Comfort to Spare (VII)

Trust me, I am woefully aware of how little I have to go on to establish what I'm trying to say about the nature of my grandparents' faith. While this January 30th, 1897, receipt from Central House proves nothing at all, it suggests at least something of what little my mother said, once or twice, about her Grandpa Dirk Hartman. 

Central House was, oddly enough, run by a name associated with the Oostburg Dutch community--a Heinen. The place was at least a tavern; there were countless road houses in Sheboygan County, in the years before prohibition (1920-1933). Certainly, by its own marketing appeals, you could pick up a drink: "FINE WHISKIES AND CIGARS" and "FRESH BEER ALWAYS ON TAP." Somebody was brewing it right then and there.

I can't know for sure what the first charge was, but my best guess is that the word is "Livery," which suggests that "D. Hartman" stayed over in Random Lake at the Central House, and that's understandable. Random Lake is not a long ways from Oostburg, where he had his business, just twenty miles or so. With a team, people might travel as far as thirty miles a day; but let's just assume that Great-grandpa Hartman had tried to make a few sales in Random Lake that day. That he would choose--if he could afford it--to stay over and start back toward home in the morning, makes all kinds of good sense. Central House, Random Lake, was his choice.

My mom remembered one story about her Grandpa Hartman, and that was the time her mother, my Grandma Dirkse, drove to Sheboygan, her little daughter in tow, pulled up outside a tavern on Indiana Avenue, which held more than a few watering holes, walked in, her little daughter in her arm, and located her father, then shoed him home in no uncertain terms. Was he drunk? I don't know. What I do know is that Mom's recollection of all of that was fuzzy, but she said she hadn't forgotten the incident because it was unusual, nothing ever repeated.

Dirk Hartman was an implement dealer, as my mom used to say, often on-the-road, a salesman, a good one, but when she offer that description, there would be more some disdain, not for him, perhaps--I don't think she knew him all that well--but for the profession, as if drinking and philandering came with the territory. 

Although my grandmother never said it at least to me, I have the sense, even the conviction, that Dirk J. Hartman, my great-grandfather, wasn't much of a dad. He was a second-generation American who didn't abide by the morality of the Dutch Calvinist world into which he was born and in which he was raised. Like his parents before him, he was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, unlike my grandfather's family, who were far more strict and worshipped at the Christian Reformed Church, the breakaway church across the street from Grandma's house and Grandpa's blacksmithing business. They were, even in the language of the time, "a mixed marriage."

A friend of mine here in Iowa, a man with the perfectly characteristic Sheboygan County Dutch name of Huibregste (heuw'-brekt-see) told me his family came west all the way out to northwest Iowa because his grandmother used to say she wanted her new husband to have absolutely nothing to do with her own brother and his business back home in Oostburg. Her brother's name was Dirk Hartman.

If by "God-fearing" we intend to describe life in a particular home--as in "a God-fearing home"--then I'm willing to believe that Grandma Dirkse's home may have been lacking. She told me once, giggling about it actually, that she'd learned the Heidelburg Catechism in the Dutch language, even though she didn't know how to speak Dutch. Her own grandparents were among the earliest mid-19th century Dutch immigrants to America, arriving before 1850. Grandma didn't know the Dutch language because she was already third-generation American. 

That Grandma Dirkse didn't fall apart the night the police knocked on her door, bearing the worst possible news any parent could hear--that all makes sense. In her life--she was 56 years old when her daughter was killed--there likely had been some strife and sadness, including the war death of her brother in 1918, her only sibling, her father's youngest. 

What I'm saying is, if we believe the story of that night's horror, that Mabel Hartman Dirkse was the strength makes sense.