The family's Christmas goose clucks softly behind the house. Her mother has nailed boards to its feet, making it swallow corn so that it will fatten, rubs its throat until it swallows. Emma remembers last Easter, when her father boiled and colored a dozen of its eggs, hid them out in the yard, inside the pots on the stove and in the empty cradle beside her parents' bed. When she'd found them all, her father told her to close her eyes, and he hid them all over again. Didn't he know she was too old for such games? she'd thought. Didn't he know that gathering the eggs felt like work? She didn't have the heart to tell him she was too old for this game, and they played until it was too dark to see the bright eggs.
        
        “Emma?”
         It is after midnight, and her mother wavers slowly in the dark kitchen in her white linen night shift. For a moment, Emma mistakes her for a curtain billowing in the window. She takes her mother's arm, leads her back up to the garret, helps her into bed. Her mother's faded blond hair is unbraided, tangled at the waist of her damp shift. The joints of her fingers are hot, knobbed, hard as ginger roots in Emma's palms. She tucks her hands beneath the sheets, as though ashamed of their ugliness, her failure to bear the violent tearing aches in her swollen joints and ligaments.
        Emma goes out to the brick oven, melts beeswax and boils the remaining wash water, carries the tub up to her mother's room. Kneeling beside her, she wraps her mother's hands and feet in wool, pours melted wax over them, bathes her mother temples with the hot water, letting her sweat out pain. She winces as she touches her mother's hot, sore joints, feels the phantom pains in her own fingers. Her mother calls out, accusing her daughter of piercing her hands and feet with flaming arrows, but Emma continues to nurse her mother's failing body until she forgets her own.
        Her mother's eyes flutter shut. As Emma stands to leave, she grabs Emma's forearm, pleading softly, “Stay here for a while. Please.” She shows Emma how to scratch the soft skin above her wrist with a fingernail. “My mother used to do this when I couldn't sleep.” Emma wants to leave the drafty garret, the smell of her mother's night sweat, but she knows if she pulls away too soon her mother's eyes will fly open, and she'll have to stay even longer. She searches through the cradle filled with books for something to read, finds the Dialogue of Catherine of Siena, her Mother's favorite saint. She pulls down the Dialogue, opens it. Catherine's voice is immediate, comforting, a girl her age speaking of fountains: It is just like a vessel that you fill at the fountain. If you take it out of the fountain to drink, the vessel is soon empty. But if you hold your vessel in the fountain while you drink, it will not get empty: indeed, it will always be full. Her Mother's eyes open. She swats the book out of her daughter's hands.
        Emma continues scratching the underside of her mother's wrist, waiting for the last wakefulness to leave her mother's body. Yearning for sleep, she becomes uncertain if she is awake. She hears the train pulling itself through the hollow, heaving its weight through the mountain, its metal wheels grinding against metal tracks, it's whistle sounding like an off-key church organ in the distance. As it approaches the house, she holds her breath, waiting for it to pass. Suddenly, she hears a thundering crash, a rumble across the front porch, sudden footsteps, as though someone is running around outside to collect the laundry before the rains come. Lying back, her head rests beside her mother's on the pillow. Her mother's eyes begin moving beneath their closed lids, her body sinks with sleep.

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