Chapter 29: Daniel

Daniel Harker was nineteen and from Leyburn, which was not the upper dale, was not even really the dale at all but the market town at its mouth, the place where the dale met the plain, where the hills gave way to the flat land, where the stone walls thinned and were replaced by hedges and fences and the wooden posts that dale farmers regarded with the quiet contempt reserved for materials that rotted. Daniel had grown up in a semi-detached house on an estate built in the nineteen eighties, a house with cavity walls and plasterboard partitions and uPVC windows and a garden that was bounded by a six-foot larch-lap fence that his father replaced every four years because the wind took it, and Daniel had never touched a dry stone wall until he came to High Scar Farm, had never run his hand along a coping or felt the weight of a through-stone or understood that a wall could be a thing that lasted for centuries, could be a structure so sound and so patient that the stone in it would outlast the name of the man who placed it.

He had studied agriculture at Askham Bryan, the college near York, and he had done well, had passed his exams and earned his certificates and learned the vocabulary of modern farming, the vocabulary of soil pH and nitrogen uptake and body condition scoring and the five freedoms of animal welfare, the vocabulary that was useful and necessary and that bore no relationship to the vocabulary of Arthur Metcalfe, who spoke of fields by name and sheep by mark and weather by feel and who had learned farming not from a curriculum but from the ground, from the animal, from the sixty years of mornings that had begun before dawn and ended after dark, the education that could not be certified because it could not be examined, the knowledge that lived in the hands and the eyes and the nose and the instinct and that died with the man who carried it.

Daniel came to High Scar Farm in January, two months before the wall fell, hired by Arthur through the agricultural college's placement scheme, a scheme that sent young people to working farms to learn what the college could not teach, which was everything, which was the actual doing of the thing that the college taught the theory of, and Arthur had agreed to take a student because Helen had asked him to, because Helen understood that Arthur could not manage the lambing alone, that his body would not allow it, that the disease in his pancreas had progressed to the point where the morning walk to the lambing shed was an achievement and the carrying of a lamb was an impossibility, and that the farm needed a young body, a pair of hands that could do what Arthur's hands could no longer do.

Daniel was earnest and willing and slightly afraid, the fear not of the work but of Arthur, of the old farmer's silences and his stares and his habit of looking at Daniel as though Daniel were a stone that Jim Pratt was inspecting, a stone that might or might not belong in the wall, a stone that was being assessed for its weight and its shape and its fitness for the purpose, and Daniel understood that he was being judged and did not know what the criteria were, because Arthur's criteria were not the criteria of the college, were not written in a handbook or described in a learning outcome, were the criteria of a man who had been farming for sixty years and who knew what farming required and who could see, in the first five minutes of watching Daniel handle a ewe, whether the lad had it or not.

Daniel did not have it. Not yet. He had the knowledge but not the feel, the theory but not the instinct, the vocabulary but not the language, and the difference between the two was the difference that Arthur saw and that Tom saw and that Helen saw, the difference between a man who could describe what a sheep needed and a man who could look at a sheep and know, the difference that years and repetition and failure and practice would eventually close but that could not be closed by reading, by studying, by the accumulation of information, because information was not knowledge and knowledge was not skill and skill was not instinct and the progression from one to the next was not a progression at all but a transformation, a change in the nature of the knowing, from the head to the hands, from the conscious to the unconscious, from the thing you thought about to the thing you did without thinking.

Tom watched Daniel from the wall. He watched the lad cross the yard in the morning, walking from the cottage where he stayed, the cottage that had been the farmworker's cottage in the days when the farm employed a man, and Daniel walked with the careful tread of a person navigating unfamiliar ground, his boots finding the cobbles, his body not yet shaped to the landscape, and Tom saw in Daniel's walk the walk of a young man who had not yet found his place, who was still looking for the arrangement that gravity intended, the position in the dale that would allow him to stand without effort, the way a stone found its position in a wall.

He watched Daniel in the lambing shed. He could see the shed from the wall, the open front of the shed visible from the hillside, and he could see Daniel moving among the ewes, his movements too fast, too urgent, the movements of a person who had learned from a textbook that lambing required vigilance and intervention and who had not yet learned that it more often required patience and stillness, the quiet watching that allowed the ewe to do what the ewe knew how to do, the waiting that was the hardest part of the job, the not-doing that was harder than the doing.

Arthur corrected Daniel the way Jim had corrected Tom, by showing rather than telling, by doing the thing in front of the lad and letting the lad see the difference between his way and the right way, and Daniel watched Arthur the way Tom had watched Jim, with a mixture of attention and confusion, the attention focused on the hands and the confusion located in the gap between what the hands did and what the brain understood, the gap that would close over time, over years, over the ten thousand repetitions that turned the watching into the doing.

Tom saw himself in Daniel. He saw the nineteen-year-old who had come to Arkengarthdale with a hammer in his hand and anger in his shoulders and no understanding of what he was about to learn, the young man who had thought that building a wall was a matter of stacking stones and who had discovered that building a wall was a matter of listening to stones, of reading them, of finding the arrangement that the stones themselves required, and he saw in Daniel the same bewilderment, the same gap between the expectation and the reality, the gap between what farming looked like from the outside and what farming felt like from the inside.

He spoke to Daniel sometimes, in the yard, in the evenings when Tom came down from the wall and Daniel came out of the lambing shed, the two of them meeting in the space between the wall and the sheep, the space that was the yard, the cobbled square that connected the house to the barn to the shed to the fields, the hub of the farm, the hearting of the layout.

"How's the lambing?" Tom said, on a Tuesday evening in March, the lambing at its peak, the ewes producing lambs at the rate of four or five a day, Daniel's days beginning at five and ending at midnight, the sleep scarce, the work relentless.

"Thirty-one," Daniel said. "Thirty alive. One stillborn."

"That's good."

"Arthur says it's average."

"For Arthur, average is good. He's had years where he lost ten percent. Thirty from thirty-one is better than average."

Daniel looked at Tom and there was a tiredness in the lad's face that was not just the tiredness of lost sleep but the tiredness of sustained attention, the fatigue of a mind that had been watching and listening and learning without rest for weeks, the fatigue that Tom remembered from his own apprenticeship, the exhaustion of becoming.

"He knows everything," Daniel said. "Arthur. He knows everything about the sheep. He can look at a ewe and tell you if the lamb's going to be a single or a twin. He can tell you if it's going to be a difficult birth just by looking at how she stands. He can tell you which ewe is which from a hundred yards. I can't do any of that."

"You've been here six weeks."

"He's been here sixty years."

"Aye. And in his first six weeks he couldn't do any of that either."

Daniel looked at Tom and something shifted in the lad's face, a loosening, a release, the tension of inadequacy easing slightly, the reassurance that the gap between his skill and Arthur's skill was not a fixed distance but a distance that time and work would close, and Tom felt the weight of what he had said, felt the responsibility of it, because he was doing what Jim had done for him, was standing beside a young man and telling him that the not-knowing was temporary, that the knowing would come, that the hands would learn what the head could not teach, and the telling was a kind of through-stone, a thing that connected Tom to Jim and Jim to Frank and the chain of teachers stretching back through the generations, each one saying to the next, you will learn, you will get there, the work will teach you.

Tom saw Daniel with the lamb that died. He had come down from the wall at noon to refill his flask from the kitchen tap, and he had passed the lambing shed and seen Daniel sitting on the bale with a lamb in his arms, the lamb grey and still, the body limp, and Daniel's face was blank, wiped clean of expression, the face of a young man who had just experienced for the first time the failure that farming guaranteed, the death that was part of the life, the loss that accompanied the gain.

Tom stood at the door of the shed and said nothing. He watched Daniel hold the dead lamb and he thought about the first stone he had set that Jim had taken out and thrown on the reject pile, the first failure, the first evidence that the work was not easy, that the skill was not automatic, that the gap between intention and result was wide and deep and would take years to cross, and he thought that Daniel's dead lamb was like his rejected stone, the first lesson in the insufficiency of effort, the first evidence that trying was not enough, that the thing required more than trying, required understanding, required the deep knowing that came only from the accumulation of failures, each failure adding to the knowledge, each death adding to the understanding, the understanding that was not comfort but was competence, the ability to do better next time, to see the signs, to intervene earlier, to turn the lamb in the womb before it was too late.

"These things happen," Tom said, because it was what Jim had said to him when he threw the stone on the reject pile, because it was what dale men said when the thing that should not have happened had happened, the words that were not consolation but were acknowledgement, the words that said the world was imperfect and the work was hard and the losses were real and the man who experienced them was not diminished by them but was being built by them, course by course, stone by stone.

Daniel looked at Tom and nodded and set the dead lamb down and stood and went to the next pen where the next ewe was straining and the next lamb was coming, and the work continued, because the work always continued, because the ewes did not stop labouring because one lamb had died, because the farm did not stop functioning because one life had been lost, because the dale went on, the spring went on, the season went on, and the young man in the lambing shed and the older man on the hillside both went on, both doing the work that the season demanded, both learning the thing that the work taught, which was endurance, which was patience, which was the ability to absorb the losses and continue building, continue lambing, continue standing.

After Arthur died, Daniel stayed for three weeks to manage the flock until the sale. He walked the fields and fed the sheep and checked the water troughs and mended the fences that the sheep had broken, the daily work of a farm without a farmer, the routine that continued in Arthur's absence because routine was the hearting of farming, the invisible structure that held the visible operation together, and the routine did not require Arthur's presence, did not require the farmer's eye or the farmer's hand, required only the doing, the mechanical repetition of the tasks that kept the animals alive and the land tended, and Daniel did these tasks with a competence that surprised Tom, a competence that had grown without Tom noticing, the way a wall grew without the casual observer noticing, course by course, day by day, the skill accumulating invisibly until one day you looked at it and saw that it was there, was real, was substantial.

On Daniel's last day Tom drove up to the farm and found the lad in the yard, loading his bags into the battered Corsa that he drove, and the yard was clean, the cobbles swept, the gates closed, the shed empty, the sheep sold, the farm ready for whatever came next.

"Where will you go?" Tom said.

"There's a farm near Hawes. They need a hand for tupping season."

"Good farm?"

"I don't know. I'll find out."

Tom looked at Daniel and saw the lad and also saw the man the lad was becoming, the face older than it had been in January, the eyes steadier, the hands rougher, the body carrying itself differently, carrying itself the way a man carried himself who had done hard work and knew what hard work was and was not afraid of it, and Tom put out his hand and Daniel took it and they shook, the grip firm, the contact brief, the dale way.

"You did well," Tom said.

"Arthur said I was too slow."

"Arthur said that about everyone. He said it about me."

"He said it about you?"

"He said my hearting was loose. He said my grading was wrong. He said Jim would have done it faster."

Daniel smiled, a small smile, the first smile Tom had seen from the lad since Arthur's death, and the smile was good, was right, was the smile of a young man who had been told that even the waller whose work he had watched from the lambing shed with quiet admiration had been found wanting by the farmer whose standards no one could meet, and the smile was a release, a permission, the permission to be insufficient and to continue anyway, to build the wall and lamb the ewes and do the work imperfectly and improve and continue and endure.

Daniel drove away down the track and Tom stood in the yard and watched the Corsa disappear around the bend and the dust settle and the yard was empty and the farm was empty and the silence was the silence of a place that had been full and was now vacant, the silence of a wall with no hearting, a shell, a structure with nothing inside it, and Tom stood in the empty yard and looked up at the wall on the hillside and the wall stood, and the wall was not empty, the wall was full, was packed with hearting, was dense with the invisible substance that held it together, and the wall would stand, and Daniel would farm, and the chain would continue, the chain of hands and knowledge and skill that ran from the past to the future through the present, through this yard, through these cobbles, through the ground that held everything.