Dr. Grey's Arc

Chapter 4 of 11

Dr. Grey stood at the corner board with the envelope of names in her hand and pulled out a clean board of her own. She wrote a list down the left side. Tar paper. Cedar shakes. Tin sheets. Felt. Pitch. She marked a single check beside the one line she could promise: the builder, already hired. The rest stayed empty. She pinned the list to a scrap of plank and carried it back to the lot, because she did not trust herself to remember the count when a door opened in front of her. The lot looked worse in the morning light than she expected. The frame stood tall against a flat gray sky, ribs open, the top plate bare. The scaffold the builder had braced against the south wall climbed three platforms high and ended at nothing. From the road, anyone could see straight through the building. A passing wagon driver slowed, looked up at the open top, and shook his head before he flicked the reins. By noon the wind shifted. A neighbor had tied a square of dark cloth to a pole at the edge of the lot to mark the wood pile from the road. The cloth snapped sideways and held there. The builder came down the scaffold and stood beside Dr. Grey and watched it. She said rain by tomorrow night. She said if water hit the joists, the frame would soften at the joints, and the donated boards inside the tent would warp before they were ever nailed. She said the work could not start until something covered the top. Dr. Grey took the list back to the corner board and pinned a second notice beside her old one. She wrote what she needed in plain words. Tar paper. Tin. Anything that shed water. She wrote that she had no money and could trade only future care. She stood there an hour. Two people read it and walked on. A boy stopped and said his father had a stack of old tin behind the mill, bent and rust-spotted, kept for patching. He said his father owed nobody and gave nothing. He said he would ask anyway. He ran off before she could thank him. He came back at dusk with his father and a handcart. The tin was bent. Some sheets had holes the size of a coin. The father said it would cover the frame if they overlapped it twice and weighed the seams. He said he wanted nothing for it. He said his wife had been one of the three the winter before. Dr. Grey took the checklist out of her coat and put a mark beside the line for tin. The builder met them at the gate and began sorting sheets by size under the lantern. The first drops came at sunrise. The frame was covered.