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pointing, but I could not make out what he was pointing at. “The crank pump in the shed out back still works. If you want, you can warm up the water on the stove.” Meaning, it seemed, that he preferred to use cold water.
    An image of my chilly self standing there half-naked or naked in the porch went through my mind.
    I had thought I would have to lug pails of water from the nearest stream, had imagined chopping through the frozen surface with an axe every winter morning. But this and other such things I would be spared, all because of the intervention, the inexplicable generosity of this stranger and the apparent coincidence of my having chosen this very island.
    A door frame to which no door was attached led from the porch into the kitchen. He raised his arms and let them drop to his sides as if to say that, as he had warned me, there was not much to it. There was a pot-bellied soot-blackened wood stove whose pipe ran up through a hole in the ceiling. On the stove was a cast-iron frying pan that still bore a trace of grease from some recent meal. “I should have washed that pan,” he said.
    “Well, it’s not as though you were expecting visitors,” I said. “Or is it?”
    “The stove was here when I fixed up the place,” he said. “That and a few other things that would have been more trouble to move than they were worth.”
    Against the far wall was a table with four chairs. Opposite the table, a daybed on which lay blankets in such disarray it looked like someone might have slept in it the night before. Beside the bed, as if the sleeper had removed them just before retiring and meant to step straight into them upon awaking, were a pair of knee-high rubber boots.
    “I’ll get my boots out of your way,” he said. “And I’ll fix up those blankets for ya.”
    How strange it would be to live, for the first time in decades, in a place where there was no one for whom my floor served as a ceiling.No broom-handle thumping from below in protest of my typing or my lop-gaited pacing of the room.
    “I closed off all the rooms upstairs,” he said. “All the doors are sealed and I chinked up all the drafts. And then I painted everything. Or papered it. Otherwise you’d freeze to death down here, even in the fall.”
    “You really have fixed it up,” I said.
    “There’s three more rooms.” he said. “There’s the front room. That’s what it was, anyway. And there’s two rooms to sleep in.” Neither the word “bed” nor “bedroom” seemed to be in his vocabulary.
    On our way out of the front room, I saw a staircase that gradually faded from view the higher up I looked, the bare, newly painted wooden steps seeming to grow less and less substantial until, as though losing all substance, they petered out in darkness.
    “Is it safe to use the stairs?” I said.
    “They’re safe, but they don’t go anywhere. The upper storeys are all sealed off.”
    Sealed-off rooms hung with squares of plywood whose shapes by day would be traced with light around the edges, light that seeped in like air between the cracks.
    I said I hoped that he had not made the house so draft-proof that I would smother unless I left a window open. He rubbed the back of his neck as if I had posed him some conundrum of carpentry he doubted he could solve.
    “I’m only joking with you, Patrick,” I said.
    “Well. I suppose it’s a lot less than you’re used to,” he said.
    “On the contrary,” I said, “it’s a lot more than I’m used to, and a great deal more than I expected.” Or deserve, I felt like adding. Where would he go now to do whatever it was that he once did here? What years-old habits was he forswearing, supposedly on a whim of generosity?
    He showed me the other rooms. The two bedrooms each contained nothing but one well-made-up bed, an enamel washbasin and jug and identical chests of drawers. As in the kitchen, there wasnothing even faintly decorative except the floral-patterned paper on the walls.
    In the