Chapter 12: The Names

They began on a Wednesday afternoon, Helen sitting at Arthur's kitchen table with a notebook and a pen, Arthur in his chair by the range with the through-stone on the armrest, and the light coming through the window falling across the table in a pale rectangle that moved slowly across the surface as the afternoon progressed, the sun tracking west, the light shifting, the shadow of the window frame drawing a cross on the table that lengthened and tilted as the hours passed.

Arthur had resisted for a week. He had agreed to it, had said yes, had said he would do it, and then he had not done it, had found reasons to postpone — the lambs needed checking, the vet was coming, he was tired, he would do it tomorrow — and Helen had not pressed him, had let the postponements accumulate, understanding that what Arthur was being asked to do was not simply to recite a list of names and marks but to acknowledge, by the act of reciting them, that the knowledge would soon have no other place to live, that the head that contained it would cease to contain anything, and that the words he spoke into Helen's notebook would be the last form of the knowledge, the final vessel, the container that would hold what the man could no longer hold.

But on Wednesday Arthur had woken with what Helen described to Tom later as a clarity, a sharpness that had been absent for days, the morphine fog lifting for a few hours, the mind surfacing from the drug like a stone surfacing from receding water, and he had said to Helen when she arrived for her morning visit, "We'll do the names today."

She had gone home and got the notebook and come back and sat at the table and opened the notebook to a fresh page and written the date at the top, and then she had waited.

Arthur began with the fields.

"Home field. That's the one in front of the house. You know it."

"I know it."

"Above that, the intake. We call it High Intake. It runs from the home field up to the wall that Tom's building. The wall is the top boundary."

Helen wrote: High Intake — from home field to upper wall.

"Above the wall, it's common. Common land. Used to be, anyway. It was enclosed in eighteen fifty-something. My grandfather's time. The wall Tom's building, that's the enclosure wall. That's the one they built when they enclosed the common."

"The Wensleydale gang."

"Aye. That's what my grandfather called them. I don't know their names. Nobody does."

Helen wrote and Arthur spoke, and the names came slowly at first, each one extracted from the memory like a stone extracted from the ground, requiring effort, requiring leverage, the name heavy with the weight of what it signified — not just a field but a history, not just a boundary but a story, each name carrying with it the reason for the name, the event or the feature or the person that had given the field its identity.

"Below the home field, going down to the river, that's the Holme. H-O-L-M-E. Flat ground by the river. It floods in winter."

"Holme."

"Aye. It's a Viking word. Jim Pratt told me that. The Vikings named half the places in this dale."

"What does it mean?"

"Island. Or flat ground by water. Same thing, up here."

Helen wrote: The Holme — flat ground by Swale, floods in winter. Viking word for island/riverside flat.

"West of the Holme, running up the side of the valley, that's Raven Scar. There's a crag at the top. Ravens nest there. Always have. My father used to say the ravens were here before the Metcalfes, and they'll be here after."

Helen wrote and Arthur smiled, a small inward smile, the smile of a man quoting his father, hearing his father's voice in his own voice, the dead man speaking through the living man, the knowledge passing from generation to generation the way a stone passed from hand to hand, each man adding his grip, his warmth, his wear to the stone's surface.

The names went on. Calf Close, where the calves were weaned in autumn. Black Rigg, the ridge above the intake where the peat was dark and the heather grew thick. Long Pasture, self-explanatory, a field that was four times as long as it was wide, running along the valley side in a narrow strip. Gill Field, named for the stream that ran through it, the gill, another Viking word, the water cutting a groove in the hillside as it ran down to the Swale. Kirk Close, named not for a church but for a circle of stones in its southeast corner, old stones, ancient, set in the ground long before the walls, long before the farms, long before the names themselves, stones that were not a kirk but that someone, at some time, had thought looked like one, and the name had stuck, as names did, the word outlasting the reason for the word.

Arthur stopped and closed his eyes and Helen thought he was tired, thought the effort of remembering was exhausting him, and she put down her pen and was about to say they could stop when Arthur opened his eyes and said, "The sheep marks."

"Are you sure?"

"While it's in my head. It won't stay."

The sheep marks were the marks that identified Arthur's sheep, the marks that distinguished his flock from every other flock on the fell, the system of cuts and burns and paint that was applied to the ears and the horns and the fleece of each animal, a code that was unique to each farm, each flock, each shepherd, the code that allowed a farmer to look at a sheep on the open fell and say, that's mine, that's my mark, that sheep belongs to me, and the code was old, centuries old, passed from father to son, the marks unchanged across generations because to change them would be to break the chain of identification, to sever the connection between the sheep on the fell and the farm in the valley, and no farmer would do that, the marks being as much a part of the farm as the walls and the fields and the name over the door.

"Right ear, a crop," Arthur said. "That's a straight cut across the top. Takes about a quarter inch off the tip."

Helen wrote: Right ear — crop (straight cut, top, ~1/4 inch).

"Left ear, a key-bit. That's a V-shaped notch cut from the edge. About halfway down."

"Key-bit."

"Aye. Don't ask me why it's called that. It's always been called that."

"A V-notch in the left ear, halfway down."

"Aye. And a red mark on the near shoulder. Raddle. We use red."

Helen wrote and Arthur dictated and the marks accumulated on the page, the code of the flock, the signature of the farm, the invisible knowledge made visible, set down in ink on paper the way the stones were set down in the wall, each mark a piece of information, each piece fitted to the pieces around it, the whole system a structure as coherent and as functional as a dry stone wall, a structure that had held for generations, that had identified thousands of sheep on thousands of acres of fell, and that was now being transcribed from the mind of the last Metcalfe farmer into a notebook on a kitchen table.

Arthur's voice grew quieter as he went on, the energy draining from him the way water drained from a field after rain, slowly, steadily, the level dropping, and Helen leaned closer to hear him, her pen moving across the page, her handwriting small and precise, the nurse's handwriting, the handwriting that was trained to be legible, to be accurate, to communicate without ambiguity, because in her profession ambiguity could kill, a misread dosage, a misunderstood instruction, the difference between milligrams and micrograms, the difference between life and death written in the shape of a letter.

"Horn burn," Arthur said. "A straight bar on the near horn. We use a marking iron. It's in the barn. In the cupboard by the door."

"I'll make sure Daniel knows."

"Daniel doesn't know owt about horn burns. He's college-trained. They don't teach marking at college. They teach nutrition and genetics and business management and they don't teach the lad how to mark a sheep."

"Then you'll teach him."

Arthur looked at her and the sharpness in his eyes was the sharpness of a man who knew that he would not teach Daniel, that there was not time enough left to teach Daniel, that the teaching required years, not days, required the slow accumulation of experience that could not be compressed or accelerated, the knowledge that lived in the hands and the eyes and could not be transferred by words alone.

"Write it down," Arthur said. "Write it all down and give it to whoever buys the farm. If they keep the sheep. If they don't—" He stopped and looked at the window. "If they don't keep the sheep, then it doesn't matter."

Helen wrote. She wrote everything Arthur told her. She wrote the marks and the field names and the names of the becks and the gills and the crags and the scars and the outcrops and the places where the sheep gathered in bad weather and the places where the lambs were born in spring and the places where the snow lay longest in winter and the places where the curlew nested and the places where the hare had its form. She wrote until the notebook was half full and Arthur's voice was barely audible and the light had shifted to the far end of the table and the cross of the window frame's shadow had stretched to a long thin line that reached the edge of the flagstones and fell over the edge into the shadow of the floor.

"That's enough," Arthur said.

"Are you tired?"

"I'm always tired. I told Tom. Tired's the default."

"We can do more tomorrow."

"Aye. Tomorrow."

Helen closed the notebook and put the cap on the pen and set them both on the table and sat for a moment, looking at Arthur, and Arthur looked back at her, and between them on the table the notebook sat with its half-filled pages, the names and the marks and the knowledge of the farm set down in Helen's handwriting, the farm on paper, the landscape reduced to words, the three hundred acres and the hundred and forty ewes and the two hundred years of Metcalfes compressed into fifty pages of a lined notebook, and Helen thought that the notebook was a kind of hearting, the invisible substance that would hold the farm's identity together after the man who carried it was gone, the knowledge packed between the pages the way the stones were packed between the faces of the wall, invisible, structural, essential.

Tom was coming down the hill when she went out to her car. She could see him on the path, his tools over his shoulder, his silhouette dark against the evening sky, and she waited for him and he reached the yard and set his tools in the Defender and came to her and they stood together in the yard, the two of them, and the farmhouse was behind them with its lit windows and the dying man inside, and the hill was above them with the wall on it, invisible now in the dusk, and the dale was around them, the whole dale, the valley and the river and the walls and the fields and the sheep, and Helen felt the through-stone of the moment, the connection between all of these things, the wall and the man and the farm and the knowledge and the notebook and the stone and the nurse and the waller, everything connected, everything held together by the invisible bonds that ran through the structure of the place, the hearting that you could not see but that you could feel if you stood still long enough, if you let the dale settle around you the way the stones settled in a wall, finding their places, fitting together.

"He did the names," Helen said.

"The field names?"

"And the sheep marks. Everything. I've got it in the notebook."

Tom looked at her and she could see his face in the last light, the lines around his eyes, the set of his jaw, the expression that she knew as well as she knew her own face, the expression that was not a single emotion but a layering of emotions, each one sitting on the one below, grief on love on worry on tenderness on the hard bedrock of the man's constancy, his reliability, his refusal to be anything other than what he was, and she loved him for the expression and for the face that wore it and for the man behind the face.

"That must have been hard," Tom said.

"It was."

"For him."

"For both of us."

Tom nodded and put his arm around her and she leaned into him and they stood in the yard in the dusk, the cobbles under their feet, the farmhouse at their backs, the hill above them, the dale around them, and the silence of the evening settled over them like a course of stone, heavy and fitting.

They drove home in convoy again, Tom's Defender in front, Helen's car behind, the two vehicles moving through the darkening dale, and the headlights picked out the walls on either side of the road, the coping stones lit for a moment and then dark again as the vehicles passed, the walls appearing and disappearing in the headlights like words appearing and disappearing on a page, the landscape revealing itself in fragments, in glimpses, in the brief illumination of the passing light.

At home Tom cooked dinner while Helen sat at the kitchen table with the notebook open in front of her, reading what she had written, the names and the marks, Arthur's knowledge in Helen's handwriting, and she read them aloud to Tom as he cooked.

"Kirk Close. Named for a circle of stones."

"I know Kirk Close. There's a good section of wall on the north side. Limestone, well-coursed. Older than the enclosure walls."

"Black Rigg. Peat and heather."

"I've walked Black Rigg. There's a boundary wall at the top that's mostly collapsed. Half-buried in peat. You can see the foundation course sticking out."

Helen read the names and Tom responded to them, his responses the waller's responses, every field name prompting a memory of a wall, a section of stone, a piece of craft, and the conversation moved between the notebook and Tom's memory, between the written word and the lived experience, the two forms of knowledge meeting over the kitchen table the way the two faces of a wall met in the hearting, each one incomplete without the other, each one giving the other its depth, its substance, its truth.

"The Holme. Flat ground by the river. Floods in winter."

"Holme's got no walls. It's bounded by the river on one side and a hedge on the other. Too wet for walls. The foundation would shift."

"Arthur said it's a Viking word."

"Jim Pratt says that about half the words in this dale. Jim thinks the Vikings invented the place."

"Didn't they?"

"They named it. Naming's not the same as inventing."

Helen looked at him and smiled and closed the notebook and put it in her bag.

"We'll do more tomorrow," she said.

"How much more is there?"

"I don't know. He was getting tired. He stopped before we got to the upper fields. There's the common land, the rights. The stints. The gathering spots."

"The gathering spots are important. If whoever buys the farm keeps the sheep, they'll need to know where to gather."

"Arthur knows. It's all in his head."

"For now."

"For now."

They ate dinner and washed up and went to bed, and Helen lay in the dark and thought about the notebook, about the names on the pages, about Arthur's voice speaking them, the voice getting quieter as the afternoon wore on, the names coming slower, harder, each one requiring more effort to extract from the memory, the knowledge reluctant to leave its home, the words clinging to the mind that had carried them the way the hearting clung to the wall, the way the stones clung to the earth, the way everything in the dale clung to everything else, held by gravity, held by habit, held by the invisible bonds that connected the place and the people and the stone and the sheep and the names and the walls, everything held, everything connected, everything part of the same structure, the same wall, the same hearting.

She slept and dreamed of names. She dreamed that the names were carved into the stones of the wall, each field name cut into a face stone, the letters deep and sharp, and the wall ran across the hillside and the names ran along the wall, and the names were the wall, the wall was the names, the stone and the word were the same thing, and the wall stood because the names held it, and the names lasted because the wall carried them, and the two were one, the word and the stone, the name and the place, the invisible and the visible, the hearting and the face.

She woke to the sound of Tom getting up, his feet on the floor, the creak of the bed, the sound of a man beginning his day, and she lay still for a moment and listened to him move through the house, the kettle, the cupboard, the flask being filled, the door opening and closing, the Defender starting in the drive, the sound of the engine receding as he drove up the dale to the wall, and she lay in the bed in the morning light and thought about the names in the notebook and the names in Arthur's head and the names on the stones in her dream, and she thought that the work of the day ahead was the same work as the day before and the day before that, the work of holding things together, the work of packing the hearting, the work of gathering the knowledge and setting it down and making it permanent, the work of tending the living and the dying and the built and the spoken and the written, the work of the through-stone, the work that connected, the work that held.

She got up and dressed and packed her bag and drove out of the village and up the dale to her first patient, and the walls stood on either side of the road, and the names of the fields were written on the walls, invisible, legible only to those who knew the code, the code of the dale, the code of the farm, the code that Arthur Metcalfe was dictating to Helen Ashworth in the kitchen of a farmhouse at the head of the dale while a waller built a wall on the hillside above them, and the names and the wall and the man and the woman and the stone and the words were all part of the same thing, the same structure, the same hearting, the invisible substance that held the visible world together.