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

pain she’d never known, worse than giving birth to him, more primal, the agony of her heart cracking.

Emil stayed strong for her, held her through the worst of it. He sat by her for more than an hour, and never broke, never even uttered a word until she said, “We have to bury him. We need a little coffin.”

He hesitated, and then said, “I haven’t been paid yet this month. We don’t have the money to buy the lumber.”

Adeline gazed dully at him. “What?”

“We don’t.”

“Then?”

“I don’t know,” he said in total defeat. “I don’t.”

“We can’t just bury our baby in the dirt!”

“I know, but I—”

Adeline pushed her swaddled dead child into her husband’s arms. “Hold him. I . . . I can’t be in here right now. I just can’t.”

She got up on wobbly legs, took her coat and hat, and went out into the predawn. It was mid-January in north-central Ukraine. It should have been bitter and snow-clad. But the cold and the storms had not yet come. Everything around her was bleak and shadowed in brown and gray as she sat on the front steps of the building, looking southeast, trying to spot the first hint of light on the horizon.

But Adeline saw only darkness there, and her grief fought against her numbness.

She bowed her head and prayed.

“You must have taken him from me for a reason,” she said, trying not to blubber, but not succeeding. “I don’t know why . . . I don’t know why you let me get sick, why he had to die. But please don’t make me put my baby in the cold dirt like something you throw away. Please don’t make me do that to my blessed little boy.”

Unable to go on, Adeline sat there in the dark, tears streaming down her face, arms wrapped around her knees until she saw a rose-hued glow appear low in the sky to the east. Then she heard through an open window above her the tortured sound of her proud, stoic husband crying for the first time in their marriage.

That cored her out, put her in an otherworldly daze in which she faced the sky where fingers of that glowing rose color were growing, extending. Adeline was so battered by that point, she barely noticed the coming dawn as she questioned how much pain a woman could go through before her mind broke as badly as her heart.

From above her, she heard Emil hit something in their apartment and then curse God. Adeline put her face in her hands. She had heard what happens to couples when a child dies like this. She wondered if her marriage was over and felt worse than abandoned. She felt tossed aside, trash, nothing in the eyes of heaven.

A breeze began to blow. Chilled, Adeline lifted her head, wanting to pull her coat collar tighter around her neck. Though she remained in dark shadow, the rose fingers of dawn had become long and beautiful now, the tips almost over her head as the sun finally began to rise, throwing a weak crown of golden rays on the horizon.

She watched it grow stronger, thinking, How can something as beautiful as this happen on a morning as vicious as this?

The breeze gusted. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught something move on the stiffened wind, tumbling, twirling, and dancing in an odd stutter. It fluttered and lifted and then fell as the gust sighed, spiraling to a stop about a meter in front of her.

Adeline gaped in disbelief at the yellow-and-white twenty-ruble note, more than enough money for Emil to build Waldemar a coffin.

She started to sob all over again.

“Adella,” Emil said, shaking her shoulder softly. “Easy now.”

Adeline startled awake, looked around for a moment in total confusion before settling on Oden and Thor pulling the wagon and then back to Emil. “I was having a bad dream.”

“A nightmare,” he said. “You were all shook up.”

“You slept longer than I did, Mama,” Will said behind her.

“And me,” said the second Waldemar, born in October 1937, twenty-one months after the first child died.

She twisted around on the bench and found her boys lying on the folded blankets, elbows up, chins in their palms. She smiled, leaned over, and kissed them both on the foreheads.

“Why did you do that?” Walt asked.

“Because you and your brother are the miracles your father and I and God made,” she said. “And because I la-la-la love you.”

Will laughed, and so did Walt before he looked past her, and his face fell. “There are six tanks up on that hill in front of us, Mama,” he said.

Adeline turned, put her hand to her brow, and made out the German Panzers sitting atop the rise, three on each side of the convoy. Their cannon barrels were all pointed up at an angle and aimed out over the caravan.

Will said, “I’m keeping my fingers in my ears until we get past them.”

Walt frowned and then put his fingers in his ears, too.

Adeline said, “Putting our fingers in our ears is probably not a bad idea.”

Her husband did not reply. Emil was now fixed on something closer than the tanks, ahead and to the right of the convoy. She could see a wagon pulled over off the track and a Wehrmacht vehicle parked beside it. Several men milled about outside.

She glanced at Emil, who’d turned his attention to the other side of the route. But when they got closer, he was watching them again, intently now.

Up the slope, the Panzers’ engines roared. The tanks began to roll, spread out in two rows, their tracks digging up mud and hurling it into the air behind them. Adeline stuck her fingers in her ears, her attention on the Panzers, which picked up speed, coming toward them.

Oden and Thor began to shiver, tremble, and snort. They remembered.

“You’re okay, boys,” Emil called in a soothing tone. “They’re just bigger horses.”

Adeline had forgotten the wagon and the Wehrmacht vehicle until they were almost to