Read Mount Terminus for Free Online Page A

ate a heavy stew, and when they were through, they set out into the darkest hour, the only lights the lanterns hanging from hooks on either side of their seats, a sliver of moon, the gauzy haze of the firmament. At sunrise, when the great valley brightened, Bloom noticed far behind them a dark fleck on the horizon; as they rode northeast in the direction of Mojave, he watched it trail after them, but just as every time he felt the presence of the men he had seen at the station, he wasn’t certain they were, in fact, there.
    At the pace of a funeral march, they traveled the valley’s entire expanse, and when they reached the range beyond Mount Terminus, they entered a canyon pass. It deposited them onto a desolate plain, onto a hard, grooved road that delivered them to a region of cultivated earth abutting the desert’s edge. For two days Jacob had gone without sleep or food, and each time Bloom insisted he stop and take some nourishment and close his eyes, his father refused. He would only break for an hour every now and again to rest the mare, during which time he looked through a spyglass in the direction from which they had ridden. Bloom asked him what he saw, and his father said, Men on horseback. Riding this way. Bloom asked who they were, and his father said, They are men. On horseback. Nothing more.
    They soon met the embankment of a river and turned in the direction of the current. For several hours they followed it to the shores of a lake taking on the shape of the rift valley in which the river’s water had settled, and when they arrived there, father and son made camp. Bloom gathered brush to build a fire while Jacob arranged, before the lapping water of the shore, the candles and the lanterns, the trimmings and the trees. When the boy returned, Jacob told him to stand beside him, and after a few moments of silence, the elder Rosenbloom lit the yahrzeit candle with a match and slipped it under the fogged glass of a lantern, and recited, God full of mercy who dwells on high, grant perfect rest on the wings of your divine presence among the holy and the pure who shine in the brightness of the heavens to the soul of who has gone to her eternal rest as all her family pray for the elevation of her soul. Her resting place shall be in the Garden of Eden. The master of mercy will care for her under the protection of His wings for all time and bind her soul in the bond of everlasting life. God is her inheritance and she will rest in peace. When the elder Rosenbloom finished the kaddish, Bloom watched his father untie the bundles of trimmings, and with the clippings piled on either side of his feet, he bent down and picked one up, rose, and cast it onto the water. He bent, he rose, davening, and with each offering, said, Forgive me. Please, my love, please forgive me. Forgive me, please forgive me. Forgive me, he said, please, my love, forgive me.
    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