The old man spoke angrily. "I can't get no help out here. Jack used a say, 'Ennis del Mar,' he used a say, I'm goin a bring him up here one a these days and we'll lick this damn ranch into shape.' . . . So he says, But like most a Jack's ideas it never come to pass."
I don't know how it could be any plainer what Annie was trying to get across. The old man was pissed he couldn't get any help, jack kept promising to come back with someone to help but he never did it. If the old man was that homophobic does anyone here really believe Jack would be telling his father he was bringing his boyfriend to live and work there? Now, as I said in another post, I am sure the old man wasn't about to celebrate Jack and Ennis's 25 wedding anniversary but it sure seems to me all he really wanted was the help, no matter where it came from.
That was my take on it, and it made the motif of missed opportunities all the more tragic.
Twist Sr. wouldn't have been pleasant to deal with; but if Jack and Ennis either built a cabin or fixed up an outbuilding - standard practice on a ranch for a "hired hand", which Ennis would have ostensibly been - they wouldn't even have been living in the house and iit wouldn't have been difficult for them to avoid the father most of the time. Ranch work is demanding, and a place that run-down, they could have pretty much made their own life with occasional shared meals in the house as a concession to Jack's mother.
And his statements made it pretty clear that the deterioration of the ranch was really bugging him; I'd assume it had been his own father's ranch and he knew it would end with him. Once Ennis and Jack did start to make improvements, Twist Sr. would never have been a nice guy but he might have become somewhat easier to live with. And as long as either parent was alive and living on the ranch, they would have been fairly safe from outside attacks as long as they used some common sense: the arrangement, to the outside world, would have been two aging parents whose son had moved back to help run the ranch, plus a hired man. Or Ennis could even have been passed off as a nephew or cousin.
But IMO it wasn't a matter of Jack reneging on a promise, although Twist Sr. would have no way of knowing that. Both in the "it can be this way always" conversation and the meeting after the divorce, Ennis shoots down any idea of their living together. And while the dangers are very real, the real stumbling block is his internalized fear and self-loathing. That would never have allowed him to live in a situation where two third parties knew what their relationship was, and Jack apparently realized that.
