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Show DIFFERENCES WITH FATHER Chapter III Although loving and generous, Father was decisive. You knew where you stood with him. You tried to obey him because he was fearsome when angry. Nevertheless in the four Nebraska years he and I had a few fallings-out. Now for example take an occurrence the year I was six. My grandmother having died, Mother journeyed to St. Ansgar to help grandfather both for the funeral and to adjust to sad loneliness in the house in town where he retired from his Cedar River farm. El Vera stayed with Father, I accompanied Mother to Iowa. After the sorrowful ceremonies my spirits rebounded. There were adventures along the river with new friends. But the center of my life was the towering form of Mother's father- He filled me with awe because he appeared like a giant, full six feet four with military erectness despite his white hair and beard. Before he came to America he'd served his two years in the Norwegian army. When the U.S. Civil War broke out the Governor of Iowa commissioned him a lieutenant in the Cedar Valley Rangers. This was a militia unit organized on the north border of the state to help protect Iowa when the blue-clad U.S. dragoons had been withdrawn from the frontier to fight against the Confederacy. Indians were threatening to regain their lost lands in Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa. But I could visualize grandfather in even a more heroic role than Indian fighter, One Sunday Mother paused before the "new" Lutheran Church, which looked like an ancient stone building to me. She pointed up to the top of the steeple at the big brass globe with a lightning rod above it. "Grandfather was the only man in town strong enough and nervy enough to carry that heavy ball and the rest to the top and fix them in place," she told me. After that I pictured grandfather as a white-haired steeplejack, his beard blowing in a wind, defying death at the top of the spire. |