The cradle
“Well,” a new voice said, “she’s not getting that baby, either.”
Jenna came up through the crowd with a hand pressed against her lower back. She is twenty-six, five months along, a teacher’s aide with a long brown braid, and I had not heard her say twenty words together at a family supper. She was crying and angry at the same time.
“I found out at ten this morning,” she said. “Rosalie called me. I want you to know I did not know a thing about this, Kayla. I swear on my mother.”
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“I believe you.”
“Donna gave me something in August. I took it because I didn’t know how to say no to her.” She wiped her face with her wrist. “Fritz, bring it.”
Fritz Hollis is Mitch’s older brother, a quiet man in a feed-store cap who works at the co-op. He went back to the white pickup and let down the tailgate, and he and one of the teenagers lifted something long out of the bed, wrapped in a gray moving blanket.
They carried it across the grass between them. The whole shelter watched. They set it down on the concrete beside Earl’s crib, and Fritz pulled the blanket away.
It was a cradle. An old wooden cradle, cherry gone nearly the color of tea, with a rounded hood at one end and curved rockers worn smooth on the bottom. The grain ran in long ribbons. Somebody had planed every surface by hand, over years of Saturdays, and then rubbed it with oil until it shone like a church pew.
“Daddy built that for me in 1993,” Fritz said. His voice cracked on it. “Out of a cherry tree that came down on Grandpa’s farm. Mama kept it in the attic till August. Then she gave it to Jenna and said it was for the first grandbaby.”
“I told her, whoever comes first,” Jenna said. “She said, fine, we’ll see. I knew what she meant by that.” She laid her palm on the hood. “Well, this baby came first, and she’s yours. Daddy Cyrus built it for the first one. That’s you.”
I could not speak. I looked at Earl, who had been standing by his own crib with his plane in his back pocket. He walked over, ran his thumb along the rocker, and checked the joints one by one the way he’d checked his own.
“Never seen better,” he said quietly. “Whoever made this knew what he was doing.”
Then he turned it on its side to look at the underside of the hood, and he went very still.
“Kayla,” he said. “Come look at this.”