Chapter 21: The Funeral

They buried Arthur on a Tuesday, in the churchyard of the church that had been closed for services ten years ago but whose yard still accepted the dead of the parish, the stones of the church grey and weathered, the tower square against the sky, the clock stopped at ten past three, the time at which the church had ceased to function, the hands frozen, the mechanism silent, the building becoming what all buildings eventually became, which was stone, which was wall, which was the material returning to its original condition, the purpose gone, the structure remaining.

The day was cold. November cold. The first frost of the winter had come in the night, and the grass in the churchyard was white, the blades stiff and glittering in the morning light, and the gravestones stood in rows, the stones of the dead, the markers that said here lies, that named the names of the people who had lived in this dale and who were now in the ground, in the stone, in the earth from which the stone had come and to which the stone would return, the long cycle, the geological patience.

Tom wore a suit. He did not own many suits — two, one for funerals and one for the rare occasions when Helen took him to dinner in Richmond — and the funeral suit was dark, ill-fitting, the jacket tight across the shoulders that years of walling had made broad, the trousers short at the ankle, the shoes pinching his feet, his feet accustomed to boots, to the heavy leather that gripped the ground and supported the ankle and protected the toes from falling stone, and the shoes were wrong, were inadequate, were the footwear of a man out of his element, and Tom felt the wrongness of them with every step across the frozen grass.

Helen was beside him, in black, her nurse's composure fully restored, the professional face in place, the coat buttoned up, the seams held, and she walked beside Tom with the steadiness of a woman who had attended funerals before, many funerals, the funerals of her patients, the people she had tended and cared for and watched decline and watched die, and each funeral was a ending and a beginning, the ending of the care and the beginning of the absence, and Helen carried the absences with her the way Tom carried the memory of the walls he had built, the accumulation of the work's outcomes, the things that remained after the work was done.

The dale came. The whole dale, or so it seemed, the churchyard filling with people, farmers in their good jackets and their wives in their dark coats, the people of the village and the farms, the people who had known Arthur as a neighbour and a fellow farmer and a man who walked his walls every morning, and they stood in the churchyard and their breath made clouds in the cold air and their feet crunched on the frozen grass and they waited for the coffin.

The coffin came from the farmhouse, carried on a trailer behind a tractor driven by Daniel, the agricultural college lad who had lambed Arthur's ewes and gathered Arthur's sheep and marked Arthur's lambs, and the tractor came down the track from High Scar Farm and along the road to the village, the slow diesel procession, the coffin on the trailer covered with a cloth, and the tractor pulled into the lane beside the churchyard and six men came forward to carry the coffin from the trailer to the grave.

Tom was one of the six.

He took his place at the front left corner, his hands gripping the wooden handle, and the coffin was heavy, heavier than he expected, and then not heavy, lighter than a through-stone, lighter than the stones he lifted every day, the weight of a man being less than the weight of the wall the man had owned, and the six men carried the coffin through the churchyard gate and along the path between the gravestones and to the grave that had been dug that morning by two men from the village with spades and a small digger, the grave six feet deep, the sides clean-cut, the earth piled beside it, and the six men set the coffin on the boards that spanned the grave and stepped back and the vicar from Reeth who came for the funerals even though the church was closed said the words that vicars said, the words about dust and ashes and the hope of resurrection, the words that Tom had heard at other funerals and that he listened to without belief but without disrespect, the words doing their work, the ritual performing its function, the ceremony holding the mourners together the way the hearting held the wall.

Robert was there. The nephew. The solicitor from Leeds. He stood at the graveside in a black suit that fitted him perfectly, the suit of a man who owned good suits, who wore suits every day, whose life was lived in suits, and his face was composed and correct, the face of a man fulfilling a social obligation, the face of the inheritor, and Tom watched him across the grave and thought about the farm and what would happen to it now, the sale that Robert had been preparing for months, the estate agent's valuation, the solicitor's conveyance, the transfer of the land from the name Metcalfe to whatever name came next, and Tom felt a heaviness in his chest that was not grief exactly but was related to grief, the heaviness of change, the weight of impermanence, the feeling of the ground shifting beneath him.

Jim Pratt was there. Jim stood at the back of the group, his cap in his hands, his face set, the face of a man who did not do well at funerals, who did not know what to do with his hands when his hands were not holding a hammer, who stood in the churchyard the way he stood on a hillside, slightly apart, slightly separate, the observer, the inspector, the man who watched and judged and said nothing.

The coffin was lowered. The boards were removed and the coffin went down on the ropes, the six men holding the ropes, lowering slowly, the coffin descending into the earth, into the stone, into the limestone bedrock that underlaid the dale, the same stone that the walls were built from, the same stone that Tom lifted every day, and Arthur was going into the stone, was being placed in the stone, was being set in his final position the way a foundation stone was set, at the bottom, at the base, in the ground, the weight of the earth above pressing down on the coffin the way the weight of the wall pressed down on the foundation course, and Arthur would lie there, in the stone, and the stone would hold him.

The vicar said the final words and the first handful of earth was thrown, the sound of it on the coffin lid a sound that Tom knew, a sound like hearting being packed, the small stones rattling against the larger stones, the void being filled, the gap being closed, and the people around the grave threw their handfuls and the sound continued, the earth falling on the wood, the covering beginning.

Tom reached into his pocket.

He had brought a stone. A hearting stone, small, angular, grey, a stone from the wall, from Arthur's wall, a stone that he had found on the hillside when he was gathering the hearting after the collapse, a stone that had been inside the wall for a hundred and seventy years, packed between the face stones, invisible, structural, doing its work in darkness. He had kept it in his pocket since the day he finished the wall, had carried it without knowing why, a talisman, a piece of the wall that he carried with him, and now he knew why, now he understood the carrying, the stone had been waiting for this moment, the moment when it would go back into the ground, back into the earth, back to the place from which it had come three hundred million years ago, and it would go with Arthur, would be buried with Arthur, the hearting of the wall accompanying the man who had been the hearting of the farm.

He dropped the stone into the grave.

It fell without sound, or without a sound that anyone noticed, the small stone falling among the handfuls of earth, lost among the soil, invisible, and it landed on the coffin lid and it lay there, the hearting stone on the coffin of the farmer, the invisible thing that held the visible thing together resting on the box that held the man who had been the invisible thing that held the visible thing together, and Tom felt the rightness of it, the fit, the stone in its place, the final placement.

Helen took his hand. She had seen him drop the stone. She had seen him reach into his pocket and take out the small grey stone and hold it for a moment and then release it into the grave, and she understood, understood without being told, because she was Helen, because she was the woman who held the two halves of his life together, the nurse and the wife, the professional and the personal, the woman who understood walls and stones and the men who built them, and she held his hand and the hand was cold and the hand was empty and the stone was gone.

After the burial they went to the pub, as was the custom, the mourners walking from the churchyard to the public house, the transition from the formal to the informal, from the sacred to the secular, from the silence of the grave to the noise of the bar, and the pub was warm and full and the beer was poured and the sandwiches were set out and the people of the dale stood in groups and talked about Arthur, the conversations following the pattern that dale conversations always followed, the pattern of anecdote and memory and the small facts of a life lived in a place, the facts that were the hearting of the man's reputation, the invisible substance of his standing in the community.

Tom stood at the bar with Jim and they drank their pints and said nothing for a while, the two men who knew walls standing together in the pub, their pints in their hands, their silence the silence of men who communicated better without words than with them.

"Good turnout," Jim said.

"Aye."

"He was well thought of."

"He was."

"Did you put a stone in the grave?"

Tom looked at Jim. Jim's eyes were on his pint but the question had been precise, had been aimed, and Tom understood that Jim had seen, that Jim saw everything, that the man who could spot a void in the hearting from ten feet away had seen Tom drop a stone into a grave from twenty yards.

"A hearting stone," Tom said.

Jim nodded. He did not say anything else. He did not need to. The nod was enough, the nod that said I understand, the nod that said it was right, the nod that was the equivalent of Jim's highest praise, the nod that was "Aye, that'll do."

Robert came over. He shook Tom's hand and thanked him for the wall and for the carrying of the coffin, and his handshake was firm and his words were correct and his manner was the manner of a man performing a duty, discharging an obligation, ticking items off a list, the solicitor's approach to the social requirements of death.

"I'll be putting the farm on the market in the new year," Robert said. "After probate."

"Aye."

"The wall you built. It looks well from the road."

"It looks well from anywhere."

Robert nodded and moved on, working the room, shaking hands, receiving condolences, the heir doing what heirs did, and Tom watched him go and felt the complicated feeling again, the mix of pity and irritation and something that might have been compassion, the feeling of watching a man deal with an inheritance that he did not understand and did not want but that was his, irrevocably, the farm and the walls and the land and the sheep, all of it Robert's now, all of it his to sell, to dispose of, to convert into the only form of value that Robert understood, which was money, which was the abstract, which was the thing that had no weight and no shape and no grain and no fit, the thing that was the opposite of stone.

They left the pub at three and walked home through the village, Tom and Helen, walking hand in hand along the village street, their feet on the cobbles, the cobbles that were stone, the same stone as the walls and the houses and the church, and the sky was grey and the air was cold and the first flakes of snow were falling, small and dry, the advance guard of the winter, the first snow of the season drifting down from the grey sky and settling on the coping stones of the garden walls and on the gravestones in the churchyard and on the fresh earth of Arthur's grave.

At home Tom changed out of his suit and into his work clothes and went to the shed and sat on the bench and looked at the dale and the snow was falling more heavily now, the flakes thicker, the sky darkening, and the walls were disappearing under the white, the coping stones collecting the snow, the face stones streaked with it, the walls becoming white walls, stone walls becoming snow walls, the grey becoming white, and Tom sat in the doorway of his shed and watched the dale change colour and thought about Arthur in the ground with the hearting stone on his coffin and the earth falling on top of the stone and the earth falling on top of the earth, the grave being filled, the gap being closed, the last gap, the gap that would not be reopened.

He went inside and took the stick from the hallway corner and held it in his hands, the hazel stick that Arthur's father had cut sixty-two years ago, the stick that was now his, and he held it the way Arthur had held it, both hands on the shaft, the grip firm, the wood warm, and he stood in the hallway and held the stick and the snow fell outside the window and the dale went white and the walls disappeared and Arthur was in the ground and the wall was on the hillside and the hearting stone was in the grave and the stick was in Tom's hands and the through-stone was — where was the through-stone?

He had left it on the bedside table. The through-stone that Arthur had held for months, the stone that Tom had brought him from the wall, the stone that connected the man to his land, the stone that was too short for the wall but that was exactly the right length for the man. He had left it in the farmhouse, on the table beside the empty bed, and it would be there still, the stone on the table in the empty room, the through-stone with nothing to connect, the stone that had linked the man to the wall now linking nothing to nothing, the man gone, the connection broken.

Tom made a note to go and get it. Tomorrow. He would go tomorrow and collect the through-stone from the empty farmhouse and bring it home and set it beside the stick in the hallway, the two objects together, the stick and the stone, the hazel and the limestone, the things that Arthur had held, the things that held Arthur, the hearting of the man's presence, the invisible things that would make the absence visible, that would stand in the hallway and say: a man lived, a man died, a man held these things in his hands, and now the things are here and the man is not.

He went to bed and Helen was already sleeping, her breathing slow and even, the sleep of exhaustion, the sleep of the body claiming what the day had spent, and Tom lay beside her and listened to her breathe and listened to the snow falling outside, the silent falling, the white covering the dale, covering the walls, covering the grave, covering everything, and in the morning the dale would be white and the walls would be white and the world would be new, would be changed, would be the world without Arthur, the world in which the walls still stood but the man who had walked them was gone, and the hearting of the dale was diminished, was reduced, was less than it had been, and the wall that Tom had built was the same wall it had been the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, unchanged, undiminished, the wall standing, the wall holding, the wall enduring, the wall being the thing that the man could not be, which was permanent.