Chapter 19: The Stick

On the last day of October, Arthur asked Tom to bring him the stick.

The stick was in the corner of the kitchen, where it had stood since Arthur had stopped walking, leaning against the wall in the angle between the dresser and the door frame, and Tom went into the kitchen and found it and brought it back to the front room where Arthur lay in the bed, and he put the stick in Arthur's hands and Arthur's hands closed around it the way they had closed around it ten thousand times before, the grip automatic, the fingers finding their places on the hazel shaft, the places worn smooth by sixty years of use, the wood polished by the friction of Arthur's hands, and his father's hands before that.

The stick was three feet long, straight, with a slight natural curve near the top that served as a handle, and the hazel was dark with age and oil and the sweat of the hands that had held it, the wood having absorbed the history of its use, the walks and the climbs and the inspections, the tapping of coping stones, the prodding of sheep, the testing of ground, the leaning-upon when the legs were tired and the hill was steep, the stick having served as a third leg, a probe, a measuring device, a pointer, a weapon against the occasional aggressive ram, and now a memory, a relic, a thing that stood for all the things it had done and all the places it had been and all the ground it had touched.

Arthur held the stick and his face changed. The pain was still there, the grey weight of it visible in the set of his jaw and the narrowing of his eyes, but something else came into his face, a softening, a remembering, the face of a man holding a thing that connected him to his past, to his father, to the walks that he would not walk again, and the stick in his hands was a through-stone, spanning the gap between the present and the past, between the bed and the field, between the man he was and the man he had been.

"My father cut this," Arthur said.

"You've told me."

"Have I?"

"Aye. Many times."

"I'll tell you again. My father cut this stick from a hazel in the hedgerow behind the lambing shed. Nineteen sixty-four. He seasoned it for a year, hanging it in the barn, and then he peeled the bark and oiled it and it's been oiled every year since. I oil it at Christmas. It's the one thing I do at Christmas that has nowt to do with Christmas."

Tom smiled because the image was right, was Arthur, the farmer oiling a stick on Christmas Day while the rest of the world ate turkey and opened presents, the stick being more important than the festival, the daily object being more sacred than the holy day.

"He used it for twenty years," Arthur said. "Until he died. Eighty-four. Dropped dead in the lambing shed. Heart. Never saw a doctor in his life and the only time he went to hospital was when they carried him there and he was already dead."

"A good way to go."

"The best way. Quick. No fuss. No — " Arthur gestured at the room, at the bed, at the bottles and the bell and the folder of Sandra's notes, the apparatus of managed dying, the infrastructure of decline. "No this."

Tom said nothing. There was nothing to say. Arthur was right. His father's death had been the death that every farmer wanted, the death that came quickly, in the place where you worked, among the animals you tended, the death that was an event rather than a process, a stone falling rather than a wall slowly leaning. But Arthur's death was not that death. Arthur's death was the slow death, the leaning wall, the gradual failure, the weeks and months of the body's decline, the organs shutting down one by one like lights being turned off in a house, room by room, the house going dark.

"I want you to have it," Arthur said.

"What?"

"The stick. I want you to have it."

Tom looked at Arthur and Arthur looked back at him and the stick was between them, in Arthur's hands, the hazel shaft dark and smooth.

"I can't take your stick, Arthur."

"You can. I'm giving it to you."

"It's your father's stick."

"It was my father's stick. It was my stick. Now it's your stick."

"Arthur — "

"Don't argue with a dying man, Tom. It's bad manners."

Tom looked at the stick in Arthur's hands, the hazel that had been cut from a hedgerow sixty-two years ago, that had been seasoned and peeled and oiled, that had been carried across every field on this farm, that had tapped every coping stone on every wall, that had been the instrument of Arthur's daily inspection, the tool by which the farmer measured his domain, and he looked at Arthur's hands on the stick and he saw that the hands were not holding the stick but offering it, the fingers loose, the grip open, the stick presented rather than clutched, and the offering was the thing, the offering was the act, the man letting go of the object that connected him to his land, releasing it the way you released a stone from your hand when you placed it in a wall, the stone leaving the hand and entering the wall, the man's grip ending and the wall's grip beginning.

Tom took the stick.

The hazel was warm from Arthur's hands, the last warmth that Arthur's hands had given to the wood, and Tom held it and the stick was lighter than he expected, lighter than it looked, the hazel having dried and seasoned over the decades, the wood losing its moisture, its weight, the stick becoming lighter as it aged, the way all things became lighter as they aged, the way Arthur had become lighter, the weight falling from his body, the substance diminishing, the man's mass decreasing as the disease consumed him, the farmer becoming lighter, becoming less, becoming the foundation of himself, the irreducible base.

"You'll use it," Arthur said.

"I'll use it."

"On the walls. When you're checking. Tap the copings. If it rings, the wall's sound. If it thuds, there's a void."

"I know."

"I know you know. But I'm telling you anyway. Because my father told me. And his father told him. And that's how it works."

Tom held the stick and felt the weight of the instruction, the weight of the knowledge passing from one man to another, the way a stone passed from one hand to another, the knowledge travelling through the stick, through the hazel, through the years, from Arthur's father to Arthur to Tom, the chain of hands, the lineage of the craft.

"Who will you give it to?" Arthur said.

"What?"

"When you're done. When you're too old to walk the walls. Who will you give the stick to?"

Tom thought about this. He and Helen had no children. There was no son to give the stick to, no daughter, no one who would carry the stick after Tom was done with it, and he thought about the chain of hands and the break in the chain, the link that was missing, the generation that would not come, and he felt the weight of the absence, the void where the next pair of hands should have been, the gap in the wall of the future.

"I don't know," Tom said.

"You'll find someone. There's always someone. Might not be a son. Might be a lad from the village. Might be someone you haven't met yet. But there's always someone."

Tom nodded and held the stick and the stick was his now, the ownership transferred, the object passing from one life to another, the way the farm would pass from Arthur to Robert and from Robert to whoever bought it, the way the wall would pass from Arthur's ownership to the new owner's ownership, the way everything passed, everything moved on, everything was handed from one set of hands to the next, the objects and the land and the knowledge and the stick and the stone, all of it moving, all of it passing through the hands that held it, temporarily, briefly, for the duration of a life, and then moving on.

Arthur closed his eyes.

Tom sat beside the bed and held the stick across his knees and watched Arthur sleep. Arthur's breathing was shallow, audible, each breath a small effort, the chest rising and falling with the slow rhythm of a body that was conserving its energy, rationing its strength, spending only what was necessary to maintain the minimum functions, the heart beating, the lungs inflating, the blood circulating, the body running on its reserves, the last resources, the hearting of the man's physical existence being consumed, used up, the invisible substance inside the body diminishing the way the hearting inside a failing wall diminished, the small stones loosening, shifting, falling away, the interior of the structure emptying out.

Helen came at three. She came into the front room and saw Tom in the chair with the stick across his knees and Arthur sleeping in the bed and she stood in the doorway and looked at the scene and Tom could see her reading it, understanding it, seeing the stick in Tom's hands and knowing what it meant, the transfer, the giving, the letting go.

She went to the bed and checked Arthur's pulse, her fingers on his wrist, her eyes on her watch, counting, and then she checked his blood pressure and his temperature and she wrote the numbers in the folder and she sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on Arthur's hand, the hand that had held the stick, the hand that was empty now, and she held it for a moment and then she stood and came to Tom.

"He gave you the stick," she said.

"He gave me the stick."

"His father's stick."

"Aye."

Helen looked at the stick in Tom's hands and then at Arthur in the bed and then at Tom again, and her eyes were bright and her jaw was set and Tom could see the effort it cost her to maintain her composure, the professional composure that she wore like a coat, the coat that kept the weather out, that kept the emotions in, and the coat was wearing thin, the fabric stretched, the seams showing, the composure that had served her through fifteen years of district nursing being tested now by this, by the man in the bed who was not just a patient but was Arthur, was the man whose walls her husband built, was the man who sat in the kitchen and drank tea and talked about sheep, was the man who was the hearting of this place.

"Let's go home," Helen said.

They drove home in the late afternoon, the October light fading early, the clocks not yet changed but the days short, the sun dropping behind the western ridge at four, the dale falling into shadow, the walls darkening from grey to black, the coping stones catching the last light and then losing it, the wall on the hillside above High Scar Farm invisible now, gone into the darkness, standing in the dark, holding in the dark, the wall doing what the wall did, regardless of the light, regardless of who was watching, regardless of who was dying, the wall standing because it was built to stand, the wall holding because the hearting was good.

At home Tom leaned the stick in the corner of the hallway, in the angle between the coat rack and the wall, the same position that the stick had occupied in Arthur's kitchen, and the stick stood there, dark and straight and smelling faintly of oil and hazel and the hands that had held it, and it would stand there for years, for decades, until Tom took it up and carried it to a wall and tapped the coping stones with it, listening for the ring that meant sound and the thud that meant void, the test that Arthur's father had taught Arthur and that Arthur had taught Tom, the knowledge in the stick, the knowledge in the wood, the knowledge in the sound of the tap and the listening that followed.

They ate dinner in the kitchen and Tom told Helen about the stick, about what Arthur had said, about the chain of hands, and Helen listened and her eyes were dry now, the professional composure restored, the coat buttoned up, the seams held.

"He asked who I'd give it to," Tom said.

"What did you say?"

"I said I didn't know."

"He's right that there's always someone."

"Is there?"

"There is. You'll know them when you find them. The way Jim found you."

Tom thought about Jim finding him, twenty-five years ago, a young man with no trade and no direction, standing at a wall in Arkengarthdale, and Jim had seen something in him, had seen the potential for the craft in the shape of his hands or the way he looked at stone or some other quality that Jim had never named, and Jim had taught him, had given him the trade, had passed the knowledge from his hands to Tom's hands, the chain unbroken, the lineage maintained, and Tom thought that Helen was right, that there would be someone, that the stick and the knowledge and the craft would find the next pair of hands, the way the stone found its place in the wall, not by design but by fit, by the recognition of the right shape, the right weight, the right hands.

He went to bed and lay in the dark and listened to the house and the dale and the night, and in the hallway the stick stood in its corner, dark and smooth and warm with the memory of the hands that had held it, and on the hillside the wall stood in the darkness, cold and grey and strong with the weight of the stones that held it, and in the farmhouse Arthur lay in his bed with his eyes closed and his breathing shallow and his hand empty, the hand that had held the stick for sixty years resting on the covers, empty, open, released.