The Cradle From the Last Board

I built it with solid sides, no slats. I’d read the federal safety rules for cradles and bassinets twice over, and I did not want any gap anywhere that a little hand or foot could find.

I bought the mattress first, a firm one, from a baby store in Springfield, and I built the inside of the cradle around it so it fit tight on all four sides. Two fingers wouldn’t go between the pad and the wall. I checked a dozen times.

I cut the dovetails on the corners by hand, the way Dad taught me when I was fifteen, with his saw and his chisels. They took me a week. A machine would have done it in an hour, but a machine had not been in that loft with him.

I added a brass pin that slides through the rocker into the stand, so the cradle can be locked still when the baby is sleeping and nobody’s there to watch it.

For a finish I used plain wipe on oil and paste wax, nothing in it that would hurt a baby who decided to chew on the edge. Five coats, rubbed out by hand. My fingers smelled like it for a month.

The last thing I did was the piece with the pencil marks.

I planed the back of it thin and set it into a shallow pocket on the underside of the cradle bottom, where nobody would see it unless they turned the cradle over. I glued it in and sealed it under the same oil as everything else so the letters would never wear off.

A’s babies. 2006.

Wilbur watched me do it. When I was finished he reached over and put his hand on the back of my neck, and we stood there in the empty shop with the dust settling around us under the lights.

“He’d have liked that,” Wilbur said.

Jenny

I had always known who the cradle was for, but it took me a while to say it, even to myself.

Wilbur’s younger sister, Jenny, was due the week before Thanksgiving. She and her husband, Chris, live out on Highway 32 east of town in a farmhouse they bought from his uncle. Chris raises a few cows and drives a feed truck for MFA.

The baby would be Beth’s first grandchild. Everybody knew that. Beth had been knitting since July. She had a baby book already started with a page for every month.

People will ask why I didn’t keep it. Put it in the closet and wait for my own. I thought about that more than I’ll admit.

But Dad didn’t write my name on that board because he wanted it in a closet. He wrote it because he wanted a baby asleep in it. And there was a baby coming, three miles down the road, whose aunt loved her already.

And I’ll say one more thing, because I said I’d be honest. Some part of me wanted Beth to see it. I’m not proud of that part. But I didn’t want her to see it so she’d hurt. I wanted her to see it so she’d know that you can’t burn a thing like that out of a family. It just comes back.

Jenny had the baby on the eighteenth of November. A girl, seven pounds two ounces, with a full head of red hair like she’d been dipped in it. They named her Cora Beth.

Wilbur and I went to the hospital in Bolivar that night. I held her for about ten minutes. She opened her eyes once and looked straight at me, the way new babies do, like they know something you don’t.

Beth was in the hall when we came out. She looked at me, and then at the floor. We had not spoken more than ten words since the burn pile. She had called the house twice. Both times I had let it ring.

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

“She is,” Beth said. Her voice was very small.