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

. . . well . . . free in a way that Adeline had never known before. Like Emil said, you know freedom when you see it.

Emil’s mother’s head was sticking out the side of the boxcar, looking at her daughter as Rese reached the bottom of the ladder by the forward left corner of the boxcar.

“What were you thinking?” Karoline yelled at her.

“I wasn’t thinking, Mama,” Rese said as she grabbed the rails of the ladder and stepped onto the first rung with her right foot. “I was swimming, and it felt great!”

She lifted her left foot to make the second rung when the train suddenly jerked and shuddered and jerked again with enough violence to fling Rese sideways and forward off the ladder in a spiraling fall that caused her to crash face-first in the grass and gravel, her chest and belly below the railroad tie and her shins across the rail. The coupler that held the coal car to their car was right behind and above her.

It all happened so fast, Adeline had barely cried out in response to Rese’s fall before the locomotive sighed and the train lurched forward again. The wheels of the boxcar rolled slowly over Rese’s legs, severing both of them at midcalf.

Chapter Fifteen

Emil erupted from his position on the roof of the boxcar, bellowing at the engineers in the locomotive to stop the train. Evidently, Major Haussmann, who was riding in the locomotive, saw the accident and shouted the same thing before the brakes hit, sending shrieks from the wheels and rails that were not loud enough to mask the trumpets of horror blaring from the crowded boxcars as Rese convulsed, squirmed, and rolled down the embankment into weeds at the edge of the clearing.

Scrambling to the ladder, Emil could see blood spurt and mist, spurt and mist from the stumps of what had been her legs. Stop the bleeding, he chanted to himself as he all but slid down the ladder. Stop the bleeding or Rese dies.

He landed hard and spun around to find the SS major almost to his sister. Emil ran to them, stripping his belt as he did.

Haussmann had already removed his own belt and was trying to get into a position to help without being sprayed with blood. Emil did not care; he went straight into the blood and to his knees beside his sister, seeing she was unconscious as he got the belt around her lower left leg, above the stump, and cinched it tight enough to staunch the spurting and the misting. Across from him, the SS major had done the same to her right leg and was now shouting for a medic.

Emil was aware of other people yelling now as he tried to comfort his sister, who was shivering as if it were well below zero while he felt as if he were burning in a hot haze of light.

“Save her!” his mother sobbed. He looked up to see Karoline standing there, her face bleeding from the fall she’d taken from the boxcar after seeing her daughter’s legs severed, and his father behind his mother, struggling to keep her on her feet as she keened, one bony hand covering her mouth and the other outstretched in misery.

“Save her,” Karoline sobbed again, and then looked up at the blistering sky. “Take me, but save her, God. She’s all we have left.”

Adeline came down beside Emil. “What can I do?”

“We’ve stopped the bleeding,” Major Haussmann said, putting his bloody fingers on Rese’s neck. “But she needs morphine, blood, and a surgeon.”

Ernst Decker, a medic and SS sergeant in his late twenties, raced from the rear of the train, carrying a pack while two soldiers followed with a stretcher. Sergeant Decker did not blanch at seeing the state of Rese’s legs, but instead calmly asked Emil to move aside, and took her vitals, saying, “How long have the tourniquets been in place?”

“A minute,” Haussmann said. “No more.”

“I need her in a more stable place,” he said. “Not out in the sun like this.”

“We’ll put more people on top and make room for her in the car,” Emil said, and glanced warily at Haussmann who’d gone stony. “I am sorry, Major. She’s my sister.”

Haussmann seemed to be studying him again. Had he recognized Emil just then? Emil didn’t care at that point and returned the stare until the major nodded.

“Do it. Get your sister inside by the door where there is air.”

Sergeant Decker got out a glass-and-steel syringe and gave Rese a small shot of morphine, enough to keep her sedated during the transfer. In moments it was done: she was on the stretcher, and hands in the boxcar were lifting her inside and placing her litter across the Martels’ wagons where Decker went to work.

Emil was going to climb into the boxcar to help the medic, when he saw Walt standing forward of the coupling and looking down between it and the coal car. He walked to his older son, who peered up at his father in bewilderment.

“They don’t look much different except right at the top where the wheels crushed them. Below that, they’re the same as they were when Aunt Rese still had them.”

Emil looked and saw it was true. The wheels, the weight of the coal, and the rail beneath had all served to cut the legs relatively cleanly.

“What do we do with them, Papa?” Walt said. “Do we just leave them there?”

Emil hated to do it but nodded. “In this heat, they are already gathering disease. They’ll be gone in hours once we’re gone, probably to buzzards and crows.”

He could see his older son was upset by that idea, but Walt finally nodded, walked around Emil, and started up the ladder. Adeline appeared in the open door to the boxcar, saying, “Emil, the medic needs you, and your mother’s having a fit.”

“Go up on top with Walt,” he said as he climbed in. “I’m predicting a meltdown up there pretty soon. He saw