Different Seasons - Stephen King [239]
I thought of asking Stevens-saw that warning light in his eyes-and dropped the question unasked.
And, over those years, there were stories. Tales, to use Stevens's word. Funny tales, tales of love found and love lost, tales of unease. Yes, and even a few war stories, although none of the sort Ellen had likely been thinking of when she made the suggestion.
I remember Gerard Tozeman's story the most clearly-the tale of an American base of operations which took a direct hit from German artillery four months before the end of World War I, killing everyone present except for Tozeman himself.
Lathrop Carruthers, the American general who everyone had by then decided must be utterly insane (he had been responsible for better than eighteen thousand casualties by then-lives and limbs spent as casually as you or I might spend a quarter in a jukebox), was standing at a map of the front lines when the shell struck. He had been explaining yet another mad flanking operation at that moment-an operation which would have succeeded only on the level of all the others Carruthers had hatched: it would be wonderfully successful at making new widows.
And when the dust cleared, Gerard Tozeman, dazed and deaf, bleeding from his nose, his ears, and the corners of both eyes, his testicles already swelling from the force of the concussion, had come upon Carruthers's body while looking for a way out of the abbatoir that had been the staff HQ only minutes before. He looked at the general's body and then began to scream and laugh. The sounds went unheard by his own shellshocked ears, but they served to notify the medicos that someone was still alive in that strew of matchwood.
Carruthers had not been mutilated by the blast at least, Tozeman said, it hadn't been what the soldiers of that long-ago war had come to think of as mutilation-men whose arms had been blown off, men with no feet, no eyes; men whose lungs
had been shrivelled by gas. No, he said, it was nothing like that The man's mother would have known him at once. But the map
the map before which Carruthers had been standing with his butcher's pointer when the shell struck
It had somehow been driven into his face. Tozeman had found himself staring into a hideous, tattooed deathmask. Here was the stony shore of Brittany on the bony ridge of Lathrop Carruthers's brow. Here was the Rhine flowing like a blue scar down his left cheek. Here were some or the finest wine-growing provinces in the world bumped and ridged over his chin. Here was the Saar drawn around his throat like a hangman's noose and printed across one bulging eyeball was the word VERSAILLES.
That was our Christmas story in the year 197-.
I remember many others, but they do not belong here. Properly speaking, Tozeman's doesn't, either but it was the first 'Christmas tale' I heard at 249, and I could not resist telling it. And then, on the Thursday after Thanksgiving of this year, when Stevens clapped his hands together for attention and asked who would favour us with a Christmas tale, Emlyn McCarron growled: 'I suppose I've got something that bears telling. Tell it now or tell it never; God'll shut me up for good soon enough.'
In the years I had been coming to 249, I had never heard McCarron tell a story. And perhaps that's why I called the taxi so early, and why, when Stevens passed out eggnog to the six of us who had ventured out on that bellowing, frigid night, I felt so keenly excited. Nor was I the only one; I saw that same excitement on a good many other faces. McCarron, old and dry and leathery, sat in the huge chair by the fire with the packet of powder in his gnarled hands. He tossed it in, and we watched the flames shift colours madly before returning to yellow again, Stevens