I had spent the intervening months doing what I had always done: maintaining the system, keeping the logs, replacing a pressure relief valve on the east manifold branch in July, noting the date and the part number and the condition of the old valve in the spiral-bound notebook in the same mechanical pencil I had used for 31 years.
The morning of the hearing was cold in the way that October mornings in this valley are always cold: a clean, dry cold that came off the ridge before dawn and settled into the low ground—the same cold that had been settling into this valley every October since before my grandfather arrived with his surveyor's transit and his decision to stay.
I drove the county road into town in the dark, the fields on either side pale with frost, the creek bottom invisible in the early mist, the ridge just beginning to show its outline against a sky lightening from black to the deep blue that comes before color returns to the world.
The courthouse smelled of old wood and radiator heat, the particular warmth of a building that has been holding cold mornings at bay for a hundred years and expects to do so for a hundred more. I sat in the hallway outside the courtroom with Patricia and her associate, a young man named Devo, who carried the accordion folder and who had the quality of stillness that the best legal minds develop early: the ability to be present without being restless, to wait without performing patience.
Diane Coulter arrived with Gerald Foss and two board members I recognized from Warren's descriptions. She was wearing the slate blazer again, or one very like it, and she carried a leather portfolio that she set on the table with the deliberateness of someone establishing a position. She did not look at me when she came in. Gerald Foss looked at me briefly, and then looked away, and in that brief look I saw something I recognized: not hostility, but the particular expression of a man who has reviewed the opposing file and found it more substantial than he had hoped.
The judge was a woman named Honorable Claire Mossberger, who had been on the county bench for 19 years and who had, according to Patricia, a reputation for reading the record carefully and reaching conclusions the record supported, regardless of the confidence with which either party presented their position. She came in without ceremony, settled her reading glasses on her nose, and opened the file.
The hearing ran for one hour and forty minutes. The record spoke first.
Judge Mossberger read in silence for a long time, turning pages with the methodical attention of someone who was not going to be hurried, while the courtroom held the particular quiet of a room where everyone is waiting for a document to finish speaking.