Chapter 13: The Wallhead

The wall was four feet high and Tom could feel the end of it in his hands.

Not the completion — the coping was still to come, the final course that would crown the wall and shed the rain and give it its silhouette against the sky — but the approaching fullness of the thing, the sense that the wall had nearly reached its intended height, that the batter frames were running out of room, the string line climbing toward the top of the A-frame where it would stop, where there was no more wall to describe, and the stone would have to find its own way to the sky.

The wallhead was the top course before the coping, the last course of face stones and hearting, and it was narrow, the batter having reduced the wall's width from thirty inches at the base to fourteen at the top, so that the stones Tom was working with now were smaller, lighter, more delicate than the big foundation pieces and the heavy through-stones of the middle courses. These were precise stones, carefully chosen, and they sat on the wall with a lightness that belied their importance, because the wallhead was what the coping would sit on, and the coping would only sit well if the wallhead was level, flat, true, a platform of stone as even as a table top, and Tom spent hours on it, adjusting, shimming, tapping the pinning stones into the gaps, his walling hammer working with the delicacy of a watchmaker's tool, the blows gentle, precise, each one placing a fraction of an inch of stone into a gap that was a fraction of an inch wide.

He thought about the word "wallhead" as he worked. The head of the wall. The top. The part that was furthest from the ground, the part that reached toward the sky, the part that was most exposed to the wind and the rain and the frost, the part that took the weather first, before the lower courses, before the hearting, before the foundation. The wallhead was the wall's face to the sky, the way the coping was the wall's crown, and between the wallhead and the foundation lay the whole body of the wall, the courses and the hearting and the through-stones, the mass of stone that supported the wallhead the way a body supported a head, the whole structure working together, each part dependent on every other part, no part able to stand alone.

And the wallhead was where the wall was most vulnerable. The top of a wall was the first place where failure showed, the coping stones shifting in the wind, the wallhead stones loosening as the frost worked into the joints from above, the rain penetrating the top of the wall and working its way down, softening the hearting, dissolving the pinning, the decay starting at the top and descending, course by course, the way a man's decline often started at the top, the mind going before the body, the head failing before the legs, the decay working its way down through the structure until the whole thing was compromised and the wall fell.

But Arthur's decline was the opposite. Arthur's body was failing first, the legs weakening, the weight dropping, the organs shutting down, while the mind remained clear, sharp, still engaged with the farm and the sheep and the walls, still asking Tom about the wall's progress, still thinking about the lambs and the marking and the names of the fields, the head holding while the body went, the wallhead standing while the foundation crumbled, and Tom thought that this was harder, was crueller, than the other way, because Arthur could see what was happening, could feel his body failing beneath him while his mind watched, helpless, the farmer watching his own walls fall and unable to repair them.

He set the last stone of the wallhead course at the north end of the gap at two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon in late April, and he stood back and looked at the wall and the wall was at its full height before coping, four feet of stone rising from the foundation to the wallhead, the batter true, the faces plumb, the hearting packed, the through-stones set, the stile built, the creep hole in place, and the wall was not finished but was approaching finish, was in the last stage of its becoming, the stage where the coping would be set and the wall would be complete, and Tom felt the mixed emotions of approaching completion that he always felt at this point in a job, the satisfaction of the wall nearly done and the reluctance to let go of the work, the work that had given his days their shape and their purpose for the past six weeks, the work that had connected him to Arthur and to the hill and to the stones.

He sat on the pile of coping stones that he had set aside at the beginning of the job and poured tea from the flask and drank it and looked down the dale. The light was changing. Spring was becoming summer. The grass was deep now, growing fast in the warm wet days of late April, the fields vivid, the hedgerows in leaf, the trees along the river wearing the pale green of new growth, the willows and the ash and the sycamore, each species leafing at its own pace, the willows first, their catkins already gone, the ash last, the ash keys still in bud, the tree that waited longest before committing itself to the season.

He thought about the ash. The ash tree was the tree of the dale, the tree that grew in the hedgerows and the field corners and along the stone walls, its roots finding the gaps between the stones, its trunk growing against the wall, sometimes growing into the wall, the tree and the wall merging, the stone accommodating the wood, the wood reshaping the stone, and the old ash trees were as much a part of the dale's landscape as the walls themselves, their canopies spreading over the fields, their shade cooling the sheep in summer, their branches breaking the wind in winter, and Tom thought that the ash and the wall were engaged in a long slow negotiation, each one shaping the other, the wall providing shelter for the young tree and the tree eventually displacing the wall's stones as its trunk expanded, the two structures coexisting for decades, for centuries, and then the tree dying and falling and the wall being rebuilt and a new tree growing in the gap where the old tree had been, the cycle repeating, the negotiation continuing.

He walked down the hill at four and went to the farmhouse. Arthur was in his chair, the through-stone on the armrest, and the kitchen was dim, the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun, and Helen was there, sitting at the table with the notebook, and Tom realised that they had been doing the names again, that the second session of dictation had happened while he was on the hill, that Arthur had been speaking and Helen had been writing, the knowledge flowing from the old man's mind to the young woman's pen, the farm being transcribed, the landscape being set down in words the way Tom set it down in stone.

"He's sleeping," Helen said quietly, standing, coming to the door where Tom stood.

Tom looked at Arthur in the chair and saw that he was indeed asleep, his head tilted back against the chair's headrest, his mouth slightly open, his breathing shallow, and the through-stone was on the armrest but his hand had slipped off it, the hand lying on the arm of the chair beside the stone, the fingers slightly curled, and the stone and the hand side by side looked like two versions of the same thing, the stone version and the flesh version, the permanent and the transient, the thing that would outlast the man and the thing that had shaped it.

"We got through the upper fields," Helen said. "The common land. The stints."

"The gathering spots?"

"We did those. He drew a map. On the back page."

Helen showed him the notebook, opened to the last page, and there was Arthur's map, drawn in pencil, the lines shaky, the hand that had drawn them uncertain, but the map itself was clear, the fields laid out in their correct positions, the walls drawn as double lines, the becks as wavy lines, the crags as jagged marks, and at certain points on the map there were X marks with names beside them — the gathering spots, the places on the fell where the sheep congregated in bad weather, the sheltered hollows and the lee sides of the walls where the ewes gathered when the wind came from the north or the snow came from the east, the places that every shepherd knew and that no map showed, the secret geography of the flock.

Tom studied the map and recognised the places. He had walked them all, had built walls near them, had seen the sheep gathering in those hollows on cold days, and he knew that Arthur's map was accurate, was true, was drawn from seventy-eight years of walking this ground and watching these sheep and knowing where they went when the weather turned.

"It's good," Tom said.

"He was proud of it. He held it up and looked at it and said, 'That's the farm.' And it is. It is the farm. On the back page of a notebook."

Tom closed the notebook and set it on the table and looked at Arthur sleeping in the chair and then looked at Helen and saw the tiredness in her face, the weight of the days accumulating, the emotional labour of sitting with a dying man and receiving his knowledge and writing it down and knowing that the writing down was a form of goodbye, that each name dictated was a name released, a piece of the farm let go, the man's grip on his land loosening finger by finger as the knowledge passed from his mind to the page.

"Come home," Tom said.

"I should stay until he wakes."

"Sandra's coming at four."

"Sandra's coming at four."

Helen looked at Arthur one more time, the sleeping man in the chair, and then she gathered her things and they went out to the yard and got in their vehicles and drove home, the Defender leading, Helen's car following, the two of them moving through the dale in the long evening light.

At home Tom went to the shed and sat on the bench outside the door and thought about the wallhead, the top course of the wall, the last course before the coping, and he thought about the wall's nearness to completion and about Arthur's nearness to the end, and he thought about the way the two convergences mirrored each other, the wall rising toward its crown as Arthur descended toward his, the wall approaching the coping as Arthur approached the ground, the two of them moving in opposite directions but at the same pace, the wall growing as the man shrank, the stones accumulating as the life diminished, and Tom thought that when the wall was finished Arthur would still be here, would still be in his chair, would still be holding the through-stone, but that the margin between the wall's completion and Arthur's death was narrowing, the gap between the two events closing the way the gap in the wall had closed, course by course, stone by stone, day by day.

Jim Pratt came on the Friday, the Transit pulling into the yard, the blue-grey van that was as much a part of the dale's landscape as the walls themselves, and Jim climbed the hill with the careful tread of a man who knew every stone on the path and whose knees bore the record of a lifetime's climbing, and he reached the wall and stood and looked at it and said nothing for a long time.

Tom waited. Jim's silences were as communicative as his words, and the length of a silence indicated the seriousness of the assessment, a short silence meaning a minor issue, a long silence meaning either a major problem or a deep approval, and Tom could not tell which this was, the silence extending past the point where a problem would have been voiced, entering the territory of approval, and then Jim spoke.

"Wallhead's good."

"Thank you."

"I didn't say it was perfect. I said it was good."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nowt's wrong with it. I said it was good. Good's what it is."

"But not perfect."

Jim looked at him with the expression that Tom knew well, the expression that said you are asking the wrong question, the expression that said perfection is not the standard, the standard is rightness, the fit, the correctness of the stone in its place, and a wall could be right without being perfect, because perfection was an abstraction and rightness was a thing you could feel with your hands.

"There's no such thing as a perfect wall," Jim said. "There's only walls that stand and walls that don't. This one'll stand."

"How long?"

"How long's a piece of string? It'll stand as long as the ground holds the foundation and the hearting stays dry and nobody drives a tractor through it. Sixty years. Eighty. A hundred."

"That'll do."

"Aye. That'll do."

They drank tea together on the flat stone, the flask and the tin mug, the ritual of their friendship, the ceremony of craft, and the dale was spread out below them, the fields and the walls and the river and the village, and the light was the light of late April, warm and golden, the best light, the light that showed everything and hid nothing, the light of the dale at its most vivid and its most truthful.

"How's Arthur?" Jim said.

"Declining."

"I heard."

"Helen's writing down the field names. The sheep marks. Everything he knows."

Jim was quiet for a moment, and in the quiet Tom could feel the weight of Jim's own knowledge, the sixty-eight years of dale life that Jim carried in his head, the names and the places and the walls and the people, the accumulated understanding that was as much a part of Jim as his hands were a part of him, and Tom thought about what would happen when Jim's knowledge was gone, when Jim's head was empty, and he felt a fear that was not for Arthur but for all of them, for the dale, for the knowledge itself, the knowledge that lived in the heads of old men and that was dying with them, one by one, the hearting spilling from the wall as the face stones fell.

"I'll go and see him," Jim said.

"He'd like that."

"I should've gone before. I've been — I don't like hospitals. I don't like illness. I don't like seeing a man I've known for fifty years in a chair when he should be in a field."

"He's not in hospital. He's at home."

"Aye. But he's in a chair. And Arthur Metcalfe in a chair is Arthur Metcalfe in a hospital. It's the wrong place for him."

"The right place for him is on the hill."

"The right place for him is on the hill."

Jim finished his tea and stood and walked the length of the wall, the full nine yards that Tom had rebuilt, and he walked it twice, once on each side, his hand running along the face stones, his fingers finding the joints, the pinning stones, the through-stones, the stile, the creep hole, reading the wall the way a blind man read Braille, by touch, by feel, the fingers translating the surface of the wall into the knowledge of its interior, the hearting felt through the face, the structure understood through its surface.

"You've done well," Jim said.

Tom said nothing. Coming from Jim, these three words were more than praise, they were a judgment, a professional assessment, the verdict of the master on the student's work, and Tom received them the way the wall received the through-stone, silently, structurally, the words becoming part of the wall's history, part of the story that the wall would tell to the next man who stripped it back and rebuilt it, a hundred years from now, two hundred, whenever the wall fell again and another waller came to read the stones and rebuild.

Jim left and Tom sat alone on the hillside and looked at the wall, the wallhead level, the through-stones set, the hearting packed, the batter true, the nine yards of rebuild sitting on the original foundation like a new paragraph in an old book, the same language, the same grammar, the same stone, and he thought about the coping that he would set next week, the final course, the stones set on edge along the top of the wallhead, interlocking, heavy, the crown of the wall, and he thought about the word "crown" and its meanings — the top of a head, the peak of a hill, the finishing of a wall, the thing that completed the thing, the last piece that made the whole — and he thought about the crown of Arthur's life, the last part, the finishing, and he thought that Arthur's life was approaching its coping, the final course, and that the coping stones of a life were not set on edge by the man himself but by the people around him, the people who attended the end, who laid the final stones, who finished what the man had started, and that Helen was one of those people, and that he, Tom, was another, and that the wall was the work by which they set the coping on Arthur's life, the wall the final act of care, the last stone placed.

He gathered his tools and walked down the hill in the long evening light and drove home and sat in the kitchen with Helen and drank tea and said, "Jim says the wall's good."

"Good?"

"Good. From Jim, that's the highest mark."

"Not perfect?"

"Jim says there's no such thing as a perfect wall."

Helen smiled and the smile was tired but real, the smile of a woman who understood what good meant in the vocabulary of walls, the vocabulary that she had learned over twenty years of marriage to a waller, the vocabulary that was as familiar to her now as the vocabulary of nursing, the two languages coexisting in her life the way the two faces coexisted in a wall, each one complete in itself, each one part of the whole, and the through-stone that ran between them was Tom, was their life together, was the shared kitchen and the shared table and the shared dale and the shared concern for the man in the farmhouse on the hill.

"Jim's going to see Arthur," Tom said.

"When?"

"He didn't say. But he'll go. He said he should have gone before."

"He should have."

"He said he doesn't like seeing Arthur in a chair."

"Nobody likes seeing Arthur in a chair. Arthur doesn't like seeing Arthur in a chair."

Tom nodded and drank his tea and the evening settled around them, the light going, the dale darkening, the walls disappearing, and the wallhead on the hillside sat in the gathering dusk, level and true, waiting for the coping, waiting for the crown, waiting for the stones that would finish it.