The Cradle That Stood Beside the Cake

“Out of a black walnut that came down in a storm. On the muck, east of Hudsonville. We were celery and onions. Eight of us children, and every one of us slept in it, and I was the last.” She was not talking to the room. She was hardly talking to us. “I topped onions on my knees from the time I was six years old. I was a De Jong before I was ever a Vandermeer, and I did not have two nickels until I was past forty. People in this club forget that. I don’t.”

“Mother,” Cynthia said softly, from somewhere behind me.

The old woman paid her no mind. “They sold that cradle at the farm auction in 1958, when the bank took the place. A man gave four dollars for it. I stood and watched him carry it to his truck.” She took a breath. “I have not had my hand on a real one since.”

Earl did not make a speech. He went and got a chair from the nearest table and set it beside the cradle, and he helped her down into it by the elbow.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Nobody’s rocked it yet. I never do. Seems like it ought to be somebody’s that it’s for.”

She looked up at him.

Then she reached out one of those walnut hands, took hold of the rail, and pushed.

It rocked. Slow and even, without a sound. He had waxed the bottoms of the rockers. It rocked on that hardwood floor like it was floating.

I looked around at those women in their nice suits, and half of them were digging for a tissue. I was.

“There,” old Mrs. Vandermeer said. “I’m first. Somebody write that down.”

People laughed, the wet kind of laugh.

She kept it going with two fingers. Then she bent closer and squinted at the rockers.

“These are darker,” she said. “The rockers. They’re darker than the rest.”

“Yes ma’am,” Earl said.

“Cherry darkens with age. My father told me that. This is old wood.”

“It is.”

“How old?”

Earl looked at me then. Just for a second.

I had not known. I want you to understand that. I had carried his supper out to that garage for ten weeks, and I had looked at those rockers a hundred times, and I thought they were darker because of the oil.

“Thirty-two years,” he said. “I cut those in the winter of 1993. We had a little girl coming that March.” He said it plain, the way he would tell you the pitch of a roof. “She didn’t live. I’d got as far as the rockers. I hung them up in the rafters, and I never could throw them out, and I never could finish it either. Then Josh came along three years later and I just bought a crib at Sears.”

The room was very still.

“So I took them down at Christmas,” he said. “Seemed like it was time they held somebody.”

I could not have spoken if the building had been on fire.

Her name was Amy. We had her for part of one morning. We do not talk about her much, Earl and I, not because it is forbidden but because we said everything there was to say a long time ago. And here was my husband saying it in a country club in his brown sport coat, to a stranger, because she had asked him an honest question about wood.

Old Mrs. Vandermeer reached over and took his hand, the big scarred one, and held it in both of hers. She did not say she was sorry. She was eighty-six. She knew better than to hand a man a word like that.