The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  Emil glanced over his shoulder, hit the deep snow at the bottom of the hill, staggered, and sprawled forward on his face. The tank stopped, pivoted, roared down the hill toward them.

  Emil was already back up on his feet, swimming and throwing himself forward again and again, not seeing the tank stop on a terrace on the hillside a quarter of the way down. Another Soviet tank appeared, and a third. They clanked down to the first tank and stopped.

  Emil, meanwhile, had flailed free of the deep snow and charged the wagon like some crazed snow creature. He scrambled up onto the bench, grabbed the reins, and yelled, “Hold on!”

  Grabbing a buggy whip, something he almost never used, Emil lashed at the rumps of his horses while pulling the reins hard left. Oden and Thor coiled and drove forward, sending the wagon sideways before heading due south.

  “There are Panzers in front of us,” Adeline said, holding the side rail for dear life.

  “What?”

  “From the tree line, coming our way. They’re in a low spot now. Six of—”

  A punching roar cut her off, followed by two more in tight succession as the Soviet tanks opened fire. The horses screamed and bolted from the noise, galloping south even as the first Soviet rounds hit down range near that low spot, blast after blast after blast throwing ice and snow and fire that spiraled into the bitter air.

  “Turn back!” Adeline shouted. “We’ll be safer behind the Soviets.”

  “We’ll be dead behind the Soviets,” he shouted back, and whipped his horses again.

  The Panzer tanks ahead of them returned fire, three guns simultaneously followed by two and then one, all of them brilliant enough flashes at the muzzle that the horses began to slow, not knowing what to fear, until Emil lashed at them again.

  German shells erupted on the hillside behind them. Oden took charge then, broke back into a gallop, bringing the wagon sliding behind him until Thor found his stride and cadence. The wagon gathered speed. The wheels sliced and plowed through the snow.

  Another Red Army tank had reached the crown of the hill behind them and fired its cannon before the other three tanks followed suit. The Soviet rounds again hit shy of that low spot where the Panzers lay, spewing flame and rock, but causing no damage. Emil could see the Panzers moving now, churning up out of the low spot and through the smoke and the snow blackened from the blasts, turrets pivoting for drift, cannon barrels rising for windage.

  The German tanks began to fire on their own now, moving independently and evasively north across the snowy flat before pausing to send a round at the hillside, which was getting farther and farther behind the Martels. The Soviets opened fire again.

  Four hundred meters separated the young family from the closest two of the six Panzers, which had slowed to a stop as their cannon barrels adjusted. Emil never stopped whipping his horses toward the oncoming German tanks, even when the Russian rounds hit and exploded between them, hurling pillars of flame and charred debris and snow into the sky.

  Adeline and the boys were screaming behind him, but he couldn’t stop. The two closest Panzers were prowling again, coming toward them. The ground between Emil and the tanks narrowed. He reined his horses farther right, trying to get out of their way, and then lashed Oden and Thor as he never had, cruelly and with purpose, again and again, with every inch of his being.

  A Panzer to their right fired its cannon, causing the horses to veer left. Emil pulled them back right, only to have the nearest German tank fire over their heads from less than one hundred meters away. The roar was deafening. The energy of the muzzle blast battered horse and man alike. The horses lurched. Emil felt it like a heavy vibrating punch that had him loopy as he tried to keep whipping the horses.

  They shot through the gap between the two Panzers.

  They were well beyond them when the Soviets opened fire again. The German tank that had been closest to them was hit and blew up, throwing fire and black smoke above the stark white fields.

  A German army truck was suddenly right there four hundred meters in front of them, crossing left to right, heading to the southwest. The track. The road.

  Emil finally stopped whipping his horses. His ears were still ringing, and he felt dizzy when he turned his heaving, coughing horses into the ruts created by the passing truck. Only then did he glance over his shoulder at his wife and children lying amid the jumble of their once carefully packed wagon. They were all gaping at him, in shock at having just survived a battlefield, still cowering at every blast in the fight raging behind them. He smiled and nodded, then looked back to his horses, saw their rumps were bleeding from open lash wounds, and felt so bad, he choked back sobs.

  Chapter Four

  Every muscle in Adeline’s body trembled. Her ribs hurt. Her throat was sore from screaming. Her ears buzzed, and everything sounded hollow and far away.

  She could tell Will and Walt were just as stunned and overwhelmed by what they had endured, and her first instinct was to comfort them. But then she realized Emil was hunched over, shoulders shaking, and crying. She shook free of the daze, got up on all fours, crawled to him, and hugged him fiercely.

  “You saved us,” she said, barely able to hear her own words. “You saved us all.”

  Emil wiped at his eyes with his forearm, and then gestured at the blood trickling from their horses’ wounds before gazing at her in deep sorrow and regret.

  “I know how you love them,” Adeline shouted. “But they will heal, and we are alive because of what you and they had to do.”

  She did not know if he could hear what she was saying, but he seemed to feel it. Some of the tension drained out of him. Then he kissed her, got down, and gathered snow that he spread over the lash wounds. Each horse quivered violently at the sensation, blew repeatedly at the pain, and then gradually settled the more snow he caked on.

  Adeline’s hearing was starting to return when he climbed back onto the wagon. He lifted the reins gently and barely touched their tails to get them moving again. The cannon fire had stopped. It appeared that the Panzers had driven the Soviets back after leaving two of the four Red tanks burning hulks on the far hillside.

  She felt a tug on her sleeve. Will was up on his knees behind her.

  “Can you hear?” he asked.

  “Getting better.”

  “I hear,” Will said, smiled, shook his head like crazy, and waved his hands around his ears in a way that made her laugh.

  His smile in reaction to her laugh lit her up even more, made her grateful for every breath. They’d been through a blizzard. They’d been through the middle of a tank battle. And they’d survived! All four of them. Banged, bruised, but nothing major broken.

  Adeline wanted to laugh and sing and cry all at once. She didn’t know if she’d ever felt so . . . so alive! Walt got up beside his brother, looking confused as he pointed to his ears.

  “Make it stop, Mama,” he said, wringing his mittens together and barely holding back tears. “Will that happen every day, Mama?”

  She realized how upset her older boy was and shook her head while throwing open her arms to him. Walt hesitated and then went to her, and she held him tight. He’d seen so much in just the six hours since they’d left their home. It was a lot for a six-and-a-half-year-old boy, she thought, and held him closer. Then she felt Will hug her from behind, laying his cheek against the nape of her neck, and nothing else mattered.

  Adeline beamed through tears that she blinked back to see Emil gazing over at them all, as happy as she’d ever seen him. Is that what it takes to feel like this? To come so close to death, you want to burst for joy because you feel so glad to be alive?

  That joy did not leave her. Every single tree or abandoned shack or rock wall or windmill that they encountered sticking up out of the vast snow-coated landscape she admired in true wonder; they were all gifts that she would take with her and never forget.

  To Emil’s surprise, they caught up to the back of the trek within an hour. The SS had called a halt during the wor
st of the storm, and the caravan was now rolling along in fits and starts, with fewer starts than fits. Adding to the mess were German reinforcements and supply trucks traveling the same routes, but moving against the westward-bound trek, headed east toward the ever-shifting battlefront right behind them.

  “How far are we going today, Papa?” Walt asked.

  “We don’t get to say.”

  “Who does get to say?”

  “Our . . . escorts,” Emil said, unable to hide his distaste. “The Nazis. The SS. For some reason, they were assigned to protect us on the way west. They will tell us when to move and when to stay.”

  “Why can’t we move when we want?” Will asked.

  “Because we are refugees of war now, people who left their lands behind. We have nothing, so we get to say nothing.”

  Emil felt a helplessness he hadn’t felt in a long time. He had liked being fully in charge of his life in Friedenstal. He did not like being told what to do and never had, though he was not stupid or vocal about it in response.

  He knew he was at the mercy of the Nazi escorts, with zero say in the direction of his near future. But it was best for his family. Of that he had no doubt. If they’d stayed behind, waited for the Russians, his family would have been torn apart. He would have been sent east to the camps and Adeline with him, leaving the boys orphans of the state.

  Emil knew he had made the right move for their survival. But he still chafed at being at other men’s whims, especially when they were men he despised.

  For the next five kilometers, they lost altitude, and the snow dwindled. With darkness approaching and the temperature turning bitter, they caught up to and passed Lydia’s wagon, with the boys yelling about their adventure in the storm and outrunning the tank battle, which frightened their grandmother and astonished their aunt Malia.

  The trek slowed yet again. Word came from the SS that the Wehrmacht had halted all westward travel for the night so troop transports and lorries heading east could pass, bringing reinforcements and supplies to the front. Wagons began to pull off to camp.

  Emil saw a wagon with a distinctive bonnet ahead, by a line of trees off to the side of the route. “Look who’s camped ahead. We’ll sleep there.”

  He pulled their wagon in near a wagon with a cover cleverly woven of dried reeds.

  A stooped, shuffling man who looked years past his age appeared, bearing a hatchet and a bundle of firewood, oblivious that they were near him. He dropped the wood near a smoldering fire in a ring of rocks by his wagon and seemed lost. As Emil often did upon seeing his father, he felt a certain sadness; Johann Martel had suffered mightily under Stalin.

  “Opa!” the boys cried. “Grandfather!”

  Will and Walt clambered out of the wagon and ran over by Emil’s father and the fire to get warm and tell him about the tank battle and how the horses had saved them.

  Johann smiled at the boys, and with his thick hands patted their shoulders uncomfortably. Emil climbed down and started to see to his horses.

  “You and your mother will cook supper?” he said to Adeline.

  “And Malia,” Adeline said. “Should we build our own fire? Or ask to share?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  Emil tied Oden and Thor to a tree, then unbuckled them from their harnesses, gave them more oats, rubbed salve into their wounds, and apologized again for whipping them so. When he was done, he went toward the fire. Before he could get there, his mother, a hard, flinty woman in her sixties, appeared around the back of her wagon, as if she’d been hiding there, waiting for him.

  Karoline Martel gestured at her grandsons squatting over by the fire.

  “I expect you’ll be feeding them from your own stores, Emil.”

  “We will,” Emil said. “Though it hardly makes sense to start two fires.”

  His mother scowled slightly. “It can’t all be on your father.”

  “Agreed,” he said, then called to Walt and Will. “Boys! Go find all the dead branches you can before it gets too dark and drag them up here. I see some down there by the stream. Nothing wet, now.”

  His sons looked ruefully at the roaring fire but then got up, and, as boys are wont to do, made it a game. Even at four and a half, Will was the more competitive of the two.

  “I’ll find more than you, Walt!” he cried, and took off.

  “Who cares about finding more?” Walt called as he ran after his little brother. “You have to bring back the biggest one.”

  “And before dark,” their father yelled.

  They went off toward the stream, laughing and shrieking, the terror of the tank battle forgotten for the moment. Emil ignored his mother’s disapproval and watched them go, his heart warmed that his sons could find a way to play and laugh while trying to outrun a war.

  Johann coughed, then coughed deeper, rattling from his chest. He paused, but then was racked by a longer coughing fit that finally brought up mucus that he spat out on the ground. He took a step with a bewildered expression on his face.

  “You should sit now, Johann,” Karoline called over, looking concerned and then glaring at her son. “You see, getting the wood has already weakened him.”

  “It’s just a little cough, Karoline,” Johann said, but sat on a stump, his back to one wheel of his wagon. “I’ve been through worse.”

  “It’s a little cough that almost killed you in the mines,” his wife shot back.

  “A little cough set me free, didn’t it?”

  “And look at you,” she said, still bitter that he’d been taken from her by Stalinists in the middle of the night and sent to Siberia, just like Adeline’s father.

  Johann, a farmer, had been a man used to living outside, but they put him to work below ground. He spent nearly seven years in the mines, digging coal, before his cough began, and then spread to other prisoners. By his own account, Johann almost died twice while more men came down with the mysterious ailment. The Soviets in charge of the mine feared they’d lose their entire work base and decided that instead of treating or killing the sick men, they’d set them free, kick them out of the camps, tell them to go home.

  Sick, feverish, Emil’s father had boarded a freight train in the middle of summer and rode west for weeks in blistering heat before finding his way back to southern Russia. He was emaciated, racked by coughing, and filthy with grime when he knocked at Karoline’s door. She had not recognized her own husband.

  Neither had his son, who thought his father had aged forty years in the seven he’d been gone. And it wasn’t just the mysterious lung sickness. The years in the mines of Siberia had done something to Johann, broken him somehow, robbed him of his inner fire. In the years after his return, he’d often be found staring off into the middle distance, transported to some dark past he rarely spoke of. Emil’s mother said he would often awake screaming at night, feverish and drenched in sweat.

  “Where is Rese?” Emil said.

  “Your sister’s sleeping,” she said. “All the jolting in the wagon that last bit made her sick to her stomach.”

  “Emil?” Adeline called before Emil could reply. “Are we good for the fire?”

  Emil turned to see Adeline, Lydia, and Malia bringing pots and cooking supplies.

  “We’re good,” he called. “And the boys are bringing more wood.”

  Adeline nodded, but as she came closer, her attention left her husband and darted to her mother-in-law, focusing then on Karoline gazing at the fire. Try as she might, Adeline could not help thinking of a small bottle of cream and feeling a familiar bitterness spoil her stomach. She mentally put her armor on, went to the fire, crouched, and with a stick began drawing glowing coals off to the side.

  From childhood, Adeline had been by nature a warm, giving person, with hardly ever a cross word to say about anyone. But her mother-in-law was not anyone. Karoline was a cold, heartless being. Adeline could not stand being around her and avoided the woman as often as possible.

  “No hellos?” Karoline said out of the corner
of her mouth.

  Adeline looked up, forced a smile. “Oh, hello, Karoline. I’m sorry. Mind’s on supper. Thank you for letting us use your fire. It’s very nice of you.”

  Karoline studied her a moment, and then moved her focus to Adeline’s mother. Lydia greeted Emil’s mother, and thanked her for the fire as well, knowing that acting subordinate tended to make Karoline less testy. Adeline put the pot on the coals and heated a stew they’d made from potatoes, onions, and salt pork.

  “Put these in, too!” Malia cried, rushing over with a bunch of baby wild asparagus. “I found them near our wagon! Like someone planted them just for us!”

  Adeline’s older sister seemed so delighted, not even Karoline’s presence could stop Adeline from smiling and taking the asparagus from her. It had been twenty years since Malia had gone to feed the family mules and been kicked, two decades since she’d lain in a coma when no one thought she had a chance of living. But Malia had spirit and woke up, certainly changed in many ways, but also the same as she’d ever been: sincere, kind, loving, and oddly funny. Adeline had adored her as a child and adored her still.

  The boys returned, pushing their little wagon, now filled with two big broken branches, up the hill from the creek bottom.

  Emil walked over, and in the glow of the fire, walked around the two branches, studying them. “Well,” he said at last, “I think Walt’s branch is bigger.”

  “What?” Will said.

  “I told you!” Walt crowed.

  “But,” their father said, “given the fact, Walt, that you have two years on Will, and eight kilos, I declare it a tie.”

  “What?” Walt said.

  “A tie!” Will said, dancing around.

  Walt looked dejected until Emil reminded him that firewood would be needed every night until their journey was over, and Adeline went over to give him and his brother a hug.

  “Why’d you hug us, Mama?” Will asked.

  “For getting the firewood.”

  “Should we hug you for making dinner?”

  “Yes, please,” she said, teasing him. “And for everything else I do for you.”