Dr. Richard.'s Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Dr. Richard set the boy's arm on a flour sack because he had no table. The mother held a lantern. The father held the boy's shoulders. They were kneeling on the packed dirt floor of a grain shed, because the shed was closer than the room above the tavern where Dr. Richard slept and worked and stitched and mixed tinctures on the same short bench. The boy screamed once when the bone went back. Then he breathed. Dr. Richard tied the splint and washed his hands in a bucket the father had drawn from the well. "Thank you, doctor," the mother said. "We ran to the tavern first. The girl there said you were out at the mill." "I was." He had come from the mill. Before the mill, a fever house at the edge of the plow fields. Before that, a birth. He was fifty-one years old and he had not slept a full night since the settlement passed two hundred souls. He walked back through town in the last of the light. He counted roofs the way other men counted coin. Forty-one now. Last spring, twenty-eight. Every new roof was another cough, another axe wound, another child. He was one man. One bad fever season would bury him and half the town with him. He needed a second doctor. He needed a nurse. He had written letters to three river towns asking for anyone with training willing to come. He had not sent them yet. He had nowhere to put a visitor once they arrived. No exam room. No cot for a patient to lie on overnight. No shelf for another physician's tools. A doctor who rode in and found a tavern bench would ride out again by morning. He stopped at the empty lot behind the community hall. Cut timber lay stacked there since spring, meant for a granary the council had cancelled. He had walked past this pile a hundred times. Tonight he stood in front of it. In the morning he went to the council. He offered his savings for the timber and the lot. He asked for four men for two weeks. He told them plainly: without a building, no second doctor would come, and without a second doctor, the next fever season would empty houses. They agreed before noon. The crew raised the walls in nine days. Dr. Richard worked with them between calls. He planed the door himself. He hung a plank sign above it that read First Doctor's Office in black paint that ran a little at the O. He stood on the new porch that evening. Two windows. A front room for waiting, a back room with a cot. A shelf for a second man's bag. He went inside and sat at the desk and started the letters again. Now he had something to offer. He also had, he realized, nothing left in his purse to pay whoever answered.