Lord of the Nutcracker Men (20 page)

“Oh, one never knows,” he said, as though Christmas had made him giddy.

I wound up my bear and sent him rattling across the floor. Then I got up and went to the pantry. And there was a bicycle standing inside.

It was red and silver, with a basket on the front. I wheeled it out, knowing better than to ride it through the house.

“That's from Mr. Tuttle and I,” said Auntie.

“Tuttle and
me,
” the old schoolteacher said.

I was grinning. “It's super!” I cried.

Auntie Ivy stood up and hugged me. “Now go outside and amuse yourself for a while. We're all going to walk to Mr. Tuttle's and see how Murdoch is faring.”

“Can I take my bicycle out?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “You'd break your neck before you passed the gate.”

Mr. Tuttle walked with me to the door. He put his hand on my back. “Merry Christmas, Johnny,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” I told him.

I thought he wanted to hug me but was too shy to do it. His hand ran up my back as I stooped to get my boots. It rubbed on my head; then his fingertips scraped through my hair, as though he held on as long as he could.

“This isn't likely the last wartime Christmas,” he said. “You might be here for quite a long time, Johnny.”

“I've thought of that,” I said.

“You won't see your father for a while. And I'm sorry for you, I really am. But while you're here; only while you're here—” He coughed. “Well, you see, I think I'll be staying in Cliffe. And a boy should have someone he can go to with his troubles.”

“I already do,” I said.

He looked at me and slowly smiled. “Oh, Johnny, thank you,” he said.

I wished he wasn't so shy. But I could see that he wasn't going to hug me, so I flapped my hands and said, “I'd better go out.” And he opened the door, with a huge grin on his face.

The frost crunched under my boots. The sun glared on the ice, on the trees and the wall, and the fields of Kent looked like carpets of jewels. Even the wooden soldiers were covered with frost, all of them sparkling below me.

On the porch was the box that my mother had sent, its top torn open. I dragged it down, across the garden, under the tree with its diamond branches. And I started packing away my Tommies and my nutcracker men.

They had frozen together, as though the British soldiers were embracing the Germans, as though they'd huddled for warmth in the cold. In France, the battle might have started; it might have finished then. But I didn't think I would ever play at war again.

The soldiers bounced into the empty box, then knocked against each other. I put them all together, Fatty Dienst and all my Germans, the dog-faced man and the
messman and the drum and trumpet players. I found General Cedric, looking cold and alone, and put him in as well. But my little broken dad I kept aside; I thought I'd stand him by my bed, and just wait for the day he came home.

I dragged the box back to the house, and no one asked me why. Mr. Tuttle was putting on his old gray overcoat. He had only one arm in its sleeve, and with his other he was helping Auntie Ivy, holding her crimson jacket. I left my box in the hall, and together we all set off for Mr. Tuttle's house.

It was almost noon when we got there. The sky was clouding over, but the weather stayed bitterly cold. Storey Sims's black horse was the only thing in all the world not covered with frost. It stood, with ice at its nostrils, like a great lump of coal in the middle of a whitewashed floor. The wagon glittered with ice: its wheels were like frozen Catherine wheels; even the reins sparkled with frost.

We didn't go in the front, but around the back with Mr. Tuttle leading. I didn't understand why until I thought of his roses, and how he must have fretted about them all night and all day. He went straight to their corner, and when he touched them the ice shivered away from their branches.

I heard a sound of engines, and looked up to the north. Above the marshes, an aeroplane was flying west toward London. The sun glinted on its wings as it banked and straightened.

I knew the shape of those wings, the curve of the tail. “An FF twenty-nine,” I said. “A German.”

“Really?” said Auntie Ivy.

Mr. Tuttle turned away from his roses. We watched
the aeroplane, and saw two others behind it, black specks coming from the east, from Grain. The German turned slightly north.

“He's going to bomb London,” I said.

The planes were so small, London so distant, that I felt only excited at the idea of it. I thought of the soldiers at their gun and how they would jump to their feet, spilling the tea from their metal cups.

The engines buzzed, barely louder than flies. The German rolled sideways, and straightened, and the other machines came into line behind it.

“A Vickers,” I said. “And the Albatros, look!” It seemed funny that a machine built in Germany would be sent up to knock a German down. And I doubted that it could. “The German's faster,” I said. “They might not catch him.”

They flitted past a line of trees, the German, then the British. And when they appeared again, the aeroplanes were closer together.

“No, I don't believe he's going all the way to London,” said Mr. Tuttle. “He'll be after the arsenal at Woolwich.”

My excitement vanished, and a sickly fear took its place.

“The arsenal's packed with powder,” said Mr. Tuttle. If he ever knew my mum was there he had forgotten it now. “We'll feel the blast from here.”

“My mother's in Woolwich!” I cried.

“Oh,” he said, in a tiny voice. His eyes were wide, and his mouth stayed open in a little circle.

The FF29 went down in a dive. It dropped below the hedges around us, and we could only hear the sound of its
motor speeding into a whine. The British pilots dipped and followed it.

“This can't be real,” said Auntie Ivy. “It can't be true.”

A gun opened up somewhere by the river. Little black clouds dotted across the sky, along the top of the hedge beside us. And it was the worst feeling in the world to know there was nothing we could do.

Then the sounds of the engines changed again. They grew clearer, and louder, and the German machine appeared suddenly, far in the west. It came toward us, maybe a thousand feet up, growing larger, tilting left and then right in slashes of sunshine. The British were above it, still behind it, and another Vickers had appeared.

The German machine had clumsy floats instead of wheels. It carried a pair of bombs slung on a rack between them. It came roaring straight at us.

“Get to the house!” shouted Mr. Tuttle. “Go on.” He shoved Auntie Ivy, and she skidded on the frost. He pushed again; she fell to her knees. “Johnny, help her!”

I ran to take her elbow, thinking that Mr. Tuttle would take the other. But he only pressed us together, gave us another push forward, then turned away himself.

He crossed the garden in his clumsy run, shattering the frost with his shoes. His coat flapped around him, tangling at his legs, and he thrashed at it as he stumbled along.

I looked up at the FF29. It skittered on the air like a boat on the sea, flung up and tossed down, tipped to its right, then its left. But it still came toward us.

“Hubert!” shouted Auntie Ivy. She was looking back at Mr. Tuttle.

I couldn't believe what he was doing. In the corner of the garden he wrestled with his big pile of boards.

“Hubert!”

He didn't look up. “My roses,” he said. “I have to shield Glory.”

“Oh, please,” she wailed.

He pulled at the boards, but the frost stuck them together. He kicked at the pile, and a white shower of sparkles rose from his foot. And the German tilted down in a dive.

Its wings stretched as wide as the house. Its propeller spun in a blur. And it swooped from the sky, no longer a machine flown by a man, but a thing with eyes, with a mind.

“Hubert, please!”

The door to the house flew open, and old Storey Sims came lumbering out. “Are you mad?” he shouted. “Don't you see that machine?”

“Help my auntie,” I said.

He dashed to her side and plucked her clear from the ground. He carried her as though she weighed nothing at all. And I ran to help Mr. Tuttle.

“Get inside,” he said.

“No, sir,” I told him.

He had a board lifted half from the pile. I got my shoulder underneath and levered it up, and it sprang loose from the others with a loud rip, like a scream. We heaved it up, one end on the wall, and there it lay, slanted in front of the roses, a tiny shield just six inches wide.

“Another,” I said.

Mr. Tuttle was panting. “No time,” he said.

The German was crossing the field beyond the road, rushing on at a hundred miles an hour. I heard the black horse whinny with fright; I heard its harness jangle.

“Get down!” shouted Mr. Tuttle.

He dropped to his belly, onto the frost. His hand groped out to find me, to pull me down. But I stepped away and went back to the wood. I had destroyed his roses, and I would do what I could to save them.

The board wouldn't lift, and the seaplane hurtled over the road. I saw the pilot, helmeted and goggled. I saw the British coming after him. And we stared at each other, through the blurred propeller, as I clawed at the wood with my fingers.

I saw him move, and I thought now the bombs would fall. I watched to see them drop.

It might have been that the pilot never meant to drop his bombs. He might only have been weaving away from the Vickers. Possibly, he saw a better target to the south. But the thought that came to me was that he just couldn't drop a bomb on a child, that he couldn't kill a boy on Christmas Day. And the pilot snapped his machine onto its side, and the tail flaps hinged as he banked away to the south.

He flew over my head with a deafening clatter, and the Vickers, then the Albatros, passed behind him.

Mr. Tuttle looked up. There was a bead of frost on the tip of his nose. “You could have been killed, Johnny. What were you thinking?”

“I had to help you,” I said. “I was the one who damaged your roses.”

“You?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“For my Guy Fawkes guy.”

“My beautiful roses?” he said.

“I'm sorry, sir,” I said.

“Why couldn't you tell me?” asked Mr. Tuttle.

“I was scared to at first,” I said. “And then I was ashamed.”

“Even after this morning?” He looked puzzled more than sad. “Even after our talk you couldn't come to me with this?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“But why on earth not?”

We heard the bombs explode then. Two geysers of mud appeared in the south, toward the railway tracks and the station. They grew higher, roiling with dust and smoke, and the British machines went tearing through them in pursuit of the vanishing German. Then the mud fell down in a rain.

Between us and the raining mud a flock of rooks went whirling up, like bits of shrapnel flung about. And the air sort of crumpled around us, and we heard the bangs, and they scared me badly. The windows rattled in Mr. Tuttle's house, and the blast echoed like far-off thunder. The aeroplanes flew off to the east, the German weaving ahead of the British.

The sound brought Storey Sims out from the house. It brought Auntie Ivy and Murdoch, too. The young soldier leaned on his father. He looked ill and ridden with pain, but I could see he would live after all. The three of them stared up at the sky, warily, as though the bombs had fallen from nowhere, and another could follow at any moment.

Then Murdoch asked me, “Do you see what I meant?”

“Yes,” I said. It would drive me mad to hear bombs burst all around me, all day and all night, to feel the air thicken and warp, and to wonder if someone I knew had been blown into smithereens.

“Thank you for bringing me home,” said Murdoch.

Old Storey held his son, and Mr. Tuttle looked at them, and then at me. He cocked his head in a quizzical way. “Ahh,” he said. Then he came to my side, and his coat—flapping out—wrapped around me. I knew that he understood why I hadn't told him about the roses; and I knew that I
could,
whenever I wanted, tell him my darkest secrets with no fear that he would think any less of me.

We went up to the door. He hugged Auntie Ivy, and she ran her hands all over his back, as though to make sure the bomb hadn't knocked him to pieces. And then we all went inside, as the church bells rang for Christmas Day.