When I lose my Grandpa, I’ll lose his stories and his language, too. © “You know, they made a good cider over there,” Grandpa said. “Hard apple cider, ‘cider’ they called it, hard.” I knew “over there” meant Europe, during the war. We were sitting at the kitchen table. I’d just poured a glass of red table wine for each of us, to go with our spaghetti—a recipe I learned from my mother, who learned it from my grandmother, who was not Italian but made spaghetti regularly because Grandpa liked it, and she could make a lot of it for not very much money. “Hard cider. Kept it in them barrels tucked up in their barns. You’d drink what you could, naturally. Tasted good too. If you could fill your canteen up with that, buddy, you’d be set for a while.” I imagine Grandpa traipsing through the farms of France, some ruined and some still standing. The standing ones: soft hay lofts, the remnants of crops, the window panes still intact and clean looking. A barn with a promising barrel, the thought of how it would taste. “But then the army said the Germans were a-poisoning those barrels, so we couldn’t drink it no more.” “What did you drink then?” “Water.” He told me the cider story a few years ago, around the time I turned thirty and started to notice the growing push to document the real, personal histories of World War II veterans—the books and oral histories, documentaries and miniseries. I’ve watched and read every story I can. Consuming them makes me anxious. There is a common fascination with that war and its soldiers, and there is a palpable press to get the stories out before we lose the generation who remembers. But where is my Grandfather’s story? None of what I see or read seems close enough to him. That September, on a Saturday afternoon when the sun still rode high and warm, Grandpa went into the kitchen to get himself a snack (some pieces of a sliced garden tomato and a leftover biscuit) and I followed. “Sit down, Baby,” Grandpa said. “I’m just a-having me some tomato is all. More in there, now, you want some.” When I sat down with a tomato, Grandpa handed me his knife, and I thought, for maybe the hundredth time that day, how thin the skin on his hands had gotten, how swollen the knuckles underneath. I sliced my tomato without words, and Grandpa began talking. Without preamble, we went back to the war, or, Grandpa went back, and I tried to follow him. “I was back in there once, there in France, you know. Back in that old country—farms and everything, like we had them here. Naturally, there’s country people everywhere. Them old farms, some had a spring, like we did back in here; some had a well. We went all through there, you know. Went wherever the Army told you to go. They’d have us stop sometimes, when there was some place we could get to, clean up some. One old place had a cabin and a well. I was in there a-washing, looked up, saw old Ford Price from down on Spring Creek.” A Journal of Creative Nonfiction
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