Free Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in) by James McBride

mountains at Carrara and using his toes and his remaining hand to carve them up into figurines, which he sold for a good price. He jumped through a back window and tried to run. The soldiers caught him, threw him on a horse, and took him to Florence, where city officials stuffed him full of olives and wine, gave him a set of new clothes and a mule, and placed him before the marble Primavera on the Santa Trinità Bridge, whereupon the poor man declared to all present, This is indeed the piece of marble that cost me my arm, and I would know it since it is my arm that lay crushed against it and fell down the mountain. Then, to the astonishment of all present, the drunken man cursed the Primavera from head to foot, calling the piece “a low, filthy whore of a statue and not worthy of the time of a great duke-in-waiting like myself, and certainly not worth my arm.”
    He was quickly hustled away—but the point, the Florentines argued, had been made. The Primavera was Florentine. It had been etched in Florentine blood. No Frenchman, be he a lowly ambassador or Louis IV, would touch it. The French ambassador backed down, withdrew the offer, and the squabbling among the Italians about the four statues began anew. It quieted down some after the duchess’s death, in 1602, died after the Romans conquered Florence in 1639, was revived again when Italy was united in 1861, then ceased again in 1914, after the First World War began. After the war, the bickering started up anew, as each of the four statues began to show its age and needed repair, and no one could agree as to how—and by whom—they would be repaired. That ended when Hitler’s army invaded Italy in 1943 and in 1944 blasted to pieces nearly every bridge in Florence, including the Santa Trinità, destroying every statue on it except the Primavera, which miraculously survived. She stood alone now on her corner post, a testament, her proponents murmured smugly beneath their breath, to God’s decision as to which was the greatest work after all, though by accident of default or irony, one of her arms was blown off and presumed to have fallen into the Arno River, and like Filippo the marble worker’s, that arm was never found. So the score of fate, it appeared, was even.
    The Primavera nearly survived the war, until November 1944, when a tired German artillery gunner named Max Faushavent received a message via his radio that Americans were marching dangerously close to Florence, and his regiment needed two artillery fires in Fiesole, four kilometers above the city. Faushavent was sleeping next to his battery when the order squawked over his radio, and he awoke in a panic, not hearing the exact coordinates. Faushavent had never seen a Negro before in his life, and when he scrambled to his feet and peered over the edge of the ridge where his battery was hidden and saw colored American soldiers marching beneath him along the Arno River near the destroyed Santa Trinità bridge, he thought he had died and gone to hell. Without thinking, he loaded up and fired two shots at them before his screaming compatriots told him he was firing backward—Fiesole was the other way—but too late. His shots fired wide and missed, scattering the Negroes. One shell landed in the Arno River and the other landed at the base of the Primavera, the lone statue remaining on the Santa Trinitá bridge, which had cost Filippo Guiano his arm, the artist Tranqueville his sanity, the duchess her stature, and the French their pride. The shot blew the statue off its base and sent the Primavera, now worth millions, hard to the concrete, where she landed with a thunk, severing her other arm, which flew into the Arno River, and also severing her lovely head, which rolled several feet away and landed in the gutter, where it was found by a Negro soldier from Mt. Gilead, North Carolina, named Sam Train, who could not unload it for fifty dollars and who was now rubbing it