Chapter 17: The Last Stone

The last stone was not the best stone.

It was not the largest or the most symmetrical or the most perfectly shaped. It was a stone that Tom had set aside early in the job, a coping stone that was slightly too thin at its base, slightly too thick at its top, the proportions wrong, the taper reversed, and he had put it at the bottom of the coping pile thinking he would not need it, thinking the other twenty-seven stones would be enough, and they were not enough, the gap at the south end of the coping requiring one more stone, the twenty-eighth, and the only stone remaining was this one, the misshapen one, the one that did not quite fit.

He held it in his hands and turned it and looked at it and thought about going to the outcrop above the intake wall to find a better stone, a stone with the right proportions, the right taper, a stone that would finish the wall with the correctness that the rest of the wall deserved. But he did not go. He stood on the hillside in the morning light with the imperfect stone in his hands and he thought about perfection and imperfection and about Jim's words — "There's no such thing as a perfect wall. There's only walls that stand and walls that don't" — and he turned the stone again, looking at it from a different angle, and he saw that the stone was not wrong, the stone was simply different, was shaped differently from the other copings, and that the difference was not a flaw but a characteristic, the stone being what it was, and what it was was a piece of limestone that had been formed three hundred million years ago on a seabed and that had been quarried from an outcrop and that had been set in a wall and that had fallen when the wall fell and that had been sorted and stacked and waited, and now it was the last stone, the stone that would complete the wall, and it did not need to be perfect, it needed to be placed.

He dressed the base with his hammer, taking a quarter inch off the thick end, squaring it, flattening it so it would sit on the wallhead without rocking, and then he set it in place, leaning it against the twenty-seventh coping stone, the stone tilting into its neighbour, the angle found, the lean established, and the stone stood, held by the stone beside it, the last stone in the row, the twenty-eighth, the stone that completed the coping, that finished the wall.

He stepped back.

The wall was complete.

Nine yards of dry stone wall, four and a half feet high from the foundation to the top of the coping, thirty inches wide at the base and fourteen at the top, built without mortar, without cement, without adhesive of any kind, held together by gravity and friction and the fit of stone against stone, the weight of each stone pressing down on the stone below it, the hearting packed between the two faces, the through-stones binding the faces together, the coping set on edge along the wallhead, interlocking, self-supporting, the crown of the wall shedding the rain, protecting the structure beneath it. The stile was built into the wall at the point where the path from the farmhouse met the upper field, the step-stones protruding from both faces. The creep hole was at the south end, the cover stone in place, the gap closed. The wall was whole. The gap was filled. The line of stone that ran along the hillside was unbroken again, the boundary restored, the field enclosed.

Tom stood beside the wall and looked at it and felt the feeling that he always felt when a wall was finished, the feeling that was partly satisfaction and partly loss, the satisfaction of the work completed and the loss of the work itself, the daily rhythm of lift and place and fit that had given his days their shape for the past two months, the rhythm that was now over, that would not resume tomorrow, that was done. He had felt this before, at the end of every job, the small bereavement of completion, the emptiness that followed the fullness of the work, and he knew that it would pass, that another job would come, that there were always walls to build and walls to repair and gaps to fill, and the emptiness would be filled by the next wall, the next set of stones, the next stretch of hillside where his hands and his hammer would find their purpose.

But this time the feeling was different. This time the loss was not just the loss of the work but the loss of the reason for the work, the man in the farmhouse below, the man for whom the wall had been built, the man whose farm it was and whose wall it was and whose land it enclosed, and Tom knew that when Arthur died the connection between Tom and this wall would change, would weaken, would become memory rather than practice, and the wall would stand on the hillside and Tom would see it from the road as he drove through the dale, and he would know it as his wall, would know every stone in it, every course, every through-stone and coping stone and piece of hearting, but he would not climb the hill to it, would not walk its length, would not run his hand along its face, because the wall would belong to someone else, the farm sold, the land transferred, the new owner a stranger who would not know that the waller who built this wall had stood beside it on a summer morning and felt the weight of its completion settle in his chest like a stone settling on a foundation.

He sat on the ground beside the wall, his back against the face stones, the stone warm against his back from the morning sun, and he poured tea from the flask and drank it and looked down the dale. The dale was deep in summer now. The grass was tall, the hedgerows thick, the trees in full leaf, the river low and slow, and the dale had the lush, heavy look of the year's peak, the landscape at its fullest, its richest, the green almost too green, the light almost too golden, the day almost too warm, everything at its maximum, the year's coping set, the season crowned, and from here the year would begin its descent toward autumn, the grass yellowing, the leaves turning, the light shortening, the cold coming, the year declining the way a wall declined, the coping shifting first, the hearting loosening, the face stones moving, the slow erosion of the season, the slow approach of the end.

He finished his tea and stood and walked the length of the wall, the full nine yards, running his hand along the coping stones as he walked, feeling each one, the shape of it, the temperature of it, the texture, and each stone was different under his fingers, each one individual, unique, the way every stone in the wall was individual and unique, no two the same shape, no two the same weight, no two the same colour, and yet all of them fitting together, all of them part of the same structure, the same wall, the differences not dividing them but uniting them, the variety the source of the strength, because a wall made of identical stones would be weaker than a wall made of different stones, the differences creating the interlock, the irregularities creating the friction, the imperfections creating the fit.

He thought about the last stone, the twenty-eighth coping, the imperfect stone that he had dressed and placed, and he looked at it now, sitting at the south end of the row, leaning against the twenty-seventh, and it looked fine, it looked right, it looked like it belonged there, the slight difference in its proportions invisible once it was in context, once it was part of the row, the imperfection absorbed by the whole, the individual stone subsumed into the wall, its oddness becoming its character, its flaw becoming its fit.

He walked down the hill for the last time as a working man on this job, his tools over his shoulder, the hammer and the chisel and the pinch bar and the flask, the bag of pins that he would not use again on this wall, and the walk down was the walk he had made a hundred times in the past two months, the path worn by his boots into the grass, a faint track that ran from the wall to the yard, the same path that Arthur had climbed in the early days, the path that the walker from Reeth had followed, the path that the sheep would follow when the creep hole was opened. He walked the path and felt it under his feet and knew that the path would fade, that the grass would grow back, that the rain and the growth of the summer would erase the track that his boots had made, and by autumn there would be no sign that a man had walked this way twice a day for two months, the path as invisible as the hearting, as gone as the footprints of the Wensleydale gang who had walked this hill a hundred and seventy years ago.

He went to the farmhouse. Arthur was in his chair. The through-stone was on the armrest. The kitchen was dim, the curtains drawn, and Sandra the palliative care nurse had been and gone, her notes on the table in a folder that Helen would read when she came.

"It's done," Tom said.

Arthur looked at him. His eyes were sharp today, the clarity that came and went, the good days and the bad days, and today was a good day, the eyes focused, present, the farmer behind the eyes still there.

"Done."

"Twenty-eight copings. Wallhead to wallhead. The wall's complete."

Arthur said nothing for a moment. He looked at the window, at the hillside, at the wall that he could see from his chair, the line of stone on the hill, and Tom saw his eyes trace the line, following the coping from one end to the other, the way he had walked the wall when he could still walk, tapping the copings with his stick, and now he walked it with his eyes, the last inspection, the final check.

"I can see the last one," Arthur said. "At the south end. It's a different shape."

Tom looked at the window and tried to see what Arthur saw, and he could not see the individual coping stones from this distance, could not distinguish the twenty-eighth from the twenty-seventh, and he marvelled at Arthur's eyes, the farmer's eyes that could read a sheep at fifty yards and a wall at half a mile, the eyes that saw what other eyes could not see, the eyes that were the last part of the man to decline, the last instrument to fail.

"It was the only stone I had left," Tom said. "It's not perfect."

"Nowt's perfect."

"Jim says that."

"Jim's right."

Arthur looked at Tom and his hand moved on the through-stone, the slow turning, the fingers tracing the stone's edge.

"Thank you," Arthur said.

Tom felt the words enter him the way a pinning stone entered a joint, small and precise and load-bearing, the words doing what words did when they were exactly right, which was to fill the space between two people, the gap between the waller and the farmer, the gap that had been there from the beginning, the professional distance, the employer-employee formality, and the words filled the gap and closed it and the two men were not the waller and the farmer but Tom and Arthur, two men in a kitchen, one dying and one not, and the wall between them was not a wall but a through-stone, a connection, a thing that bound them.

"You don't have to thank me," Tom said. "It's my job."

"It's not just your job."

"No. It's not."

They sat in the kitchen and the silence between them was full, the fullest silence, the silence that contained everything that had been said and everything that had not been said, the wall and the stone and the hearting and the through-stone and the stile and the creep hole and the names and the marks and the sheep and the dale and the farm and the two hundred years of Metcalfes and the hundred and seventy years of the wall and the twenty-five years of Tom's craft and the seventy-eight years of Arthur's life, all of it in the silence, all of it held, all of it hearting.

Tom left at three and drove down the dale and did not look back at the wall, did not look in the mirror, kept his eyes on the road and the walls on either side of the road and the river below and the dale around him, and he drove home and parked in the drive and sat in the Defender for five minutes without getting out, his hands on the wheel, his hands that were the shape of the stones they had lifted, and the shape was complete now, the hands had done their work, and the work was finished, and the wall was standing on the hillside behind him, the coping set, the crown in place, the wall complete, and the hands rested on the wheel and the man sat in the vehicle and the vehicle sat in the drive and the drive sat in the village and the village sat in the dale and the dale sat in the hills and the hills sat on the earth and the earth turned in the sky and the sky held everything, the way the coping held the wallhead and the wallhead held the wall and the wall held the hearting and the hearting held the wall.

Helen came home and found him in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a mug of tea that had gone cold.

"You finished," she said.

"I finished."

She sat beside him and put her hand on his hand and her hand was warm and his hand was cold, the cold of a man who had stopped working, whose body had stopped generating the heat of labour, the heat of the craft, and her warmth seeped into his fingers the way the sun's warmth seeped into the stone of the wall, and he felt it and held it and the tea went colder and the evening came and the dale darkened and the wall stood on the hillside, complete, crowned, finished, holding.