Coal dust blows over the fence. A clothespin drops from the line, and the water-heavy clothes sag dangerously close to the earth.
        “Can't keep anything clean here,” her mother fusses.
        The tightness in her mother's voice makes Emma's stomach clench. The inevitable sadness of coal dust on clean laundry could send her mother to bed for days. Buried beneath a quilt scattered with books of saints and prayer cards, her mother takes her own journey to a dangerous place in her mind, leaving Emma alone for days, the terrifying silence in the house echoing louder than a mine siren. Emma goes inside for a slice of Maria's herbed bread, hoping it will raise her mother's spirits. Her mother refuses to eat, calling it “demon bread.” Quickly, Emma picks up two empty pails, follows the rusted train tracks beside the house, gravel tumbling beneath her feet as she heads toward the water pump in the middle of the camp.
        At the culm bank, the two spraggers are stealing coal. The shorter one whistles low, murmurs in harsh Polish, dips his good hand into his pail. Before she can duck, a grease ball covered with coal dust slams against her chest, knocking out her breath. She turns, running as a second grease ball smashes against her back, pushing her to her knees, her pails skidding across mud and slate. She stands, collects her pails and runs, chest and back aching from the grease balls, balancing on the wooden planks leading through the muddy streets, slowing only when she no longer hears the boys' cruel laughter, their harsh, shushing language.
        Reaching the mountain's flank, she finds a ridge steep enough to lean against and rests. Her chest throbs, and her back still aches, but she knows better than to go home to her mother empty handed. It could be hours before the spraggers get their fill of stolen coal and leave, so she decides to fetch the priest's laundry while she waits. Raised a staunch Methodist, Emma's mother became a staunch Catholic when she married an Italian, and she often vied with the Polish and Italian wives for the privilege of taking in the priest's wash for free. Emma reasons that the sight of the priest's coveted laundry will cheer her mother more than clean water from the pump.
        The ridge's uphill path leads through the church cemetery. Traveled only by widows and old miners, it smells of laurel and decay, but it is safe. Sundays, when her father isn't too tired for church, he walks this path with Emma and her mother, reciting names of shrubs and flowers that make them laugh—dog-hobble, toothwort, Dutchman's britches. In the middle of the graveyard, Emma rests beneath the old maple that grows into a hemlock. On one side of the entwined trees, blank slate markers slide down the hillside. They are the graves of miners trapped and killed in a shaft fire, their anonymous bodies washed out of the mountain with fire hoses. Emma wanders down the other side of the slope, where tall tombstones are dug right out of a coal seam, etched with words in Italian, Polish and Cyrilic. She finds the small sarcophagus, the picture of a toddler brother who died in the pandemic before Emma was born sealed beneath oval glass. They didn't have a photo of him when he died, so the women of the family leaned his coffin against a coal seam, opened its lid and posed with his body. The brother's eyes are closed, one hand hanging from the open coffin, as though he has fallen there exhausted by play. Emma's blond mother stands behind the coffin, flanked by her dark aunt and her grandmother, glaring straight ahead.
         In early May, her living brothers, Michael, Carlo and August followed the young priest from the white church through the cemetery, carrying the statue of the Virgin Mary on their backs. Wearing a thin, white robe, the priest swung a gold ball of incense from a chain while the statue teetered on their shoulders. Emma and her mother followed her brothers, singing, Mary, full of grace. Purest of our race. Spring frost thickened her breath as she circled the graves, her feet sinking through the soft snow, her heals hitting hard against the frozen coal seam.

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