The Cradle From the Last Board

Wilbur

Wilbur got home a little after six. He’d heard about it from his dad, who’d heard about it from Beth on the phone, who had told it as “Alice’s upset about some old boards.”

He found me in the garage with the board on two sawhorses and Dad’s old number seven jointer plane in my hand.

He stood in the door a long time. Wilbur is not a big talker. He’s a lineman for the electric co-op, and he says what he thinks in about half the words most people use.

“How many did she burn?” he asked.

“Eleven.”

He closed his eyes. “Did she know what they were?”

“She asked me the day we hauled them out. I told her.”

He nodded slowly. Then he asked the question I had been dreading. “Did she say anything else?”

I told him. I watched it land on his face. His jaw went tight and his hands closed and opened once, and that was all.

“I’ll go talk to her,” he said.

“Not tonight,” I said. “Please. Not tonight.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he took off his co-op jacket, hung it on the nail by the door, and picked up a pair of clamps off the bench. “Then what are we making,” he said.

The build

I knew what I was making. I had known since the second I saw the pencil marks.

I went to the shop that Monday and asked Delbert, my boss, if I could use the band saw and the planer after hours. Delbert is sixty and has run that shop for thirty years. He came over to look at the board on my truck, ran his hand down it, and whistled.

“Where’d you get eight quarter walnut that old?”

I told him. He didn’t say anything for a second. Then he said, “Lock up when you go,” and handed me a key I’d never been given before.

For five weeks I worked on that cradle every night after the shop closed. Six to ten, sometimes eleven. Wilbur brought me supper in a cooler, and on Saturdays he stayed and held things.

The first thing I did was cut off the burnt end. Nineteen inches of it was charred too deep to use. I cut it square with the miter saw and set it aside.

Then I cut off the clean end too, just three inches, with the pencil marks on it. I wrapped that piece in a shop rag and put it in my lunch box and carried it home like it was eggs.

I planed the board down to a fresh face. Under the gray, the color came up like it was waiting. Chocolate brown, with purple in it when the light hit it right, and a streak of cream sapwood along one edge.

I resawed the board down the middle on the band saw, slow, with a sharp blade, and ended up with two boards seven eighths thick when I’d planed them flat again. Close to eighteen square feet of good stock from one board, once the ends were gone. I laid out every part of the cradle in chalk before I made a single cut.

Two end panels, tall, with a heart cut through the top of each for a hand hold. Two side panels, low, so a mother could reach in without bending double. A solid bottom. Two rockers cut on a long gentle curve, from the same board so they’d match.