Dr. Grey's Arc

Chapter 6 of 11

By morning the rain had stopped and the cold had moved in behind it. Dr. Grey stood inside the frame and counted the gaps in the roof again. Two sheets bent past use. Three boards swelled and split. She wrote the count on her supply list and underlined the line for tin. The builder said they had four weeks, maybe five. Past the lot, smoke poured from the smokehouse chimney in a thick straight line. The air carried the smell of cured meat and the bite of frost. Winter was already in the wind. She spent the morning walking to every place tin might still be found. She went to the mill first. The owner met her at the gate and shook his head before she spoke. The pile behind the mill was gone. She had taken the last of it. He offered her boards instead, and a sack of nails, and told her he was sorry. She thanked him and wrote his name on the list anyway. She walked the edge of town to a shed she had been told about, a low building with a tin face that had stood empty for years. When she reached it the door hung open on a broken hinge. The roof was already stripped. Someone had pulled the sheets months ago. Inside, the beams sagged under a crust of ice, and the floor held nothing but old straw and a dead crow. She stood in the doorway a long minute. Then she closed the door as best she could and turned back. On the road she stopped to rest against a fence post. A large bird sat on the post above her shoulder, white-headed, gray across the back, claws sunk into the wood. It did not move when she came near. Its feathers were thick and layered against the cold. She watched it watch the field. It was built for the season she was not. She thought of the open seams above the boards inside her frame, and the way the wind would pass straight through them in a month. She had walked the whole town. There was no tin left to find. She went back to the lot and found the builder waiting by the supply tent. She told him the truth plainly. No mill, no shed, no donation left to ask for. He listened and did not argue. Then he said there was one thing she had not tried. The roofer two towns over kept seconds and offcuts in a yard behind his shop. He would not give them away. But he had a wife, and the wife had been sick a long time, and no doctor in that town would ride out to see her. Dr. Grey wrote the name on her list and put a check beside it. She would leave in the morning.