They pooled their money, saving until they could afford to buy a small lot across from the high school and pay to have a basement foundation dug and poured. Emil worked at the hospital site and other projects during the day and, with Bill, put down a subfloor on top of the foundation in the evenings. They also installed plumbing, electrical lines, and a woodstove in the basement.
The Martels lived in the basement the entire winter of 1952–53, enduring minus-thirty-degree-Fahrenheit nights and big snowstorms. But it was their basement, and Emil and Adeline could not have been happier. And little miracles continued to unfold all around them.
Walter happened to mention that the butcher often threw away the pigs’ heads and hocks because no one wanted them. Adeline couldn’t believe it and asked him to bring them home. She made headcheese, soup stock, and braised hocks in the basement that winter. Emil liked to joke that they ate so much free pork, he felt like they’d left Ukraine and ended up in hog heaven.
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
