"I’ll drive my own truck, Paul," I said, picking up the handle of my toolbox with my good right arm. The steel was heavy, the tools inside shifting with a familiar, solid clink that sounded like work that needed doing. "The carrier's still open on the ridge, and there’s two more towers between here and the gap that haven't had their winter diodes set."
Miller looked at me for a long second, then pulled his pencil from behind his ear and tucked it into his ledger.
"Take it slow through the creek bridge, Arthur," he said, turning toward the door. "The water’s coming up, and that road don't belong to the Vance family anymore."
CHAPTER 4: What The Timber Kept
The creek road had narrow shoulders where the elderberry bushes met the wet ditches, and I kept the Econoline in second gear all the way down to the clinic turnoff. The rain had stopped beating against the curved glass, turning into that fine, smoking drift that rises off fallen leaves whenever cold water hits black earth in late autumn. My left hand rested useless on my knee, the fingers numb from where the collarbone was pressing against the shoulder bundle, but my right forearm held the wheel steady against the pull of the washouts. Behind me, the auxiliary transmitter had finally gone cold. Without the generator load from the patrol bridge, the heavy dry-cell unit had simply run its plates dry, leaving only the sharp smell of rosin core solder and wet iron in the cab.
The county health clinic sat three miles south of the depot, housed in an old limestone schoolhouse that the WPA had put up back when the timber mills were still running hemlock down to the river barges. A concrete ramp ran up to the side entrance where the county nurse kept her morning hours. When I eased the van into the gravel circle beside the woodpile, Jesse was already leaning against the heavy rear bumper of the rescue engine, his turnout coat unbuttoned, holding a paper cup of black coffee between his gloved palms. He didn’t come over to help me crank the door handle. He knew better than to treat a man like a bundle of wet cordwood, but he stepped up to the running board and caught my elbow with just enough lift to take the weight off my left collarbone as my boots found the gravel.
"Miller radioed ahead from the courthouse," Jesse said, his voice quiet under the dripping eaves of the porch. "Dr. Bradley’s inside with the tape and the sling. Martha brought down two clean flannel shirts from Paul’s closet so you don’t have to tear that canvas jacket trying to get back into your sleeves."
"Paul’s shirts are too broad in the yoke, Jesse," I told him, though I let him guide me through the heavy oak door where the heat from the cast-iron radiator hit us like a dry wool blanket. "He’s got four inches on me across the ribs."
"You’ll take the extra cloth today, Arthur," Jesse said. "You won't be reaching for an overhead aerial until after the first hard freeze anyway."
The clinic smelled of witch hazel, carbolic soap, and the wet boots of four men who had spent six hours pulling gravel trucks out of the lower ditches. Dr. Bradley didn't ask me how I ended up in the clay on Blackwood Ridge. In a county with forty miles of logging track and three hundred miles of creek hollows, an old repairman with grease under his thumbnails and a wrenched shoulder wasn't a mystery that needed explaining. He cut the sleeve away from my left arm with a pair of curved bandage shears, worked a heavy roll of linen tape around my chest until my scapula was locked tight against my ribs, and pinned my forearm against my sternum in a dark blue triangular sling.
"The bone didn't snap, Arthur," Bradley said, wiping his shears on a clean towel before dropping them into the alcohol tray with a sharp, metallic ring. "The ligament’s stretched out like an old fan belt, though. You lift twenty pounds with that elbow before Thanksgiving and you’ll be wearing an iron brace until the rhododendrons bloom."
"I don't need twenty pounds to test a diode pack, Doctor," I said.
"You need twenty pounds to lift that steel toolbox out of the back of your Ford," Bradley answered without looking up. "Leave the heavy iron to the boys who haven't spent forty years climbing guy-wires."
He gave me two white envelopes with four pain tablets in each, written down on county script, but I left them lying on the green oilcloth of his examination table. A man who makes his living listening for carrier tones on an open receiver doesn't need his ears muffled by codeine while the afternoon logs are still being read into the magistrate's record.