Inside the blanket was a cradle. Small and plain, made of cherry wood, the rockers worn smooth. Hand joined, no nails. Somebody had rubbed it with oil so many times it glowed even in the dust.
Tucked in the bottom, under a folded baby quilt yellowed with age, was a note on lined paper. It said, I made this for our son. He did not need it long. I cannot look at it and I cannot burn it. Whoever finds this, if there is a baby coming, it was made with love. Use it. Henry, 1947.
I carried it down off the scaffold like it was glass.
The widow who hired me, a woman named Joan, was in her seventies. She had lost her husband the year before and bought this old house outside Marietta to be closer to her daughter. She sat down on the stairs when she read the note. She said she did not know if it was the saddest thing she had ever held or the kindest.
A father who could not bear to keep it had put it where it would wait for the next family, for as long as it took.
She called the historical society in Marietta. A volunteer there found the records in a week. Henry and Lois Barrett built that house in 1940. Their first child, a boy, was born in 1946 and lived eleven days. They had three daughters after that. Henry was a carpenter at the boat works on the river. The note matched his handwriting on a church record from the same year.
One of those daughters was still living. Her name was Margaret. She was seventy four and lived in Parkersburg.
Joan called her. Margaret was quiet for a long time on the phone. Then she said she had always heard she had a brother. Her mother told her once, near the end. Her father never spoke of him at all.
Margaret came to the house. She sat on the parlor floor with the cradle and ran her hand along the rockers. She said, Daddy made these. I can tell by the joints. Then she read the note, and she cried, and so did Joan, and so did I.
She asked what Joan planned to do with it.
Joan said her daughter was due in March.
Margaret said then that is exactly what he wanted.
I fixed the ceiling. It took me two weeks. Every day I came in, the cradle was sitting in a corner of the parlor, cleaned and oiled.
The baby came in March. A boy. His name is Henry.
Joan sent me a picture. The little guy is sleeping in that cradle in her living room with the old yellow quilt tucked around him. Margaret is sitting in the rocking chair next to it, and she is smiling.
Thirty one years working plaster. I have sealed up a lot of ceilings. That is the first one I was glad to open.