The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  The only thing missing for Adeline was her mother and sister, with whom she kept up a correspondence made intermittent and difficult by the closing of the Iron Curtain. Everything they wrote was being read. Lydia was sickly, and Malia’s life was consumed caring for her.

  They had no word from Emil’s parents or his sister, none since Adeline had watched them leave for the train back to Friedenstal. He began to think of Karoline and Johann the way he’d come to think of his older brother, Reinhold: spirits lost to him in the wind.

  But by Christmas 1953, the house was done, and they were celebrating the fact that it would soon be paid for. There was also a 1947 Chevy sedan in the driveway. Emil’s bosses marveled at the sheer effort the man put out day after day in bitter temperatures, often gloveless as he mixed cement or helped frame up a new wall.

  Adeline continued to clean at the motel and to work her wonders in the kitchen. She also became an active member of the local Lutheran church. Bill enjoyed working with his father more than he did attending school, but Walter blossomed in the classroom.

  Indeed, in the spring of 1956, a little more than four years after he arrived in America with only a smattering of English, Walter was named the valedictorian at Baker High School two months before graduation. During those years of studying and watching his father work construction, he had grown interested in architecture. Walter applied to two schools and was accepted to both.

  After their escape from Soviet control, the Martels had vowed never to live apart. Around Easter that spring, Emil, Adeline, and Walter boarded a train bound for the University of Chicago. They wanted to see if they thought they could live in the Windy City while Walter studied at one of the greatest architectural schools in the world. But after less than a day and a half on Chicago’s South Side, they all felt claustrophobic and voted unanimously to leave on the very next train headed back to Montana.

  About a month later, in mid-May, Emil and Adeline were driving west to Bozeman, a place they’d never been, to try to find a house there to live in. Walter would be attending the School of Architecture at Montana State University, and they wanted to keep the family together. They’d left Walter and Bill in Baker the day before because the boys had final exams and work they could not miss.

  They battled typical spring weather in Montana the entire drive: rain, then sleet, then intense periods of wet snowflakes that plastered the windshield and forced them to slow because cars were sliding off the road.

  “Do you remember all the wagons we had to pull out of the mud on the Long Trek?” Emil asked. “When we were fleeing the bear and running with the wolves?”

  Adeline smiled. “If I close my eyes, I can remember it all. The mud. The cold. The bombs. The tanks. The good and the bad.”

  “Luckily, there are much better things to think about in America.”

  “Thank the good Lord for that.”

  Near Big Timber, the weather began to show signs of breaking, with thinner clouds racing across the sky like moody red fingers. Adeline found them hypnotic. As they approached Livingston, she began to drowse and then dozed off.

  Maybe it was those clouds in the sky; maybe it was Emil’s talk of the Long Trek, but Adeline dreamed vividly of that day they left Friedenstal with her mother and sister in the wagon behind them and years of uncertainty and suffering before them. Will was curled up in her lap, and she was feeling every bump in the road through the wagon’s flat wooden seat, when Walt asked, “Where are we going, Mama?”

  A horn blared loud enough to jolt Adeline wide-awake.

  A big truck honked its horn a second time and swerved around them in driving sleet and rain on a steep and winding road that was barely visible through the windshield.

  “Emil?”

  “I’m okay.”

  A sudden flash of lightning revealed they were in a densely wooded mountain pass. The flash was followed almost immediately by a thunderous explosion as loud as the tank cannons they had dodged outrunning Stalin’s armies. The blast shook the car.

  “Maybe we should get off the road!” Adeline yelled.

  “I can’t!” Emil said. “There are cars behind me and there’s nowhere to get off!”

  The rain stopped slashing the car for a moment, and she could see a pale cliff jutting out of the forest high above them and looking for all the world like the silhouette of a frog. Two turns past the frog rock, the road flattened, and the rain began to pour again.

  “Bozeman two miles,” Adeline said, reading the sign.

  “There’s an exit ahead,” Emil said before sheets of rain came and the wipers failed.

  He rolled down the window and stuck out his head, squinting into the rain as he braked and took the exit, which put them on a gravel road that turned left beneath the highway. He pulled over under the bridge, started fiddling with the wipers, and got them working again.

  Back in the car, Emil drove forward to a T in the road, intending to make a U-turn. He saw a signpost with the names of ranches and arrows pointing in either direction. The bottom sign pointed right and read “Montana State Ag Fields.”

  “There,” Emil said. “Looks like we can drive right to the school from here.”

  Another rain squall swept over them as they drove down a long gravel road that broke away at right angles but kept trending west. At one point, they could see the highway to their right before they dropped into a ravine. The road got bumpy on the way down and looked almost washed out on the way up the other side.

  “Maybe we should turn around,” Adeline said.

  “The sign says it’s right in front of us,” Emil insisted, and floored the accelerator.

  They shot up the other side, fishtailing in mud and bouncing through potholes and puddles that spattered the windshield brown and killed the wipers again. The rain was still coming when they reached the top, and Adeline could see through the muddy windows that they were on a plateau of sorts with a ranch yard on their left and a barbed-wire fence across the road just beyond with a sign that read “Dead End.”

  Emil said nothing, just started to jam the transmission into reverse, when Adeline threw out her hand and said, “Wait!”

  She was staring through the cleaner parts of the windshield at beams of sunlight shining through breaks in the storm beyond the plateau. Feeling compelled and trembling head to toe, Adeline opened the car door, climbed out, and looked west, gasping at the breathtaking valley that unfolded before and around her in a hundred shades of green.

  Several of those pillarlike sunbeams shone down on farm fields already emerald with the shoots of spring wheat. Other beams illuminated the twisting, lime-colored lines of leafing cottonwoods and quaking aspens along creeks that braided across the valley floor toward the cow town of Bozeman and a river called the Gallatin she could see sparkling in the distance.

  Emil’s door opened behind her, but she did not look back at him. She was too enthralled by the clouds lifting with every second, revealing the six mighty mountain ranges that surround the Gallatin Valley, their foothills emerald and sea green with new grass and blooming wildflowers rising to jade-and-olive pine and spruce forests that climbed the rugged flanks toward impossible crags freshly blanketed in snow and piercing the bluest sky she’d ever seen.

  Emil came up beside Adeline as overwhelming love and joy burst from her heart and tears began to stream down her cheeks.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered, feeling humbled and awestruck. “Like God painted it for me, Emil. So much more than I ever could have imagined.”

  “Look behind us.”

  She turned to look back across rolling, grassy hills, toward the mountain pass they’d come through. The storm was in full retreat now, with lingering broken clouds and scattered showers that caught the noonday sun and threw a massive arching rainbow across the east end of the valley that was quickly joined by a second rainbow at a different angle, and then a third. From beginnings miles apart, their multicolored arches seemed to erupt out of the verdant hills, to soar,
collide, and shimmer red, blue, purple, and gold with sheer, stunning intensity.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that in my entire life,” Emil said as he put his arm around Adeline’s shoulder.

  She put her arms around his waist and laid her head on his chest, watching the rainbows pulse and radiate for almost a minute before they faded to pale, colored glimmers and then to cherished memories.

  “We are never leaving here, Emil,” Adeline vowed, looking west again at the last green valley of their long and improbable journey.

  “Not until the day we die,” Emil said, and held her tight.

  Chapter Forty-One

  But for occasional short trips and after returning to Baker to pack their things and sell their home, Emil and Adeline Martel never did leave Southwest Montana’s Gallatin Valley. And from that point forward, after all the hardships and tragedies they’d endured, nearly everything the Martels touched seemed to turn to gold.

  Before Walter and Bill started school in the fall, Emil had bought a lot in Bozeman and started building a new home within walking distance of the university.

  After he finished with his house, he recognized an opportunity when three small lots went up for sale near the Dutch Reform church on the less-tony north side of town. Reasoning that the aging Dutch farmers who lived west of Bozeman might like a small home to retire to near their place of worship, Emil took a risk, bought all three lots, and started building the first house with Bill helping after school.

  They were putting up roof trusses when a Dutch farmer came along and asked if the house was for sale. Emil said it was. The farmer asked the price, didn’t flinch at it, and handed Emil a twenty-dollar bill to hold the house until his wife could see it. The next day, the farmer and his wife returned, asked several questions, and went to the bank for a check for the full price.

  Emil Martel & Son Construction was born and capitalized in one day.

  When he wasn’t working on the houses his father was building, Bill, at sixteen, tried to get a job building the field house at Montana State University. When the contractors turned him down, he walked away, vowing to build projects bigger than any of them could imagine.

  The following year, Bill quit before graduating high school, went to work full-time for his father, married his teenage sweetheart, Lynell Lewis, and never looked back. The Martels were soon so busy and so successful, Adeline and Emil were able to sponsor her brother, Wilhelm, to come to the United States after finding his name on a Red Cross list of refugees. But she could not convince Malia to come, even after Lydia died in 1964.

  Walter finished college, married Deeann Kessler, and worked for several years as an architect in Billings until Emil and Bill asked him to join their expanding company in 1967. Martel Construction grew at an even faster pace until near disaster struck.

  Driving home after a late night putting together construction bids, Walter was T-boned by a drunk driver running a stop sign. He had to be cut out of the car and lay in a coma for two days with a head injury. It would be a year before he could work full-time again.

  In February 1971, Emil was stunned to learn that his older brother, Reinhold, who’d been conscripted into the German army and vanished during the war, was alive and free after spending twenty-six years in a gulag in Siberia, cutting timber for lumber. Emil and Adeline immediately bought airline tickets and flew back to Germany as US citizens. They visited Reinhold, now sixty-five, in West Germany where he had been reunited with his family, who had also managed to end up on the right side of the border.

  Seven years later, Emil and Adeline returned to West Germany because Reinhold had tracked down Rese and gotten her a three-month travel visa. They were there when she arrived. Both brothers were so rocked to see her that Adeline joked that they almost had to be hospitalized for too much happiness. Then Rese told her two brothers that their father had been savagely beaten by Polish militiamen on the way back to Ukraine in June 1945. Johann did not survive the journey. Back in their home in the tiny farming village of Friedenstal, which had been renamed Tryhrady by the Soviets, Karoline dwindled and passed away in the early 1960s.

  Rese told them she was happy under Communism, but soon enough, Emil and Adeline figured out that she had succumbed to bitterness and alcoholism. She was drunk nearly her entire time with them and refused their offer to sponsor her to come to America, preferring to return to the hell she knew rather than move to the paradise she did not. It was the last time Emil ever saw her. Rese died in the early 1980s.

  On their return flight to the States, Emil asked himself why some people were willing to uproot and chase freedom at all costs while others were content to stew in their misery. That led to thoughts of Corporal Gheorghe, and he wondered yet again what became of the Romanian who’d helped save his life in Poltava and made him truly aware of the miracles and opportunities unfolding everywhere around him.

  In 1979, twenty-eight years after their arrival in New York Harbor, the Martel brothers were able to offer their father a buyout and a pension so he could retire in style.

  “Retire? What would I do all day?” Emil asked.

  “Go fishing, Papa,” Bill said. “You’ve always liked fishing, and some of the best fishing in the world is right here.”

  Emil did like fishing, and he was tired of banging nails at twenty below zero with no gloves on. After some thought and several talks with Adeline, he took his sons’ offer.

  With part of the lump sum the boys paid him on day one of his retirement, Emil bought a gold Cadillac that he proudly drove around Bozeman and the Gallatin Valley, fishing poles in the trunk.

  Emil, meanwhile, lived to see Martel Construction prosper, to witness his sons have children, and to see his entire family, including Reinhold and his new wife, gathered at his home, laughing, telling stories, drinking the wine he made in the basement, and savoring Adeline’s cooking.

  Walter worked with Bill for fifteen years, until a dispute with a union in 1982 resulted in one of their construction trailers being firebombed with Molotov cocktails. For Walter, who’d been shaken by tank cannons as a child and was sick of the fighting between union and nonunion labor, it was the final straw. He went to Bill and said he was done and asked to be bought out. Bill was not happy. He felt abandoned by his brother but raised the money. For three years afterward, there was no contact between them, which greatly troubled Emil and Adeline, who prayed that they would come to peace with each other.

  In 1985, Emil had to have gallbladder surgery, ordinarily a two-hour ordeal. But the surgeons faced complications from his earlier tapeworm surgery, and he almost died on the operating table. Nonetheless, when Bill and Walter walked into his hospital room together shortly after he awoke, he told Adeline it was one of his happiest days ever.

  In 1987, Emil was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, which caused him to reflect on his remarkable life. He, of course, had come to believe that it is only rare individuals who can rely completely on themselves. At some point, most people will face obstacles or situations that seem impossible to overcome unless they have the stubborn will to dream and learn to humble themselves and rely on a greater power as they work to make their vision real.

  He noted often that everything difficult he’d had to do seemed to have prepared him for the next difficult thing. Being imprisoned now seemed to have been one of the best things that ever happened to him because, after his escape, he had never looked at life the same way again. Every moment, every opportunity he’d been given after Poltava was a gift—from God, the Almighty One, the Divine, the Universal Intelligence, or whatever Corporal Gheorghe wanted to call it—and he gave thanks for those gifts by being happy and cheerful about nearly everything.

  Soon afterward, at seventy-five, Emil passed on, a content, fulfilled man who’d seen his adult life begin under brutal oppression and unfold in poverty and starvation, only to have it end in freedom, blessed with abundance beyond his wildest dreams.

  Every morning before and after Emil’s deat
h, Adeline got out of bed in Bozeman and went down on her knees, thanking God for their miraculous good fortune. She ended her day the same way. People who knew her for decades said she was relentlessly cheerful and grateful for every blessing she’d been given in life.

  She was also determined never to go hungry again.

  Adeline had a big garden in her backyard where she grew bumper crops of vegetables that she canned for winter and huge cabbages she used to make sauerkraut. Emil had dug her a root cellar where she buried potatoes and onions in the winter. She adored the kitchen the boys built for her, and it became a hub of family and friends where everyone was welcome and well fed, especially her grandchildren, whom she doted on.

  She attended Lutheran services every Sunday. She loved going to have her hair and nails done at a beauty parlor. And because she’d never had a doll as a child, Adeline amassed a large collection that was her pride and joy.

  Walter and his wife traveled to Europe in 1993 and were able to visit Adeline’s older sister in the former East Germany. Malia had lived a hard life but still retained her amused optimism and odd perspective. She died two years later at age eighty-seven and is buried alongside her mother in Falkenberg.

  Around that time, Adeline was interviewed by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle as part of its Fourth of July package. In the article, she recounted her suffering and starvation in Ukraine, the ordeals of the Long Trek, the family’s separation when Emil was sent to Poltava, his escape from Communism, her escape from Communism, and her endless gratitude for the country that had finally taken them in.

  “God bless the United States of America,” Adeline said. “Only in America is a story like ours possible.”

  Indeed, Adeline would live to see Bill driven to success by a small, empty, wooden packing crate he kept outside his office door. The crate once held the last of the Martels’ belongings when they sailed for the United States. Like the little wagon in his memory, the crate was a constant reminder to Bill of how desperately poor his family had been when they sailed into New York Harbor, and how far they’d all come since then.