The Last Green Valley, Mark Sullivan [most read books in the world of all time .txt] 📗

along the soffits. Kneeing open the door bar, she pushed inside and used her heel to shut the door behind her.

“Put that lantern out,” her father called from the table where he was repairing a leather harness for his plow horses with two glowing lanterns hanging from the rafters above him and a blazing fire at his back.

“Papa, I—”

“Put your lantern out, girl,” Karl Losing said. “Fuel’s rare these days.”

“Listen to your father,” her mother, Lydia, called from the kitchen beyond him. “And where are those peelings? I expected you long before this.”

Adeline swallowed her frustration and blew out the lantern as her eleven-year-old brother, Wilhelm, came in from the back with wood for the fire. She hung the lantern on a hook by the front door and put away her coat and scarf before hurrying with the potato peels past her father and brother into the kitchen where Lydia had a loaf of bread coming hot from the wood oven.

“Peelings,” Adeline said, putting the bag down. “A whole kilo. I measured.”

“You done with the onions to go with them, Malia?” her mother said, setting the bread tin on the stove to cool.

“If I was, you would be the first to know, Mother,” Adeline’s older sister, Amalia, said in her odd cadence. She had her back to them and was chopping onions slowly but steadily.

“Set the table, Adella,” her mother said. “And fill the pitcher from the well.”

“I have to tell Papa something, Mama.”

“You’ll do as you’re told.”

Adeline knew it was impossible to reason with her mother once an order had been given, so she grabbed the pitcher and went outside to the pump in the backyard. The temperature was dropping, and her hands were stinging when she returned and put the water on the table. She set spoons for five around the table and around her father, who kept at his harness, engrossed in his work. Once there were cups and bowls laid out as well, Adeline stood squarely in front of him.

“Papa,” she said.

“Can it wait for dinner, child?” he said, never looking up at her.

“Can’t you see your father’s busy?” her mother called.

Adeline felt unseen, unheard, and something in her broke. She burst into tears. “Papa, please! You need to listen to me!”

At last, her father took his attention off his leatherwork, looking puzzled by the outburst. “What is this? Why the tears? What have you got to be sad about today?”

“On the way home from school,” she blubbered, “I saw two dead dogs. Their throats had been cut. The blood was fresh.”

Her father’s face fell. He set the harness on the table and said softly, “Calm down, Adella, and tell me where you saw them.”

Her crying slowed. She wiped at her tears with the frayed sleeve of her sweater.

“How far from here?” he said.

“The second one three hundred meters?” she said. “Maybe less.”

Her father studied his leathery hands. Adeline had always thought him larger than life and full of fire, but now he seemed suddenly smaller, less sure of himself.

He glanced at his wife, who stood in the kitchen doorway, worrying her apron.

“It’s someone else, Karl,” she said. “One of the new fools flapping his jaws.”

He swallowed hard and nodded. “Let’s pray so.”

Adeline could not help herself. She went around the table and threw her arms around her father. He said nothing, just rubbed her arm for several moments before saying, “I have to finish my work before supper, girl. Go help your mother.”

She kissed his cheek and drew back. He smiled softly and touched her face before returning to the harness with the awl, the big-eyed needle, and the leather cord.

Adeline went back to the kitchen where her mother was stirring onions and potato peels in a cast-iron skillet.

“Mama,” she said.

“It’s for one of the fools,” her mother declared.

“What is?” Malia asked.

Adeline started to reply, but her mother looked over her shoulder sharply at Adeline and shook her head.

“Nothing, sweetie,” Adeline said.

Malia said, “I’m not going to break, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’m better than ever.”

“You are,” their mother said. “Better than we could have hoped.”

“Thank you, Mama,” Malia said, and seemed to lose her train of thought. “What am I doing next?”

“Sitting down, dear,” Adeline said. “We’re going to eat.”

“Oh,” her sister said, brightening. “I like that.”

Aside from Malia and Wilhelm, the mood at the table that evening was somber. Adeline and her parents feared what the dead dogs meant.

There was no insane man on the loose with canine bloodlust in Schoenfeld. The OGPU, Stalin’s secret police, was well known to arrange to have dogs murdered so their barking would not give the police away when they came in search of political prisoners during the night.

At one point during the meal, Adeline was stunned to see her father’s spoon shake and his food fall back into his bowl.

Her mother put her hand on his elbow. “You brought in the best harvest they’ve had in six years, Karl. There are grain shortages everywhere else. They cannot do without you.”

He did not look convinced. “They don’t want you to do well, haven’t you heard?”

He stared at the table a moment, and then smashed it with his fist. “First the Communists killed all the smart people who made things work in the cities. And now they want to make doing good at anything at all a punishable crime! What has happened to the world? How did we end up in an asylum?”

He looked at his stunned wife, daughters, and son, who were all slightly cowering from him. Ordinarily, Karl Losing was a quiet, well-tempered, even affable man. But now his shoulders were slumped, and there was anger and then despair in his voice when he said, “You don’t grow grain, people starve. You grow too much and feed too many, and you become an enemy of the people. How is this right?”

“It’s not right,” Adeline said.

“Not a bit,” Malia said, surprising everyone. “If you work hard, Papa, if you hurry to it, you are doing the right thing because