The Cradle From the Last Board

Grace, I suppose

But I was standing in my sister in law’s front yard on a cold afternoon with the sun going down, next to a cradle my father had promised me when I was twelve. And the baby it was built for was right there, asleep on her mama’s shoulder, not knowing any of it.

Dad would not have wanted that cradle to be the place where somebody got even.

“Your granddaughter’s waiting, Beth,” I said. “We ought to get her in it.”

Beth looked at me for a long second. Then she put both her hands over her face and cried. Not loud. Just her shoulders going.

Jenny reached out and put her free arm around her mother. Burl came down off the porch and stood behind her with his hand on her back. Wilbur came and stood beside me, close enough that our coats touched.

When she could talk again, Beth wiped her face with the back of her glove and looked down at the cradle at the foot of the steps.

“Could I,” she said. Then she stopped and started over. “Alice, would it be all right if I was the one who rocked her in it first?”

I looked at Jenny. It was her baby. Jenny looked at me and nodded, very small.

“It’s yours to ask her,” I said, nodding toward Jenny. “But it’s all right with me.”

The first rock

Chris and Wilbur carried the cradle up the steps and set it on the porch boards where the sun came in low and warm, and the rest of us gathered around it like it was church.

Jenny laid Cora down on the mattress on her back, in the knitted yellow blanket, and tucked it at her chest so it couldn’t come up over her face. The baby sighed and threw one arm up over her head and stayed asleep.

Beth got down on her knees beside it. It took her a while. Her knees aren’t much better than Burl’s. Wilbur gave her his arm, and she took it without looking at him and held on.

She put two fingers on the end panel, right below the heart, and pushed.

The cradle rocked. Slow and even, the way Dad would have wanted, because I had cut those rockers on the longest curve I could fit on the board so it would never tip and never jerk.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Out in the yard the fire ring ticked and settled.

Beth was crying again, but quietly now, the way you cry at a funeral when it’s a good one. She did not stop rocking.

“I’ve never had anything this nice in my life,” she said, to nobody in particular. “Not one thing. We didn’t have anything that wasn’t falling apart.”

“It’s not yours,” Jenny said gently. “Mom. It’s Cora’s.”

“I know it.” Beth wiped her nose. “That’s what I mean. She’s going to have this. She’s going to grow up with something somebody made her on purpose.”

The underside

It was Burl who found the pencil marks. Of course it was.

When the sun went behind the tree line and Jenny took Cora in to feed her, Burl and Wilbur went to carry the cradle inside to Jenny’s room. Out on the porch, Burl tipped it up to see how the rockers were joined, because Burl has never in his life carried a piece of furniture without looking underneath it.

He went still. “Alice. Come look at this.”

I knew what he’d found. I went anyway.

There, set into the bottom, sealed under five coats of oil, was the three inch piece of end grain with my father’s square block letters on it. A’s babies. 2006.

Beth came over and looked at it over Burl’s shoulder. She read it twice, moving her lips.

“A,” she said. “For Alice.”

“He never once wrote my whole name,” I said. “Not on a birthday card, not on anything.”

She put her fingers on it very gently, like it might be hot. “And you put it under Cora’s.”

“He’d have wanted a baby in it,” I said. “He wasn’t particular about whose. He’d have been crazy about her.”