The Cradle From the Last Board

Twenty years in a loft

Mom passed when I was nineteen. Cancer, quick, the way it sometimes is. After that it was just Dad and me and the cows, and then just Dad, when I went to the vocational program in Springfield for cabinetmaking.

I came back home to work at a cabinet shop in Buffalo. I build kitchens for a living. Face frames, drawer boxes, the occasional built in bookcase for a doctor’s wife in Springfield who wants it to look like it came from England.

Dad never sold one of those walnut boards. People asked. A man from Lebanon offered him three thousand dollars for the stack once, and Dad laughed at him in a friendly way and walked him back to his truck.

When Wilbur and I got married, Dad shook his hand on the church steps and said, “You know what’s in my loft, son?” Wilbur said yes sir, he’d heard. Dad said, “Good. Then don’t keep me waiting forever.”

We tried. We just didn’t get there in time for him.

He died two springs ago. His heart, in the barn, on a Tuesday. The neighbor found him when the cows were bawling at the gate.

The farm had to be sold to settle things. I have a brother in Kansas City who needed his half, and I understood that, and I don’t hold it against him. Wilbur and I rent a little house in town, and we could not have kept a hundred and sixty acres if we had sold everything we owned.

The only things I kept were Dad’s tools and those twelve boards.

The tools went in our one car garage. The boards would not. Ten foot boards do not fit in a one car garage with a truck in it, no matter how you angle them.

So Burl, Wilbur’s dad, said what any good man would say. “Bring them out to the farm. There’s room in the old shed. They’ll keep there as long as you need.”

He helped us haul them out on his flatbed. He and Wilbur restickered them on a dry concrete floor up off the ground on blocks, the same way Dad had them, and Burl even put a tarp over the top to keep the pigeons off.

Beth stood in the doorway and watched us that day. “What are those for?” she asked.

“Cradles,” I said. “For when we have babies.”

She nodded. I remember she nodded.

The farm sale

This past summer Burl’s knees finally quit on him. He had farmed that ground for forty one years, and he and Beth decided it was time. They bought a little ranch house on the edge of Buffalo, three streets from ours, with a yard Burl could mow sitting down.

The farm sale was the second Saturday in October. An auctioneer from Marshfield ran it, with a hay rack for a stage and a lunch wagon from the church selling pulled pork and pie. Half the county came out to look at Burl’s equipment and tell stories about him.

I helped Beth set up the household tables that morning. I’ll say that for her: she knew how to run a sale. Every dish priced, every box marked, every tool laid out so a buyer could see it.

She also threw away more than she sold. That was the side of her I did not understand yet.

I watched her set a box of Burl’s mother’s hand pieced quilts on the free table and walk away from it fast, like it was hot. “I can’t keep everything,” she said when I asked. “I won’t live like that.”

That evening, after the last trailer pulled out, I told her I’d come in two weeks with Delbert’s trailer from the shop and get my boards. The new people were taking possession on the first of November. She said fine. I know she said fine.

What I did not know is that the buyers had asked to move their cattle in early, and the closing had been pushed up to the twenty sixth. Beth knew it. She meant to tell me. Or she meant to and then she didn’t, and then she decided the boards were just more of the clutter she could not stand to look at.

I have gone over it a hundred times. I don’t think she lit that fire to hurt me. I think she lit it because burning things was how she had always made herself feel safe. But she knew what those boards were. And the thing she said about the baby, she said that to hurt me, and she knew it the second it was out.