Comfort to Spare (XI)

The Dirkse family; far left is my great-grandfather

Of my four grandparents, I knew only Grandma Dirkse. Grandma Schaap passed away near the end of World War II, three years before I was born. Grandpa Schaap lived with us periodically toward the end of his life. Once, I remember, I was standing at the kitchen sink for a drink of water when he emerged from his room behind me, sloughed up in the house slippers he always wore, and scolded me for letting the water run, wasting it. I was waiting for it to cool. It's my only memory of him. 

Grandpa Dirkse died when I was nine. They lived in a new house a block or so east of the place that had been the downtown home, a home that had, by then, become a Mobil station, big red horse out front. The night he died I happened to be returning from downtown--or maybe the park on the other side of town. I stopped and could feel something unusual, even scary, was in the air. 

Uncle Allie came to the door and shooed me away in a manner I thought unfeeling, as if my being there was an offense. I've always had the feeling that what was happening just beyond the door I never opened was the heart attack that took him, that put him on down on the kitchen floor. That I didn't see him doesn't mean but I'll never forget imagining him there, his thick, blacksmith body so out of place beside the kitchen table.

An cigar box tucked in the back of a drawer behind me holds maybe forty old photographs Grandma gave me when she was old and I was visiting. I don't remember asking for them; she knew her grandson was interested in the old days, loved the pictures, still do. She went through them with me, one at a time, a gallery of long gone family and friends, a scrapbook just like most everyone has somewhere in the back of drawer rarely opened. 

Grandma Dirkse told me only one story about her husband when they were young. That story I never forgot. Went like this. The two of them went on a date that night, took the horse-and-buggy all the way out to Hingham, a small town that would have been, by horse and wagon, an hour away. There was a dance there, she said--I remember that specifically--and before they'd left it got pretty darn late--and the two of them still faced the long ride home. 

There's some exposition here that's crucial: the event that night was a dance, which meant their going there--at least Grandpa's going there--would have been verboten, a dance being a species of "worldly amusement" good Dutch Calvinists kids of their time foreswore, or claimed to. 

Motivations get murky. My memory isn't 20/20. That it was a dance mattered to Grandma's telling of the story, but so did the late return. I'm guessing that Great-grandpa Dirkse wouldn't have known his son was out dancing. What he would know was that his boy and his girlfriend pulled up way past the time he should have. 

The scene she then described, to my mind happened on the front porch of the house just a bit west on Main Street, the house where Grandpa Dirkse grew up. When young Harry drove up, his father was out front. When young Harry got down off the wagon, his father kicked him solidly, powerfully.

There was no great outrage in her tone. She wasn't calling it abuse really. Chances are, a town full of fathers would have done the same thing. Training up a child "in the way he should go" often meant not sparing the rod or a battery of swift kicks, maybe worse. 

What I think she wanted me to know is that the family her husband and my grandpa came from was, at least to her, overabundantly strict about things. 

I'm sure her father wouldn't have behaved the same way.

When, years later, Oostburg high school began to stage dances in the gym, my father, the preacher's son, determined not to allow my older sisters to attend. It was, after all, a dance, and everyone knew the church warned against "the dance" in the same breath as card-playing, and movies--all "worldly amusements." Dad said no.

His mother-in-law must have rolled her eyes because she told her son-in-law, whispered it, I'd guess, that she thought it wouldn't hurt him or his daughter if he'd lighten up a bit. 

The story of that wordless kick in the butt came out in giggles when she told me, shadowy giggles, however, partially hidden, as if talking about it in the tone of voice she had was somehow naughty, almost like spotten, making fun when one shouldn't.

Did they love each other--Grandpa and Grandma Dirkse? I have absolutely no reason to believe or suggest they didn't. But they were created of different materials, different genres of spirituality. They knew the same catechism, but one of them was fully capable of shedding a tear simply by reciting the first question and answer. The other had learned that catechism in Dutch, a language she'd never fully understood.

According to the old story of Aunt Gertie's death, Grandpa, the blacksmith, fell to pieces when the police arrived at the front door of the house right downtown. Grandma tried to help him, I'm sure, then looked up at the cops and told them she couldn't help feeling for them, men whose job it was to walk up to front doors late at night with shocking news of death.