Adeline went back to the kitchen one last time, finding the leaf and that memory all oddly upsetting, as bittersweet as it was mysterious, as awe-inspiring as it was frightful.
Like every big change in my life, blown by the wind.
Around the house, Emil finished tying the little wagon to the rear of the big one.
“No one steps on it, right?” he said to his young sons. “You want to come out the back, you wait until I’ve taken it down.”
Walt nodded. Will said, “When are we leaving, Papa?”
“As soon as Mama returns,” he said, “and your grandmother and aunt get here. Go use the outhouse if you need to.”
Both boys ran out behind the house while the two geldings, Oden and Thor, danced in place, again spooked at tanks passing so close. Emil had to soothe and coax them until they finally calmed. The horses were fit and well cared for. They were used to pulling plows and weight. If he slowed them down to handle the heavier loads on the steeper hills, and barring lameness or, worse, a wreck, Emil believed the pair would take his family a long way.
He paused to study the house he’d built single-handedly, fighting all thoughts of pity or remorse. A house was a house. There would be others. Emil had learned the hard way to detach from the idea of possessing anything for long in his life. But he stared at the roof for a moment, seeing himself two and a half years before, loading tin roofing sheets and trusses into his wagon in a town called Dubossary, some thirty kilometers to the west.
He shook off the memory and turned away from the house and that roof.
“If God giveth, Stalin taketh away,” Emil mumbled, and refused to give the home he’d built any more attention. In his mind and in his heart, the house had already crumbled to dust or been burned to ash.
Whoomph, whoomph. Artillery fire began to the north. Whoomph, whoomph. The explosions were not close enough yet to make the ground shake, but he soon saw plumes of dark smoke in the northeastern skies, no more than nine or ten kilometers away. For the first time, the true stakes of the journey that lay before him and his family became clear, sending him staggering, dizzied, against the side of the wagon. He was thrown back to a day in mid-September 1941, when he’d gripped the side of this same wagon, feeling relentless nausea and the noon heat and hearing the grasshoppers whirring as he gagged out the poison that had welled in his gut. He’d glared up in rage and shook his fist at the sky with such bitterness, he’d gotten ill all over again.
Remembering that day and still clinging to the side of the wagon, Emil gasped at the way his heart ached. I remember this. How it felt to have my soul torn from my chest.
Adeline ran from the house with a few more things. The boys were exiting the outhouse.
“Are we leaving now?” Will asked.
“Yes,” she said. She rounded the house and saw Emil hunched over, holding on to the wagon with one hand, gasping, his eyes closed, his features twisted with pain as his free hand clawed at his chest.
“Emil!” she yelled, and rushed toward him. “What’s wrong?”
Her husband startled and stared at Adeline as if she were part of a nightmare and then a desperately welcome dream. “Nothing.”
“You looked like something was wrong with your heart.”
“It hurt for a second there,” he said, standing up and wiping the sweat gushing from his forehead. “But I’m all right.”
“You’re not all right,” she said. “You’re as white as snow, Emil.”
“It’s passing. I’m fine, Adella.”
“Mama, here come Oma and Malia!” Will cried.
Adeline’s concern left her husband and lifted when she spotted her mother at the reins of two old ponies pulling her wagon at a steady clip through the loose and shifting caravan of refugees and defeated soldiers all heading west.
Lydia Losing’s face was harder and more pinched than usual, but the fifty-four-year-old was still dressed as she’d been dressed for the last fifteen years—in dark grays and widow black. As she was wont to do, Lydia was jawing at Adeline’s sister, who was thirty-five and leaning slightly away from their mother, nodding and smiling without comment, a common-enough posture between the two of them. Malia had been kicked by a mule as a fifteen-year-old, which had left her childlike in some ways and wiser than most in others. She looked at Adeline and winked.
Another cannon barrage began, this one close enough to shake the ground beneath their feet. Four German fighters ripped across the sky, followed by six Soviet planes on their tails. Machine guns opened fire above them.
“Whoa!” Will said, thrilled.
“Mama!” Walt said, and grabbed Adeline around the waist.
“Everyone in!” Emil shouted, and ran to untie his horses from the tree.
When he was up on the bench with the reins in his hands and had checked to see that Adeline was beside him and the boys under the bonnet behind him, he yelled to his mother-in-law, “Let’s get as far away from the battles as we can today!”
“As fast as my ponies will take us!” Lydia called back.
Emil released the wagon’s simple lever brake and clucked up the horses, which leaned hard into the load, the wagon rolling slowly at first, and then gathering enough speed to slip into a gap between other wagons and groups of refugees on foot who stood to the side, all their belongings in burlap sacks, staring in envy as the Martels passed.
At the west end of the village, they passed Emil’s parents’ home, his childhood home. The front door to the old place was open. There was nothing worth saving in the yard.
Emil refused to let a single memory of his childhood
