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,
