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Show in my father's house/ 265 But the sale had an effect: suddenly our lives were like jackstraws thrown and come down helter-skelter, tangled up with one another. My father had invested the remaining white house money and whatever else he could muster in some Montana acreage - beautiful pine-sentried, lake-studded land which we came to call "the ranch" though no real ranching went on there. Initially, he wanted to move us all there - to cluster his families together under only the eyes of God and wilderness where we could forget about the law. But the mothers dissented. How would he keep his practice going? they queried. Who would pay monthly mortgages if all were stranded in the middle of nowhere, unable to get work? Besides, they liked living in the city. They had learned to like earning their own money, making their own way. In the end, only my father's younger families with the mothers who could not work were moved to the ranch. The ranch became my father's major preoccupation. The mothers had cringed when he invested his money and all the Priesthood's as well in one hundred and sixty acres of Montana land. "It's been his dream for years," Aunt Sarah explained to us. Ever since he was a boy and they had to leave his father's ranch in Canada, he's wanted to go back to ranching. Before it was his dream, it^was his father's. Ranching's in the Allred blood like the Principle. No use trying to squelch it." Aunt Elsa was the first to live there, and Aunt Rachel soon followed with her brood - those still at home, for her three oldest girls were married with babies of their own, and her second son, Lynn, had drowned in the large clear pond about two hundred yards from Aunt Elsa's house. My father accepted the death with the same equanimity |