Chapter 28: The Church Wall

The churchyard wall was the first commission Tom had taken on his own, the first wall he had built without Jim beside him, and the memory of it sat in his mind the way a foundation stone sat in the ground, heavy, immovable, the thing that everything else had been built upon.

He was twenty-three. Jim had retired the previous autumn, or rather Jim had stopped taking commissions, which was not the same thing as retiring because Jim would never stop walling, would wall until his hands could no longer grip the hammer, would wall in his garden and in his mind and in his sleep, the craft having become so thoroughly a part of him that to stop walling would be to stop being Jim, and Jim was not ready to stop being Jim. But the commissions had ended, the driving and the quoting and the early mornings in other men's yards, and Jim had told Tom that it was time, that Tom was ready, that the dale needed a waller and Tom was the waller the dale would have.

"You'll make mistakes," Jim said. "You'll set stones that should have been rejected and reject stones that should have been set. You'll build walls that lean and walls that bulge and walls that you'll drive past in ten years and want to take down and start again. That's the job. The job is not perfection. The job is standing."

The churchyard wall ran around the perimeter of the churchyard in the village, a low wall, three feet high, enclosing the graves and the paths and the yew trees and the church itself, the wall separating the sacred ground from the secular, the dead from the living, the buried from the walking, and the wall had been there for as long as the church had been there, which was three hundred years, the wall and the church built at the same time, the same stone, the same masons, the wall being the church's boundary the way the field walls were the farm's boundary, the same principle applied to a different purpose.

The wall had collapsed on the north side, where the ground was shaded and damp and the frost had been working on it for decades, the water penetrating the joints, freezing, expanding, the slow prying of ice, and a twelve-foot section had come down in the January rain, the face stones spilling across the path that ran along the outside of the churchyard, the hearting exposed, the gap showing the gravestones inside, the dead visible through the breach, the boundary between the living and the dead opened by the weather.

The vicar, who was young and energetic and from Northamptonshire and who did not understand dry stone walls any more than he understood the dialect or the weather or the silences of the men who came to his services, had asked Tom to rebuild it, and Tom had said yes, and the saying yes was the beginning of his independent life as a waller, the first time he had agreed to do a job without Jim's name behind his, the first time he had stood alone in front of a collapsed wall and known that the rebuilding was his responsibility, his craft, his reputation.

He worked on the churchyard wall for a week in February, the coldest week of the year, the ground frozen, the gravestones white with frost, the yew trees dark against the grey sky, and he stripped back the damaged ends and laid the foundation and built the courses and packed the hearting and set the copings, working in silence, working alone, the churchyard empty except for the dead and the robins that perched on the gravestones and watched him with their small dark eyes, the birds unafraid, accustomed to the presence of humans in this place, the humans who came to visit the graves and to tend the plots and to stand in the cold air and remember the people who were no longer standing.

The stones of the churchyard wall were different from the stones of the field walls. They were dressed, the faces smoothed with a chisel, the edges squared, the surfaces more regular than the rough-faced stones of the fell boundaries, because the churchyard wall was a public wall, a visible wall, a wall that people walked past and looked at and judged, and the standard was higher, the finish finer, the craft more demanding. Tom dressed each stone with care, the cold chisel ringing against the limestone, the sound carrying across the silent churchyard, the sound of stone being shaped, the sound of the craft, and the shaped stones went into the wall with a precision that was almost painful, each face flat, each joint tight, the wall rising with a neatness that the field walls did not require and that the churchyard wall demanded.

He thought about the graves as he worked, the gravestones visible through the gap where the wall had fallen, the names cut into the stone, the dates, the brief summaries of lives that had been lived in this dale, the inscriptions that said beloved wife and devoted husband and at rest, the words that the living chose for the dead, the words that were the coping stones of a life, the final course, the crowning statement, and the words were often wrong, Tom thought, were often inadequate, were the verbal equivalent of a poorly dressed stone, the surface not quite matching the substance, the word not quite capturing the life, but the words were there, were set, were permanent, and the lives they described were over, were done, were beneath the ground that Tom knelt on as he built the wall that enclosed them.

He found names he recognised. Metcalfe. Pratt. Dinsdale. Calvert. Raw. The dale names, the names that appeared on the gravestones and on the gate posts and on the electoral rolls and in the parish records, the names that had been in this dale for centuries, the families that had farmed and walled and shepherded and lived and died here, generation after generation, the names recurring the way courses recurred in a wall, the same pattern repeating, the same families producing the same names, the sons named for the fathers and the fathers named for the grandfathers, the chain of naming running parallel to the chain of walling, parallel to the chain of farming, all of it continuous, all of it connected, the names and the walls and the farms and the graves all part of the same structure, the same hearting, the same invisible substance that held the dale together.

He saw Arthur's parents' grave. Harold Metcalfe, 1912-1986. Margaret Metcalfe, 1918-1990. The stone was simple, grey, a piece of limestone not unlike the stones Tom was setting in the wall, and the names were cut deep and the dates were precise and beneath the dates were the words that someone, Arthur perhaps, had chosen: Of this dale. Two words that were everything and nothing, that said nothing about the people and everything about the place, that located the dead in their landscape the way a foundation stone located a wall on its ground, and the words were right, Tom thought, were the truest words on any stone in the churchyard, because the dale was what they were of, was what they were made of, was the substance that had produced them and sustained them and received them back when they were done.

And now, twenty years later, Arthur would join them. Arthur would be buried in this churchyard, in the ground that Tom had knelt on while rebuilding the wall, in the dale that had been Arthur's world, and the grave would be dug and the coffin would be lowered and the earth would be filled in and the headstone would be set and the inscription would be cut, and the words would be chosen, and Tom wondered what the words would be, what Robert would choose, what inscription would crown the headstone of the last Metcalfe farmer, and he hoped that the words would be simple, would be true, would be like the stones in the wall, plain and unadorned and right.

The churchyard wall had been Tom's education in solitude. Without Jim beside him, without the teacher's presence, without the grunts and the silences and the occasional word of correction, Tom had been forced to become his own teacher, to develop the internal voice that judged his work, the voice that said no and yes and again, the voice that was not Jim's voice but was derived from Jim's voice, the way a wall was not the same wall as the wall that had taught the waller but was derived from it, shaped by it, made in its image. And the internal voice had stayed with him, had become permanent, had become the voice he heard whenever he set a stone that was not quite right, the voice that said try another, the voice that said look again, the voice that said that'll do, the voice that was Jim's and was also his own, the two voices having merged over the years into a single voice, the voice of the craft, the voice of the stone, the voice that spoke from the hearting of his skill and told him what the wall required.

He finished the churchyard wall on a Friday afternoon, the last coping stone set, the wall complete, and he stood back and looked at it and the wall was good, was sound, was his, was the first wall that was entirely his, built by his hands alone, judged by his eye alone, and the satisfaction of it was intense, was physical, was a warmth in his chest that had nothing to do with the exertion and everything to do with the accomplishment, and he gathered his tools and walked to his van and drove home and sat in the kitchen of the flat he rented in Reeth, the flat he lived in before Helen, before the cottage, before the marriage and the garden walls and the life that would follow, and he sat in the kitchen and drank tea and thought about the wall and knew that he was a waller, knew it the way you knew your own name, knew it in his hands.

The vicar had been pleased. The vicar had stood beside the rebuilt wall and said it was "marvellous" and had asked Tom how old the stones were and Tom had said three hundred years, some of them, and three hundred million years, all of them, and the vicar had smiled the smile of a man who did not quite understand what he had been told but who appreciated the sentiment, and he had paid Tom and shaken his hand and Tom had driven away, and the churchyard wall had stood, and was standing still, twenty years later, the wall intact, the graves enclosed, the dead contained, the boundary between the sacred and the secular maintained by the same stones that had maintained it for three hundred years, the stones that Tom had lifted and placed and fitted and packed, the stones that carried his handprint the way the gravestones carried the names.

Tom thought about this now, in March, on the hillside above High Scar Farm, building Arthur's wall, and he thought about the churchyard where Arthur would lie, about the wall he had built twenty years ago that enclosed the ground where Arthur would be buried, and the connection between the two walls, the churchyard wall and Arthur's wall, felt like a through-stone, a binding, a link between the two commissions that spanned twenty years and that were connected by the same stone and the same dale and the same craft and the same man's hands, the hands that had built the wall around the dead and were now building the wall for the dying, the hands that worked with stone and time and the patient accommodation of gravity, the hands that were Tom's and were Jim's and were Frank's and were the hands of every waller who had ever lifted a stone and set it in its place.

He worked through the afternoon, the March light fading, the dale going grey, and below him the farmhouse windows glowed yellow and the shape behind the glass was Arthur, watching, and the wall rose, course by course, the hearting packed, the face stones set, the string line true, and the two walls, the churchyard wall and Arthur's wall, existed simultaneously in Tom's mind, the wall of the dead and the wall of the living, the wall that enclosed the graves and the wall that bounded the fields, and between them the dale, the valley and the river and the stone and the sheep and the people who had lived here and the people who would live here and the people who were gone, all of them held by the walls, all of them contained by the stone, all of them part of the same structure, the same hearting, the same invisible substance that held the visible world in its place.

The light failed and Tom packed his tools and walked down the hill and the wall behind him was dark against the darkening sky and the churchyard wall in the village was dark behind the darkening church and the two walls stood in the gathering night and the night held them and the dale held the night and the stone held everything, the living and the dead, the built and the buried, the visible and the invisible, the face and the hearting, the two things that were one thing, the one thing that was the dale.