Duma Key(186)

I drew quickly, and the jockey came out of the white like a figure out of heavy fog. It was quick, the strokes careless and hurried, but the essence was there: the knowing eyes and the broad lips that might have been grinning with either mirth or malevolence. I had no time to color the shirt and the breeches, but I fumbled for the pencil stamped Plain Red (one of mine) along its barrel and added the awful cap, scribbling it in. And once the cap was there you knew what that grin really was: a nightmare.

"Show me!" Noveen cried. "I want to see if y'got it right!"

I held the picture up to the doll, who now sat straight on Jack's leg while Jack slumped against the wall beside the staircase, looking off into the parlor.

"Yep," Noveen said. "That's the bugger who scared Melda's girls. Mos' certainly."

"What ?" Wireman began, and shook his head. "I'm lost."

"Melda seen the frog, too," Noveen said. "The one the babbies call the big boy. The one wit d' teef. That's when Melda finally corner Libbit in d'kitchen. To make her talk."

"At first Melda thought the stuff about Charley was just little kids scaring each other, didn't she?"

Noveen cawed again, but her shoebutton eyes stared with what could have been horror. Of course, eyes like that can look like anything you want them to, can't they? "That's right, sugar. But when she seen ole Big Boy down there at the foot of the lawn, crossin the driveway and goin into the trees..."

Jack's hand flexed. Noveen's head shook slowly back and forth, indicating the collapse of Nan Melda's defenses.

I shuffled the pad with Charley the jockey on it to the bottom and went back to the picture of the kitchen: Nan Melda looking down, the little girl looking up with her finger on her lips Shhhh! and the doll bearing silent witness from her place against the breadbox. "Do you see it?" I asked Wireman. "Do you understand?"

"Sort of..."

"Sugar- candy was mos'ly done, once she was out," Noveen said. "Thass what it come down to."

"Maybe at first Melda thought Shannington was moving the lawn jockey around as a kind of joke because he knew the three little girls were scared of it."

"Why in God's name would they be?" Wireman asked.

Noveen said nothing, so I passed my missing hand over the Noveen in my drawing the Noveen leaning against the breadbox and then the one on Jack's knee spoke up. As I sort of knew she would.

"Nanny din' mean nothin bad. She knew they 'us scairt of Charley this 'us befo the bad things started an so she tole em a bedtime story to try an make it better. Made it worse instead, as sometimes happens with small chirrun. Then the bad woman come the bad white woman from the sea n dat bitch made it worse still. She made Libbit draw Charley alive, for a joke. She had other jokes, too."

I threw back the sheet with Libbit going Shhhh, seized my Burnt Umber from my pack now it didn't seem to matter whose pencils I used and sketched the kitchen again. Here was the table, with Noveen lying on her side, one arm cast up over her head, as if in supplication. Here was Libbit, now wearing a sundress and an expression of dismay achieved in no more than half a dozen racing lines. And here was Nan Melda, backing away from the open breadbox and screaming, because inside -

"Is that a rat?" Wireman asked.

"Big ole blind woodchuck," Noveen said. "Same thing as Charley, really. She got Libbit to draw it in the breadbox, and it was in the breadbox. A joke. Libbit 'us sorry, but the bad water-woman? Nuh- uh. She never sorry."

"And Elizabeth Libbit had to draw," I said. "Didn't she?"

"You know dat, " Noveen said. "Don't you?"

I did. Because the gift is hungry.

viii

Once upon a time, a little girl fell and did her head wrong in just the right way. And that allowed something something female to reach out and make contact with her. The amazing drawings that followed had been the come-on, the carrot dangling at the end of the stick. There had been smiling horses and troops of rainbow-colored frogs. But once Perse was out what had Noveen said? sugar-candy was mos'ly done. Libbit Eastlake's talent had turned in her hand like a knife. Except it was no longer really her hand. Her father didn't know. Adie was gone. Maria and Hannah were away at the Braden School. The twins couldn't understand. But Nan Melda began to suspect, and...

I flipped back and looked at the little girl with the finger on her lips.

She's listening, so shhhh. If you talk, she'll hear, so shhhh. Bad things can happen, and worse things are waiting. Terrible things in the Gulf, waiting to drown you and take you to a ship where you'll live something that's not life. And if I try to tell? Then the bad things may happen to all of us, and all at once.

Wireman was perfectly still beside me. Only his eyes moved, sometimes looking at Noveen, sometimes looking at the pallid arm that flickered in and out of view on the right side of my body.

"But there was a safe place, wasn't there?" I asked. "A place where she could talk. Where?"

"You know," Noveen said.

"No, I- "

"Yessir, you do. You sho do. You only forgot awhile. Draw it and you see."

Yes, she was right. Drawing was how I'd re-invented myself. In that way, Libbit

( where our sister )

was my kin. For both of us, drawing was how we remembered how to remember.