The Cradle From the Last Board

After

I’d like to tell you that everything was easy after that, but it is a family, so it wasn’t.

Beth and I had a few stiff months. She called and I answered, and we talked about the weather and the baby and Burl’s knees. She did not bring up the boards and I didn’t either.

But in January, she showed up at our house on a Saturday with a box. Inside were the hand pieced quilts from the free table at the farm sale. Burl’s mother’s quilts. She had gone back for them that same afternoon, she said, before anybody could take them, and kept them in the trunk of her car for three months because she didn’t know what to do with them.

“I can’t keep them,” she said, standing on my front step in the cold. “I’ll ruin them. I’ll put them on a pile some bad day. You keep things. You know how.”

“Beth,” I said, “you could learn.”

She looked at me like I’d said something in another language. Then she laughed a little. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I’ll start with one.”

She took one quilt back home with her anyway. It’s on the back of her couch in the little ranch house now. I’ve seen it.

As for the walnut, there is no more. That was it. Eleven boards became smoke in a cow pasture in Dallas County, and nothing I can do will bring them back, and I don’t pretend otherwise.

But I have the burnt end I cut off. Nineteen inches of char on one side and clean dark walnut on the other. It sits on the shelf over my bench at the shop, and when somebody asks about it, I tell them it’s the best piece of wood I own.

Spring

This past March, I took a test in our bathroom at six in the morning and sat down on the edge of the tub and looked at it for a very long time.

Wilbur found me there. He didn’t say anything. He just sat down on the tub beside me and took my hand.

We’re due in October. Almost a year to the day after the burn pile.

Burl has a cherry log drying on blocks behind his new garage now, cut along the creek at the old place with the new owners’ blessing. I’m going to build the next one from it. Beth asked if she could help, and I said yes. I’m going to teach her to sand. She says she’s never made anything in her life that wasn’t for supper.

Cora is five months old now. She sleeps in the walnut cradle at the foot of Jenny’s bed every night. When she outgrows it, Jenny says, it’s coming to us, and then it’s going back to her, and then to whoever comes after that.

On Sundays at Jenny’s, Beth still gets down on those bad knees beside it and rocks that baby, two fingers on the end panel, right below the heart.

She says it’s the only thing she’s ever wanted to keep.