There were bitter arguments. Daddy mad at Adie and vicey-versey. Hannah and Maria mad at Adie for having a handsome boyfriend who was both Older and Below Her. The twins scared by all that mad. Libbit scared, too. Nan Melda declared over and over that if not for Tessie and Lo-Lo, she would have gone back to her people in Jacksonville long since.
Elizabeth drew these things, so I saw them.
The boil finally popped its top. Adie and her Unsuitable Young Man eloped off to Atlanta, where Emery had been promised work in the office of a competitor. Daddy was raging. The Big Meanies, home from the Braden School for the weekend, heard him on the telephone in his study, telling someone he'd have Emery Paulson brought back and horsewhipped within an inch of his life. He would have them both horsewhipped!
Then he says No, by God. Let it be what it is. She's made her bed; let her sleep in it.
After that came the storm. The Alice.
Libbit felt it coming. She felt the wind begin to rise and blow out of simple charcoal strokes as black as death. The size of the actual storm when it arrived - the pelting rain, the freight-train shriek of the gale - frightened her badly, as if she had whistled for a dog and gotten a wolf.
But then the wind died and the sun came out and everyone was all right. Better than all right, because in the Alice's aftermath, Adie and her Unsuitable Young Man were forgotten for a time. Elizabeth even heard Daddy humming as he and Mr. Shannington cleaned up the wreckage in the front yard, Daddy driving the little red tractor and Mr. Shannington throwing drowned palm-fronds and busted branches into the little trailer trundling along behind.
The doll whispered, the muse told its tale.
Elizabeth listened and painted the place off Hag's Rock that very day, the one where Noveen whispered the buried treasure now lay exposed.
Libbit begs her Daddy to go look, begs him begs him begs him. Daddy says NO, Daddy says he's too tired, too stiff from all that yardwork.
Nan Melda says Some time in the water might loosen you up, Mr. Eastlake.
Nan Melda says I'll bring down a picnic lunch and the l'il girls.
And then Nan Melda says You know how she is now. If she say something's out there, then maybe...
So they went downbeach by Hag's Rock - Daddy in the swimsuit that no longer fit him, and Elizabeth, and the twins, and Nan Melda. Hannah and Maria were back in school, and Adie... but best not talk about her. Adie's IN DUTCH. Nan Melda was carrying the red picnic basket. Inside was the lunch, sunhats for the girls, Elizabeth's drawing things, Daddy's spear-pistol, and a few harpoons for it.
Daddy puts on his flippers and wades into the caldo up to his knees and says This is cold! It better not take long, Libbit. Tell me where this fabulous treasure lies.
Libbit says I will, but do you promise I can have the china dolly?
Daddy says Any doll is yours - fair salvage.
The muse saw it and the girl painted it. So their future is set.
9 - Candy Brown
i
Two nights later I painted the ship for the first time.
I called it Girl and Ship to begin with, then Girl and Ship No. 1, although neither was its real name; its real name was Ilse and Ship No. 1. It was the Ship series even more than what happened to Candy Brown that decided me on whether or not to show my work. If Nannuzzi wanted to do it, I'd go along. Not because I was seeking what Shakespeare called "the bubble reputation" (I owe Wireman for that one), but because I came to understand that Elizabeth was right: it was better not to let work pile up on Duma Key.
The Ship paintings were good. Maybe great. They certainly felt that way when I finished them. They were also bad, powerful medicine. I think I knew that from the first one, executed during the small hours of Valentine's Day. During the last night of Tina Garibaldi's life.
ii
The dream wasn't exactly a nightmare, but it was vivid beyond my power to describe in words, although I captured some of the feeling on canvas. Not all, but some. Enough, maybe. It was sunset. In that dream and all the ones which followed, it was always sunset. Vast red light filled the west, reaching high to heaven, where it faded first to orange, then to a weird green. The Gulf was nearly dead calm, with only the smallest and glassiest of rollers crossing its surface like respiration. In the reflected sunset glare, it looked like a huge socket filled with blood.
Silhouetted against that furnace light was a three-masted derelict. The ship's rotted sails hung limp with red fire glaring through the holes and rips. There was no one alive on board. You only had to look to know that. There was a feeling of hollow menace about the thing, as though it had housed some plague that had burned through the crew, leaving only this rotting corpse of wood, hemp, and sailcloth. I remember feeling that if a gull or pelican flew over it, the bird would drop dead on the deck with its feathers smoking.