The Cradle From the Last Board

I smelled it before I saw it. Walnut smoke is sweeter than oak, almost like burnt sugar, and it came through the cracked window of my truck a quarter mile before the turn.

By the time I pulled into the yard behind the old machine shed, the pile was already going hard. Brush, broken pallets, a busted feed bunk, and on top of all of it, my father’s boards.

I knew them from the road. Nobody else in Dallas County had twelve boards of black walnut ten feet long and two inches thick, and nobody else had stickered them with strips of cedar the way Dad did.

My mother in law was standing on the far side of the fire with a hay fork, pushing the last of the brush into the middle. She looked up when my door shut, and she did not stop.

Her name is Beth. She was sixty three that fall. She had been my husband’s mother for six years and my friend, I thought, for at least four of them.

“Alice,” she said. “You’re early.”

“I said I’d be here Saturday with the trailer.” I could hear my own voice and it sounded calm, which surprised me. “It’s Saturday, Beth.”

“The buyers get the keys Monday.” She leaned on the fork. “I’ve got that whole shed to empty and nobody to help me but me. Burl and Wilbur took the last of the sale equipment to that man in Bolivar.”

That much was true. My husband, Wilbur, and his dad had left before daylight with the hay rake and the old Massey on two trailers. I had waved them off myself.

“Those were Dad’s,” I said. “Those were the boards from the pond tree.”

“Honey, it’s old barn lumber.” She said it kindly, the way you tell a child the dog is not coming back. “Your dad saved everything. You know he did. I am not leaving a stranger a shed full of somebody’s junk.”

I looked at the fire. I counted. Eleven of them were in it, laid crossways over the pallets the way you lay kindling, already black down their length and splitting along the grain.

The twelfth had slid off the side when the pile settled. It lay half out of the flames on the edge, and only the far end of it had started to char.

I did not scream. I want to say that I was too good a person to scream, but the truth is that I was too tired. And it was her ground, and her fire, and there was nobody on earth to call about a woman burning boards on her own farm. Walnut does not come back out of a fire because you yell at it.

Then she said the part I still hear some nights when I can’t sleep.

“Besides,” Beth said, and she was not looking at me anymore, she was looking at the smoke, “you don’t even have a baby to put in a cradle.”

Wilbur and I had been trying for three years. Two rounds of the pills from the doctor in Springfield. One loss at nine weeks that we had told almost nobody about. Beth was one of the almost nobody.

She heard herself, I think. Her mouth closed hard. She stood the hay fork against the corner post of the shed and walked up the lane toward the house without another word.

I stood there a while. The heat came at me in waves, and every few seconds a board would pop and throw a spark up into the gray.

Then I went back to the truck and got my leather gloves out of the console, the heavy ones I wear when I unload sheet goods at the shop, and I put them on.