Read Online Snow Mountain Passage by James D Houston - Free Book Online

just below the surface. As a wave lifts, the kelp appears like the broad shadow of some great bird flying through the fog. But you look up and there is no bird anywhere. There is just the shadow, the ghostly shape that seems to slide across the water as the wave moves on toward shore and rises and curls over and breaks and disappears.
    That’s what held me this morning, the way they disappear.
    I couldn’t tell you how long I stood there, watching the waves, each one its own thing and finely edged, moving through the silky water, shining, leaping into a noisy burst of spray, then all of a sudden, it was over. It was just … gone.
    You have to wonder at this, at the way it disappears. After so much buildup and clatter, it comes down to a slick of foam oozing toward your feet. And then not even that.
    What I mean is, you get to my age you have to ponder such things. When you’re younger, of course, looking at the Pacific Ocean, chances are you just dive in. You get past eighty you can stand on the beach till noon if you take a mind, or you can sit here on the porch and watch the water all day long.
    It has sent me back again to the time of the crossing and the day our world would change forever. I can see now that a big wave had been rolling and rising and gathering force. After papa killed John Snyder it all came clattering down around us, and something disappeared. I could not have said quite what. But before you knew what happened, something you imagined would always be there was simply gone, sucked right on down into the desert sand.
    I had never seen papa hurt the way Snyder hurt him. When we dressed his wounds he was close to weeping, but trying not to let us know. His head was bowed. I had to turn away from the gashes in his scalp. When I touched his neck I felt his whole body tremble. My sister finally broke down, crying for all three of us, since papa would not let us see him cry, and me, I couldn’t. I felt like running. I could see us running along the trail ahead of the wagon party and making our escape before whatever was coming next. I did not know what that would be, but I already felt it rolling toward us.
    That night after the opposing sides had backed off a ways, after we had fixed dinner and cleaned up the camp and made ready for bed, I saw papa walk out alone toward the riverbank. I was filled with the greatest fear I’d known up to that time. Grandma used to sing a song, a mournful ballad about a fellow who jumped into a river and drowned. I thought that’s what he was going to do. I didn’t know the Humboldt right along there was only two feet deep. I slid out of my bedroll and followed him down to the bank. At that hour, with everything as quiet as it only gets in the desert, you could hear the water slithering along like a snake on its belly, that slow, quiet hissing.
    When he saw me next to him, he reached out his arm and drew me close, and I asked him if he was going to go away.
    “I don’t know, Patty.”
    “I saw what happened, papa. Johnny started it.”
    His voice cracked when he said, “That he did, darlin’, that he did.”
    “If you go away, I’m going with you.”
    “Mama’s going to need you more than ever, darlin’.”
    “Milt and Virginia and James Junior can take care of mama all right. But who will take care of you?”
    “I’ll do just fine.”
    “Please take me with you, papa.”
    “I didn’t say for sure I was going anywhere, did I?”
    “But if you do.”
    He picked me up and held me and pointed toward the east where the sky was glowing as if a forest had caught fire somewhere beyond the nearest mountain. Then the first glint of moon showed at a ridgetop, and we watched it swell up, round and yellow and nearly full, and spread its silver light across the long, long desert.
    He and mama stayed up talking half the night, whispering under the camp tent. The next morning John Snyder was buried in the sand in a shroud, with one board below his body and one above, to