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

“You don’t have to tell me what you went through that night,” she said. “Just tell me if Haussmann and that other man are a danger to our boys. To us.”

After several moments, Emil said, “They’re a danger to everyone on the face of the earth. They kill innocent people and steal good men’s souls. And please, Adeline, let’s leave it at that. I’ve been through enough just having to see Haussmann again.”

Adeline did not want to leave it at that, but she could see how upset Emil was.

“Okay,” she said finally. “And thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and started toward the horses.

“I love you, Emil Martel,” she called after him.

He looked back at her and smiled a little bittersweetly, she thought, before he said, “I love you, too, Adeline Losing.”

Artillery roared to the east, closer than before, so close, she heard the hard edges of the blasts, which turned everyone camped around them frantic to leave.

“In you go,” she said, scooping up Will and helping him into the rear of the wagon. “Crawl up there with Walt.”

She got up on the bench, took the reins, and watched Emil untie the horses from the tree.

“Release the lever,” he said.

Adeline eased off the brake, felt the horses and the wagon retreat enough that they could clear the tree. Emil got up beside her, took the reins, and clucked up the horses even as a new salvo of cannon fire sounded to the west.

“They’re getting close again,” she said as they started to roll.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Nothing is going to stop us from going west from now on. We’ll go day and night if we have to.”

An hour later, they rolled across the border into Romania on the road to the small city of Barlad. The crossing was heavily fortified and defended by more than two hundred Romanian soldiers, all of them looking anxiously east past the caravan, toward oncoming combat. To get her mind off the morning and the threat of Major Haussmann, Adeline scanned the Romanian soldiers, some of them so very young, but did not recognize any as Corporal Gheorghe from two nights before.

“Didn’t Corporal Gheorghe say he was from this town?” she said once they’d passed completely through the checkpoint.

Emil shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“He was strange and interesting to listen to, wasn’t he?”

Emil’s brows knitted. “You haven’t given up on him yet? The man’s head was hit with a bomb, Adella.”

“And Malia was kicked in the head, and even though it’s made her special and interesting in her own way, Corporal Gheorghe, well, he was very different. He was . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know the right word. Touched? In a good way?”

“Touched?”

“I said, I didn’t know the exact word, but I just can’t get his story off my mind, how after the bomb hit his head, he walked for days through the battle unharmed, as if an angel or a spirit were right there with him, clearing the way, protecting him.”

“Protecting him so he could become a beekeeper?”

“Maybe. And why not? It’s his dream, isn’t it?”

Emil’s face tightened. “Who knows if any of that’s even true? He could have been making it all up. Or because he got hit in the head, that’s just the way he thinks. Who knows? He was crazy, and that’s it.”

Adeline studied her husband without judgment, then looked away from him when the wagon bounced through a rut in the road. She gazed out over the plateau they crossed, seeing Corporal Gheorghe in her mind.

“I think it was true,” she said at last. “When he talked about waking up in the ditch, covered in snow, then walking through the bullets, I don’t know, didn’t he seem to kind of glow, Emil? Didn’t he seem happy? Like really happy?”

Emil turned, exasperated, and said, “If I’d had as much honey wine as he did, I’d have been glowing, too. And I don’t want to talk about him anymore. Corporal Gheorghe is behind us, Adeline. For good.”

She wondered why Emil had reacted so negatively to the beekeeper and his story. But then she set that aside, remembering how the corporal had been flirting with Malia. He was, wasn’t he?

Adeline had not had the chance to talk to her older sister more about Corporal Gheorghe, what with the disturbing visit from Haussmann, but she smiled when she recalled how Malia herself had glowed in the beekeeper’s presence, as if they were connected somehow. Wasn’t that interesting? Wasn’t that . . . well, miraculous? She decided that if what she’d seen was the spark and first flame of love, then she had indeed seen a small wonder with her own two eyes.

Adeline bowed her head and gave thanks. Although the Lutheran religion and all other religions were banned and the churches shuttered or converted under Stalin, her parents had imbued her at a young age with a strong Christian faith that she’d relied on repeatedly in her life. Her faith had certainly wavered at times but never once left her. She had never stopped believing that God had a greater plan for her and for her family.

She looked over at her husband, rock-steady, strong-as-an-ox Emil, and remembered how he’d trembled in her arms after Haussmann left their campground. She closed her eyes and prayed that her husband still had his faith.

We can’t do this alone, she thought. There’s no way to do this without help.

For hours on end, like an inchworm crossing a twig, the caravan stretched out and then squeezed to a stop, stretched, and squeezed through Barlad and into rolling grasslands that reminded Adeline of the country around Friedenstal. Even though there had been no weather to speak of in several days, the creek bottoms remained boggy. Wagons were getting stuck or sliding off the wood planking the SS put down across the worst of the muck.

Whenever the caravan halted, Adeline could still hear the distant rumor of war behind them. And every now