They spent the afternoon preparing, the way you prepare for work that cannot be redone: Soren wrapped the broken rung in a clean cloth and laid it in a wooden box; Maren folded the old newspaper issue so that the sale notice showed on top, and marked the date with a slip of paper; and together they went through the trial log, page by page, checking each entry and initial, so that there would be no mistake when it was read aloud. The log was a plain book, nothing grand, and that was its strength: five days of entries, each one in a different hand or the same hand made careful, each one saying the same small thing — true at noon — and the depot agent's separate record at the depot saying the same thing in his own book, which Soren had gone to look at that afternoon, with the agent's permission, and found to agree to the minute.
In the late afternoon, before the meeting, Soren walked up to the tower alone, the way he did when he needed to think with his hands. He checked the new ladder, rung by rung, and the timbers, and stood at the tower window looking out over Fox Creek, at the street and the shops and the houses with their smoke rising, and at the print shop with its board outside, and he thought about the town the way a carpenter thinks about a building he has worked on for years: not as an idea, but as a set of joints, each one either sound or not, each one holding or waiting to fail. The town's joints were its people, and the meeting tonight would test which was which, the way a load tests a beam.
He went down as the sun went low, and washed his hands, and put on his good shirt, and walked with Maren to the town hall, where the meeting room was already filling. The room smelled of lamp oil and dust and the particular closeness of a room full of people who have all decided to be in the same place at the same time. The council sat at a long table at the front, the chairman in the middle with the key to the clock case in his pocket, though the case was not the business of the evening. Fallon sat to one side with his petition board on the table before him and a stack of his papers beside it, his face composed as a man come to do a public duty and expecting thanks for it. Soren did not look at him longer than he had to. He set the wooden box on the table in front of the council, and Maren set the folded newspaper beside it, and the trial log beside that, and they took their seats in the front row, side by side, the way work partners sit, and waited.
The chairman called the meeting to order, and his voice shook a little at first, and then steadied, and he said that the council had agreed to hear the petition to demolish the town-hall tower and to hear the answer to it, and that the room would hear both in full before any decision was made. He asked Fallon to speak first, because the petition was his, and Fallon rose, and smoothed his coat, and spoke the way he wrote: smoothly, reasonably, with the air of a man who is only saying what everyone already knows.
He spoke of safety, and of the woman who had fallen — he did not name Maren, but he looked in her direction — and of the danger that a tower which had already failed once would fail again, and of the cost of maintaining an old building when a new printing house on the same lot would bring work and wages to the town. He spoke of progress and of sentiment, and made sentiment sound like a luxury the town could not afford. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The room listened the way rooms listen to a man who owns the paper they read, with a mixture of respect and habit that is harder to argue against than any single claim.
When he finished, he laid the petition on the table, and the chairman looked at it, and at the names on it, and said, "The council will hear the answer now," and he looked at Soren, and Soren stood up, and for a moment his hands felt empty, because he was a man used to having a tool in them, and then he opened the wooden box and took out the broken rung, wrapped in its cloth, and laid it on the table in front of the council, and the room went very quiet, the way rooms go quiet when a real thing is put in front of them.