so the spring came out straight. When he did it right, she said, "Yes. Like that." When he did it wrong, she said, "Stop. Look again," and he looked, and saw what he had missed. She never took the tool from his hand. She never sighed. She treated his hands as if they were her own, only slower and larger, and Soren, who had spent his life working alone, found that he did not mind being someone else's hands. In fact, he found that he liked it, which surprised him more than the cracked spring had.
At noon they went down for bread and coffee, and Soren saw the town from the tower stairs the way he always saw it, in pieces: the street, the store, the print shop with its windows full of Fallon's paper. The paper that morning had carried another paragraph about the tower, and Soren had read it standing in the store, his coffee going cold in his hand. *A town that cannot keep its own tower safe cannot keep its own time.* Fallon had a gift for sentences that sounded like wisdom and meant nothing at all. Soren had folded the paper and put it back, because arguing with a newspaper in the street is like arguing with the wind. But now, sitting on the tower steps with Maren, eating bread with his left hand because his right was black with clock dirt, he said, "He wants the tower down."
Maren did not pretend not to know who he meant. "I know. He came to see me yesterday, at Mrs. Petersen's boarding house, very polite. He asked me how my wrist was. He asked me if I thought the tower was safe. He did not ask me if the clock could be repaired."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him the truth. I told him the tower is wood and stone, and wood and stone can be judged, and the clock is brass and steel, and brass and steel can be repaired. He wrote something down in his little book, and he smiled, and he left. I did not like his smile."
Soren nodded. He had seen Fallon's smile before, at council meetings, when a vote went his way. It was the smile of a man who had already decided what the truth was and was only waiting for everyone else to agree with him. "He has a petition," Soren said. "Men are signing it at the store. They say the tower is dangerous. They say a woman fell, and next time it might be a child."
"You built a new ladder," Maren said. "That is the first thing done right. Before we touch the clock again, I want to judge it the way a foot judges it — rung by rung, in the dark."
Soren stared at her. "I built it in the square, in full view of the town," he said. "With pine I bought myself. The council would not pay for it, so I did."
"Then let me judge it," Maren said. "Not with council money. With my own foot, and my own hand. A ladder is not a complicated thing. It is two rails and a set of rungs, and it must be strong enough to hold a person who is carrying tools, and it must be true enough to climb in the dark. Show it to me this afternoon, and we will set it in place tomorrow morning, and then no one will climb a rotten ladder in this tower again."
Soren felt something loosen in his chest, something that had been tight since the morning of the fall. He had blamed himself, quietly, for the ladder. He had warned the council, but he had not refused to let Maren climb, and he had stood below and held the ladder steady, and it had not been steady enough. Now this woman, who had every reason to be angry with him, was asking to judge his ladder honestly, rung by rung, and the simple rightness of it nearly undid him. He stood up, brushing crumbs from his knees, and said, "Good. I will show it to you this afternoon."
They went to it in the square, in the long light of a Wyoming summer afternoon, and Soren discovered that Maren Reed, for all her injured wrist, was a exacting judge of wood. She ran her left hand along the pine rails and found no board she would reject, though she looked for one. She made him measure the rung spacing twice, and when he asked why, she said, "Because a ladder is climbed in the dark, Mr. Krogh, and in the dark a person's foot trusts the spacing. If the spacing lies, the foot falls." Soren had never thought of a ladder that way. He had thought of ladders as things you built and forgot. He thought about it now, and he measured twice, and the ladder he had built was the truest thing he had made in years.