MATEJ'S JOURNEY TO AMERICA

PAPA'S TREASURE CHEST

"Tell me your story Papa" was the haunting plea I whispered pushing open the tilted door to my grandfather's house. As I carefully made my away across the rotted wooden floor in his old washroom, I could almost hear his gruff command, "Pojd'te sem, chlapec!" "I remember him," I had earlier told my mother. "But you were only two," she scoffed. Yet his craggy voice echoes in my memory, calling me to his deathbed 56 years before. "You did speak Bohemian before English," my mom reflected, "maybe you do remember?" Setting the record straight, my dad added, "We're Moravian, not Bohemian," not sure of the difference. A lifetime flashed across my mind: my first day at a one-room farm school a mile away . . . a moment later at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln . . . and then an engineering career that took me around the world. In the process, Czech became barely understood, but I still knew Papa's words, "Come here, boy!" and I ached to hear more.

Now in Papa's kitchen, I felt sudden warmth: there was the familiar iron stove with aromas of Czech foods and vapors from steaming kettles no longer here. Memories and spirits were everywhere as I reflected on my boyhood and my recent visit to Bohemia and Moravia – the Chmelka homeland my grandfather had never seen. Baby John was born only months after his Papa Matej brought the Chmelka family to Nebraska in 1871. My tour of Matej's 200-year-old Moravian farmhouse was particularly emotional and I could feel him watching me as I walked through his barn and garden. The Chmelkas always enjoyed music, and I could almost hear Matej playing his violin in the background as my wife and I danced to polka music in his old Moravian kitchen. Matej passed his violin and love for music to his grandson John . . . and then to me, this treasured instrument forming a unique five-generation bond among us.

A long, painful groan awoke me from my nostalgic trance . . . "Just the wind shivering the rafters," I convinced myself. Papa's house was without life for 20 years since my father found his brother resting for eternity in the room where my grandfather told me his last story. But it seemed time had stopped as I walked into Papa's bedroom: there was his bed amidst clothing and household items long forgotten.

I could plainly hear him talking to me, his little chlapec, and with tears streaming down my cheeks, I looked out the window to the back garden where I played so many years before. To my surprise, a four-prong, whitetail buck was watching me, majestically unafraid. I asked half aloud, "Are you the ghost of Papa watching his garden of cabbages, cucumbers and corn?" But I expect Papa didn't believe in reincarnation, in fact, to my recollection he was non-religious. His father and grandfather were founding members of the first Catholic parish in the area, and I once asked my father, "Why didn't Papa and Grandma go to church?" "Children didn't discuss such things with their parents," he replied, annoyed with my parental disrespect. "So why did you?" I persisted. "My aunt encouraged us . . . "

We had always been serious churchgoers, but not Papa and Grandma. Why? I still wondered. Almost every day after school, my brother and I walked to Grandma's three-room house in Brainard, just across the street from where my dad and mom later built their retirement home. And on Sundays, we often stopped and ate with her after Mass, Papa now long gone. Strange, we went to the Catholic school and Mass almost every day, yet she would not go to church? Then she died when I was eight . . . and now the little house I remember was also gone.

I snapped back to the living as the whitetail moved slowly through a forgotten orchard to a prairie meadow restored by a government-funded, soil-conservation program. I could imagine a young Papa with a similar view from his father's Soddy four miles to the northeast. I thought back a year when my father and I went to see that first Chmelka homestead, and also our visits to the lonely graves of our pioneer ancestors. The homesite had almost returned to nature with no trace of the Soddy, and the homestead was no longer in Chmelka hands. But Papa's land and adjoining farm where I was born were still in the family – perhaps little to show for six generations of hard times, yet more than the lonely plots awaiting us all.

Another loud groan awakened me from these morbid thoughts and drew me to investigate its source. I walked slowly up narrow, dark stairs to the three bedrooms where my father slept as a boy. As I reached the top step, my eyes were drawn to movement of tattered curtains, blown by a warm May wind through broken glass. Like downstairs, there were beds, furnishings and items of clothing left by Chmelka cousins departing for college 30 years before. Another groan drew my eyes upward, and I recoiled in surprise: a dazzling, celestial light hung like a halo surrounding a trap door to the attic.

I drug a half-empty hutch beneath the door, and from it reached the ceiling. Pushing up the water-stained, wooden door, I was blinded by sunrays beaming through a jagged hole in the rotted, collapsing roof . . . then startled by soft, quick footsteps. Shaking sunspots from my vision, I saw two beady eyes watching me from the far dark corner of the attic. Don't go there, an inner voice warned. Undeterred, I acrobatically pulled myself up and cautiously crawled through boxes of heirlooms stored for future use . . . but forgotten. As the sagging roof slanted closer and closer, I again heard the familiar groan, and yes, I was being watched! Only feet ahead was a masked bandit, a large, furry raccoon defiantly protecting her babies nestled in Papa's old shirts. Don't go there, my inner voice repeated. This time I listened and turned non-aggressively to make my escape, and there it was – Papa's treasure chest!

My chest thumping, I pulled the small trunk toward me, then lifted its hinged lid: Papers . . . Papa's story? Too dark to read, and deciding this was not a safe place, I crawled back to the trap door, carefully lowered myself to the hutch, and reached up to bring down Papa's chest. Now I could see clearly, a scarred leather strongbox with dull-gray metal corners, and it was nearly full. Ancient letters, official-looking documents and journals, many in German and Czech that I could not understand; not only Papa's, but there were the names Matej and Jan and others I did not know. Feeling I discovered the Chmelka's lost Ark of the Covenant, I cradled the treasure in my arms and walked to my father's bedroom window overlooking Papa's garden. The whitetail deer was still there, keeping his lonely vigil and looking up at me, seemingly saying, "Well done, chlapec, now write my story."