Chapter Fourteen
THERE WAS A TRICK WITH a needle Delta once showed Tamsen. The old woman would take a darning needle and a bit of thread and she would dangle it over a woman’s child-swollen stomach.
“Now if that needle swings with the sun, it’s a boy, and if it swings against, well then it’s a girl,” Delta had said.
Tamsen had laughed at Delta at the time, but now she was deadly serious. She wanted to try the needle trick on herself, yet try as she might she could not get a reliable reading. The needle swung one way and then other, as if it could not make up its mind.
Just a fool trick, she told herself.
“And when that needle starts to circle, well you count those circles,” Old Delta said. “Every apostle means one child.”
Every dozen circles means one child, Tamsen understood.
“Twel
