White Mountain Red

There's blood buried in these hills. I've seen it with my own. The spirit of the mountain, bleeds the ill gotten man. Spoken in the guarded tongues abroad is a haunting quip, "True man's greed be told, runs red, not gold." The truth behind the coarse saying towers above the crude flavorless rhyme. I've seen the river of red, seeping in the cool dirt core. It calls, beacons the man forward until his hands become bone and his soul is bare.

My Pa had bloodshot eyes since before my memory began. His stare had been stoic frosted with a soulless gourd. He stood borderless and empty, a man who had nothing, wanted nothing and was nothing. Wasted was the space I knew only as Pa. This living coffin of a man heard a tale that flourished inside him igniting the purpose pyre inside his heart. Gold be out west, striking rich in the mountains of California. The disease of gold blossomed within the capsules of his veins. Prosperity became this shell's destiny.

Pa panned his family across the frontier. A daughter, six in age, barren in speech since a sickness struck her at the age of four. Meek she lavished in sorrow while the reaper would seldomly rap at her door reminding her of his presence. Her name escapes me, brisk was her pestilence in memory, a stark steaming sore. Pa rinsed the frontier with our presence, my Ma, sister and I. He coated the land with our smut of greed using a rushed uncontrolled motion, unpropper and came with a toll. With the panning blight of this hollow father figure we as a family sloshed the nourishing grain of commonality to the wind pursuing the bright nugget of hope.

My Ma, a thin frail twig shadowed in a forest of oak. Melancholy she was in demeanor and spoke with a creed of calming soothing peace. This trait was a learned one, for her motherly duties it deemed less extravagant but used none of the less. I looked down upon my Ma, a tempest of weakness.

I, thirteen year old Jebediah. Jeb is what they called me, my family, maybe friends if I had some. I was a stout eager young man, obedient. I honored thy father, tolerated thy mother and condemned thy sister. I was what I believed normality was. White Mountain, it has now been called, was our final destination as a family unit. A layered wilting wood heap of a homestead and a simplistic "X" marked in the sand, this was the beginning of my Pa's dream. This "X" marked his future, his hopes, his sense of being but this "X" marked forever, a loss, the grave of a broken household swept away by the sin of greed, a pursuit of grandeur. With all of this said, let me tell you what made the White mountain Red.