By Bob Chrisman
I possess no physical evidence to offer in defense of my father. Family stories and my own fragmented memories comprise what little I know of him. Fifty-seven years have blurred much of what I remembered, but I will bear witness for him.
At a trial, the court clerk would instruct me to raise my right hand. “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” I would hesitate before I answered. I don’t know the “truth.” I only know my truth. But the court doesn’t want to hear my doubts. The only answer to the question is, “I do.”
My Father – 8 Months Old, circa 1914, Missouri, photo © 2009, Bob Chrisman. All rights reserved.
On February 28, 1914, my father, Len Chrisman, became the first child of H.T. and Annie Chrisman. In September of that same year, H.T.’s gall bladder ruptured. The resulting infection killed him. My father never knew his father, not even from stories, because his mother didn’t talk about the man.
Several men courted the Widow Chrisman. A local banker, my father’s favorite, asked her several times to marry him, but she refused.
When she remarried in 1920, she chose a widower, William Hecker, who had seven children. By all accounts, including some from his children, he was a very angry man. Mr. Hecker stipulated one condition for the marriage. “You must promise that you’ll never favor your son over my children.” She promised, and she never broke a promise.
My Father In His Baby Carriage, circa 1914, Missouri, photo © 2009, Bob Chrisman. All rights reserved.
My father rarely talked about the mother of his childhood. I remember him saying, “She married him because the children needed a mother. She felt sorry for them.”
The step-daughters resented her. Ruth, the oldest, had already married and left home. Fern and Gladys soon followed their oldest sister’s lead. The remaining daughter, Myrtle, who was my father’s age, loved both her new stepmother and stepbrother. The teenaged stepsons, Ralph and Glenn, took after their father. They hated my dad because he had been an only child with a mother all to himself. The remaining step-son, Everett, died in 1926. My father rarely spoke of him, except to say, “He died too young.”
Early in the marriage they lived in western Nebraska. One day the boys roped my dad and dragged him behind a horse through cactus patches. “I never cried. Mom pulled the needles out of my bottom and back with a pair of pliers. I didn’t cry then either. I never let them have that satisfaction.” His voice remained flat as he told the first part of the story, but cracked when he said. “You know, my own mother didn’t say anything to Dad Hecker or to the boys.”
A high school teacher offered to send him to college and pay his expenses. My father wanted to go. “Mom and Dad Hecker listened politely. The last thing he said was, ‘A brilliant mind like his shouldn’t go to waste.'”
Widow Chrisman & Her Son, circa early 1900s, Missouri, photo © 2009, Bob Chrisman. All rights reserved.
“Mom answered as soon as he finished, didn’t even take time to mull it over. ‘None of the other kids went to college. Len doesn’t need to go either.’ It wouldn’t have cost them anything. I left the room because I was so mad at her.”
Her decision doomed my dad to a lifetime of farm labor and blue collar jobs. He worked at a dairy. He worked in a foundry, a meat packing plant, and finally in a grain mill. He never fit in with his fellow workers. He read too much, thought too much.
My father met my mother in the mid-1930’s. She lived down the street from his parents. The two became friends. In the late 1930’s he traveled to Oregon to pick fruit because local jobs didn’t exist. His traveling companions were his future brothers-in law. He wrote letters to my mother. She saved them, called them “love letters” even though they contained no obvious expressions of love, other than “Love, Len.”
I asked my mother why she married him. At that time, he had been bedridden for five years. “Did you love him?”
She dodged the question. “I promised myself that I would marry someone like my dad.”
“Was Daddy like him?”
“No, he was nothing like my father. I felt sorry for Len. He needed me.” I cringed. My heart hurt. She hadn’t loved my father. I didn’t ask any more questions because I didn’t want to know the answers.
My Father Dressed For A Tom Thumb Wedding, circa early 1900's, Missouri, photo © 2009, Bob Chrisman. All rights reserved.
In 1942, my sister was born. My father loved her. She was his special child.
In 1943 his stepfather died, but not before he secured a promise from his wife to watch over Ralph. My father never understood why she agreed to put up with someone who had treated her so rudely, a man who cussed and swore about everything. Maybe she felt sorry for him because his vision was so severely impaired. Whatever the reason, she took care of him until her death 32 years later in 1975.
In 1952 I arrived. Unexplainably, my mother laid sole claim to me. She excluded my sister and father from taking care of me. I was her child. The possession of my life had begun.
For the first five years I slept next to my parents’ bed in a crib, then on a tiny rollaway bed. Our four-room house didn’t have any extra rooms. My father added two rooms, moved my sister to a new bedroom and moved me into her old room.
He lived his early life abandoned and betrayed by the people who loved him or should have loved him. He had no protector, no father. Long after he died I complained to my mother about the kind of father he had been. “Don’t be so hard on him. He never learned to be a father because he never had one himself.” My father and I never had a chance to have a normal father-son relationship. That’s all the truth I know for now.
About Bob: Bob Chrisman is a Kansas City, Missouri writer who frequently writes memoir about his mother, her three sisters, and their influence on his life. This is Part II of a series of three about his father. Part I, My Father’s Witness, was published on red Ravine in August. Bob’s other red Ravine posts include Aunt Annie’s Scalloped Oysters, Hands, Growing Older, Goat Ranch, Stephenie Bit Me, Too, The Law Of Threes, and In Memoriam.
redravine.wordpress.com 
I received an email from my sister with a correction in the date of marriage of my grandmother and her second husband. They were married on March 29, 1922. My father would have been 8 years old. Not that it would have made much of a difference, but I thought I would clarify that fact.
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You are also bearing witness to yourself, Bob. You are a very brave man.
Seems like H.T. ruptured more than his gall bladder in 1914. Also, I pictured you being dragged behind a horse through cactus patches. All the silence and pain cascading down into the sweet heart of the child in the crib or rollaway bed next to a parents’ bed.
This is a painful read.
Something to consider: I don’t think the opening paragraphs of this story are needed. The rest of the piece shows us your truth or lack of knowledge about it without you telling us.
That is minor compared to the courage you are mustering to confront the memories of your father. The photos of seeming innocence were particularly heartbreaking next to to the written flashes of violence and abuse.
This is tough stuff, Bob. Keep going. I am so very proud of you.
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Flannista, thanks for the comments. I toyed with how to start the second piece which brought up more emotion than the first one. I wanted to ease people into it, to warn readers that I don’t have evidence to support my “testimony” and don’t know the “truth”. It was like a disclaimer of sorts. Thanks for stopping in.
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You still planning to meld this all together — the three pieces into one longer one?
And you’re welcome, of course. Always a pleasure and a gift.
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Don’t know where it’s gong yet. I have the third installments finished, but pull it up on the computer to edit it. yb & QM suggested I see what comments came in as a result of this post before finalizing the last piece in the series. It will cover my life with my father and is perhaps the most emotional of the pieces when I read it, but I have those feelings to deal with.
We have discussed a fourth piece about what I have learned in this process. Believe me, I have learned a lot. We’ll see.
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Bless your dad’s heart. Really. To have to blend in with the Hecker family and to have a couple of just plain ol’ nasty brothers and no advocate, no protector–I just can’t imagine how harsh a life that was for a young boy. It breaks my heart thinking of it.
And then the blind brushstroke of equity–no calling out of any one’s individuality, their talents and passions. His spirit was crushed so long ago. My comment to QM after I read this was that it made sense to me that he was the father you describe in your first piece. This second piece about his young life jibes with the everything I gleaned from your writing about your father.
It also made me realize how powerful memoir is, in that it can give a whole sense of a person. Going back and sharing this history helps me fill in more of the puzzle of a human’s life, and in doing so, humanizes him. And me.
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Thanks for your words, yb. It sets the stage for the third piece which is a more detailed story of what I knew of him from experience. No more history, but a look at what life was like growing up with him. It means the world to me when my stories communicate my feelings to other people who read the words.
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Hi Bob – I actually like the way you opened this piece. I like the gentleness of it, the humility. I also think that when you put all the pieces of this together the opening will fit well with the whole story. I think you should keep it.
This was painful to read, brave to write. I could hardly bear reading about the cactus torture. Poor Len, so many forces aligned against him his whole life. So little love, so little acknowledgment of who he was. No one saw him, not ever.
Except now, you do.
The kindness and depth of understanding that Len so badly needed exists in you, Bob. I am very touched by how you portray him here in this piece, offering him across the distance of time, across the boundary of the father-son relationship, some recognition of how barren, how cruel, the world was for him and how it broke him down.
I want to read the next part.
one small thing, in the paragraph that begins “in 1943 his stepfather died,” I got a little confused about who Ralph was, had to look back to remind myself, and also was confused about who it was that promised to take care of him. Len’s mother? And Ralph was blind? I don’t think you mentioned that before. Take a look at the paragraph – see what you think.
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I see the confusion. Let me explain. Ralph was the son who had a severe visual impairment. That condition did not keep him from farming, driving tractors, and cruising down the highway at 50 mph. He was cantakerous on his best days. He loved my sister very much. She got along with him and I didn’t want him anywhere near.
Thanks for the comments.
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I take it Ralph was one of the ones who tied your father to a horse and pulled him through cactus, yes?
BTW, I had meant to ask you more about your mother’s claim on you. I realize you already state in this piece that it was an inexplicable sort of attachment, but do you have any theories on this? Surely it must have contributed to the eventual strain in your relationship with your father.
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I am assuming that Ralph participated. He and Grandma Hecker lived together all of their lives on a farm outside St. Joseph and then he forced her to move way out in the country. An odd relationship. I know my father resented the way his mother had looked after Ralph for all hose years and had not looked out for him.
Theories on my mother’s claim on me? I have theories, lots of theories. She had lost a baby when my sister was about 4 years old. I found out about that in 1968 when we ordered our birth certificates so we could go to Canada for the World’s Fair in Montreal. When I asked her about the baby, she said, “It was a miscarriage.” But that’s not what the birth certificate said. Her sisters couldn’t (wouldn’t?) tell me anything because they said they didn’t know. Maybe her claiming of me was a reaciton to the loss of that baby.
Maybe she had given up on my father by the time I was born and I took his place. I don’t know.
Yes, it contributed a great deal to the strain in my relationship with him. You’ll see a little more of what happened in the next installment.
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Wow. Stunning. Excellent writing. Even though I always know to expect great writing from you, this is exceptional. Truly, you blow me away.
I want to hear more about your mother. Reading this makes me picture your mother as an aggressive plant, overgrowing you and blocking out the sun.
Wow again. Thank you for your bravery and talent.
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Bob, you write with such a talent that blows me away! That with what always comes out in the end, if we ever get there, can be most surprising. I’ve discovered so many things & feelings about myself while I continue to write own memoir.
I think the words that struck me the most personally while reading this are: “I didn’t ask any more questions because I didn’t want to know the answers.”
Remarkable writing, Bob! You have the gift! D
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Thanks, D. I must give the credit for the impetus to write these pieces to yb who first asked the question that led to them and to yb & QM for their support. It hasn’t been easy to do.
Would enjoy seeing your memoir when it’s finished.
Neola, thanks again for your praise. I appreciate all of the kind words.
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I know it’s been a painful and difficult journey, Bob, opening up this whole question of your father, and at times I worry that it’s been too painful. I remember sitting those many weeks with you over the course of a year, was it three years ago?, and your mother was in her final years. You wrote of her often, and I guess listening all those times, a question might have come up about your father. What was he like?
You might be surprised to know that after I read the first essay, which you sent to me well before we published it, I had formed an impression, a misimpression actually, that your father must have been cruel or abusive. You know, in the absence of information, we tend to fill in the blanks with our imaginations. But what I have learned in just one more essay is that he was not what I would call cruel or abusive, but that he was, as Jude puts it, broken. Disspirited. Not so much a victim, but rather a product of his generation and his upbringing and his family’s (and the larger society in which they lived) mores or ways. It strikes me how stoic he and your mother were, how stoic his own mother was.
And yet you don’t strike me as being stoic. You reach out, you divulge. You don’t hold it in. And so the questioning on the part of the reader (this reader, anyway) continues. How does one break the cycle? How did you end up so different? Maybe that is the fourth essay, or at least a part of it.
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Bob, I agree with yb in that written words are in the mind of the reader. The imagination does take over. That’s what makes you such a great writer! It’s the little things, that might not seem little to you, that make a world of difference to those of us who read your words. You are a brave soul, Bob, whether you realize it or not. I don’t think I have what it takes to share my memoir with others, a journey not many of us are so willing to take. D
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Bob,
What strikes me first, and makes a lasting impression throughout the whole story, is the expression (or lack of) on your Papa’s face in those old photos. There isn’t a smile to be seen and that’s very telling to me. It makes me sad for the lost boy who never got his chance at happiness and for the man who never learned to create it on his own terms.
He was a reader, which was rare for kids back then, where money was tight and kids worked to help their Families. To me that means he was sensitive, possible creative in some area, but he never got his chance to find out.
Many children, without a champion to protect them or someone to look up to, have a hard time becoming a good person, parent or spouse. And even sadder, is watching it perpetuate from generation to generation. Luckily, there are still individuals, strong enough to break the barrier and become someone that people (like me) can look up to. You did.
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Bob, thank you so much for letting me know this was posted. This story makes me feel so sad for your dad – that you never got to know him well while he was alive, and to discover all the abandonment, all the loss, the lack of love he suffered. The thing this most reminded me are those genograms we learned about when hubby was in that Master’s program on counseling. So often, there are emotional patterns we subconsciously respond to – also thinking of the Imago theory of relationships. Seems to be a pattern appearing in your story, one of people partnering due to, or motivated by, misplaced sympathy, pity – rather than doing something because they love that partner. It can be so hard to look at this stuff, but so often it is a tremendous help to finally feel something like understanding and empathy for those earlier generations. By examining these lives, and chronicling their experiences, you help bring worth to it all – to help all of us be more sensitive to each other. And above all, the treatment seems even, perhaps kind. Don’t know why I keep thinking of Greek philosophers, but I’ll give you all the credit!
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” (Plato)
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates)
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yb: your comment is stunning and to the point. The questions in your last paragraph are trenchant.
I, too, remember wondering about Bob’s father after listening to so many stories about his mother. Initially, I assumed for that Bob had been raised and/or adopted by a single mother.
Pondering Bob’s journey with his father, I was inspired to find five photos of my father as a child that he reprinted and sent to each of his daughters at the end of last year. I plan to fan them out and see what words emerge. The combination of the photos with Bob’s words is quite powerful, as anevuestudio points out.
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yb, those questions again. I’m almost afraid to go where they will lead. Because you don’t have access to the interior me, you can’t know how stoic I find myself. I can chat with almost anyone about almost anything, but I always feel as if a part of me hides in a quiet place in my heart afraid to come out into the world. Maybe other people feel the same way. I don’t know.
D., when I write I want to connect with the readers because what’s the point of writing without that connection. Writing memoir for me has not been about sharing it with other people, but about making sense of a sometimes nonsensical past. I would encourage you to write your memoir if for no one else other than yourself. I’ll warn you that it isn’t always easy, pretty, or pleasant, but you will learn something about yourself.
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anuevuestudio, thanks for the comments. I think my father was a sensitive soul who continued in the face of adversity to a point and then surrendered to the overwhelming effects of disappointment.
He loved to read everything he could find. He would buy boxes of books at yard sales and then read them all. If he could have found a job where all he did was read, he would have been in heaven.
Terri, thanks. The quote from Plato says volumes to me. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” I remind myself of that constantly when dealing with other people. We tend to live out our patterns with the greater world around us. I know I do.
And in the next installment we will discover how many of those patterns I stepped into to play a part in the family drama. The third part was probably the hardest to write.
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Flannista & yb, I wrote about my father many times. In looking back through my writing practice notebooks for information on the memoir of the last five years of my mother’s life…hopefully a book at sometime. I discovered many writes about my dad and what had happened between us.
During the intensive where we wrote together, my father had faded into the background and my mother was fading fast. The decline of just an unnatural force and powerful source in my life affected me in ways I’m still discovering. I think that’s why you all heard so much about her. She had become the focus of my life. My father, who I didn’t want to think about, had disappeared into the cells of my brain.
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Bob,
I love how you titled your grandma “The Widow Chrisman”—it’s so Mark Twainish. Oh, wait! You’re from Missouri…no wonder. And what is a Tom Thumb Wedding?
This piece leaves me a little speechless…the choices everyone made, the loneliness, the taunting by meaner, bigger boys, the missed chances. How does anyone survive these things? I think what I like best about this, Bob, is that you lay it all out on the table with no judgment. We can’t so quickly dismiss anyone, or tie a neat bow on anything else. Like Natalie told us so often, holding the good and bad in people.
The writing you do about your family is consistently alive, deep, and a great gift to readers. Keep going. We’ll keep listening.
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Bob, when I think of the stoicism of some people among our parents’ generation and of some people of a certain heritage or part of the country, the stoicism is solid, through and through. There is no differentiation between inside oneself and outside oneself. That’s how it seems to me, at any rate. Along the same lines, you seem to be cut from a different cloth than your parents. You drop the veil long enough to reveal yourself to others. That strikes me as a big opening in the armor.
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Teri, thanks for the kind words. Apparently during the 1920’s people held Tom Thumb weddings where all of the parts of the wedding party were played by children (under the age of 10). Some of these events were lavish productions and some were simpler entertainments. General Tom Thumb married the lovely Lavinia Warren in 1863. The press went wild. Sixty some odd years later, people still put them on. My dad was in one. I think he played the groom but I don’t know for sure.
yb, our grandparents and parents grew up during very hard times when people didn’t give into the horribleness of life. You faced it and went on OR you gave up eventually and died. Life was never fair. Death was a common occurrence. Everyone had it hard so you weren’t special because of what horrible thing happened to you.
Then somewhere along the way that changed. We felt free to talk about our troubles and to get help for them. Maybe I’m a product of those times.
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Bob, I’m just catching up on the stream of conversation on your piece. I think there is a lot of truth in what you say on your last comment. We have the time and luxury of being able to take time to reflect on and examine our lives — something many of our grandparents may not have had. It’s also more acceptable these days.
I’m so happy to be a part of your exploration of the relationships with your mother and father. I remember you writing about your mother in Taos near the end of her life and being moved by that. Now I get the backstory of your father and, like ybonesy says, it rounds out the picture.
Memoir can be so powerful in revealing difficult sides of family relationships in new and creative ways. Writing these pieces in series and publishing them here allows us a glimpse into your memories.
You know what the introduction reminded me of when I was preparing this post a few nights ago? It was a conversation you and I were having in the comments on a past red Ravine post. It was about the nature of memoir and you were saying something to the effect of how it’s not really the truth because there are many versions of the truth.
And then I was saying how that’s what makes memoir so wonderful — it’s based on memories, not truth. It is our memories, the way we recount them — for us, it is the truth of our past. But perhaps not for all. Thanks so much for being our guest.
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Just a couple of other things I forgot to mention. I’m glad the question was asked about the Tom Thumb wedding. I wanted to hear the explanation, too. Also, when I was preparing this post, it suddenly hit me that you were writing about your grandmother as well as your father. I really like the photo of her with her hand in her skirt pocket, arm around your Dad who is standing on the steps. It made me want to get inside her heart, her brain, and find out why she turned away from your father when she remarried instead of protecting him and standing up for him. Was she scared of losing her new husband? Was it financial? Did something change toward your father or was she always that way with him? I had all these questions come up about your grandmother.
Maybe it’s because I write about my grandmother in memoir and she was a powerful influence in my life. Yet once I heard one of my siblings recall that they had a more difficult relationship with her than I did. A totally different version of who she was as a person, as a grandmother. All of these pieces make up the person she was. People are multi-faceted.
I’ve started to wonder when I read more memoir — what would people say about me and my life if they examined it the way I go back and examine my parents, my grandparents, and wrote down those stories, wrote a book, or a memoir. I’m guessing that none of us would look particularly handsome in terms of the examined life. I’ve made so many mistakes. What would it be like to have them be in the spotlight in a book? I write my own stories to make sense out of my life, out of generations of history. I love memoir because the stories are worth telling. The good, the bad, the ugly, the unusually heroic. I’m looking forward to your next installments.
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QM, my maternal grandmother was my favorite. She loved me unconditionally which is odd considering how my father perceived her treatment of him (abandonment of him). Maybe she did treat him as coldly as he remembered.
It is my understanding that the marriage was not financially beneficial to my grandmother. H.T. had left her comfortable. She worked part-time as a switchboard operator (I have a vague memory of my mother telling me that). She didn’t need the extra money. I think she wanted to be a mother to Dad Hecker’s children because they had been so long without a mother. Mr. Hecker spent her money.
My Aunt Gladys (one of my father’s step-sisters) told my mom and I a story one morning after we had finished eating breakfast. When they were little, the kids would sit around the table and play a wishing game. Each child had one wish. One night she wished for a second dress.
She only had one and she washed that one every night after school and sometimes it wasn’t dry the next day but she had to wear it anyway. She made her wish and her father backhanded her off her chair and told her she should be grateful for the one dress she had.
She sobbed when she finished the story and kept asking, “Why did he do that? It was only a game.” Over and over as my mother put her arm around her shoulders and hugged her. That was a lesson in how those incidents in childhood can hang onto us for a lifetime. She was almost 90 at that time she told the story.
Maybe my grandmother saw how much they needed a maternal presence in the house.
I don’t know much about my grandmother during the time just she and my father lived together. They never talked about it. I’m sure that loosing your first husband suddenly and without any warning shocked her plus she was a new mother with a 7 month old. She may have shut down for awhile or for the rest of her life. I don’t know.
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Bob, this is strong writing and powerfully presented with the addition of family photos. I look forward to reading your next post. I am haunted by the ending. You wrote,
“He lived his early life abandoned and betrayed by the people who loved him or should have loved him. He had no protector, no father.” and later,
“My father and I never had a chance to have a normal father-son relationship.”
Though not in the same way, it seems that history has repeated itself in separating father and son. Is it “nurture” or “nature” at work in your history, or some combination of both?
The more I’ve learned of my mother’s childhood, the more I’ve understood about my own. To learn so much made my parents really human, which was hard, because as a child I often saw them as super-human. It’s the death of a dream, of sorts, or at least of a fantasy.
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breathepeace, I would say it’s a little of both. I have come to believe that the patterns are established and we tend to fall into them. I understand about wanting parents to be superhuman and coming to a realization that they are people like me with the same flaws.
The breaking of the patterns established long ago appears to be the most difficult thing to do. I see it all around me in the lives of other people. In the third piece of the series you will see what impact his had on mine.
Thanks for stopping by.
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I guess one of the things we can all take away from this is the fact that our decisions are often far-reaching. We aren’t deciding just for ourselves and for the moment. We’re effecting many lives for many years.
If only…
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Thanks for commenting Corina. I think I will take the last two sentences of your first paragraph, print them on a piece of paper, and hang them over my computer. They are so true.
When someone would say, “If only…” the mother of a good friend would interrupt, “If only frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their asses when they jumped.” That saying caught me by surprise the first time I heard it. Now I hear her voice in my head when I hear anyone say, “If only…”
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Wow Bob…moved to tears again by your words. What you were having to endure all those years. What Uncle Len had to endure! I had/have such fond memories of Grandma Hecker, and going to the farm with you all on Sundays. There’s so much I never knew, huh? I’m so, so sorry.
My admiration and respect for you continues to grow. You’re such a gifted individual, you always have been. To read your work makes me realize there’s a whole new layer of talent and artistic ability coming to the surface.
I’m looking forward to the final work in this series.
With pride and love,
Randy
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Randy, thanks for stopping by and reading the piece. There are lots of things neither one of us know about each other’s families. The Patton girls didn’t walk about what went on in their families much, or not to anyone other than each other (which I doubt).
Everything that happened to my father made him who he was in all his defects and strengths. Same for me and you. We survived it all.
Grandma Hecker was the only person in my life who I felt loved me unconditionally…something she couldn’t show to my father.
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[…] About Bob: Bob Chrisman is a Kansas City, Missouri writer who frequently writes memoir about his mother, her three sisters, and their influence on his life. My Life With Dad is Part III in his exploration of a trilogy series about his father. Part I, My Father’s Witness, was published on red Ravine in August, followed in September by Part II, Bearing Witness. […]
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Good story, excellent writing style. Compelling characters. I like it and hope to see the additions. Keep writing. You won’t regret it.
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Thanks for the compliment, Graham. Easy to write these pieces when the compelling chracters are your family members. Hope you have a chance to read the other pieces I’ve posted about my family.
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