The Cradle From the Last Board

The last board

So there I was in my old cream sweater and my olive work pants, the ones with the knees stained from glue, standing beside a burn pile with my gloves on.

The twelfth board was lying at the edge of the fire with its near end in the grass and its far end in the coals. The flames were working toward the middle of it, and the end grain was starting to smoke.

I got down low, because heat rises and I’m not a fool, and I took hold of it where it was still cool enough to grip. Walnut that thick is heavy. A ten foot board, two inches thick and thirteen inches wide, will go close to seventy pounds even dry.

I lifted the near end, set my feet, and walked backward. The board dragged across the coals, threw a shower of sparks, and came out of the fire into the cool air with the end of it glowing like a cigarette.

I laid it down in the grass and stepped on the burning end with my boot until it quit. Then I threw two buckets of water from the stock tank on it for good measure.

Behind me, the other eleven boards were going. I could hear them. Walnut cracks when it burns, a deep sound, like a knuckle.

I sat down on the ground next to the one I had. I took my gloves off and put my hand flat on it, the way you’d put a hand on a horse to calm it. It was warm.

I did not cry then. I want to be honest. I mostly felt very quiet and very clear, the way I feel at the shop when a big job has gone wrong and the only thing left is to figure out what can still be saved.

One board. Ten feet. Two inches. If I planed it and resawed it down the middle on the band saw, I’d have two boards an inch thick, near enough. That was a lot of walnut. That was enough for one cradle if I was careful and wasted nothing.

I turned the board over to look at the end. The fire had blackened the far end, but the near end, the one that had been in the grass, was clean.

And there it was, in Dad’s square letters, gray with twenty years of dust. A’s babies. 2006.

That was when I cried.