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.