Relieved that her mother is finally asleep, and that one of her brothers thought to save the laundry from the rain, Emma goes back to her cot. It must be almost morning because the stove is cold, but the shutterless window remains black. She burrows toward the remaining warmth of her quilt, tries for a few hours of sleep before her mother comes down to the kitchen to tell her to heat the stove and prepare for a day of ironing.
        
        She wakes again to the sound of shoveling outside on the porch, imagines the first snow fall, how she loves to run up the mountain with her youngest brother, Michael, to play in the new snow before the coal dust settles over it. Rising from her cot, she steps into the front room, finds her brother lying precariously on the edge of the narrow bed, his end of the blanket tied to the end so nobody can steal it. Anger pricks her temples as she imagines him sneaking outside without her in the middle of the night, to play in the immaculate snow beneath a moon blazing like sunlight.
        Outside, the valley is train-haunted, snowless, and the blue air is thick with coal dust. Beside the house, a coal car lies on its side in the gravel, the coal spilling from it drifting over the yard and across the porch, rising over the windows of the house. Her father and two older brothers have shoveled the coal away from the door, and now they are digging out the coal that drifts over the windows. They have started a fire in the brick oven, and they step toward the flames every so often to warm their frozen hands. Though Emma can't see her, she hears her mother weeping in the shadows beyond the fire. Coal pricks her bare feet as she follows the eerie sound toward the brick oven, finds her mother sitting cross-legged, rocking a dark bundle in her arms. The fallen wash line snakes through piles of coal all around her, half a shirt sleeve waving like a white flag from beneath one black heap.
         Emma's eyes burn from the greasy dust. Her chest tightens beneath the weight of her mother's grieving, and her arms and legs shake with a raw, empty fatigue. Crushed by the thought of washing everything all over again, she picks through the first mound, unburying the waving shirt. A man walks toward her, tall and blond in the dim, blue light, and she recognizes the Norfolk and Western man who sells her ice and lemons on baking day. She'd give anything to be pulling soft loaves of warm bread from her Aunt Maria's oven, to be drinking lemonade cooled by the ice this railroad man brings to her all summer long.
         The man squats beside her, so close she can breathe his scent of sweet tobacco and clean sweat.
        “Are you all right?” he asks, looking closer at her face until he recognizes. “Why, it's the schoolteacher.”
        Emma nods, her throat too dry to respond to his familiar teasing.
        “I'll tell you one thing,” he says. “You all are sound sleepers. I waited a long time for somebody to answer me. I thought you all were dead in there.”
        Her foot throbs, and she looks down, slowly noticing the cuts in the soles of her bare feet. She can take the pain in her body, but this handsome man's kindness makes her want to sit cross-legged on the ground and weep. She sits on a cleared patch of grass, but she won't allow herself to cry in front of him. Following her glance, the man pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, sets her foot on his knee. She stares at the white handkerchief. As he begins wiping the blood and grit from her foot, her body warms and softens with the pleasure of his hands against her skin. She marvels at how well she already knows the back of his neck, his scent, the precise, lanky movements of his fingers. Then she looks down, notices she's still in her nightclothes, remembers her Aunt Maria's nightgown and the illicit flight to Detroit. Emma shivers, knowing that only this thin piece of linen hangs between this man and her own naked flesh, and she can't help but think that she's called him to her. She wonders, Is it the leaving or the return that will be my sin?

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