The Cradle That Stood Beside the Cake

I would carry his supper plate out when he forgot to come in. I watched it come together a piece at a time. The corner posts first. Then the rails. Then the spindles, sixteen to a side, every one turned on his old lathe and sanded by hand.

He spaced those spindles two and three-eighths inches apart, and not a hair wider. He looked that up. That is the rule now for anything a baby sleeps in, so a little head cannot get through. He cut a block of scrap to exactly that width and carried it in his shirt pocket for a week, checking every gap twice.

There is not a nail or a screw in it that you can see. It is all pegs and glue and joints that fit.

He finished it with oil and wax, rubbed in with a rag, three coats, and then he let it stand a full month so there would not be any smell left in it for the baby.

And on the headboard, the last week of February, he carved a name.

Not the baby’s first name. Nobody knew that yet. Josh and Ashley had decided to be surprised, boy or girl.

He carved Tucker. Plain letters, cut deep, in a little arch across the top.

Underneath it he left a wide smooth space with nothing on it at all.

“What goes there?” I asked.

“Dates,” he said.

“Whose?”

He blew the dust out of the K. “Whoever sleeps in it. This one. Then the next one. Then theirs.” He ran his thumb down the empty wood. “I left room.”

I had my own part. All winter, while he was in the garage, I was at the sewing machine in the back bedroom. I cut up three of his old flannel work shirts, the soft ones gone thin at the elbows, and the yellow receiving blanket we brought Josh home in, and I pieced a quilt just the size of that cradle.

So that was our gift. Ninety hours of his evenings, by his own count, and a winter of mine.

It did not occur to either of us until that Saturday morning that it was going to be a problem to carry in.

The shower was at noon. The club wanted Cynthia’s final count by the Wednesday before, which I knew because it had been printed right on the invitation, reply by such and such a date. I thought about that some. Forty women, a plate apiece. I understood the arithmetic. I just had not known I was a line in it.

I wore my navy dress, the one I keep for funerals and Easter, and I had my hair set on Friday. Earl wore his church slacks and the brown sport coat. He was only there to carry. That was the plan. Josh was pouring a garage floor with his crew that morning and coming at three with his truck to haul the presents home. Earl would help me get the cradle inside, then go sit in the pickup with his thermos and the ball game until the ladies were through.

We wrapped it in two moving blankets and strapped it down in the bed of the truck, and he drove the whole way up M-40 at forty-five with his flashers on. People passed us. He let them.