Mount Terminus (5 page)

And when he had begged for his wife's forgiveness more times than Bloom could bear to hear, when the trimmings seemed to cover the vast surface of the lake, the sun started its descent behind the range. His father gathered some rocks, and with the brush Bloom had collected, he started a fire to keep Bloom warm and told him to eat the bread and meat, to drink some water. He told him he would be watching over him through the night and throughout the following day.

But where are you going? asked Bloom.

His father told him he would see soon enough. Don't wander off, he said. And don't follow me. He handed Bloom his spyglass, then lifted the juniper saplings in his arms, and through the eyepiece of the small telescope, Bloom watched him climb.

The elder Rosenbloom climbed high up the escarpment above the lake, and there, under the gnarled limbs of mature trees of the same variety he carried, Bloom could see him dig into the rocky earth with his spade. He watched him submerge the trees into their holes, cover over their roots, and sprinkle them with water, at which time Bloom could see no more, as his father's figure and his trees were soon shrouded in darkness. For the entirety of the night his father didn't return, for the entirety of the night the blue flame of the yahrzeit candle burned, and when the sun rose in the morning, Bloom discovered him sitting between the fledgling trees, and he discovered, too, high up the escarpment on the opposite side of the lake, three dark figures standing tall under the shade of a boulder. For the entirety of the following morning, Bloom sat between them and his father without moving. For the entirety of that afternoon, the men stood under cover of the overhang, watching Jacob. For the entirety of the afternoon, Jacob sat under buzzards perched in heraldic poses.

The birds, unmoving and silent, clutched at pale blue berries with their talons, Jacob's only cover the shadows cast from their outstretched wings. In the desert heat, Bloom watched his father fast and pray, and stare beyond the grand deposit of lake water, up the mouth of the river, whose bounty Bloom could see evidenced through his scope by the meandering lines cut through the plains, in the oblong curves etched into the earth from its overflow, in the argent veins of irrigation canals running to plots growing high and green. He imagined his father fortifying his weakening body with images of ice melt flowing from the mountains beyond, with thoughts of the rushing cascade falling through the gorge of a volcanic crater. How else could he sustain himself if not by envisioning the way in which the waters fell down steep cliffs into the maw of jagged rock? He must have seen it streaming through canyons in his mind, rounding its tortuous route through the scrub and bramble, pooling into the graben over which he sat. Over the water, onto the expanse of the panorama, Jacob stared for the entirety of the day. Not until the arc of the sun once again kissed the summit of the distant range did he lift his weary body and begin his descent down the trail he'd yesterday negotiated upward.

When the elder Rosenbloom returned to the campsite, he asked Bloom if he wouldn't mind packing up. Bloom did as his father requested. He rolled up his bedding into his tarp, and collected and stored the lanterns. Jacob, meanwhile, watered and fed the mare, and drank some water and ate some food himself, and when Bloom had finished his task, Jacob climbed into his seat and took hold of the reins; and when Bloom joined him, he said, Father?

Yes, my dear?

Did you see them?

Did I see who?

The men. Up there, he said, pointing, sitting opposite you.

Yes, I saw them.

Who are they?

They are men.

What sort of men?

Men whose interests happen to coincide with ours for the time being. Nothing more.

Bloom looked up to where the three dark figures had been biding their time, and he asked his father what those interests were. Jacob said they were none of Bloom's concern. It is not for you to worry about, he said. The worry is mine, and mine alone. They are only men, he repeated for Bloom. They will do us no harm. This I promise you.

*   *   *

Some weeks later over breakfast, Jacob said to Bloom, You are lonely, my dear.

To this Bloom said, No, father. We, together, are all that I need.

The following day, the elder Rosenbloom traveled to Mission Santa Theresa de Avila, and hired from its refectory two sisters to be their cook and maid. Before they arrived, Jacob told his son he was never to say a cross word to their new cook. For a young woman of twenty-three, she had been through an ordeal a boy wouldn't understand, and he expected Bloom to treat her with the kindness of a pure heart even when he didn't feel like being kind.

The young woman Jacob referred to was Meralda, the elder sister, the larger and heartier of the two, the one more worn around the eyes. She possessed plump ankles and wrists, and had fingers like overstuffed sausages, which, in the first days she took up residence on the estate, she used to knead the boy's cheeks as she kneaded the dough she flattened into tortillas and shaped into loaves of bread. She would then stop and hold him firmly in her grip for a few moments, at which point a doleful expression overcame the corners of her mouth; her eyes moistened, and in that instant, Bloom found his nose buried in the smell of flour powdered about the heft of her breast. Any motherless child would have been fortunate to be embraced so tenderly. However, Bloom concluded, from the way Meralda would release him to gaze out through the kitchen's open shutters onto the sky, that her affection was meant for some boy other than him. To the sound of wood burning in the stove, to its crack and hiss, he watched her disappear into memory, and he, whose boyish frame prompted this reverie, became invisible to her.

Bloom was better disposed toward spending his time in the dim presence of Roya, who had been born into a chrysalis of silence almost four years to the day before he entered the world. Deaf and mute, she wandered with a somnambulist's gait from room to room without acknowledging Bloom was there observing her. Unlike Meralda, whose fleshy features readily displayed her most internal thoughts and feelings, Roya's youthful lineaments were more delicate and narrow and remained fixed in beatific remove. They hardly ever changed, and if they did, the changes were so subtle, Bloom could never be certain if what he saw wasn't an invention of his imagination. Each morning after breakfast, he trailed after her to watch her sweep aimlessly at surfaces with the bright green plumage of her feather duster. And when she had tucked away the corners of their beds, and had pressed and hung the elder Rosenbloom's shirts, she broke from her chores and sat in the courtyard with her feet submerged in the reflecting pool. Bloom would sit beside her, and together they would stare down at the ripples of water moving through the reflection of a crescent-shaped building terraced onto the shelf of a short, crescent-shaped mesa. Sometime, long ago, his father had told him, this dwelling had burned from within, and was now derelict and forbidden. For this reason, its shutters had been nailed tight, and its door fixed with a sturdy lock, its only dwellers brown lizards warting its stucco walls.

It was at the edge of the reflecting pool, some months after the sisters' arrival, that Roya presented to Bloom an object that would connect him to a part of his past about which he wouldn't have otherwise known. From a pocket in her skirt, she removed a folded piece of paper whose seams were thin and worn, then pulled at the corners one by one to reveal an ink drawing crafted with heavy lines Bloom recognized to be his mother's. It was a portrait of his father standing in the shadows of Mount Terminus's gate, looking very much as he appeared at present: drawn and longing and mournful. Bloom stared at the image for a time, trying to divine from the dark warrens composing his father's expression how this was possible.

Where did you find this? he asked Roya.

In the same manner with which she had presented the drawing to him, she folded it into a square and placed it back in her pocket. He expected this would be the extent to which she would answer a question she couldn't hear, but after she had dried her feet with the hem of her skirt and had pinched her toes into her shoes, she tugged on the collar of Bloom's shirt and began walking toward the house. He trailed behind her through the arcing shadows of the courtyard's loggia and followed her inside, up the stairs, along the landing. They passed Jacob's bedroom, and Bloom's, then entered the gallery, where Roya approached one of Rachel's paintings; one at whose vanishing point was a church on a hilltop, nearly all of it lost in a heavy mist, all for a muted yellow glow emanating from a window in its spire. She pulled away from the wall the bottom of its frame, retrieved the piece of paper from her pocket, and slipped it into a worn crevice between the canvas and the wooden slat. And then, as if nothing unusual at all had transpired, Roya went about her duties as if Bloom wasn't there.

Over dinner that evening, when Bloom set his mother's drawing down at the head of the table, his father, who wore the same expression as the one in the picture, nodded at the image—as if to say he already knew of its existence and knew where Bloom had found it. He then folded it over along its worn seams and slipped it into the inner pocket of his dinner jacket.

For a long time Jacob stared into steam rising up from a tureen of broth fogging the lusters of the dining room's chandelier, and, after this period of contemplation, he turned to his son and said with a thin smile all he was going to say. He said, It was a very long time ago.

Bloom wanted to know if the time in the past spent on Mount Terminus with his mother was a time like now, one filled with sorrow. But his father, anticipating a question, said, I will tell you more when you've become a man. The boy wasn't aware of what his face revealed, but whatever he had shown of his interior, of his hunger to know more about his mother and his father, Jacob said: I promise, my dear, you will know everything you need to know when you have grown.

Bloom didn't object. He knew his father's resolve well. He knew it was a futile endeavor to extract from him what he wanted with childish emotion, so he said, Yes, Father, when I have grown.

*   *   *

Bloom began to imagine, when he reclined in the library, or walked the dusty trails, or sat with her likenesses in the gardens, his mother observing him from across the room, or from somewhere ahead in the distance, or while sitting at the opposite end of a bench. And when he sat with Roya at the edge of the reflecting pool, he would wonder aloud about what might have occurred in his mother and father's life to have made them travel to the end of the world. Why, he asked more than once, would they willingly choose desolation? Bloom discovered on his nightstand, the morning after he had posed this question to Roya, a wooden cross with acorns engraved on the front and on the back a primitive figure of a whale. As soon as he dressed, he carried it to the garden, where he found his father standing on a ladder, narrowing the shape of his mother's face where it had grown plump in the cheeks.

Have we become Christians? he asked as he lifted the cross.

His father stepped down and took it from him, examined it, and then handed it back, saying, No, my dear, we have not become Christians.

Then why did you leave this beside my bed?

To which Jacob said as he climbed back onto the ladder, I'll have a talk with Meralda.

Bloom suspected it wouldn't have been Meralda who had left the cross. Indeed, he was certain it would have been Roya. But because he wanted to protect her from any discomfort she might feel in his father's presence, and because he hoped his silent companion would one day introduce him to something else belonging to his mother, he didn't want to say as much. So he said nothing. And having said nothing, he began to believe in the causality between his omission and the great number of objects that appeared beside his bed. The morning after he found the cross, he discovered next to his pillow a Latin Bible, its pages oxidized brown and illustrated with images intended for the eyes of a child. Soon, artifacts fashioned in the same style as the cross began to appear; such things as clay pots and dolls carved from oak, a leather pouch filled with charms, talismans shaped from polished bone.

Each morning these objects appeared, and each evening after Bloom had fallen asleep, they were taken from his possession. He tried to remain awake into the early hours of the morning, after his father had quietly drunk himself into unconsciousness, when he could sneak out of his room and follow Roya to wherever it was she retrieved these items. Every night he went in search of her, it was as if she didn't exist.

Everywhere he looked, in the many rooms and halls, in the maids' quarters, in the outbuildings, she was never present. And so he would return to his bed and wait for her to arrive, but as if he had been put under a spell, his anticipation weakened; his eyes grew heavy, his small body fell into a deep pit of darkness, and when he awoke to the sun filling his room, there appeared a new curio. In several notes he left on his bedside table, he wrote,
Where do you go at night to find these?
But there was never a reply, only more and more objects left in exchange for his inquiries. He soon found colorful pictures printed from woodblocks, meticulous etchings whose compilation over time shaped for the boy a tragic tale.

The story began under dusty blue skies, where a tribe of Indians gathered at the mouth of the spring that now filled the estate's cisterns and irrigated its land. There were no eucalyptus or orange trees, no avocado or olive trees, no rosebushes or manicured gardens, only a wilderness of oaks, into which Indian children climbed and shook from their limbs acorns into waiting baskets below. Under a bright canopy of stars, under a full moon, in the crepuscular glow of distant wildfire, the women ground acorn into meal. Before sunrise, the men departed for the sea, and returned to the fires in the afternoon, wearing lines of fish hung over their shoulders. All the tableaus from this time resembled an Eden, vignettes of a people free from adversity, until one day Franciscan priests led a serpentine trail of soldiers, armored and helmeted, strapped with muskets and swords and rapiers, to the heights of the mountain. They forced the tribe in its entirety to lie prostrate before the crosses mounted to their saddles, to witness them fell the oaks and cap the spring. When the trees had all fallen and the spring had ceased to flow, the eyes of the captive men and women collectively darkened. Their faces contorted, as if afflicted with palsy. The priests marched away the women and children to a glowing cross by the sea. Behind remained their men, who the soldiers felled as easily as they had felled the oaks. And in place of the spring water that had streamed down the mountainside ran the men's blood. In the aftermath of the atrocity, the priests returned the women to the mountain, to make them handle at the point of swords the gruesome corpses of their husbands and brothers, fathers and sons, cousins and uncles. One after the next, they were appointed to drag their men into a ravine in which buzzards and coyotes tore away at their remains. The land afterward was cleared by oxen, the fallen trees stripped of their bark and cut for lumber that would be used in the construction of the villa, in which the women would live as servants, on whose property their daughters terraced the mountain for orange and lemon groves, where they could see to the east from the peak of Mount Terminus their sons raising swine in the valley below.