Dr. Grey's Arc

Chapter 9 of 11

She was back on the roof when the shouting started at the gate. A man came up the lane carrying a boy on a door pulled from its hinges. Two others held the corners. The boy was maybe seven. His face was red and slack, his lips cracked. The father said the fever had come in the night and would not break. He said the next doctor was a day's ride and the boy would not last it. He had seen the sign at the gate. He had come here. Dr. Grey climbed down. She had no clinic yet. She had no cabinet, no thermometer, no quinine, no clean blade. The frame above her was half walls and new tin. She told the men to set the door down in the yard where the wind was cut by the south wall. She pulled the supply tent flaps wide and dragged a crate inside it for a table. She told the builder to drop the hammer and boil water in the kettle over the bonfire he kept going for the nails. She had a tent, a fire, and her hands. She knelt by the boy on the door. His pulse was fast and thin. His belly was soft. She lifted his shirt and found the rash along his ribs. She had seen it before, in the houses two streets over last winter. She knew what it was and she knew what it needed, and she had none of it here. What she could do was bring the fever down and get fluid into him before his heart gave out. She sent the father to the well at the edge of the lot for cold water by the bucket. She tore a clean sheet from her own bedroll and soaked strips and laid them on the boy's neck and groin. She boiled water and let it cool and salted it from her cooking tin and spooned it past his teeth one slow mouthful at a time. The vein at his elbow had collapsed. She needed a way in. She had no cannula, no fine steel. She went to her sewing kit and took out the bone needle she used on canvas. She held the tip in the kettle flame until it glowed and let it cool on a clean rag. She tied off the boy's arm with a strip of the same sheet. She found a small vein on the back of his hand, slid the bone in, and threaded a length of boiled gut tubing she cut from the builder's snare line. She raised the salted water in a tin cup above his head and let it drip. The father held the cup steady. The builder held the boy's shoulders. By dusk the boy's skin was cooler. He swallowed on his own. He opened his eyes once and closed them. The father sat on the dirt and cried without sound. Dr. Grey washed her hands in the bucket and looked at the half-built walls around her. She had treated a patient on a door in the open air. The boy would live tonight. Tomorrow there would be others, and still no room to put them in.