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

get their bedding from the wagons below. Emil carried it all to the roof of the boxcar where they found the boys curled up together sleeping, their safety ropes still tied around their waists.

He helped Adeline to get the blankets over and around their sons before doing the same for her. “Don’t untie the rope unless the train is stopped,” he whispered. “I’ll wake you up when it’s your time to watch over her.”

He moved toward the ladder with the lantern.

“Emil,” she whispered sharp enough to turn him. “I love you. And thank you.”

Her husband looked at her as if she were speaking another language, but then nodded. “I love you, too. And you are welcome. I guess.”

Emil started down the ladder before she could reply. Eyes closed, she lay there, thinking about him before images and sounds of Rese began to appear in her mind: Rese vomiting on the way to the train station; Rese coming up out of the lake water, screaming with delight, so wild and free; Rese falling onto the tracks; Rese screaming when Decker cauterized her stumps.

More and faster images flashed as she fought for sleep: Marie delivering Rese’s stillborn son and Adeline holding him, a miracle ended, so tiny and so sad and precious; she wanted to cry at how dizzy and beaten down she felt now atop the train, displaced, a refugee of war with no place to call home other than the one she’d conjured from a painting in a book.

Was it only this morning we left Budapest? Adeline thought as she drifted to sleep. How can so much hope and tragedy be packed into one day?

Emil woke her in the darkness before dawn as they passed through the Czech town of Puchov. The boys still slept. The train rolled at a walking pace.

“How is she?” Adeline whispered as she got out from under her blankets.

“A few nightmares, but she slept through it,” he said.

“Your mother?”

“You mean the Sphinx?”

Even though she’d only just awoken, Adeline couldn’t help but laugh again at the idea of Karoline still not talking. She kissed his cheek after he got beneath the blankets and then climbed down the ladder. Johann was waiting to help her over to the open door of the boxcar.

She thanked him and scooted by Marie and her twins sleeping on the floor and went to Rese’s side. Putting her hand on her sister-in-law’s head, she found it warm but not feverish. She used the lantern to inspect the bandages, which were just soaking through. In the first good light, she’d help her cousin change them.

As Adeline hung the lantern back on its hook, she noticed Rese move, not with a jerk of pain, but a stirring, her shoulders shifting, her jaw going slack and then swallowing before her eyelids fluttered open. Rese’s eyes rolled as if she could not focus them. She swallowed, closed her eyes, and then opened them again, wobbling before they settled shakily on Adeline.

“Where am I?” she rasped.

Adeline took her young sister-in-law’s hand in her own and murmured, “You’re alive, Rese. You had a bad accident, but you’re alive.”

She grimaced and said, “It hurts. Everywhere.”

“Yes, there will be a man here to help with that soon.”

Johann came behind Adeline, put his massive hand on his daughter’s shoulder with tears in his eyes. “Rese.”

“Papa,” she said, and smiled as her eyes shut and her head lolled a bit.

Rese took two big deep breaths before she suddenly stiffened and clenched Adeline’s hands. Her cheeks drew back, her lips thinned, and her eyes stretched wide.

“I fell,” she said.

“Yes,” Adeline said.

“I landed by the tracks.”

“On the tracks,” her father said.

Rese seemed confused before looking toward the ceiling with an expression that fluttered between disbelief and total dread.

“No,” she said at last. “Tell me it didn’t . . .” Then she smiled crazily at them. “No, I feel . . . feel them! You see?”

With that, Rese struggled upright and looked down her skirt, seeing the bloody, round bandages about the stumps where her feet, ankles, and lower calves used to be. She gaped at them, wrenched her hand from Adeline’s, and reached for them.

“They’re there! I feel them! They’re under the bandages! I feel them!”

Karoline appeared at the foot of the stretcher, facing the doorway, unable to look at her daughter directly.

“Mama?” Rese said. “I feel them.”

Adeline feared her mother-in-law was going to launch into her damnation sermon from the night before. But instead, Karoline said coldly, “You’re feeling the ghosts of them, Rese,” she said. “My mother knew soldiers who lost their legs in the Great War, and they swore they could feel them years later.”

Much went out of Rese, then. She blinked at her mother blankly and then at her bandaged stumps. She lifted the left leg, pain rippling through her, and then bent it at the knee. After doing the same with the right, she burst into tears.

“Now Stephan will never come find me to marry me!” she sobbed, and threw herself backward on the stretcher. “Oh God, he’ll leave me with the baby! We will be left to beg in the streets of Germany, the freak girl from Russia with no feet and a child!”

Rese went hysterical, inconsolable, tortured and racked with agonies Adeline could not begin to fathom until Marie appeared at her side. The sun had risen. The train was slowing.

Marie took Rese’s hand. When Rese tried to pull it back, Marie held her firmly by the wrist and stroked her forearm, saying, “I have delivered many children, Rese, and have two of my own. See them there in the basket?”

Rese’s tears slowed, and she opened her eyes to blearily look at the basket Adeline held tilted toward her so she could see the infants in the increasing light.

“My sons are both my greatest blessing and my greatest curse,” Marie said. “God gives you children only when he thinks you are ready for the experience of holding your greatest blessing and your greatest curse in your arms