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

on a floodplain that was just greening. There was a lull in the battle behind them.

“What do I do when I’m done?”

“Hand it to me, and I’ll dump it over the side.”

The trek was still moving at a steady clip and was nearing the far side of the floodplain where the road climbed a bluff. After a minute, Adeline said, “Are you done back there?”

“No.”

“No?” she said, twisting around to see him with his pants fully unbuttoned and pulled down to his thighs.

Will was still frowning. “It doesn’t want to come out, Mama. It’s like it’s scared!”

Adeline burst out laughing again. Walt looked, made a disgusted face, and clamped his hand across his mouth to hide his amusement. Emil glanced over his shoulder, and he started laughing, too. It was contagious. There was no stopping it.

Even Will started laughing so hard, tears streamed down his face and he was having trouble holding the jar in front of him. Then a short shot of pee squirted from him and hit the oilskin tarp beside Walt.

Adeline shrieked with laughter. Walt screamed as he rolled away, “Piss in the jar, idiot!”

“You pee any more on that tarp and you’ll clean it, Will,” Emil said.

Will clamped the jar over his groin. “I couldn’t help it,” he chortled.

Adeline turned around again. She had forgotten how good it felt to laugh like this, the tank battles and the bombardments forgotten for the moment. Laughter was like a hot shower for the soul after a long, cold day.

“Ahhhh,” Will said.

“He’s peeing!”

“Thank you, Walt,” Emil said. “Congratulations, Will.”

Adeline started laughing all over again. A half minute went by.

“He’s peeing a long time,” Walt said.

“Enough,” Emil said.

A few moments later, Will cried, “I’m empty, and the wagon behind us is back there pretty far, Mama. I’ll pour it out. You don’t have to do it.”

“Thank you, Will,” she said. “And find a place for the jar that’s not in the kitchen box.”

“Okay,” he said. “And I’ll find a rag to clean up the pee on the tarp.”

She looked at Emil and winked at him.

A few minutes later, Will crawled into her lap, snuggled into her, and said, “When are we gonna get there?”

Adeline kissed the top of his head and smiled. “In God’s time.”

“That’s long,” Will said.

“Sometimes. And sometimes God works in the blink of an eye.”

“And most times he doesn’t work at all,” Emil said. “Sometimes God is so deaf, you’d know he wasn’t—”

Adeline shot him a sharp look and said, “That’s enough.”

“What? They might as well learn the truth young, Adella.”

“And what truth is that?” she said in a tone that warned him he was on thin ice.

Emil hesitated, said, “God is not going to be there for them at every turn.”

“Of course he is. If they ask him.”

“I’m just saying a man has got to look out for himself and what’s his, Adeline. If some invisible God has a hand, I’m all for it. But I’ve learned from experience not to expect it, and neither should you, and neither should the boys. And I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

The wind shifted now and blew a little harder, forced her to rewrap her scarf as she watched Emil at the reins. Is he still scarred by Dubossary?

Every time she’d brought the subject up after that morning he’d come home back in September 1941, he’d gotten angry and walked away, just like his mother had the night before.

He said he was held by the Nazis. What happened? Is there a part of him I don’t know? And never will?

Chapter Seven

Those questions did not leave Adeline’s mind until she forced herself to remember the laughter they’d just shared and their survival of both a tank battle and a bombardment. She was feeling grateful as they got farther from the border and the sun arced toward the western horizon. Every single tree or abandoned shack or rock wall or windmill that they encountered seemed to shine and catch her attention.

“What’s that, Mama?” Will asked, pointing straight ahead and down the road.

Adeline stood, shielded her eyes from the low-angled sun. Large, twisted, hulking things stuck up out of the ground in and to either side of the road. She could see men and animals moving about among them.

Closer, they became lorries and other vehicles, bent, torn, riddled with machine gun rounds. German soldiers whipped mules to drag debris off the road. They rode through the destruction caused by the Soviet fighter planes earlier in the day. Adeline was shocked, seeing maimed corpses frozen in the grotesque positions in which they had died. They’d gone by the third dead soldier before she realized her sons were seeing it. She looked back. Will and Walt were staring at the scene, wide-eyed and horrified.

“Sit back now and don’t look,” she said. “You don’t have to be seeing this at your age.”

“Leave them be, Adeline,” Emil said. “I want them to see this, understand what one man will do to another.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“So people getting killed in war is real to them. Not something you see from far away. It should be something burned in their minds young.”

Adeline stared at him, feeling irrationally angry. “I want to protect them from that, Emil.”

“You can’t.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes I love you more than anything on earth. And sometimes I don’t understand the half of you, Emil Martel.”

He nodded. “That sounds about right.”

Before darkness fell, they stopped and pitched camp near the road. Emil’s parents and sister rolled in beside them shortly afterward, followed by Lydia and Malia. They did not bother with a fire that second night. They ate dried meat and water and the last of the bread Malia had baked the night before they left on their journey.

Emil again worked salve into his horses’ wounds by lantern light, brushed them, and told them how much he appreciated their hard work.

As Adeline got her sons back under the blankets inside the wagon, she could hear him talking to the