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the windows, heads bobbing up to catch a glimpse.
    Bram was painfully aware of the new teacher too but he felt the fool sitting in this schoolroom with the little ones. He should be deep in the stopes by now with the men. Because of his size and strength he would have been promoted from nipper to mucker if Ma’am hadn’t insisted he go to school.
    “Well, Mr. Brambaugh O’Connell, it appears from your previous records that it’s going to be difficult to find work for you.” Miss Heisinger stood close to his seat and bent down to show him a paper with little boxes all checked off in ink. “Seems you’ve been promoted out of nearly everything.” Her smell was delicately sweet as if she kept a sachet in her trunk like Ma’am did. There was not a mole, not even a pox scar marring the milkiness of her complexion. Her eyes, when she turned them to him up close, were almost as pale a green as Charles’s, with the same amber flecks deep inside.
    “Yes, ma’am.” He felt trapped by Miss Heisinger’s closeness, her cool regard, and the helpless sweatiness that tried to stop his breathing.
    “I expect I’ll find something.” When she smiled, her tiny teeth showed no uneven spaces between them.
    Bram caught Callie watching them and hoped she couldn’t see his trembling.
    Shortly after Bram and Callie had settled into the school day, Luella put aside her washing and rushed over the hill to her sister’s cabin. A neighbor of Lilly’s had summoned her. Lilly’s time had come. As the news spread, other matrons wandered in with food and stayed to encourage Lilly, to exclaim over the layette, and to chat with whoever had stopped by. Lilly didn’t listen much to the encouragement. If the mill hadn’t been thundering away her screams would have been heard clear down to the Loop.
    “Try to relax, dear, you tense your body and make the pains worse.” Luella couldn’t hide her embarrassment over her sister’s lack of control, but Mrs. Traub, the manager’s wife, who’d brought a cake for Henry’s supper and dinner pail, tried to make Luella comfortable. “It’s harder on some than on others. She’ll make a fine mother, I’m sure.”
    Mrs. Traub went on to exclaim about her new boarder. They’d stepped outside to hear each other over Lilly’s screams while Mrs. McCall spelled Luella at the bedside. “She brought two trunks. Have you ever heard of such a thing? A schoolteacher with two trunks? And big ones too. She must have a change of clothes for every day of the week. And sleeping in with my Bertha that way, well the room’s so full you can’t move around in it. ‘Mark my words, Mr. Traub,’ I said, ‘that young woman will be trouble here with a boardinghouse full of single men.’”
    “And what did he say?”
    “Said she was all they could find and the children must be taught. Such a fancy lady, Mrs. O’Connell, do you know she offered no help in putting the supper on last night and when we’d finished she sat at the table and talked to Mr. Traub and the little boys? Let Bertha and me do the dishes. Then, when I finally got all my work done and had a moment to sit in the parlor and visit, she gets up and goes off to Bertha’s room to read. What do you think of a schoolmarm who talks only to men?”
    Callie was amazed to hear that Jesus had brought Aunt Lilly and Uncle Henry a baby boy. “Did they see Jesus?”
    “Callie, don’t be silly.”
    How could he give them a baby in broad daylight without showing himself? Throw it at them out of a cloud? But she knew by Ma’am’s tone better than to pursue the subject. Callie wondered why Jesus didn’t deliver kittens too. She’d watched Bertha Traub’s cat deliver its own. And a messy business that was. The strangest part was that of the five kittens, three looked so much like Charles.
    After a cold and hastily prepared supper, Luella took Callie over to Aunt Lilly’s to see the new baby. The new baby looked like a baby but the change in Aunt Lilly