Love Among the Walnuts (11 page)

"Good," Sunnie said. "That shows how smart you are. You know what's good for you."

Boom-Boom beamed.

It was more like an hour before Sunnie got everyone, including Dr. Waldemar, bundled up and out the door to the backyard, but she did it. She herded them ahead of her like a flock of recalcitrant sheep, with Sandy and Boom-Boom as the enthusiastic sheepdogs, pulling Eddy's cart and keeping everyone else in line.

Dr. Waldemar, after messing around with a pile of snow for a few minutes, decided it was too cold for him and went inside. Lyle and Virgil tried to follow him, and so did L. Barlow Van Dyke and Mr. Moreland. But Sunnie stopped them. She said Dr. Waldemar was the boss and the oldest—heavens, he must be eighty—and so he had special privileges. The four men turned around but not without grumbling, at least from three of them. Mr. Van Dyke contributed a virtuoso scowl.

An hour later the yard was populated with a crowd of snow people. Mr. Van Dyke and Mr. Moreland had made two rotund snow tycoons facing each other, their round tummies touching. They each smoked a corncob pipe—goodness only knew where Opal had found them—stuffed with Monopoly money. Lyle and Virgil made identical snowmen, so close together it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. Boom-Boom's creation was a snow woman with a snow child tucked into her side. All of Graham's snowmen were slender—with wide shoulders—wonderfully sculpted, and hardened into ice with water he'd brought in a pitcher from the kitchen. Sunnie and Opal between them made a throng of people, in a multitude of shapes, sizes, and genders. Sunnie even made a few four-footed snow creatures of pet size. Opal's figures tended to be less rounded than Sunnie's, but they definitely had energy and originality. She stuck cigarettes in all her snow people's mouths, and Sunnie went around taking them out. Everett didn't make any snow people of his own, but he helped everyone else with theirs. Poor Eddy didn't do anything, of course, but he made an attentive audience, which every performer needs.

Sandy horrified himself by making two snowmen in the shapes of Bart and Bernie—which wasn't hard, because Bart and Bernie were shaped just like snowmen—and then knocking their heads off. As angry as he was, he was ashamed to lower himself to the point where he was acting like they did. He put heads back on his snowmen, but before he knew what he was doing, he had knocked them off again. It felt wonderful, he realized with guilty glee. He did it a few more times before he was satisfied to put the heads back on and let them stay.

His life at Eclipse had been so placid, so tranquil that the strongest negative emotions he had ever felt had been annoyance when he couldn't get the top off a jar of pickles and mild irritation at the prospect of having Bart and Bernie for dinner once a month. In the past few weeks, he had discovered an entire catalog of feelings he hadn't even known existed: terror at the thought that Horatio, Mousey, Flossie, and Attila might ... he couldn't even
think
the word; fury and hatred toward Bart and Bernie, plus a real fear that they might try something on Sandy himself; soaring joy at the new things he was learning to do—drive, understand high finance, beat Mr. Moreland at cards without feeling guilty about it. The way Sunnie made him feel occupied a whole category all by itself. Knowing she regarded him with the same fondness she felt for everyone else at Walnut Manor filled him with a sadness that was new to him, too.

He sighed and punched his snowmen in the stomachs, leaving fist-shaped holes.

"You've made the buttonholes too big," Sunnie said, coming up behind him. "They should be just big enough for a piece of coal. Of course, we don't have any coal, but I think the barbecue briquettes look nice, so square and all. You want some? I'll help you fix the holes in your snowmen." She set to work fixing. "Isn't this fun? Look at all the people we've made. Wouldn't it be perfect if we could make a world exactly the way we want it, with just the people we want in it, the way we've done here? Then there wouldn't be any horrible conflicts and everybody would be happy." She sighed. "Sure, I know there's always conflict, even between people who love each other. But I look at that as good conflict. It's what you have to do to get problems worked out. You can't agree all the time, even with people you love. Think how boring that would be."

That's how it had been at Eclipse,
Sandy thought. There was no conflict. And they'd all been happy, hadn't they? But Eclipse, from what he could tell, had almost no relation at all to the real world. Had he been bored at Eclipse? He hadn't thought so. But now, seeing just the little he had of what went on outside the estate's walls, he knew he'd never be satisfied to seclude himself in there again. It was
too
peaceful,
too
quiet. Now he knew there were lots of interesting places to go and interesting people to meet, even if going and meeting did lead to conflict.

"I don't know much about conflict," he finally said.

"Thank your lucky stars," Sunnie said. "But don't forget, you're getting a crash course in it from Bart and Bernie. When you're through with them, you'll have a Ph.D. in conflict."

"You think so?"

"You'd better if we're going to protect your darling family from them. And it's not just your family anymore, either. It's you and Opal—did you see the way Bart looked at her when she threw him out of Walnut Manor?—and probably all of us now that they know we're on your side. They're bad clear through, and they won't stop until they get what they want or until we make them stop."

Sandy shivered.

"Right," Sunnie said. "We've all been out here long enough. We need some hot chocolate—with marshmallows, of course—and a fire. But first I want to get my camera and take pictures of every one of these snow people. I feel like I know them all because I know their parents."

That night, after dinner, Sunnie turned off the TV in the library, took up her copy of
The Wind in the Willows,
which she was reading for the second time because everybody loved it so much, and led the way upstairs to the sleepers' room. Sandy had lit the fire and arranged the chairs for her. It would be the first time she had read without the TV playing in the background. There were only the hiss and crack of the burning logs in the grate and the cottony silence that came from Walnut Manor's being enveloped in falling snow.

The solemnity of sharing a room with four comatose fellow creatures affected all the inmates. They settled themselves quietly and, though the lack of a TV screen clearly made Virgil and Lyle uneasy, they all turned their faces expectantly toward Sunnie.

She read the chapter where Rat and Mole are head ing back to Rat's riverbank home, where they both now live, through a mid-December snowstorm and stumble upon Mole's old home. Rat and Mole stay the night there—fixing a cozy supper for the mice who come along caroling—and Mole realizes that, though he has a new life now, "it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome."

When Sunnie read those words and closed the book, there was a long thoughtful silence. Could any of the people in the room have said the words Mole had?

Perhaps because of their preoccupation with their own thoughts about what constituted home, no one had noticed that while Sunnie was reading, Louie had jumped into L. Barlow Van Dyke's lap, curled himself up, and gone to sleep while Mr. Van Dyke scratched his ears.

Sometime during the night the power went off at Eclipse, and Sandy and Bentley awoke shivering. They dressed quickly and warmly. Bentley covered his chemistry experiments with thermal blankets, and they decided to have breakfast at Walnut Manor.

When they arrived at Walnut Manor, Sandy was surprised to find icicles hanging above the front door. On the inside.

He could see his breath in the front hall.

"Rats," Sandy said, "the heat's off here, too. It's even colder than at Eclipse."

They went upstairs, where Sunnie, in her snowsuit and mittens, had piled more blankets on the sleepers and had just thrown more logs on the grate in the fireplace. "Do you know how long it'll be before the electricity's back on?" she asked Sandy and Bentley. "We haven't got any heat or lights or kitchen appliances. Not that we need refrigeration, that's for sure. But poor Virgil and Lyle are going crazy without their TV."

"I have no idea," Bentley said. "We don't have a radio or a TV, and our phone is out, too."

"The wires to both Eclipse and Walnut Manor must have come down in the storm. There's nothing else out here, so it'll probably take a long time for the power company to pay any attention to us," Sunnie said. "They don't know we have medical equipment to worry about."

"I didn't see any wires down," Bentley said. "And I looked when we drove over here. I wonder..."

Bentley and Sandy looked at each other, the same idea occurring to each of them at the same time. "Bart and Bernie," they said in unison.

"No!" Sunnie said. "They wouldn't."

"Why not?" Sandy asked her. "You said yesterday that none of us were safe now. Freezing Horatio and Mousey are all that's necessary, but I doubt they'd care if a few more of us froze in our sleep. Especially me."

Sunnie put her hands on her hips. "Well, if that's what they have in mind, they've got another think coming. We're all tougher than that. Sandy, you and Graham get outside and chop lots of wood for the fireplaces. We can stay warm and cook, too. Opal's got candles and the pantry's full. All the important medical equipment's got battery backups and there're plenty of blankets. How do you think people got along before there was electricity?"

"I'm going to have a look at the telephone and power lines," Bentley said, "to see if I can find out what happened."

***

Graham was so terribly clumsy at chopping wood that Sandy was afraid he would amputate something on himself or on somebody else, but he kept gamely at it. Sandy wasn't so coordinated himself at first, but he caught on after a while. Everett helped, too, grunting with each stroke of the ax. Since Everett didn't attribute his grunts to anyone, Sandy knew nobody else could have said it better.

Rather than leave the sleepers alone, Sunnie and Opal decided everyone should congregate in the sickroom. Lyle and Virgil and Boom-Boom, Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke and Dr. Waldemar formed a sort of bucket brigade going up the stairs and passed along the logs and food and supplies until everything they needed was stockpiled in the hall outside the sickroom door.

Virgil and Lyle, huddled under so many blankets that they looked like a year's worth of undone laundry, asked plaintively, "When will the TV be back on?"

"I don't know," Sunnie said. "Maybe not for a long time. This might be a good chance for you to begin reading some books. I have lots and I'd love to share. And the library's full, if you don't like my books."

Mr. Moreland and Mr. Van Dyke were already browsing through Sunnie's library of financial books, blowing dust off the tops of them. Sunnie's interest in finance had flagged early, and she'd moved on to reading about gemstones in spite of the fact that Mr. Moreland told her they were a risky investment.

Soon, between the fire and the heat generated by all their bodies, the room warmed. Opal made hot chocolate and soup, Sunnie passed out books, and Dr. Waldemar fell asleep in his chair. When Sunnie wasn't tending to her patients, she was rubbing liniment into the shoulders of Everett and Graham, who were sore from chopping wood.

Sandy watched and regretted that his regular workouts in the gym at Eclipse had kept him in such good shape that his own shoulders felt perfectly fine.

Late in the afternoon, Bentley returned. He came into the sickroom so red faced and angry that he looked as if he could heat the room all by himself.

"What?" Sandy said.

"Those #*@!* uncles of yours!" Bentley exploded, getting so tangled up in unwinding his scarf that he almost strangled himself. As Sunnie helped him get his scarf and coat off without hurting himself, Bentley told them what he had found out. "None of the wires are down, or even out of order. I went over every inch of them, from where they leave the poles at the road to where they come into the houses. Then I drove along Old Country Road looking for a place they might be downed. No soap. I ended up driving all the way to Jupiter and not finding anything. As long as I was in town, I went to the power company and the phone company to find out about getting our service restored, and they said our service had somehow been inadvertently shut off. They blamed it on a computer error. Sort of a big coincidence that both companies shut both of us off at the same time, isn't it?"

"But how could Bart and Bernie get to the computers?' Maybe it
was
an error," Sandy said.

"I don't believe it," Bentley said. "I know Bart and Bernie aren't smart enough to work a computer, but they're certainly smart enough to find somebody who can: either employees at the phone company and the utilities company, or one of their unsavory friends. For enough money, almost anybody will do almost anything. I
know
they're responsible for this. I'll bet they'd be calling right now to see if anybody answered the phone, if they knew our phones were working again, the way they did the morning after they brought the birthday cake to Eclipse."

"Are they?" Opal asked. "Working again?"

Bentley picked up the extension in the sickroom. "Yes! There's a dial tone. So we should have heat soon, too, and—" He flipped the light switch and the overhead light went on.

Sunnie hugged him. "Oh, Bentley, you've saved us."

In spite of the restoration of lights and heat, no one seemed eager to leave the sickroom, not even Lyle and Virgil. They all had the somewhat giddy feeling of accident survivors, and they needed to keep telling one another the story of what had happened to them.

When night came and their picnic-style dinner was finished, Sandy and Bentley got ready to return to Eclipse. Sandy never could explain what made him do what he did: It might have been a simple desire to share what was his with people he cared about. Anyway, he said, "Would any of you like to come spend the night at Eclipse? We have lots of beds."