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

“Four big pieces, please. Oh, you’re so kind.”

He untied his bundle, got four stout pieces for her.

“You’ve rescued me,” she said, handing him the money. “Thank you forever!”

He took it and said, “If I knew firewood would make a beautiful young lady like you this happy, I would have bought an ax a long time ago.”

He was grimy from work and stank of it, too, but she liked the way he smiled and the way he looked at her, as if he really saw her. She realized she liked his smile and eyes so much, it embarrassed her, made her blush, and she looked down.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No,” she said, still looking down, but smiling. “It was nice and funny. Thank you, but I have to boil the chicken and start the egg noodles.”

“What’s your name?”

She hesitated. “Adeline. Adeline Losing.”

He smiled again. “That’s a pretty name. I’m Emil Martel.”

PART TWO:

THE PURE BLOODS

Chapter Eight

When Emil awoke in the dark on the third full day of their exodus, a thick warm fog had rolled in, blanketing the land. He fed and cared for his horses by lantern light, rubbing more salve into their lash wounds. Though he could not see thirty meters in any direction or hear anything like a big engine, he felt anxious, like tanks or planes with machine guns could burst out of the fog at any moment.

His instincts proved correct. He’d no sooner gotten Oden and Thor back in their traces than whistles began to blow in the fog. That German voice came over a bullhorn, warning that Soviet forces were close and moving their way. The caravan would roll in fifteen minutes.

“The boys haven’t eaten,” Adeline called from beneath the bonnet.

“They’ll eat as we ride. We all will.”

She nodded. “I’ll get everything tied down except for dry food and water.”

As Adeline turned away, Emil smiled at her the way he’d smiled the first time he met her, out in the alley behind Mrs. Kantor’s house, desperate for firewood for her chicken soup. From the very beginning, she’d made him feel needed in almost every way.

Maybe that’s all I really need in life, he thought. Adeline’s love. My boys’ love.

When the wagons began to move in the warm fog, there was the predictable chaos made worse by the mud that soon caked the horses’ underbellies and flanks and spotted the lash wounds on their haunches. It coated the spokes, wheel rims, and axles as well.

For the next few hours, it seemed as if the trek were a ghostly, segmented, snakelike creature, appearing and disappearing in the fog, sliding and twisting in the muck. In the slick, near-blind conditions, wagons began to drift, crash, and overturn. It took all of Emil’s skills to keep their wagon and horses moving forward.

Twice that morning they encountered wagons buried up to their axles in the mud.

One of them was Emil’s parents’ wagon, so he’d pulled over and helped get them unstuck and rolling again. His mother, Karoline, was more civil than usual. His father, Johann, seemed unbothered by the foul conditions. Rese had been unable to leave her bed since Dubossary.

“She sleeps and can’t keep anything down for long,” Karoline said.

“I’ll make something for her stomach when we stop tonight,” Adeline said.

Emil’s mother wouldn’t look at her but nodded.

They rode hard and long that day, through the city of Chisinau, Moldova—where slave laborers, men taken by Hitler from every country he conquered, were building fortifications for the Wehrmacht—and out the other side, hearing stories of other battles brewing to the southeast. The fog burned off before noon, revealing land that had been occupied, conquered, and reconquered over the past few decades. Romania held dubious title to the land at the moment, a payment Hitler made to the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu for allowing German troops to travel east to conquer Stalin in the summer of 1941.

Emil did not care about politics or who controlled the land he and his family crossed that day. All he wanted was to be so far west, he’d never meet another Communist as long as he lived. He could tolerate traveling under Nazi protection for the time being, but when he saw a chance to get west of the murdering, inhuman bastards, he planned on doing just that. In the meantime, he kept a constant eye out for Major Haussmann.

Was it Haussmann back there? Was I imagining him? No. It was him. But why would he have been outside Dubossary? Of all the SS men in Ukraine, why was he the one directing traffic there? Why was he the one to point us into the town?

Those questions threatened Emil’s sanity at some level, so he flung them aside unanswered, told himself it was just one of those cruel coincidences in a lifetime. After Haussmann had done his dirty work in the early days of the German occupation, he’d been assigned in some capacity to protect the ethnic Germans fleeing west. End of story. Emil might never see the man again, and if he did, he’d make sure he, Adeline, and the boys were heading in the opposite direction.

That third evening of their journey, the caravan finally ground to a halt and camped in the countryside twelve kilometers southwest of Chisinau. Cannon fire rumbled throughout the night, close enough to wake Emil and Adeline again and again.

The fourth day of the trek, it rained early, which churned up more mud. They barely made fifteen kilometers’ progress. The fifth night, bombs fell so close, the Martel clan abandoned its wagons and took refuge in a large road culvert.

The culvert trembled with each explosion. They could hear the shrieking of horses and the cries of those without shelter. But they remained safe. From that point forward, Emil looked for a culvert or some reinforced concrete work like a bridge abutment to camp near or under.

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