Lord of the Nutcracker Men (5 page)

It was like a story cut off at the wrong place, with the ending not quite there. I was left feeling funny inside, proud and worried and sad all at once. I held the wad of
crumpled paper that had come in the parcel, feeling the shape of the little man inside. I didn't want to open it.

“Read the letter again,” I said.

“You just heard it,” said Auntie.

“Please?” I said. “

No, Johnny. Even if I wanted to, you don't deserve it. Not after the lies you've just told me.” She read the one from my mother. It talked about soldiers drilling in Hyde Park, and the suffragettes' battle to find work for women. But I barely listened.

I heard the guns in my mind. I saw the earth flying up, and my dad whittling away, his wood chips scattering. He might have been talking about the same battle I'd had in the garden as I'd moved the wooden man with his tiny gun right up to the front.

I worked at the crumpled paper until the new soldier fell out. It was a lieutenant, just like Sarah's father, wrapped in a trench coat spotted with painted mud. At his neck hung a whistle, a little tube of silver.

Auntie Ivy finished Mum's letter. “Now off you go, Johnny,” she said. “And I don't want to see you until supper.”

“Can I take my guy to Cliffe?” I asked.

“If you're back in an hour. If you stay away from the farm.”

I didn't even
want
to go there. “I heard someone screaming,” I said. “I tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen.”

“Then you shouldn't have come in telling lies.”

“What happened, Auntie?” I asked. “I saw the postman there.”

“He brought a telegram to Mr. and Mrs. Sims, Johnny. Murdoch, their son, just died in France.” She got up from the table, and gathered her knitting. “Mr. Tuttle met the postman, who told him all about it. The Simses thought their boy was coming home. They'd been told as much. Murdoch had been wounded in the leg, and he was coming home. That was the last his parents heard, until the wire came today.”

She was holding the wool and her needles, but she put them down again. “Screaming, was she? Oh, it's dreadful. Johnny, I'll walk with you as far as the farm.”

I didn't have a cart or a wagon. I had to drag my guy along the road, through dirt and patches of mud. His little cloth cap fell off as he tumbled behind me. Then a leg dropped away, and Auntie Ivy carried the pieces until we reached the gates of Storey's farm.

“Don't dally,” she told me. “And be sure you stop at the next house. That's where Mr. Tuttle lives.”

Auntie Ivy went up to the farm, and I lugged my guy to Mr. Tuttle's house. I propped him against the hedge, put his cap in place, and chanted my little song:

Mr. Tuttle appeared from the back of his house, and I shouted out, “A penny for the guy!”

He didn't come any closer. “Johnny?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Come to the garden.”

He led me there, round the side of his house. “Look at this,” he said. “Look at my roses.”

I felt an awful thump in my heart to see his garden again, the same one I had found from the footpaths. It was Mr. Tuttle's roses that had stuffed my monstrous guy.

“I'm trying to save what I can,” he said, going straight to the bushes. He pulled the branches apart. “See how they're splintered? The frost will get in there, and the mulch that might have kept them warm is gone.”

Mr. Tuttle let the bushes snap together. He stood up. “I'm livid,” he said. “I've never been more angry. These roses are all I have; they're like children to me.”

I hung my head.

“Do you know who did this?”

My heart, which had sunk, fluttered again to think he didn't suspect me. “No, sir,” I mumbled.

“Well, it's no concern of yours. You only came to get a penny for your guy.”

I couldn't let him see it. The thorns of his roses stuck out from every part of the guy. “You don't have to give me a penny,” I said.

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Tuttle. He groped through his pockets and pulled out a florin. It was riches to me, twenty-four times what I'd asked for. “I'll give you this if you can tell me why I should.”

I thought it was obvious. “Because I have to buy fire-works,” I said.

He smiled, and I felt sorry for him. “But why, Johnny? What's the story behind the fireworks and guys?”

“Treason and plot?” I guessed.

He could tell I didn't know, but pretended that I might. “Indeed,” he said. “Guy Fawkes was a Catholic, wasn't he? He hated James the First, the Protestant King, and tried to blow up the Parliament buildings on the day that all the Lords and all the Commons and the King himself would be there. But he was caught, wasn't he? He was arrested in the coal cellar with his barrels full of powder, ready to set them off on November fifth. He was hanged for treason, as you say.” Mr. Tuttle held out his hand. “There you go.”

I stared at the silver coin pinched in his fingers. I'd rarely owned a shilling, let alone a florin. But something inside me wouldn't let me take it. “I didn't really know,” I admitted.

“You do now.” He pressed the coin in my palm. “I wish all the boys were as honest as you, Johnny.”

I felt miserable.

“Now, don't fret about my roses. Perhaps I can still save something.”

I went on to the village, though not as cheerily as before. I sat by the Victoria Inn, with the gangly guy leaning against the wall like an old boozer, and the men smiled and the ladies giggled as they passed. I looked up at them all, shouting, “Pennies for the guy!”

All I got was a grubby old farthing, one penny and a ha'penny. Then I dragged my guy to the hardware store and went in to buy my fireworks. I asked for rockets.

“Rockets?” said the old geezer inside. “Are you mad, boy? Don't you know there's a war going on?”

“But it's Guy Fawkes Day,” I said.

“No rockets. No Catherine wheels. It's only what's left over from last year, and the best of it's gone already.”

I went away with two whizz-bangs and an old, bent tube of Crimson Rain, feeling as though all my joy in the day ahead had vanished in Mr. Tuttle's garden.

In the morning I started school again. I walked through the village, kicking at stones, and Sarah caught me up at the post office. She came too suddenly for me to go a different way, and though I tried to keep ahead of her, she could walk very fast for a girl. She skipped along at my side with my satchel on her shoulder, and the boys teased me in all new ways to see us arrive together at the school.

They shouted, “Sarah's got a boyfriend!” And, “Johnny's going to get maaaa-ried!”

In class, Mr. Tuttle singled me out for his questions about history and geography. He glowed when I knew the answers and coached me when I didn't, but I wished he would just leave me alone. I didn't want the boys to think that he liked me or, worse, to think I was smart.

When school finally ended, I was first out the door. I ran all the way home, frightened the boys would chase me.

I was disappointed by the first figure that I found inside the package, the man who brought the breakfast. It made me smile to see his arms stretched so long by the weight he carried that his hands reached nearly to his ankles. But I wanted soldiers, not messmen, and he would look rather silly, I thought, running over no-man's-land with kettles in his hands. I stood him on the table and took the wrappings from the second man.

“Oh, he's a darling,” said Auntie Ivy.

He lay on his side, curled into a ball like a khaki-colored kitten. He had an old Burberry pulled over his shoulders, his forearm for a pillow. His cap was twisted sideways and his face smiling, as though his dreams were happy.

“I'll make him a dead man,” I said.

“Oh, Johnny,” said Auntie Ivy. “Do you have to think of things like that?”

“But I don't have any dead men,” I told her.

“You should count yourself lucky.” She turned her chair sideways and read my other letter, from my mum this time.

I always closed my eyes to hear my mother's letters. She wrote just the way she talked, and Auntie's voice was a lot like hers, so it seemed that Mum was there beside me.

“There is great pressure on all the men to do their bit and enlist. Today Mr. Brown joined Kitchener's army, and you know very well how little like a soldier he looks. But it must be nice to feel wanted by someone. I think that every man in London could be off to France and there still!! would be no work for women. If you're not a nurse or a seamstress there's precious little you can do, except stay home and knit wretched socks!”

Auntie Ivy
tsked
.

“I got a scare last night, when the guns started shooting in Regent's Park. I looked out and saw the searchlights sweeping across the sky. Back and forth they went, making circles on the clouds. The shells burst above them, with flashes like lightning. I didn't see a zeppelin. Maybe there wasn't even one there. But I thanked my lucky stars that you're safe and well looked after.”

I took my new soldiers out to the garden, and stood the messman in the Tommies' trench. I put the other down in no-man's-land, then covered his foot with a bit of mud, to make it look as though he had been there for a long time. He made my battlefield look proper and gory.

I hurled some shells about, but didn't have time for a battle. The potting shed and the ground around it were littered with the remains of Mr. Tuttle's roses. I felt like a killer, with Scotland Yard closing in; I had to get rid of the evidence. I hid the branches deep in the forest. I carried away the leftover mulch and scattered it among the bushes. Then I built my bonfire with the bits that were left, disguising them below a layer of twigs and moldy leaves. It was the saddest little fire I'd ever seen, no bigger than a pudding.

As soon as darkness came, Auntie Ivy touched a match to the shreds of rotten leaves. They fizzled but wouldn't burn. They filled the garden with a thick smudge of smoke.

Auntie Ivy said “Ooooh!” as the Crimson Rain squirted up in a crackly spurt. She said “Gracious!” when my first whizz-bang sputtered and popped. Then the second one went off with a tiny yellow flame, and Auntie Ivy said, “Are you finished now? It's getting rather cold.”

“I have to burn the guy,” I said.

“Well, hurry up,” she told me.

I dragged him from his corner, his poor head lolling on its strings. He was more than twice my size, but I heaved him up to my shoulders and staggered with him round my little fire.

“Guy, guy, guy,” I sang. “Stick 'im in the eye.”

“Watch your shoes,” cried Auntie Ivy. “You'll scorch your good shoes.”