OCR Text |
Show all yery close together, overlapping in some spots. Hunt wondered how long she'd been gone. How long had he tried to paint Washington Street? How many cigarettes had he smoked? How long had he thought about tones of white, about his uncle in New York who was a Jew? There was wind, low wind moving around the trunks of trees. The snow moved and salted over itself, lightly, And the water, skimmed in places with ice, looked very black. At one point Leah's tracks moved toward it, toward the edge. Hunt thought it possible that he would find her in it, standing in it up to her chest, looking out through some window of the just past night and morning that she had brought with her. And the birds. Dark scissor-like birds. Around branches and within spaces to the side. They made sounds. They were gossipy, old, thin, black crone birds, filled with rumors, shuttling, now visible, now out of sight. Hunt thought of Brueghel landscapes, bird traps set up in grey, grainy snow. He stopped. He saw snow: lines of it drawn on the tops of branches, speckled on the wind side of dark-umber trunks, caught in crotches. It was still November, but there were no signs of fall left.. Total winter! Not a dangling still leaf. Even a negative of death, Hunt thought: dark bones, dark skeletons against a cold lifeless white. Hunt expected suddenly to see Brueghel's lean, unleashed dogs there too, or a living skeleton, perhaps a fleshless horse. Was Brueghel agnostic? Hunt tried to think. Did he believe? He felt a wind; he moved on, followed. Then suddenly there was blood. In the snow in front of him, on the path, there was snow-granulated blood, small craters red and white, where it had dropped. Hunt screamed "Leah!" But there was nothing. So he ran. He could hear the wind. He could hear water sucking against rocks to |