Skeletons were hard enough to draw, but in his mind, all the bones were jumbled in a pile of pickup sticks. Long legs, shorter arms, the connect-the-dots of the vertebrae. The fingers and toes were puzzle pieces that could be made to fit together only just so. Even the skull had come apart, the lower jaw separated from the face, and some of the tiny teeth gone missing. He took a long time to lay out the skeleton, but Jack Peter wasn’t bothered, he had all day to move the bones from his mind to the picture he had to draw. The pencil fit precisely in his hand, and the sketch paper was clean and white as a bedsheet. He ran his palm against the smooth blank surface, pleased at how it felt against his skin.
When the package was presented to him off the Christmas mound and he tore the wrapping paper, he was both surprised and dismayed. Surprised by the sheer variety of the Young Artist’s Gift Set, the watercolors and the assorted colored pencils and the sharpener and eraser and the formal elegance of the sketch pad, but dismayed by what to do with it, for he had been drawing forever with pencil stubs on scraps and bits of found paper, and his pictures had always done what he desired.
“But I can already draw,” he told his parents.
“Of course you can,” said his mother. “This isn’t going to teach you to draw any better, but having the right tools is essential to any artist. Just imagine what you can do.”
All through the morning, he waited to try out the new pencils and paper, waited while his parents opened their presents to each other, waited to whittle away the remains from his mountain of gifts. They took their time, since it was just the three of them, and fussed over each new package. He waited through their coffee and the big brunch of bacon and Daddy’s special flapjacks, “stacked as high as an elephant’s eye.” He waited through the obligatory phone call to his grandparents, the long-distance thank-you for the sweater and hope you have a Merry good Christmas. By noon, there were no more festivities planned.
In his easy chair, Daddy would soon fall asleep. The bandages had come off, but the three slashes across his neck were still pink and vicious. His mother sat across from him, playing with her new tablet, the glow from the screen shining on her face.
“There’s plenty online,” she said, “but it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Here’s a whole database with shipwrecks off the coast from as far back as 1710.”
Her husband opened his eyes briefly and nodded.
“But where’s the Porthleven?” she asked, and the question lingered in the air. From time to time, she mentioned another discovery, lost for a while in the Cornish village for which the ship had been named, but the news drew no response.
“It’s here,” his mother said to no one in particular. “Records of the Porthleven at the Maine Maritime Museum over in Bath.” She dug deeper into the digital archives, while stealing glances at the Christmas tree and the fire dancing in the fireplace. His father lounged around in his robe and slippers, spending a great deal of energy doing nothing.
By one o’clock, Jack Peter abandoned the concept of family time. Alone at the kitchen table, he wore his new sweater, the red and blue of the Union Jack, his favorite flag, and he had on a pair of those thick woolen socks that had been balled up in the toe of his Christmas stocking. From the corner of his mouth, a peppermint candy cane hung like a cigarette. He had already tried out the high-powered binoculars he had begged for, and had been searching the rocks and the ocean, though he did not tell his parents what he saw through the lenses, because they wouldn’t believe him. They never believed him.
The bones had been dancing around in his imagination since the night before Christmas. Where such persistent images came from, he did not know. Sometimes the image appeared quite suddenly, and he was compelled to put it to paper as quickly as he could. Other times he drew things simply because he wanted to make them, and those were the pictures he controlled. But lately, they had come unbidden. The skeleton was one such mystery, and he was dying to get it down. He spent the next hour at the kitchen table carefully drawing all of the bones from memory. Nobody bothered him the whole time.
Jack Peter drew the bones, starting with the ones closest to the surface. He could render in detail the forearm sticking up from the hole in the sand, but the buried ones were much more difficult to see and harder to render. The candy cane in the corner of his mouth thinned to a sliver. He finished by drawing a few waves in the distance, with one grinning head poked above the foam, a little joke that only he would ever get.