Chapter 18: Autumn

September came to the dale the way autumn always came, not suddenly but in increments, in the shortening of the evenings and the lengthening of the shadows and the first touch of colour on the bracken, the green fading to gold, the gold deepening to rust, and the hillsides above the intake walls turning from the uniform green of summer to the mottled bronze and copper and brown of the dying bracken, the change happening day by day, so gradual that you did not notice it until one morning you looked at the hills and they were different, were autumn, were no longer the hills of summer but the hills of the turning year.

Tom noticed.

He drove through the dale to his next job — a gap in a boundary wall near Muker, a small job, two days' work, nothing like the weeks at High Scar Farm — and he noticed the bracken turning on the hillsides and the rowan berries ripening in the hedgerows, bright red against the green, the trees producing their fruit before their leaves fell, the urgency of autumn, the rush to set seed and drop fruit and prepare for the winter, and the dale was busy with the work of the season, the hay being cut in the last of the warm days, the tractors moving through the fields trailing the mowers and the turners and the balers, the grass falling in rows and drying in the sun and being gathered into round bales that sat in the fields like boulders, like stones waiting to be placed.

He thought about Arthur as he drove. He thought about Arthur every day, and the thinking had changed over the months, the way the wall had changed as it rose from the foundation to the coping, the thinking starting as a professional concern — the farmer who had commissioned the wall, the employer, the man whose fields Tom was working — and becoming something else, something deeper, something that Tom could not quite name, a connection that was not friendship exactly, because friendship implied equality and there was an inequality between them, not of status but of fate, the inequality between the man who would die and the man who would live, the inequality that divided every relationship in the world into two categories, the dying and the not-yet-dying, and that made every relationship, finally, a relationship of farewell.

Helen reported to him each evening.

The reports were shorter now. There was less to report. Arthur's world had contracted to the chair and the bed and the distance between them, the fifteen feet of kitchen and hallway and bedroom that was the territory of his remaining life, and within that territory the changes were small, incremental, the blood pressure dropping a few points, the weight dropping a few ounces, the pain increasing by a degree that the morphine could not quite cover, the decline so gradual that from day to day it was almost invisible, but from week to week it was undeniable, the man being eroded the way the limestone was eroded by the rain, molecule by molecule, the surface dissolving, the substance diminishing, the shape remaining but the mass decreasing.

"He's not eating," Helen said on a Tuesday evening.

"At all?"

"A few sips of soup. Tea. He'll drink tea. But food — he's past food."

"What does Sandra say?"

"Sandra says what I say. That the body is shutting down. That the organs are failing. That the pain will get worse before it gets better."

"Gets better."

Helen looked at him. "Gets better meaning stops. Meaning the end."

Tom nodded and drank his tea and looked out the window at the dale, at the hills turning brown, at the light failing earlier each day, the evenings drawing in, the year contracting the way Arthur's life was contracting, the expansive days of summer giving way to the shorter, darker days of autumn, and he thought about the wall standing on the hillside above the farm, the wall that he had finished two months ago, the wall that he had not visited since, the wall that stood in the changing light, the coping shedding the rain that came more frequently now, the autumn rain, the rain that was not the heavy driving rain of winter but the steady soaking rain of the season's end.

The sheep were gathered from the fell in the third week of September.

Daniel organised it, with the help of two men from the village and three dogs, the sheep brought down from the common land above the enclosure wall — above Tom's wall — and herded into the fields below, the ewes and the lambs of the year separated, the lambs taken to the auction in Hawes, the ewes kept for another season, another tupping, another lambing, unless they were too old or too weak or too barren, in which case they went to the auction too, the flock culled, the numbers reduced, the farm's herd pared back to the animals that would earn their keep through the winter.

Tom heard about the gathering from Helen, who heard about it from Daniel, who came to the farmhouse each evening to report to Arthur, the lad standing in the kitchen with his boots on and his cap in his hands, telling Arthur how many sheep had been gathered and how many were missing and how many lambs had been sold and at what price, and Arthur listening from his chair, his eyes closed, his face grey, the information going in, being processed, being filed in the farmer's mind that still functioned, that still cared about the numbers, the prices, the condition of the flock, even as the body that had tended the flock for sixty years lay motionless in the chair, the hands that had held the crook and the lambing rope and the shears resting on the armrests, the right hand on the worn wood, the left hand on the through-stone.

"He asked about the wall," Helen said one evening. "He asked if you'd been up."

"No. I haven't been up."

"He'd like you to go."

Tom said nothing. He had not been to the wall since the day he finished it. He had not been to the farm. He had reasons — the job in Muker, the boundary wall that needed gapping, and then a week of rain, and then another job near Reeth — but the reasons were not the real reason, and the real reason was that he did not want to see the wall finished, did not want to stand beside the completed wall and look down at the farmhouse and know that Arthur was inside, diminishing, the wall complete and the man incomplete, the thing he had built outlasting the man he had built it for.

But Helen had said Arthur wanted him to come.

He went on a Saturday, driving up the dale in the October light, the light that was different from the summer light, lower, softer, more golden, the light that photographers loved and that painters sought, the light that made the dale look like a painting of itself, every wall and field and tree rendered in the warm tones of the autumn palette, and the bracken on the hillsides was brown now, fully turned, and the trees were turning too, the sycamores yellow, the ash trees the last to change, their leaves still green but beginning to curl at the edges, beginning to let go.

He parked in the yard and sat in the Defender for a moment and looked up the hill at the wall. He could see it from here, the line of grey stone, the coping visible against the sky, the silhouette sharp and clean, and the wall looked good, looked sound, looked like it had been there for a hundred years rather than two months, the new stone already weathering, already darkening, already beginning to blend with the old stone on either side, the join between the new work and the original wall becoming invisible, the two sections merging into one continuous line, the gap healed, the wall whole.

He went inside.

Arthur was in the bed.

Not the chair. The bed. The bed that had been brought downstairs by two men from the hospice team and set up in the front room, the room that had been Arthur's sitting room and that was now his bedroom, and Arthur lay in the bed with the covers drawn up to his chest and his head on the pillow and his eyes open and the through-stone on the bedside table beside a glass of water and a bottle of pills and a small brass bell that Sandra had given him to ring when he needed help.

Tom stood in the doorway and looked at Arthur in the bed and the sight of it hit him like a stone to the chest, the physical impact of seeing the man horizontal, the man who had been vertical for seventy-eight years, who had stood upright in his fields and walked upright on his hills and sat upright in his chair, now lying flat, the vertical becoming horizontal, the standing man becoming the lying man, the change in orientation a change in everything, a declaration, a statement, the body's admission that it could no longer hold itself upright, that the foundation had shifted, that the wall was leaning.

"Tom," Arthur said.

"Arthur."

Tom went in and sat on the chair beside the bed, a wooden chair that Helen or Sandra had placed there for visitors, and he sat and looked at Arthur and Arthur looked at him and the room was quiet and the light came through the window and fell across the bed in a rectangle of gold, the way the light had fallen across the kitchen table when Helen was writing the names.

Arthur's face was barely recognizable. The flesh had gone from it, the skin stretched tight over the skull, the cheekbones and the jawline and the eye sockets prominent, the face becoming the skull beneath the face, the man becoming the bone beneath the man, the surface stripped away, the hearting exposed, and Tom thought of the wall when it had collapsed, the face stones fallen, the hearting spilling out, the interior of the wall suddenly visible, the hidden structure revealed, and he thought that Arthur's face was like that, the structure of the man's skull showing through the skin, the foundation exposed, the thing that had been hidden by flesh and health and the fullness of life now visible, now undeniable.

"You haven't been up," Arthur said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't know."

"Go and look at it. Go and look at the wall."

"I will."

"Now. Go now. I'll be here when you come back."

Tom looked at Arthur and Arthur's eyes were steady, commanding, the eyes of a man who was accustomed to giving instructions and having them followed, the farmer's eyes, the employer's eyes, and Tom nodded and stood and went out of the room and out of the house and across the yard and up the hill.

He walked the path that he had walked a hundred times, the path that was fainter now, the grass grown back, the track that his boots had worn almost gone, and he climbed the hill in the October light and the bracken was brown around him and the sheep were in the fields below, gathered from the fell, and the sky was grey with the first clouds of autumn, and he climbed and climbed and reached the wall.

He put his hand on the coping.

The stone was cold under his palm, the cold of autumn, the stone releasing the summer's warmth, the surface temperature dropping as the days shortened and the sun's angle lowered, and Tom's hand on the coping was the first hand on the coping since he had set the last stone two months ago, and the stone received his touch the way stone received every touch, without reaction, without response, simply being there, being stone, being the thing that it was.

He walked the length of the wall, his hand on the coping stones, feeling each one, the twenty-eight copings that he had set, and they were all there, all standing, all interlocking, the row intact, the crown unbroken, and the wall beneath the coping was sound, the face stones unmoved, the batter unchanged, the hearting undisturbed, the through-stones holding, the stile solid, the creep hole closed, the cover stone in place, and the wall was as good as the day he had finished it, as good as the day Jim had walked its length and said "You've done well," and Tom felt the satisfaction of the wall's survival, the wall's endurance, the wall doing what it was built to do, which was to stand.

He sat on the ground beside the wall, his back against the face stones, and he looked down at the farmhouse, at the lit window where Arthur lay in his bed, and he sat for a long time, the autumn air cold around him, the silence of the hillside, the sheep in the fields below, the curlew gone, the curlew's cry absent from the dale now, the birds having left for the coast, for the estuaries, for the mud flats where they would spend the winter, and the dale was quieter without them, emptier, the silence deeper.

He went back down the hill and went into the farmhouse and Arthur was still in the bed, still awake, still waiting.

"How is it?" Arthur said.

"It's standing."

"Of course it's standing. You built it."

Tom sat down and reached out and put his hand on Arthur's hand, the hand that was not on the through-stone, the right hand that lay on the covers, and Arthur's hand was cold and thin and the bones were visible beneath the skin and the hand did not grip back, did not have the strength to grip, but it was there, it was present, the hand was still a hand, the farmer's hand, the hand that had held the crook and the rope and the shears and the stick, the hand that had touched every wall on this farm, the hand that was the through-stone between the man and his land, and Tom held it and did not let go.