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both on the table together and poked at our stomachs so much that it tickled. Then he said we were fine, and he gave us each a taffy to eat.
    There were cabinets where Father kept medicines and tools. Sometimes he gave me wooden tongue depressers to play with. I drew faces at one end and wrapped the other part with clothes scraps to make a dress. They weren't as real-looking as my doll with the bisque head, the one I called Princess Victoria, but Jessie and I could make a lot of them and then we held balls and cotillions and danced them around together.
    I climbed up in one of the patients chairs and watched while Father opened a cupboard and took out something like a statue. It was the stomach part of a lady. He set it on his desk, and then carefully he opened it up! It came apart just down the middle, and there inside you could see an upside-down baby with its eyes tightly closed and its little hands curled up. It
was
wonderful, just as he had said; and when he began to explain it to me, how the baby grew there, I could see that it all made sense; it was exactly right, much more right than
finding it in the dirt with the cutworms and slugs under the tomatoes and summer squash.
    "Me?" I asked him. "I grew like that?"
    He said yes.
    "And Austin? And Laura Paisley?"
    He said yes.
    "And Peggy? And Jessie? Jacob Stoltz? And—" But he could tell that it was like when I tried to think of more people to bless, so that I wouldn't have to go to sleep. "God bless the postman," I would say, "and my cousins in Cincinnati—"
    He closed the woman back up and hid her baby away. But I liked knowing it was there, and knowing now too that there was one like it inside my mother. "When?" I asked him. "What kind? And how long?"
    He said spring. It took a long time. And we wouldn't know until it was born whether it would be a sister or a brother.
    Then we turned out the lights and he took me home again, through our own yard and up our front steps, past the porch swing, and in through our own front door to where Mother was still sitting in the sitting room with her knitting in her hands, the white yarn going up and around, up and around. I could hear Peggy finishing the dishes in the kitchen. Naomi had hung up her apron, put on her jacket, and gone home, carrying a basket of leftovers for her own family.
    "May I tell Peggy?" I asked.
    Mother smiled. "She knows."
    I ran to the kitchen anyway, to tell Peggy that now I knew, too.
    Â 
    It
was
Jacob in the stable. I knew it when the stable boy told Father. But I knew it for certain when I saw him there myself.
    It was early evening, and I had been playing skip-rope on the front walk with Jessie until her mother called her home for supper. It was chilly out, Thanksgiving-soon weather, and there were still dead leaves in the yard, the last fallen not yet raked up. I thought to go in by the back door instead of the front so as to walk through the leaves, because I liked the feel of them on my feet and the sound of the whispery rustle they made.
    When I neared the stable I saw a dog by the door, one I did not know, not one of the neighborhood pets. This one was brown with a white face, and it sat patiently the way dogs do when they are waiting. From inside I heard sounds: not just the stamp and snort and shiver of the horses, but the sounds of a boy's voice, a kind of singing.
    Levi was already gone. After he fed and watered the horses each evening he always left to do his other odd jobs around town before going back to the little ramshackle house down near the railway
station where he lived with his widowed mother and a great many younger brothers and sisters. A downright shame, Naomi said, that Levi's father had died two years ago of pneumonia, leaving that poor woman with all those little ones to raise alone and no chance, now, of any of them being educated.
    It was not dark yet outside but I could see through the kitchen window that our lights were on, and I could see the figures of Naomi