Some years back, my wife and I rented a tiny little cottage in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard. It was called the Binnacle. According to a story we heard, the Binnacle had been built with a keel for a foundation and a hurricane had floated it to where it was now, on the road from Lobsterville toward Red Beach.

Instead of moving it back to its original site, the Binnacle’s owner, Dorothy Scoville, had simply bought the lot where it had landed.

In those days, it was possible to buy a lot like that, just a few feet from the beach for a couple hundred dollars.

Other houses on regular foundations had been ripped apart by the storm. The Binnacle, built like a little ark on its keel by Dorothy Scoville’s seafaring father, had ridden out the hurricane.

We’d rented the Binnacle over the phone, and we asked if she was Miss or Mrs. Scoville? “MISS Scoville,” she emphatically replied.

The Binnacle lived up to its name and was tiny indeed, with a little wood stove.

There were mice in the Binnacle, and that was all very well except they were eating Miss Scoville’s bedspreads. They were making a nest in one of the drawers out of the fluff they’d pulled from the bedspreads. I thought that was not a good idea, and we called Miss Scoville.

She said, “Oh, come around and I will give you some poison.”

We went to where she lived, a small house at the top end of Lighthouse Road. It was almost in the shadow of the Gay Head Light itself, warning ships away from the shoals and rocks of Devil’s Bridge.

She gave us the poison for the mice. We took it back and spread it around. Then there were these little tiny mice that were dead in the drawer and they were so small. They were really field mice that had moved into the house. My wife and I felt so bad, since they were just making the nest for the young they were about to have.

But the poison worked, and we thanked Miss Scoville. She asked if my wife and I would like to come for coffee some evening after dinner. And we did.

Miss Scoville took us around her house, and introduced us to her sister, Barbara, who was called Bobbie. Miss Scoville at that time was a lady of perhaps 60; Bobbie was in her 50s.

Bobbie was mentally challenged. In her mind, she was a little girl of 10 or 12. She had a room full of little girl dolls and doll clothes, and games children could play by themselves. But she was also a grown woman, and she liked me very much.

Bobbie showed us her room, her dolls and her cutouts. She wanted to stay up and talk to us, but Miss Scoville said she should go to bed or play in her room.

From our conversation over coffee with Miss Scoville we learned that she worked at the Island museum at the other end of the Island, in Edgartown.

It was clear that she had never married, and obvious that she had devoted herself to caring for Barbara. She must have been home almost every evening, so Barbara would not be left alone. In a sense, Barbara was her child, though also her sister.

Miss Scoville thought a lot of her father, who had built the Binnacle and sailed the oceans of the world. She pointed out a rich-looking chest in her living room that he had brought back from China. She treasured that chest. It was a beautiful piece.

I said, “Miss Scoville, I feel you must have been very close to your father. You have that chest of his here. He must have sailed around the world. Have you traveled much?”

“Not much,” she said. She had been to Europe once. “That must have been nice,” I said. “How did you travel?”

“Oh, I went on a large liner, the Queen Elizabeth. Before the war.”

Without Barbara, I gathered.

Miss Scoville said she had gone to New York and had gotten on the ship and sailed out. She knew that the course lay somewhere past the Island here, on its way to Europe. She said they were out of New York, on their first night a few hours out and they were at dinner, her first dinner on the ship. There came an announcement. Miss Scoville was called to the purser. She went, and he asked her to please go up to the bridge.

She went up to the bridge — this was in the days when radio-telephones were new and she thought that maybe there was a call for her, possibly some of her friends in Gay Head, knowing that she was traveling and this was her first night out, and knowing that the ship could not be too far off, had placed a telephone call. And she thought, “How nice!”

Whoever was on duty, the captain or the first mate perhaps, introduced himself.

He said, “Miss Scoville, we understand that you come from Martha’s Vineyard,” and she said yes, and he said, “We’re not far off from the Vineyard now.”

She said, “I would think not.” It was dark and he said, “In fact that is the Gay Head Light out there.”

“Oh,” she said, “I live a stone’s throw or two from the light itself.”

“You know the light well,” he said.

“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s three white and one red.”

The officer looked at his watch in the dimness of the bridge. “Do you recognize the light? Out there, to port?”

Miss Scoville said, “Oh yes, I recognize it. It is going around, yes, and now it will come around again.”

It did, and then it didn’t. They dipped the light, put it out, for three full turns. It was a clear night. They were able to do that. They put the light out. There were those turns where there was no Gay Head Light. The people of Gay Head knew that she would be sailing past, and had arranged to salute her and dipped the light.

“That was really something, Miss Scoville,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “I thought so.”

I thought then, and later too, how proud she must be of this. I thought of her dutiful caring for her sister, and how the Gay Headers thought of her life.

Still now I see Miss Scoville on the bridge, the great ship coursing through the dark, and ahead to port the Gay Head Light flashes, is dipped, then flashing once again.

Peter Ochs is a longtime seasonal resident of Aquinnah (formerly Gay Head).