“I was walking like a duck as fast as I could to get out,” Carlo says.
         “The mountain was falling down behind me,” August says.
        As her father and brother's talk of the hazards inside the mine, Emma watches her mother's face, thinking of how her mother carries the mine inside of her all the time, always waiting for the siren to sound, for a son to come home too late, for that knock at the door in the middle of the night. When her brothers finish bathing, Emma hangs their work clothes to dry behind the coal stove in the kitchen. Their trousers are heavy with dirt and water from kneeling in the mines all day, but they will wear them for several more days. There's no use cleaning them until the next wash day.
         After the meal of pasta and olive oil, her father goes back to the mine to work a night shift, and her mother climbs up to the garret to sleep in the wrought iron bed beside the empty cradle. Her three brothers lie crossways on the bed pulled out in the middle of the kitchen. Lying on her cot beside the coal stove, surrounded by a curtain of sodden work clothes, Emma pulls out the priest's book of statues, splits it open, studies the picture of David by the acetylene lamp. There are dark, ropey veins in his arms and legs, and his toes look smudged. Only his pubic hair looks clean. In 1808, she reads, the middle finger was stolen from his right hand, and a lesser-known artist was charged with replacing it. But the new finger was too large, distorted, and David would never be perfect again. She turns to the book's title page and reads the inscription: For Edward Winnis, bought at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., 1920.
        She has bathed men since she was seven, scrubbed their naked, sooty flesh as she would their pants and shirts, but as she thinks of the young priest's eager face as he slid the book between folds of his laundry, his careful hands moving gently over the mural in the church, her stomach cramps. She recalls the Norfolk and Western man's gentle teasing, I'll bet you loved ciphering in school, and at the sound of the word, love, spoken to her by a man, a surprising heat blooms between her legs, rising, spreading, until her whole body burns and aches pleasantly. Then she recalls her mother's story about her aunt's careless comportment with men. Terrified that she might be becoming a siren, she slams the book shut, slides it beneath her cot, turns out the lamp, promising herself that she will return it to the priest first thing in the morning.
        A draft blows through the knotty pine wall, over her face and hands, and she breathes in the smell of mine water drying on her brother's clothes. Waiting for sleep, she thinks of men emerging from stone, and imagines how it must have felt to be the nameless artist charged with replacing the missing finger of the most perfect man. She thinks of her own father as she handed him his dinner pail as he left for his night shift.
         "What will you think about all night?" she'd asked.
        "I don't think," he said. "If I let my mind wander, I'd lose an arm, or worse." Then her father rubbed her head, kissed her. "Every night, before I go down into the mine, I say a prayer."

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