9/25: Merrill, part the third

Merrill visited for three hours today. I was up on a particularly nasty piece of roof, twisted over on my side, painting beneath the eave. Jude sat him down on the porch and brought him a cup of coffee and asked him if he wouldn’t like a cookie.
-That’d be alright, he said.
I came down and we sat on opposite ends of the wicker porch divan, legs crossed over formally, drinking our coffee and eating cookies. After a while, he had a sandwich. Then a bowl of fish stew. So the meal proceeded backwards, from dessert to soup.
We talked quite a bit about how the island had changed since the 1920’s when people from “away west” had come to displace the old farmers and fishermen. It had been part of a much more widespread movement which brought well-heeled “rusticators” from Boston and New York to the Mount Desert Island area to build themselves huge summer palaces on the rocky beaches. He (Gilley) had been the nephew of Merrill’s great-great-grandfather and a Stanley had been midwife to Gilley’s mother for most of her ten children. John Gilley is commemorated in a little biographical monograph by Charles W. Norton, president of Harvard (which contributed quite a number of rusticators to Sutton Island) at the end of the 19th century. Merrill has served as a kind of caretaker and resident guardian spirit to the houses on Sutton for many years, as his father did earlier, and it is clear that he walks the paths of the island in the vivid company of Stanley’s and Gilleys long gone.
We walked Merrill down to the town dock where he had tied up his dinghy and talked another hour before he untied and rowed himself over to his boat, moored about a quarter mile up the beach. Once again, the weather blew up and it was a little strange to watch a sixty-nine-year-old Merrill bounce around like cork in his skiff and haul himself into his lobster boat. As he rowed, he kept very close to the shore, even though it would have been more direct to make straight for his mooring, and it occurred to me that he had probably never learned to swim.

Merrill Comes for Tea