Duma Key

How to Draw a Picture (VI)

Keep your focus. It’s the difference between a good picture and just one more image cluttering up a world filled with them.

Elizabeth Eastlake was a demon when it came to focus; remember that she literally drew herself back into the world. And when the voice inhabiting Noveen told her about the treasure, she focused on that and drew pictures of it littered on the sandy floor of the Gulf. Once the storm had uncovered it, that entrancing strew was close enough to the surface so that the sun must have picked out gleams on it at midday — gleams that would have searched all the way to the surface.

She wanted to please her Daddy. All she wanted for herself was the china doll.

Daddy says Any doll is yours — fair salvage, and God help him for that.

She waded in beside him, up to her chubby knees, pointing, saying It’s right out there. Swim n kick til I say stop.

He waded out farther while she stood there, and when he rolled forward, giving his body to the caldo, his flippers looked to her the size of small rowboats. Later she would draw them just that way. He spat in his mask, rinsed it, and put it on. Popped the mouthpiece of his snorkel behind his lips. Went fin-trudging out into the sunny blue with his face in the water, his body merging with the moving sun-sparks that turned the glassy rollers to gold.

I know all this. Elizabeth drew some and I drew some.

I win, you win.

She stood up to her knees in the water with Noveen tucked under her arm, watching, until Nan Melda, worried about the rip, hollered her back to what they called Shade Beach. Then they all stood together. Elizabeth shouted for John to stop. They saw his flippers go up as he made his first dive. He was down maybe forty seconds, then surfaced in a spray, spitting the snorkel’s mouthpiece.

He says I’ll be damned if there isn’t something down there!

And when he came back to little Libbit, he hug her hug her hug her.

I knew it. I drew it. With the red picnic basket on a blanket nearby and the speargun sitting on top of the basket.

He went out again, and the next time he came in with an armload of antiquity held awkwardly against his chest. Later he would begin using Nan Melda’s market basket, a lead weight in the bottom to pull it down more easily. Later still came a newspaper photo with much of the rescued rickrack — the “treasure” — spread out before a smiling John Eastlake and his talented, fiercely focused daughter. But no china doll in that picture.

Because the china doll was special. It belonged to Libbit. It was her fair salvage.

Was it the doll-thing that drove Tessie and Lo-Lo to their deaths? That created the big boy? Just how much did Elizabeth have to do with it by then? Who was the artist, who the blank surface?

Some questions I have never answered to my own satisfaction, but I have drawn my own pictures and I know that when it comes to art, it’s perfectly okay to paraphrase Nietzsche: if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you. Sometimes without parole.