Chapter 34: The Notebook

The notebook was in the kitchen drawer, the drawer beside the sink where Helen kept the things that were not quite useful and not quite disposable, the things that existed in the middle state between keeping and discarding, the rubber bands and the takeaway menus and the spare batteries and the birthday candles and the instruction manuals for appliances they no longer owned, the drawer that was the hearting of the domestic life, the invisible interior where the miscellaneous things were packed, and the notebook was in there, among the miscellany, and Tom found it on a Saturday morning in February, three months after Arthur's death, when he was looking for a pencil.

He held it and knew what it was. The blue cover, the lined pages, Helen's handwriting visible at the edges where the pages did not quite close, and he took it from the drawer and set it on the table and sat down and opened it and read.

Helen's handwriting was small and clear, the handwriting of a nurse, the handwriting that had been trained to be legible because legibility could save a life, and the words on the pages were Arthur's words in Helen's hand, the farmer's knowledge transcribed by the nurse, the spoken made written, the temporary made permanent, the knowledge that had lived in Arthur's head for seventy-eight years now living on the pages of a lined notebook in a kitchen drawer in a village in Swaledale.

Home field. High Intake. The Holme. Raven Scar. Calf Close. Black Rigg. Long Pasture. Gill Field. Kirk Close.

The names ran down the pages in a column, each name followed by a description, Helen's description, the words that Helen had written as Arthur spoke, the words that captured the field's location and character and history, the words that were the face stones of the knowledge, the visible part, the part that could be written and read and understood by anyone who picked up the notebook and turned the pages.

But the hearting of the knowledge was not on the pages. The hearting was in Arthur's voice, in the way he had said the names, in the pauses between them, in the silence that followed each name as Arthur let the name settle in the room before moving to the next, in the way his hands had moved on the through-stone as he spoke, the turning of the stone accompanying the speaking of the names, the stone and the words connected by the man's hands, by the man's memory, by the man's life on the land that the names described. This hearting was gone, was lost, was in the ground with Arthur, and the notebook held the face stones but not the hearting, held the words but not the voice, held the knowledge but not the knowing.

Tom read the sheep marks. Right ear, a crop. Left ear, a key-bit. Red mark on the near shoulder. Horn burn, a straight bar on the near horn. The marks were precise, detailed, the code of the flock, the identification system that had distinguished Arthur's sheep from every other sheep on the fell, and the marks were now meaningless, were a code without a cipher, a language without speakers, the sheep sold, the flock dispersed, the animals that had carried these marks scattered across a dozen farms in three dales, the marks clipped from the ears and replaced by other marks, the identity of Arthur's flock erased, the code overwritten.

Helen came into the kitchen and saw the notebook open on the table and saw Tom reading it and she stood in the doorway and watched him the way she had stood in the doorway of Arthur's kitchen and watched Arthur sleep, the watching that was both professional and personal, the watching that assessed and the watching that loved.

"I found it in the drawer," Tom said.

"I know where it was."

"I wasn't looking for it."

"I know."

She sat down across from him and the notebook was between them on the table, the pages open, the names and the marks visible, Arthur's knowledge in Helen's hand, and the kitchen was quiet, the Saturday morning quiet, the quiet of a house where no one was in a hurry, where the day's shape was soft and undefined, where the only obligation was the obligation to be together.

"What do we do with it?" Tom said.

Helen looked at the notebook and her face was the face of a woman who had thought about this question, who had carried the question for months, the way Tom carried the through-stone in his pocket, the question heavy and present and always there, and she said, "I don't know."

"Robert should have it."

"Robert doesn't want it. Robert wants the solicitor's fees and the proceeds of the sale. Robert doesn't want a notebook full of field names that he can't pronounce and sheep marks for sheep that no longer exist."

"The Harrises."

"Maybe. They own the land now. The names belong to the land, not to the man."

Tom thought about this, about whether names belonged to the land or to the man, about whether the name Kirk Close belonged to the field with the circle of stones in its southeast corner or to the person who had called it Kirk Close, and he thought that the name belonged to neither and to both, that the name was a through-stone between the land and the person, the word that connected the place to the mind that knew it, and that without the mind the name was just a word and without the place the name was just a sound, and that the two needed each other the way the two faces of a wall needed each other, each one giving the other its meaning.

"We could give it to the archive," Helen said. "The county archive in Northallerton. They keep records like this. Parish records, farm records, field names. They have boxes of them. The dales are full of notebooks like this."

"In boxes."

"In boxes. On shelves. In a building in Northallerton."

"Nobody reads them."

"Somebody might. A historian. A researcher. Somebody writing a book about the dale."

Tom looked at the notebook and thought about the names on the pages being read by a stranger in a building in Northallerton, a person who had never walked these fields, who had never stood in the home field and looked up at the High Intake and beyond it to the enclosure wall on the hillside, who had never heard Arthur's voice say the names, who would read them as data, as information, as entries in a catalogue, and the reading would be accurate and thorough and scholarly and it would miss everything, would miss the hearting, would miss the voice and the hands and the through-stone on the armrest and the view from the kitchen window and the man in the chair and the dale around the man, would miss the thing that made the names alive, the thing that made them more than words on paper.

"I want to keep it," Tom said.

Helen looked at him.

"I want to keep it here. In the house. Not in a drawer. On the shelf. With the through-stone and the stick."

Helen's eyes were bright and she nodded and Tom picked up the notebook and closed it and carried it to the hallway and set it on the shelf beside the hazel stick and the through-stone, the three objects together, the stone and the wood and the paper, the wall and the walk and the knowledge, the three things that Arthur had held, the three things that held Arthur, and the shelf held them all, the shelf in the hallway of a waller's cottage in Swaledale, the shelf that was a foundation course, the base on which the objects rested, the objects that were the hearting of Arthur's memory, the invisible things made visible, set out on a shelf, present, available, touchable.

Tom stood in the hallway and looked at the three objects and thought about the fourth object, the one that was not on the shelf, the hearting stone that he had dropped into Arthur's grave at the funeral, the small angular piece of limestone that had been inside the wall for a hundred and seventy years and that was now inside the grave, inside the coffin, inside the earth, and the four objects were connected, were parts of the same structure, the through-stone and the stick and the notebook on the shelf and the hearting stone in the ground, the four elements of Arthur's legacy, the things he had left behind, the things that remained when the man was gone.

He thought about what remained. He thought about the walls that remained and the fields that remained and the dale that remained and the through-stone on the shelf and the stick beside it and the notebook with its names and marks, and he thought that what remained was not Arthur but was the evidence of Arthur, the proof that Arthur had existed, had farmed, had walked, had known, the evidence as clear and as readable as the fossil in the quarry, the imprint of the creature in the stone, the evidence that something had lived here, had left its mark, had pressed itself into the substance of the place and had been preserved.

Helen came to the hallway and stood beside him and they looked at the shelf together, the three objects, and Helen put her hand on Tom's arm and the touch was light, was brief, was the through-stone of the moment, the connection between the two of them and the man they had both cared for and the objects they had gathered and the knowledge they had preserved.

"He'd be pleased," Helen said.

"About what?"

"That we kept them together. The stone and the stick and the notebook. He'd like that they're together."

Tom thought about Arthur and about what Arthur would think and he thought that Helen was right, that Arthur would like the three objects together, would like the through-stone beside the stick beside the notebook, the three things arranged on the shelf the way stones were arranged in a wall, each one in its place, each one touching its neighbours, the arrangement deliberate, the placement careful, the objects fitting together the way face stones fit together, the way through-stones fit across the wall's width, the way hearting fit between the faces, everything in its place, everything held, everything holding.

"The names should be read," Helen said. "Not by someone in Northallerton. By someone here. By someone who walks the fields."

"The Harrises."

"Maybe. Or the next people after them. Or the ones after that. Someone will want to know what the fields are called. Someone will stand in the home field and look up the hill and want to know the name of the intake above and the name of the scar above that and the name of the ridge above that. And the notebook will be here. And the names will be in it. And the person will read them and the names will come alive again, will come back into use, will be spoken again on the hillside where they were first spoken, the names returning to their places the way stones returned to a wall, the fallen things set back in their positions, the collapsed thing rebuilt."

Tom listened to Helen and the rightness of what she said settled in him the way a through-stone settled across the width of a wall, spanning the gap, connecting the two sides, and he thought about the names on the hillside, the invisible names, the words that were not carved in the stone but that lived in the air above the fields, in the space between the walls, in the mouths of the people who spoke them, and he thought that the names were a kind of hearting, the invisible substance that held the landscape together, that gave the fields their identities and the boundaries their meanings and the dale its character, the names being the words that the dale spoke about itself, the dale's own language, the vocabulary of stone and water and wind and sheep and wall.

He left the hallway and went to the kitchen and made tea and brought it to Helen and they sat at the table and the notebook was on the shelf in the hallway and the through-stone was beside it and the stick was beside the stone and the three objects sat together in the quiet house and the dale was outside and the walls were on the hillside and the names were in the notebook and the names were on the hillside and the names were in the air, and the hearting held.