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her. The oral history describes the death of her father, who had been bedridden for years, cared for, cleaned, and fed by Millie alone. When the body was delivered to the hospital it was clear that the old man had been shot in the head. Quite a few nurses and hospital workers must have noticed it, but the doctor on duty was also the medical examiner for the County of Nantucket. He filled out the form, listing the cause of death as heart failure, and signed with a flourish. A brave act, if indeed it happened. The doctor was rather an odd fish himself, with only a partial belief in the science of medicine. He was very cavalier with his patients, including me, one of his friends. I never asked him about the story because I knew I’d never get a straight answer from him, so much did he love affecting an air of mystery.
    TAKE ANOTHER LOOK at the map. I lived about halfway between the towns of Nantucket and ’Sconset, off Polpis Road behind the first salt marsh at the south end of the harbor. In those days there were no other houses nearby. I saw a completely different Nantucket when I became a year-rounder, a pretty tight place where it wasn’t easy to make a buck. The action in town—the rebuilding of the harbor and other Sherburne projects—was covered by old time local labor. I managed to survive the first winter by doing magazine work by mail, playing the piano in a year-round bar, cashing small royalty checks from my book, and living on the cheap. I installed electric heaters in the bedroom and the kitchen, but the barn hadn’t been built with winter in mind and I spent a lot of time in the crawl space underneath working on frozen pipes with a propane torch, or installing new ones with an instruction book lying open in the dirt in front of me. My mortgage was $600. I discovered anew how claustrophobic and narrowing it is to live with little money. (I’d known it in my childhood, too, although in a different way.) The amount of time and energy spent on small household and automotive tragedies. The frustration of not being able to go anywhere more than ten miles away. The fact that even with long winter underwear it was cold. The brutality of the wind in February, humming through the thin spaces in the barn’s oak siding.
    I tried scallop fishing, but I wasn’t strong enough and it was dangerous work. I kept warm many nights, and kept myself in beer, by shooting darts in a pub, as I’d done at college. I spent the first winter like quite a few of the locals, simply waiting for summer.
    â€œDon’t sink,” my lawyer had said on a brief visit to check up on me after the divorce. “Some guys just sink. Don’t.” He wasn’t talking about boats.

Squirrels?
    BECAUSE OF ITS PROXIMITY TO THE GULF Stream, Nantucket is usually 10 percent cooler than the mainland in the summer and 10 percent warmer in the winter. This means that usually you can get by with a couple of heavy sweaters (and the obligatory long underwear for those living in unheated barns) until Christmas. January, February, and March tend to be very windy, and somehow psychologically debilitating. Spring is a foreign concept on Nantucket. Sometimes it doesn’t rain in April and May, and a lot of times it does. June is muddy.
    Nevertheless there was something about this mild common hardship that drew people together, that helped to form the spirit of Nantucket, our “rock.” In the seventies it was easy to meet people and make friends. A certain civility prevailed, presumably because there was no escape from each other. There were only so many places—be it The Hub, Cy’s Green Coffee Pot, the Chicken Box—and you could be sure if you ran into somebody in one place you’d see them a couple of days later in another.
    It was such a small town that sometimes odd, nice things would happen. Maggie, my girlfriend, lived on the westernmost edge of the island near Madaket Millie, I lived on