OCR Text |
Show 247 all will be well. In her next remark we get a clue that Bard may have plural wives: he wants to get "Clara and children" located in some town in the county so that he can "look after and be with all of his dear ones." Family records indicate that daughter Ellis' husband, Saint Joseph White Musser, had four wives and that though there was a divorce from his first wife shortly before Ellis joined the family, at least one of the other two bore children while Ellis was producing hers. We have pondered possible reasons for Bard's tribulations but now see that they could have been rooted in his marital status in that post-manifesto time. Did Musser also have problems of the same nature? Speculation runs wild in this area, for people were extremely careful not to allude to those matters. Of Bard himself, Ellis tells Nellie that she wishes it were possible for his sister to see him and to feel his spirit for he is trying so hard to "live his religion" and it produces a great spirituality. One of the very few references by Ellis to her husband in these years occurs when she is seventy-one and he is eighty-two. It is poignant in that it implies the children are the source of her information about him, that they seldom write to one another and even less often see each other. I am so sorry your father has been feeling so poorly...It is just as dear Richard says-after 82 life is ebbing!... but somehow I cannot think of myself as being old and passing away at that age-I feel so well and full of force |