The Last Green Valley - Mark Sullivan (black female authors .txt) 📗

out of the forest high above them and looking for all the world like the silhouette of a frog. Two turns past the frog rock, the road flattened, and the rain began to pour again.

“Bozeman two miles,” Adeline said, reading the sign.

“There’s an exit ahead,” Emil said before sheets of rain came and the wipers failed.

He rolled down the window and stuck out his head, squinting into the rain as he braked and took the exit, which put them on a gravel road that turned left beneath the highway. He pulled over under the bridge, started fiddling with the wipers, and got them working again.

Back in the car, Emil drove forward to a T in the road, intending to make a U-turn. He saw a signpost with the names of ranches and arrows pointing in either direction. The bottom sign pointed right and read “Montana State Ag Fields.”

“There,” Emil said. “Looks like we can drive right to the school from here.”

Another rain squall swept over them as they drove down a long gravel road that broke away at right angles but kept trending west. At one point, they could see the highway to their right before they dropped into a ravine. The road got bumpy on the way down and looked almost washed out on the way up the other side.

“Maybe we should turn around,” Adeline said.

“The sign says it’s right in front of us,” Emil insisted, and floored the accelerator.

They shot up the other side, fishtailing in mud and bouncing through potholes and puddles that spattered the windshield brown and killed the wipers again. The rain was still coming when they reached the top, and Adeline could see through the muddy windows that they were on a plateau of sorts with a ranch yard on their left and a barbed-wire fence across the road just beyond with a sign that read “Dead End.”

Emil said nothing, just started to jam the transmission into reverse, when Adeline threw out her hand and said, “Wait!”

She was staring through the cleaner parts of the windshield at beams of sunlight shining through breaks in the storm beyond the plateau. Feeling compelled and trembling head to toe, Adeline opened the car door, climbed out, and looked west, gasping at the breathtaking valley that unfolded before and around her in a hundred shades of green.

Several of those pillarlike sunbeams shone down on farm fields already emerald with the shoots of spring wheat. Other beams illuminated the twisting, lime-colored lines of leafing cottonwoods and quaking aspens along creeks that braided across the valley floor toward the cow town of Bozeman and a river called the Gallatin she could see sparkling in the distance.

Emil’s door opened behind her, but she did not look back at him. She was too enthralled by the clouds lifting with every second, revealing the six mighty mountain ranges that surround the Gallatin Valley, their foothills emerald and sea green with new grass and blooming wildflowers rising to jade-and-olive pine and spruce forests that climbed the rugged flanks toward impossible crags freshly blanketed in snow and piercing the bluest sky she’d ever seen.

Emil came up beside Adeline as overwhelming love and joy burst from her heart and tears began to stream down her cheeks.

“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered, feeling humbled and awestruck. “Like God painted it for me, Emil. So much more than I ever could have imagined.”

“Look behind us.”

She turned to look back across rolling, grassy hills, toward the mountain pass they’d come through. The storm was in full retreat now, with lingering broken clouds and scattered showers that caught the noonday sun and threw a massive arching rainbow across the east end of the valley that was quickly joined by a second rainbow at a different angle, and then a third. From beginnings miles apart, their multicolored arches seemed to erupt out of the verdant hills, to soar, collide, and shimmer red, blue, purple, and gold with sheer, stunning intensity.

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my entire life,” Emil said as he put his arm around Adeline’s shoulder.

She put her arms around his waist and laid her head on his chest, watching the rainbows pulse and radiate for almost a minute before they faded to pale, colored glimmers and then to cherished memories.

“We are never leaving here, Emil,” Adeline vowed, looking west again at the last green valley of their long and improbable journey.

“Not until the day we die,” Emil said, and held her tight.

Chapter Forty-One

But for occasional short trips and after returning to Baker to pack their things and sell their home, Emil and Adeline Martel never did leave Southwest Montana’s Gallatin Valley. And from that point forward, after all the hardships and tragedies they’d endured, nearly everything the Martels touched seemed to turn to gold.

Before Walter and Bill started school in the fall, Emil had bought a lot in Bozeman and started building a new home within walking distance of the university.

After he finished with his house, he recognized an opportunity when three small lots went up for sale near the Dutch Reform church on the less-tony north side of town. Reasoning that the aging Dutch farmers who lived west of Bozeman might like a small home to retire to near their place of worship, Emil took a risk, bought all three lots, and started building the first house with Bill helping after school.

They were putting up roof trusses when a Dutch farmer came along and asked if the house was for sale. Emil said it was. The farmer asked the price, didn’t flinch at it, and handed Emil a twenty-dollar bill to hold the house until his wife could see it. The next day, the farmer and his wife returned, asked several questions, and went to the bank for a check for the full price.

Emil Martel & Son Construction was born and capitalized in one day.

When he wasn’t working on the houses his father was building, Bill, at sixteen, tried