Chapter 23: The Quarry

The quarry was half a mile above the wall, set into the hillside where the limestone outcropped in a shelf of pale rock that ran along the contour for perhaps a hundred yards, the exposed face of the rock showing the strata in clean horizontal lines, each line a bed of stone laid down in a different epoch, a different age of the sea that had covered this ground three hundred million years ago, and the quarry had been cut into this shelf by the men who built the walls, the Wensleydale gang and the farmers before them and the farmers before them, each generation taking stone from the same source, the quarry growing wider and deeper with each extraction, the hillside giving up its stone the way a body gave up its warmth, slowly, from the surface inward.

Tom climbed to the quarry on the second Saturday of March, a day when the ground was too wet for walling, the overnight rain having soaked the hillside, the grass squelching under his boots, the stone slippery, and he had decided not to work on the wall but to source more hearting stone, because the hearting he had gathered from the collapse was not going to be enough. The gap was nine yards. The hearting pile he had collected was sufficient for perhaps six yards, and the remaining three yards would need new stone, stone that had never been in the wall, stone that would enter the wall for the first time, virgin stone, and the quarry was where he would find it.

Arthur had told him about the quarry on the second day of the job, when Tom had asked where the original stone had come from. Arthur had pointed up the hill with his stick and said, "The scar above the intake," and Tom had looked up and seen the pale line of exposed rock on the hillside and had nodded, because the stone was obviously from there, the colour and the grain matching the stone in the wall, the limestone the same age, the same composition, the same fossil-bearing grey that was the colour of the dale itself, the colour that everything was made of, the walls and the houses and the bridges and the barns, all of it the same stone, quarried from the same beds, the same geological stratum, the Yoredale Series, the alternating bands of limestone and sandstone and shale that formed the Pennines, that had been formed on the floor of a tropical sea in the Carboniferous period and that now, three hundred million years later, formed the walls of a hill farm in Swaledale.

The quarry face was ten feet high at its tallest point, the rock cut back into the hillside in a rough semicircle, the floor of the quarry littered with fragments and shards, the waste of previous extractions, the stone that had been rejected, the pieces that were too small or too shattered or too awkwardly shaped to be used as face stone and that had been left behind, discarded, and it was this waste that Tom had come for, because the waste of a quarry was the hearting of a wall, the small angular pieces that were no good for the face but were perfect for the interior, the invisible core where shape did not matter but size and weight and angularity did, the small stones that would wedge between the face stones and lock them in place.

He stood in the quarry and looked at the face. The strata were visible in the clean-cut rock, the layers running horizontally, each one a different shade of grey, a different texture, the beds varying from dense fine-grained limestone at the bottom to a coarser, more fossil-rich stone higher up, and between the limestone beds were thin layers of shale, dark, crumbly, the compressed mud of the ancient seabed, the mud that had settled between the limestone deposits and that now formed the weak points in the rock, the places where water penetrated and frost acted, the places where the quarrymen had driven their wedges, splitting the stone along the natural bedding planes, letting the rock fall apart along the lines that geology had drawn three hundred million years ago.

Tom crouched and began to gather hearting stone. He worked with a method that was not quite systematic and not quite random, his eyes scanning the quarry floor, his hands reaching for the pieces that looked right, that felt right, the angular fragments of limestone that were the size of his fist or smaller, pieces with edges, with corners, with the rough irregular surfaces that would grip the face stones and the other hearting stones and lock everything together. He dropped each piece into the bucket he had carried up the hill, the stones clanking against each other, the sound of stone on stone, the sound that was the sound of his trade, the sound that he heard all day every day and that was as familiar to him as his own heartbeat.

The work was slow and meditative, the kind of work that freed the mind while it occupied the hands, and Tom's mind went to the places it went when his hands were busy, the places that were not quite thoughts and not quite memories but something between, the drift of consciousness that accompanied repetitive physical labour, and he thought about the stone in his hands and the stone in the wall and the stone in the quarry face and the stone beneath his feet and the stone of the dale, the omnipresence of it, the way the stone was the foundation of everything in this landscape, not just the walls but the soil that the grass grew in, the soil being the limestone's slow dissolution, the rock breaking down over millennia into the thin acid earth that covered the fell, the earth that grew the grass that fed the sheep that grazed the fields that were bounded by the walls that were built from the stone that the earth had been before it was earth, the cycle complete, the circle closed, stone becoming soil becoming grass becoming sheep becoming farmland becoming wall becoming stone.

He filled the bucket and carried it down to the wall and emptied it onto the hearting pile and went back up to the quarry and filled it again. Six trips. Six buckets of hearting stone, each bucket weighing perhaps forty pounds, the stone heavy and angular and rough in his hands, and by the end of the sixth trip his arms were aching and his back was stiff and the hearting pile had grown from a modest heap to a substantial mound, enough for the remaining three yards, enough to fill the interior of the wall from face to face, enough to pack the voids and close the gaps and make the wall solid through its full width.

On the fourth trip he found a fossil.

It was in a piece of limestone that he had picked up from the quarry floor, a flat piece about six inches across, and on its surface, preserved in the grey stone, was the imprint of a shell, a brachiopod, the two halves of the shell spread open like a butterfly's wings, the ridges of the shell's surface visible in fine detail, the growth lines, the radiating ribs, the hinge where the two valves had joined, and the fossil was perfect, undamaged, the creature's form pressed into the stone with the fidelity of a stamp in wax, and Tom held it in his hand and looked at it and thought about the animal that had lived in this shell, the animal that had lived on the floor of a tropical sea three hundred million years ago, in a world where this hillside was underwater, where the air was warm and humid and the sky was different and the continents were arranged in shapes that would be unrecognisable to anyone standing on this spot today, and the animal had lived and died and its shell had sunk into the mud of the seabed and the mud had become stone and the stone had become this hillside and the hillside had become this quarry and the quarry had produced this piece of rock with this fossil on its surface, and now Tom held it in his hand, the first hand to hold it in three hundred million years, the first eyes to see it since the eyes that did not exist when the creature was alive, because there had been no one to see it then, no person, no human, no eye capable of seeing and understanding what it saw, and now there was Tom, and Tom saw it, and the seeing was a kind of through-stone, a connection between this moment and that moment, between the waller on the hillside and the creature on the seabed, separated by three hundred million years and connected by the stone.

He did not put the fossil in the hearting pile. He put it in his jacket pocket, the way he would later carry the hearting stone to Arthur's funeral, the way he would carry the through-stone home from the empty farmhouse, the pocket that was the place where the significant stones went, the stones that were too important for the wall, the stones that carried a meaning beyond their weight and their shape, and the fossil went into the pocket and stayed there, the brachiopod riding against Tom's hip as he walked down the hill with the last bucket of hearting stone, the creature from the ancient sea descending the hillside in a waller's jacket, the stone holding the animal and the jacket holding the stone and the man holding the jacket, the chain of holding, the nested containers, each one inside the other, the way the hearting was inside the wall and the wall was inside the landscape and the landscape was inside the dale and the dale was inside the stone that had made it.

He showed it to Arthur that afternoon, sitting in the kitchen, the through-stone not yet on the armrest because the through-stones had not yet been set, and Arthur held the fossil in his thin hands and turned it the way he would later turn the through-stone, slowly, carefully, the farmer's hands that had handled ten thousand lambs now handling a creature that had died before the first sheep walked the earth, and Arthur looked at it with the steady attention that was his way of looking at everything, the attention that missed nothing, that saw the growth lines and the ribs and the hinge, the fine detail preserved in the stone.

"There's thousands of them," Arthur said. "In the walls. In the scar above the intake. When I was a lad I used to collect them. Had a box full. My mother threw them out."

"She threw them out."

"She said they were dirty. She said I was bringing the hillside into the house."

"You were."

"Aye. I was."

Arthur handed the fossil back and Tom put it in his pocket and they sat in the kitchen and drank tea and the fossil was in Tom's pocket and the quarry was on the hillside and the hillside was on the dale and the dale was old, was ancient, was the product of three hundred million years of the earth's patient work, the slow accumulation of stone and soil and water and life, the layers building up the way courses built up in a wall, each one sitting on the one below, each one bearing the weight of the ones above, the whole structure held together by the same force that held the wall together, which was gravity, which was the most ancient force, the force that had been there since the beginning, that had pulled the mud to the seabed and the stone to the hillside and the wall to the ground and the man to his chair, gravity, the great hearter, the invisible thing that held the visible world in place.

Tom kept the fossil. He set it on the shelf above the sink in the kitchen at home, the shelf where Helen kept the things she did not want to throw away but did not quite know what to do with, the odds and ends that accumulated in a household, and the fossil sat there among the odd screws and the expired coupons and the single earring that Helen could not find the pair to, the brachiopod on the shelf, the creature from the sea on a shelf above a sink in a village in Swaledale, and sometimes Tom looked at it when he was washing his hands and thought about the quarry and the stone and the wall and the dale and the three hundred million years that separated the animal in the stone from the man looking at it, and the three hundred million years were nothing, were a number, were a measurement that the mind could hold but not comprehend, and the fossil was something, was real, was the evidence, the proof, the hearting stone of deep time, the invisible past made visible in the present, the thing you could hold in your hand and know, without understanding, that the world was older than anyone could imagine, and that the stone was the record of it, and that the walls he built were built from it, and that every stone he lifted carried within it the memory of a world he had never seen and could never see, and that this was the true hearting of the dale, not the small angular stones packed between the faces of the wall but the deep history packed into the stone itself, the three hundred million years of accumulation and compression and uplift and erosion that had produced this landscape, these hills, these walls, this man, standing in a quarry on a wet Saturday morning in March, filling a bucket with the shattered remains of an ancient sea.