Dr. Grey's Arc

Chapter 5 of 11

The rain held through the night and into the next day. Dr. Grey came to the lot at first light and saw the trouble before she reached the gate. Water ran down the outside of the frame in dark streaks. The tin overhead sagged at the seams where the boy's father had warned them it would. A thin sheet of water fell from one corner of the roof onto the boards stacked inside, and the stack had begun to darken at the edges. She climbed the scaffold to look. From the top platform, the tin roof showed its full damage. Two sheets had peeled back at the overlap and folded inward under the weight of standing water. Rust ran in orange streaks down the stone-gray frame below. Through the open gap, she could see straight down to the donated boards inside. The builder came up behind her and said the joists were already soft at three points. He said another day of this and the frame would not hold a wall when they nailed it. He said they needed the water off the wood before they fixed anything above. Dr. Grey climbed down and pulled the tarp off the supply tent. She dragged an empty barrel from the corner of the lot to the worst drip and set it under the fall. She cut a length of stovepipe from the scrap pile and bent it into a funnel with her hands and a stone. She wedged the funnel into the barrel's lid. Within an hour she had three barrels in place under the three worst leaks, each fed by a bent pipe or a folded sheet of tin. The water no longer hit the boards. It hit the barrels and held there. She moved the board stack two feet to the dry side and threw the spare tarp over it. The builder watched her work and then climbed back up with a hammer and began bending the peeled sheets flat against the frame. He nailed each seam twice. He weighed the patches with stones from the yard. By dusk the rain thinned. Dr. Grey stood inside the frame and listened. No water fell on wood. The barrels were half full. The boards on the dry side were still sound at the core, though three on the outside of the stack had swelled past use. She wrote three losses on her checklist and a mark beside the line for roofing repair. The roof would hold for now. It would not hold through winter. She stood there until the last drip stopped and then went to find the builder to ask what it would take to replace the tin before the first freeze.