Chapter 22: The Hearting

December. The dale in winter was a different country.

The snow had come and gone and come again, and the ground was frozen, the grass stiff and brown, the becks iced at their edges, the river low and dark between banks of white, and the walls stood in the winter landscape like lines of ink on a white page, the grey stone stark against the snow, every wall visible, every course, every coping stone picked out in the cold clear light, the walls declaring themselves against the white the way they never declared themselves against the green, the winter making the walls conspicuous, making them the dominant feature of the landscape, the thing your eye went to first, the lines that divided the white into fields and parcels, the geometry of the dale laid bare by the snow.

Tom drove up the dale on a Saturday morning in mid-December, the Defender grumbling on the cold road, the heater blowing warm air that smelled of diesel and dust, and the dale was sharp and bright, the sky pale blue, the sun low in the south, the shadows long, the light slanting across the hills at an angle that made everything vivid, every stone, every wall, every tree standing in its own precise shadow on the white ground. He had not been to High Scar Farm since the funeral, three weeks ago, and the farm was empty now, the sheep sold — Daniel had taken them to the auction in Hawes in the last week of November, the ewes and the tups and the remaining lambs, the flock dispersed, the animals that had been Arthur's scattered across a dozen farms in three dales — and the farmhouse was closed, the windows shuttered, the doors locked, the range cold, the kitchen empty, Robert having arranged for the electricity to be turned off and the water drained and the house winterised, the technical term for making a house ready for the season in which nobody would live in it, the house becoming what the church had become, a structure without a purpose, a shell, walls with nothing inside them.

Tom parked in the yard. The cobbles were icy, glazed with the frost that had not thawed for a week, and the yard was silent, the silence of a farm without animals, without machinery, without a farmer, the silence that was the absence of everything that had made the farm a farm, and Tom stood in the yard and listened to the silence and it was the loudest silence he had ever heard.

He went to the farmhouse. The back door was locked but the key was under the stone where it had always been, the flat stone beside the boot scraper, the hiding place that Arthur had used and Arthur's father had used and that every farmer in the dale used because the dale was a place where doors were not locked against people but against the wind, and the key was for the wind, not for the neighbours. Tom turned the key and pushed the door open and went in.

The kitchen was cold. The range was out, the iron box that had been the heart of the house for two hundred years now dark and cool, no fire in its belly, no heat in its bones, and the kitchen smelled of cold stone and damp and the faint chemical tang of the medication that Sandra had administered, the smell lingering in the room the way a voice lingered in the memory, present after the source was gone. The table was bare. The chairs were pushed in. The dresser stood against the wall with its plates and cups gathering dust, the crockery that Margaret had chosen forty years ago and that Arthur had used every day since her death, the cups from which he had drunk ten thousand cups of tea, the plates from which he had eaten ten thousand meals, the objects of the daily life sitting in the empty kitchen, waiting for hands that would not come.

Tom went through the kitchen and down the hallway to the front room.

The bed was gone. The hospice team had collected it. The room was empty except for the chair and the table and the lamp, and on the table, where the bed had been, there was nothing, and on the chair, which had been moved to the corner of the room, there was nothing, and the room was a room without a person, a room without a purpose, a room with walls and a floor and a ceiling and nothing else.

The through-stone was on the windowsill.

Someone had moved it from the bedside table to the windowsill, Sandra perhaps, or the men who had collected the bed, and it sat there in the cold light from the window, the grey stone, the piece of Arthur's wall, the stone that was too short to span the wall's width but that had spanned the gap between the man and his land, that had sat on the armrest of his chair and then on the table beside his bed, that his fingers had turned and held and warmed for months, and now it sat on the windowsill in the empty room, cold, alone, the stone that connected nothing, the through-stone that spanned no gap, the stone waiting for hands.

Tom picked it up.

The stone was cold. December cold. The cold of a house without heating, the cold of stone without the warmth of hands, and Tom held it and felt the cold seep into his fingers and he held it tighter, warming it, his hands doing what his hands did, which was to hold stone, to warm stone, to give stone the warmth of the living, and the stone received the warmth the way stone always received the warmth, silently, gradually, the surface temperature rising degree by degree, the stone's mass absorbing the heat from his hands, the transfer slow, patient, the stone taking what the man gave.

He put the through-stone in his jacket pocket, the same pocket where he had carried the hearting stone that now lay in Arthur's grave, and the pocket held the stone and the stone held the warmth and Tom went out of the room and out of the house and locked the door and put the key back under the flat stone beside the boot scraper and stood in the yard and looked up the hill.

The wall was there.

The wall was there the way the wall had always been there, the way the wall would always be there, the line of grey stone running along the hillside at twelve hundred feet, the coping stones visible against the snow, the wall's silhouette sharp and clear in the December light, the wall standing in the winter the way it had stood in the spring and the summer and the autumn, the wall enduring, the wall lasting, the wall being what it was, which was stone, which was weight, which was the accumulated labour of hands, the hands of the Wensleydale gang a hundred and seventy years ago and the hands of Tom Ashworth two hundred days ago, the hands that had lifted and placed and fitted and packed, the hands that had found the arrangement that gravity intended, the hands that had set the hearting and the through-stones and the copings, the hands that had built the wall and then left it, and the wall had stood, and the wall was standing, and the wall would stand.

Tom climbed the hill.

The ground was frozen hard, the grass crunching under his boots, and the slope was steep and his breath made clouds in the cold air and the exertion warmed him, the body's furnace firing, the muscles working, the heat building, and he climbed the way Arthur had climbed in those first days, slowly, steadily, one foot in front of the other, the hill accepting his weight, the ground holding him, and he climbed without stopping, without pausing, the way Arthur had paused, because Tom's body was not Arthur's body, Tom's body was strong, was healthy, was the body of a man who had been lifting stones for twenty-five years and whose legs and back and arms were shaped by the work, and the hill was not an obstacle but a medium, a thing to be moved through, a thing to be climbed.

He reached the wall and put his hand on the coping.

The stone was cold under his palm, colder than the through-stone in his pocket, the coping stone exposed to the wind and the frost and the open sky, the coldest stone in the wall, the stone that took the weather first, and Tom's hand on the coping was the first hand on this wall since his own hand had set the last coping stone six months ago, and the wall received his touch the way it had received his touch then, without reaction, without response, the stone being stone, the wall being wall, the thing simply there, simply present, simply itself.

He walked the length of the wall. Nine yards. Twenty-eight coping stones. His hand ran along them as he walked, his fingers touching each one, counting them, greeting them, the hand remembering, the fingers knowing, and each coping stone was where he had set it, each one standing on edge, each one leaning into its neighbour, the row intact, the crown unbroken, the wall complete.

He stopped at the south end, at the last coping stone, the twenty-eighth, the imperfect stone, the stone with the wrong taper that he had dressed and placed and that had found its fit, and he put his hand on it and felt its shape, the slight difference from the others, the irregularity that had become its character, and the stone was there, was holding, was doing its part.

He looked at the stile. The step-stones protruded from the wall, solid, unchanged, waiting for feet, and the stile was as he had built it, the through-stones spanning the wall's width, the steps firm. He walked to the creep hole and crouched and looked at it, the cover stone in place, the gap closed, the opening sealed for the winter, and the cover stone was snug, precise, fitted, the gap between the stone and the wall's face so narrow that no wind could enter, no snow could penetrate, the closure complete.

He stood up and stepped back from the wall and looked at it.

The wall stood in the winter light, in the snow, in the cold, and it was the best wall he had ever built. He knew this now, knew it the way Jim knew things about walls, by feel, by the weight of the knowledge in his hands, and the wall was the best because it was built for a man who understood walls, built on land that had been farmed for two hundred years, built from stone that had been in the wall for a hundred and seventy, built with a care and an attention that were not just professional but personal, the care of a man building for a friend, the attention of a man building for a dying man, the wall carrying not just its own weight but the weight of everything that had happened while it was being built, the spring and the summer and the autumn, the lambing and the shearing and the gathering, the naming and the marking and the dictation of the field names, the visit from Jim and the visit from Robert and the walk of the woman from Reeth, the through-stone on the armrest and the stick in the hallway and the hearting stone in the grave, all of it in the wall, all of it part of the wall's substance, the invisible hearting, the weight that could not be weighed, the thing that held the thing together.

Tom took the through-stone from his pocket and held it.

The stone was warm now, warmed by his body, by the heat of the climb, and he turned it in his hands the way Arthur had turned it, the way he turned every stone, looking for the face, looking for the surface that would show, and the stone was smooth and flat and heavy in his hand, twenty-six inches long, too short for the wall, too short to span the gap from face to face, but the right length for something else, the right length for a man's hand, the right length for a pocket, the right length for a memory.

He did not put it back in the wall. It did not belong in the wall. It belonged somewhere else, somewhere between the wall and the man, somewhere in the space that the through-stone had always occupied, the space between the two faces, the interior, the hearting, the invisible place where the real work was done.

He put it back in his pocket.

He stood beside the wall for a long time. The sun moved across the sky, low, the arc of the December sun that barely cleared the southern ridge before beginning its descent, the shortest arc of the year, the least light, the deepest winter, and the shadows were long and the light was gold and cold and the dale was spread out below him, the fields white with snow, the walls dark lines dividing the white, the river a thread of black in the valley bottom, the village a cluster of grey roofs, the smoke from the chimneys going straight up in the still air, and the dale was beautiful, was itself, was the thing that it had always been and would always be, the valley and the river and the walls and the stone, the place that held everything, the place that was the hearting of the world.

He thought about what Arthur had said. The wall. Arthur's last word. And he thought about what the word meant, what the wall meant, what all the walls meant, the thousands of miles of wall that covered this dale and the dales beyond, the walls built by hands over centuries, the walls that divided and enclosed and bounded and marked, the walls that stood in the rain and the snow and the wind and the sun, the walls that fell and were rebuilt and fell again and were rebuilt again, the walls that were never finished because they were always being repaired, always being maintained, always being tended by the men with hammers and string lines and the knowledge in their hands.

The walls were the hearting of the dale. The invisible structure that held the visible landscape in place. Without the walls the dale would be a different place, an open place, an undivided place, a place without the lines and the boundaries and the fields that gave the landscape its character, its shape, its meaning. The walls were what made the dale the dale, the way the hearting made the wall the wall, the invisible thing that held the visible thing together, the thing you never saw but that you always felt, the thing that was there whether you knew it or not, doing its work, holding its weight, keeping the structure standing.

And Tom was the hearting's keeper. Tom was the man who packed the hearting, who filled the voids, who maintained the invisible structure, who kept the walls standing so that the dale could be the dale, and when Tom was gone there would be another man, another pair of hands, and when that man was gone there would be another, the chain of hands stretching back to the Wensleydale gang and forward to the man who had not yet been born, the man who would one day lift a stone from this wall and turn it in his hands and feel its weight and set it back in its place, the conversation continuing, the wall and the man, the stone and the hand, the permanent and the transient, the visible and the invisible, the face and the hearting, the two things that were one thing, the one thing that was everything.

Tom walked down the hill. The walk down was easier than the walk up, gravity helping, the slope carrying him, and he went down through the frozen fields where Arthur's sheep had grazed and where they would not graze again, past the lambing shed where Daniel had sat on the bale and the first lamb had been born at two in the morning, past the barn where Tom had parked the Defender on that first day in March when he had driven up the dale and seen the gap in the wall from a quarter mile below.

He stopped in the yard and looked back up the hill one more time. The wall was visible, the coping stones dark against the white sky, the line of stone running along the hillside, and from down here in the yard it looked as it had always looked, a wall, a boundary, a line of stone on a hill, and you could not see the hearting from here, could not see the through-stones or the pinning stones or the careful grading of the face stones from large to small, could not see the stile or the creep hole, could not see any of the things that Tom had put into the wall, the things that made it what it was, the invisible things, the hearting things, and that was right, that was as it should be, because the hearting was not meant to be seen, the hearting was meant to hold, and it held, and the wall stood, and from the yard of the farm you could see only the face, only the surface, only the visible part, and the visible part was the part that mattered least, and the invisible part was the part that mattered most, and the part that mattered most was the part that would never be seen.

He got in the Defender and drove down the dale.

The road was clear, the snow ploughed to the sides, and the walls on either side were dark against the white, and he drove slowly, the way he always drove, and the dale passed around him, the familiar landscape, the landscape of his life, the walls and the fields and the river and the stone, and the through-stone in his pocket pressed against his hip, warm, heavy, present, the stone that connected him to Arthur and to the wall and to the dale, the through-stone that spanned the gap between the man who was gone and the man who was here, between the past and the present, between the dead and the living, the stone that was too short for the wall but that was exactly the right length for the heart.

He drove home and parked in the drive and went inside and took the through-stone from his pocket and set it on the shelf in the hallway beside the hazel stick, the two objects together, the stone and the wood, the wall and the walk, the things that Arthur had held, the things that held Arthur, and the two objects sat on the shelf in the hallway of Tom's house and they would sit there for years, for decades, until Tom was gone and someone else found them and wondered what they were, the small grey stone and the dark smooth stick, the objects of a life that was over, the objects that meant nothing to anyone who did not know the story and that meant everything to the man who did.

Helen came home at five, her car in the drive, her step on the path, the door opening, the sound of her setting down her bag and hanging up her coat, the sounds of arrival, of return, of coming home.

"You went to the farm," she said.

"I went to the wall."

"How is it?"

"It's standing."

She came into the hallway and saw the through-stone on the shelf beside the stick, the two objects that had not been there when she left that morning, and she looked at them and then at Tom and her eyes were bright and her face was soft and she put her hand on his chest, on the place where the through-stone had pressed against him all the way home, the warm place, the place where the stone had rested, and her hand was on his chest and his heart was under her hand and the through-stone was on the shelf and the stick was beside it and the wall was on the hillside and the dale was around them and the snow was falling again, falling on the walls and the fields and the grave and the farm, falling on everything, covering everything, the white covering the grey, the snow covering the stone, and under the snow the walls stood, and inside the walls the hearting held, and the hearting would hold through the winter and the spring and the summer and the autumn and the winter again, and the walls would stand, and the dale would endure, and the hearting would hold, the invisible thing holding the visible thing together, the thing you never saw doing the work that mattered most, the small stones packed into the centre of the wall, between the two faces, in the dark, in the silence, holding.

The wall stands.

The hearting holds.