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reason, apparelled in a life jacket. Perhaps he suffers a phobia of drowning. Mr. Zoller is enlisting support for a public meeting soon to be held for a rezoning, an expansion of Evergreen Estates.
    â€œFifty more lots, Mr. Bo-champ. More people, more clout. New and better roads, more tax money to pay for them. We need your voice, because a lot of people are going to be there who want to live in the past. They don’t want to enjoy all the comforts. I see a day coming when we will all have a mall, our own police office. Cablevision.”
    â€œAh, yes, that will be a boon. But, Mr. Zoller, I am a newcomer — it might be seen as brash of me to loudly add my voice.”
    â€œWe have to stand up to them.”
    â€œWho?”
    Though we are alone, he lowers his voice: “Margaret Blake and the eco-freaks. “This has the sound of a popular music group. “There are quite a few of them here. Most of them don’t advertise it. They look and act just like us.”
    I ask Mr. Zoller how he came to be chosen to represent his fellow islanders.
    â€œI was their unanimous choice.”
    â€œHow remarkable.”
    â€œI won by acclamation.”
    â€œAh, no one was willing to run against you.”
    â€œExactly.”
    Testing a theory that plants respond to fine music, I have set speakers out on the back deck so that my peas and carrots may enjoy Bachand Vivaldi while I hack away at the uncultured thistles with my hoe. The flowers of late May are making a vigorous show: daisies, foxgloves, lupines, purple roadside sweet peas. The song sparrows are in full-throated ease. The days are growing longer; summer waits anxiously in the wings for her grand entrance.
    In response to a notice in the
Island Echo
(“14-foot runabout with engine and canopy that runs like new for sale at marina, just ask Emily”), I stop by the marina office. Emily is fetched from The Brig, where she has been tending bar, a woman of middle years who wears tight jeans that make a swishing sound between her bounteous thighs as she walks towards me with extended hand.
    â€œHi, I’m the manager here. Emily Lemay.”
    Ah, this is the seductress I have been warned against. I will strive to keep my honour intact.
    She leads me to the boat, which is tied to one of the slips. It is homely, but looks serviceable and safe. During a demonstration of the thirty-horse engine, the arms of Emily Lemay entwine with mine, and I am overcome with the smell of ripe peaches with which, apparently, she has perfumed her ample bosom.
    â€œI’ll sell it to you cheap,” she says. “One of the local characters gave it to me to pay off his bar bill. George Rimbold? Met him?”
    â€œI have read of his exploits.”
    We negotiate a price, and she offers a drink to seal the bargain.
    â€œThank you, but I don’t. Any more.”
    â€œWell, then, a coffee.”
    â€œTea, if you don’t mind.”
    We repair to The Brig, which is empty in the afternoon of all but a loud table of four who are debating politics, hotly castigating the government for reducing welfare benefits. These I am told are the local drunks. Is one of these lads the notorious George Rimbold?
    I survey with trepidation the many alluring labels of bottles arrayed on the counters behind Mrs. Lemay. I wonder if there is not, on this sinful island, a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.
    Mrs. Lemay is a woman without secrets, and she babbles merrily on about various marriages she has suffered — brutish, callused men, none of them the gentleman she perceives me to be. I am rather flattered by her attentions, for she is attractive, open and gregarious, a full-fleshed woman of the type celebrated by the Dutch masters.
    She extracts from me the confession that though I am married I am currently living alone, and as I rise to leave she offers to come visiting one day. I am too polite to demur to this, though I suspect her intentions are dishonourable.