like a hermit, nearly. But you were changing him; you were bringing him out of his shell.”

The tree shook as I put the last ornaments on. Auntie
Ivy held on to the tub. She said, “I think you should invite him for Christmas dinner.”

“All right.” We started fitting the candles in their little tin cups. “He can celebrate the end of the war.”

“Oh, that could be years away, Johnny,” she said. “No, Auntie.” I clipped the candles on the tree. “The war's going to end on Christmas.”

“They used to say that, Johnny,” she said, staring at me through the wiry branches. “But not anymore. It might go on—”

“Yes it is,” I told her. “It's going to stop on Christmas Day.”

“And how do you know that?” she said.

“I just know.”

“This isn't to do with your soldiers, is it?” She frowned when I nodded. “For heaven's sake, we've been over that. Wooden soldiers can't decide the war.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I think they might at Christmas.”

She sighed. “Do you know what this is sounding like?”

“It's not rubbish,” I said.

“It's mindless chatter,” she told me. “I can't
abide
mindless chatter.”

At the bottom of the box I found a little Father Christmas with his flowing beard and long red dressing gown. There was a spot for him on the very tip of the trunk, and I stood him there as the tree swayed and shook.

“Well, it's not so bad,” said Auntie Ivy. She touched the branches the way Mr. Tuttle had touched his roses. “It's a brave little tree, I suppose.”

“It
is
going to look splendid,” I said.

“Oh, Johnny,” she said. “Won't you please go and ask Mr. Tuttle?”

“I think I'll take him a present,” I said.

She beamed. “That's very kind of you.”

I let her think what she wanted, but it really wasn't kindness. If I gave a present to someone, I thought, he would have to give one back to me.

I took the money that was left over from Guy Fawkes Day and bought a box of Bovril for my father, and a little rosebush for Mr. Tuttle. It was just a withered stump with a single twig, but the shopkeeper told me it would grow into a very fine rose.

Mr. Tuttle nearly cried when he saw it. He held it like a baby, in both his hands. He said, “I don't think I've ever been given something that means so much to me.”

“Is it as good as your old ones?” I asked.

He looked at the stump, at the tiny arm branching from it, and I could see that he was trying to find something to say that wouldn't disappoint me. He was too honest to lie, but too kind to say no. Finally he smiled and told me, “I shall treasure it even more.”

“You won't have to move away now, will you?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't know,” he sighed. “We'll see.” “I'm sorry it's not a bit bigger,” I said.

“It will grow, Johnny. Don't worry about that,” said Mr. Tuttle. “In a few years it will be as big as Glory. The flowers will be just as pretty as hers.”

I thought he was joking, but he wasn't. “You give your roses names?” I asked.

“The new ones, yes,” he said. “You see, Johnny, Glory wasn't just any rose.” He cradled my little stump and added, in a hurry, “Not that this one is. But Glory was a hybrid, a brand-new thing.”

He took me into his house. There were more tea chests in his front room, a stack of them against the wall he'd bared. His black gown, neatly folded, lay on top of the pile. We went through to the kitchen and sat at a table where all his silverware had been arranged in tidy patterns.

“A rose grower does the work of God,” said Mr. Tuttle. “I was
creating
something, Johnny. In the spring Glory was going to bloom for the first time, and the world would have something new and beautiful. In the midst of a war, the world would be a little better for what I was doing in my garden.”

He made me feel dreadful, all rotten inside. I wondered what he would say if I told him that I was the one who had killed his Glory rose.

He was touching the stump I'd given him, peeling bits of bark from its frail little branch, already starting it going. “Whoever harmed Glory harmed the whole world,” he said. “But myself most of all. My wife bred the parents and I was breeding the child. My wife lived on in those roses.”

I was trying to decide how to tell him the truth when his mood turned suddenly to anger. “And he never came forward! That cowardly boy,” he said. “If he came to me now I would thrash him for what he has done.”

My shame and my fear must have shown on my face. Mr. Tuttle softened his voice, and even smiled. “I'm
sorry,” he said. “Here you are, the only one who has stood by me, the bearer of this wonderful gift, and I'm venting all my anger on you, the one who least deserves it.”

I hung my head.

“You restore my faith in boys,” he told me. “You've been so kind, you and your aunt.”

“I wish you wouldn't leave,” I said.

“Bless you, Johnny. Perhaps I shouldn't.”

“We hoped you would come for Christmas dinner,” I said. “Auntie sent me to ask you.”

That seemed to please him greatly. “I would love to come,” he said.

Dad sent the letter in the same sort of green envelope that had arrived just before the victory. Auntie Ivy put it away in her wooden box, and I trudged back to Cliffe, to buy presents for Auntie and Mum.