By Jerry Kraft

Memoir

Often I will write to the assignment myself. This piece was in response to an assignment where they were asked to imagine themselves meeting with someone in their family whom they never met. Here's what I wrote:

THE END OF ANOTHER DAY

By Jerry Kraft

There is so little furniture. A picture of Christ on the Cross is the only decoration on the walls. A table near the cook stove has a bench on one side and two chairs on the other, a short stack of white plates are used for breakfast, supper and dinner. One four-pane window looks out on the summer kitchen where the heat of summer forces the women outside. Now the cool evening air makes that seem like a distant memory.

A cast iron fireplace sits on top of a layer of red brick, fitted together but not mortared. Two wooden chairs, sturdy and simple, face the fire. I sit on one of them, looking around this unfamiliar room while I wait for him to come in from the field. It is early evening, the sunset already fading from its colorful display to this nearly gray half-light, soon to be the full darkness of a cloudy, starless night. I've never been in this home before, though it feels familiar to me from the detailed descriptions of relatives who knew Conrad Luft; the descriptions from my father of the place where he spent much of his youth working side by side with this man, learning from him about work and about the world.

Conrad Luft was his grandfather, my great-grandfather, and in the natural world he would be 152 years old on this evening, born on New Year's Day, 1857 in Shilling, Russia. From that German village he came to America, to this house in North Dakota, where he would spend the rest of his days. I c an hear him out on the porch stomping the mud off his boots. He comes in through the rough wooden door and closes it behind him. He walks directly to me, standing slightly to the side and behind the chair where I'm sitting. I turn half-way to face him. He speaks in a soft, deep voice, almost a whisper, but stronger.

"Ve talk while the dinner is cooking," he says, sitting in the chair beside me. "Vat for you come this long way?"

"I just really wanted to get to know you better," I say. I immediately regret the lameness of my reply. He must think I'm an idiot, pulled out of the shallow end of the gene pool.

"I'm not much to know," he says. He pulls on the end of his long mustache and stares at the fire. "I'm just a farmer. That's all I know." He breathes deeply and sinks back a bit on the chair, finally relaxing from the stiff, upright position he's been sitting in. "So what is your work?"

"Actually, I'm a writer," I say. Well, it's something, I think.

"Horse rider?" he asks.

"No. Like books."

"Me, either," he says. "The kids, they're learning to read American and write. I don't."

"German is your language?"

"Jah." Then he's silent. He stares at the fire again. His body is so lean, so wiry and taut. His muscles look like the rails of the fence he built around the house. His skin as tough as the harness that hangs in the barn. When he talks to me he looks directly into my eyes, never allowing me to wander, to hide. His brown eyes are not unkind, but but the eyes of a man who never looks away from something unpleasant, something difficult or painful.

"My father said you taught him how to use tools, how to make things."

"That little Conrad, he's not a stupid one. He can figure things out." My father was named after his Grandfather, after this Conrad Luft. "He's just a little boy and already he fixed the pump on the well. He built new blades for the harrow, made them out of the pounded steel. He's no dumbkopff. And he works like a man, that little one."

I love sitting in a room with a man who knows my father as a child, who lives next door to his father, whose life is really not at all different than it was in the old country. I love that for just now time has forgotten to keep track of itself and history is as fresh as the eggs his wife brought in from the henhouse this morning.

"Mother will have the dinner ready now," he says. "Schnitzel and kraut and chicken and spuds, fresh greens from the garden. Baking for after." He says it like it is just another of the certainties that mark his life, like work creates sweat, crops will ripen, children will grow up and have children of their own.

"What would you like people to remember about you?" I ask.

"Remember me?" he says, surprised at the idea. "Why people vould remember me? Only Gott vill remember me, maybe."

"But you are the pioneers, the immigrants. Your story, how you came to this country, built a new life, built families, that's the story of America."

Now he seemed to be dozing off in front of the warm fire, as I spouted my heroic telling of his tale. With a snort he woke and stood up.

"Come, it's dinner time." He walked to the table and sat in the chair at the end, folding his hands in front of him. Grandma Anna Christina brought a tray filled with meat and potatoes and vegetables, placed it on the table and sat in her place, folding her hands over her plate. Together, they prayed.

Come Lord Jesus

Be our Guest

Let this food

To us be blessed.

Amen.

"Another day," Grandpa Luft said. I wasn't sure if it was an announcement, a summation, or a plea. "Another day," he said.