Her aunt either didn’t notice these preparations, or had decided to act as if she hadn’t. And as for Aunt Jinny—well, she’d taken a bath as well, and put on a clean shirt and set of overalls, but she had scraped her hair up to the top of her head so tightly that Anna’s eyes watered in sympathy, bound it into a hard knot, and jammed her straw hat down over the top of it. Anna had thought that she would at least make the concession to other people’s ideas of what was proper by putting on a skirt—but no.

Wall, she’s been here a long time. Mebbe them folks in Ducktown’re useter her ways by now.

She somehow managed to keep herself from running down the lane to the Holcrofts’, but it was with a supreme effort, and her heart actually felt as if it stopped for a moment when she saw Josh standing in the bed of his father’s wagon, doing something back there, while his father checked the harness on their mule.

When they got to the wagon, she saw what it was he was doing. They’d put straw in the wagonbed, and a hessian sack over the straw, and the angel-baby was cradled in both. Josh was just making sure there was no way the statue could move around back there. He glanced up—when the mule reacted to their presence by looking at them and snorting loudly—smiled, and waved.

“Pa says y’all should ride up front with him, Miz Jinny,” he said, when they were within conversational distance. “Anna an’ me’ll ride in back and keep this here statchoo steady.”

“Better yore behinders than mine,” Jinny replied, with a glance at Anna that said, as clearly as speaking, Y’all ain’t foolin’ me one bit, chile. Anna flushed, but was more than happy to have Josh lift her up into the wagonbed and show her where to sit, while Matt Holcroft came around and took his spot on the driver’s side of the bench, and Aunt Jinny hoisted herself up beside him.

Matt clucked to the mule and slapped her back gently with the reins, and off she went, at a sedate pace.

“Rosie don’t much like a-goin’ inter Ducktown,” Josh said, as if to excuse the mule’s reluctance to move any faster. “Don’t rightly blame her. Ev’ time I go down there, m’nose an’ eyes start a-burnin’, an’ m’throat gits raw. Reckon they’s plenty wrong with the place, like yore aunt says. Think I tol’ y’all it ain’t no use makin’ stuff in marble cause it don’t last down there?”

Anna looked over the statue that lay between them. “Aunt Jinny says thet too. Not ’bout the marble, but she says the pizen goes up from the smelters, inter th’air, then down as rain.”

“Ain’t no doubt,” he agreed. “It’s pizened from one end’ve the Ducktown Basin t’ t’other. I dunno how anybody c’n stand t’live thar. I cain’t get outa thar fast enough when I gotta go.” He sighed. “Makes me wisht there was a faster way there an’ back. I mean, there is, iffen I had a hoss, but I cain’t carry stone an’ finished pieces on a hoss, so hevin’ a hoss wouldn’t do much good.” He scratched his unruly hair and grinned sheepishly at her. “Reckon I made a muddle of ’splainin’ thet.”