Dr. Grey's Arc

Chapter 10 of 11

By morning the boy was awake and asking for water. His father carried him home on the same door, and word of it went down the lane faster than Dr. Grey could wash the salt cup. By noon a woman she had never met stood at the gate with a basket of jars. By dusk there were six more people in the yard, and none of them had come to be treated. They came to work. A man with a wagon brought field stone he said had been sitting behind his barn for years. Two brothers unloaded sand and a barrel of lime. An old mason walked the frame with the builder and pointed at the soft ground under the south wall. They needed a real footing, he said, or the first hard freeze would crack the boards apart. By the second morning the men were digging a trench along that wall, and by the third they were laying stone and beam into a low base that locked the frame to the ground. Dr. Grey tried to keep up with the names. She wrote them in the ledger between patients. A girl with a burned hand. A logger with a split thumb. An old woman who only wanted her chest listened to. The supply tent was no longer a tent of crates. Someone had brought a tall cabinet on wheels with shelves and a door that latched. The women who came in the afternoons sorted the jars onto the shelves and labeled them in pencil: salt, lye soap, boiled rags, the bone needles in a tin. When Dr. Grey reached for a thing now, the thing was there. At the edge of the lot a fire burned all day. People kept it fed without being asked. They boiled water on it for the cabinet and warmed their hands between shifts. Around the fire they ate from a common pot a baker's wife brought each noon. Dr. Grey came down off the frame once and stood at the edge of the circle and could not name half the faces. The builder found her there at dusk on the fourth day. He wiped his hands on his shirt and said the south footing was set. He said the walls would go up faster now than she could pay for, and she was not paying for any of it. He said she should stop trying to thank each person at the gate. It slowed the line. She nodded. She had not known she was doing it. That night she sat by the fire with the open ledger and counted thirty-one new names since the boy left on the door. The building had a stone base under it now. It had walls rising on three sides. It had a cabinet and a fire and a pot and hands she did not have to ask. She closed the ledger. The hospital was no longer only hers to finish, and she did not yet know what that would cost her.