Chương 192: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO: THURSDAY

The quarterly ran in the long room over the dispensary. Eleven practitioners on benches, Okafor at the front, a table with the case sheets on it. Bertrand was given a chair at the side and the boy who had come with him waited outside. Kwan presented first. A dislocated shoulder that had gone on to a nerve injury. She had reduced it correctly and the injury had happened anyway and she said so and sat down. Two questions. Both about the traction. She answered them. It was over in six minutes.

The second case was a stillbirth. Okafor read it herself because the practitioner who had attended was at a station forty miles out. There were no questions. Then a man named Ferrin — no relation to the Vellenmoor advocate, and Marcus noticed Bertrand register the name and let it go — stood up with a sheet in his hand and said, "Mine's the burn." Okafor said, "Go on." Marcus had read the case that morning. He had asked Okafor whether she was putting it third deliberately.

"It's third because it's the third-oldest," she'd said.

"I don't arrange them."

"He came a long way to see somebody get it wrong."

"Then he'll see it. I'm not going to stage it for him." Ferrin read it flat. A boy of nine, scalded across the forearm and chest from a pot of water, brought in on the second day. He had cleaned it, dressed it, and sent them home with instruction to return on the fourth day. They had returned on the sixth.

"By then it was down into the fat across about a third of it," Ferrin said.

"The arm's going to work. The chest won't stretch properly and he's nine, so he'll be growing into it for eight years and it won't grow with him."

"Why the fourth day?" Rue said. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Because that's what I was taught."

"By whom?"

"By you." Silence for a beat.

"Say the rest of it," Okafor said. Ferrin looked at the sheet.

"The rest of it is I was taught fourth day for a clean burn and I wrote clean on the sheet on day two and it wasn't clean, it had already got dirty water in it from the cloth they'd wrapped it in at home, and I could smell it and I put clean." He stopped.

"I put clean because they'd come eight miles and I wanted to give them something to take home." Nobody said anything.

"That's the error," Ferrin said.

"Not the fourth day. The fourth day was right for what I wrote down. I wrote down the wrong thing because I wanted the mother to stop crying." Rue said, "Would you know it now?"

"I'd know it in a burn." Ferrin put the sheet on the table.

"I don't know what else I'd do it in. That's the part I've been sitting with." Okafor let it stand for a moment.

"Anyone," she said. A junior at the back asked about the dressing choice. Ferrin answered. Sef asked whether he'd told the family, and he said he'd told them on the eighth day and the father had shaken his hand, and Sef said, "That's worse," and Ferrin said, "Yes." The whole thing took nineteen minutes. Okafor entered it. Name, date, finding, and the line: Practitioner recorded a wound as clean which he had reason to believe was not, for the family's comfort. Error is in the recording, not the interval.

Then she said, "Next," and a woman stood up with a fractured hip. Afterward Bertrand did not move for some time. The room emptied. The boy came in from the corridor and stood by the door and Bertrand waved him off without looking. Okafor stacked the sheets and did not go over to him. Marcus watched her not go over to him and understood it was deliberate. Bertrand said, to nobody, "Nineteen minutes."

"Longer than most," Okafor said.

"Nineteen minutes and the boy's chest will not grow with him for eight years and that man is going home to his dinner."

"Yes."

"How is that sufficient?" Okafor put the sheets down.

"It isn't," she said.

"Sufficient would be that the boy's chest grows. There's no version of this room that gets you that. The only thing this room does is make the next one less likely, and it does that by being nineteen minutes and survivable, because if it were four hours and a punishment he would have written clean on the sheet and then never brought the case."

"He would have concealed it."

"He'd have concealed it from himself first," Okafor said.

"That's the one that kills people." Bertrand got up. It took him a while and neither of them helped.

"Thirty-three years," he said. Okafor waited. He seemed to think better of whatever the rest of it was. He went to the door, and stopped there, and said without turning round: "Your man said the mother had come eight miles."

"Yes."

"Mine come four," Bertrand said, "and I have never once in thirty-three years asked what a man was carrying when he wrote a thing down." He went out.