Chapter 35: Jim's Wall

Tom drove to Gunnerside on a Sunday in March, the first March after Arthur's death, the dale in the early stages of the spring that would be the first spring without Arthur in it, the first spring in which no one would walk the fields of High Scar Farm with a hazel stick and tap the coping stones and count the sheep, the first spring in which the farm would be silent of its farmer, and Tom drove through the dale and saw the walls on either side of the road and thought about the walls and thought about Jim and turned off the road at Gunnerside and parked in front of Jim's cottage and sat in the Defender for a moment, looking at the cottage, the small stone house with its slate roof and its chimney and its garden wall, the wall that Jim had built and rebuilt fifty times.

Jim was in the garden. Tom could hear him before he saw him, the sound of the walling hammer, the sharp ring of steel on stone, the sound carrying through the still morning air, and Tom got out of the Defender and walked around the side of the cottage and there was Jim, standing at the wall, his hammer in his hand, the wall three courses high, the batter frames set, the string line taut, and Jim was building, was doing the thing that Jim did, the thing that Jim had done every day for fifty years, the thing that Jim would do until he could no longer do it, the wall rising under his hands the way it had always risen, course by course, stone by stone.

The wall in Jim's garden was ten yards long and three feet high and it served no purpose. It divided nothing. It enclosed nothing. It bounded no field and contained no sheep and marked no boundary between one man's land and another's. It was a wall that existed for the sake of its own existence, a wall built to be built, the building being the purpose, the wall being the medium through which Jim practised the craft that was not just his profession but his identity, the thing that he was, the thing that he could not stop being.

He built the wall and then he took it down and then he built it again. He had been doing this for fifteen years, since he retired, since the commissions stopped, since the Transit stopped driving to job sites across the dale, and in those fifteen years the same stones had been lifted and placed and fitted and packed and lifted again and placed again and fitted again and packed again, the cycle repeating, the wall rising and falling and rising, the stones wearing smooth from the handling, the garden becoming a workshop, a studio, a place where the craft was practised not for money or for clients or for the landscape but for itself, for the pure exercise of the skill, the way a musician practised scales, the way a painter drew, the fingers and the eyes and the muscles kept sharp by repetition, by the daily doing of the thing.

"Jim."

"Tom."

Jim did not look up. Jim rarely looked up when he was working. His eyes were on the stone in his hands, the stone that he was turning, reading, the stone that had been in his hands a thousand times and that he was reading for the thousand-and-first time, because the stone was never the same twice, the stone being turned by a hand that was a day older than the hand that had turned it yesterday, the reading being different because the reader was different, and the wall being built by a man who was a day closer to the end of his building.

Tom stood at the edge of the garden and watched Jim work and the watching was a pleasure, the deep pleasure of seeing a thing done perfectly, the way a listener took pleasure in hearing a piece of music played without error, the craft at its highest expression, the hands moving with a fluency that was beyond skill, was beyond competence, was the thing that came after competence, the thing that had no name but that everyone recognised when they saw it, the thing that made you stop and watch and forget that you were watching, the absorption, the seamlessness, the wall appearing to build itself, the stones seeming to find their own places, Jim's hands merely the instruments through which the wall's intention was expressed.

"Tea?" Jim said.

"Aye."

They went inside and Jim's kitchen was as Tom remembered it, unchanged in the twenty-five years since Tom had first sat at this table as a nineteen-year-old apprentice, the range still throwing heat, the mugs still brown with tannin, the window still looking out over the dale, and Jim made tea and they sat at the table and drank it and the silence between them was the silence of two men who had known each other for a long time and who did not need to fill the air with words, the silence that was not empty but was full, full of the shared knowledge, the shared history, the shared understanding of the stone.

"Arthur," Jim said.

"Aye."

"He was a good man."

"He was."

"I visited him. In the autumn. Before the end."

"I know. He told me."

"He told me about the wall. Your wall. He said it was the best wall he'd ever seen."

Tom looked at Jim and Jim looked at his tea and the words sat between them on the table, the words that Arthur had spoken to Jim about Tom's wall, the words that had passed from the farmer to the old waller, the farmer's assessment of the waller's work, and the words were heavy, were significant, were through-stones that spanned the gap between the three men, the dead man and the two living men, the farmer and the teacher and the student.

"He said that," Tom said.

"He did. He said, 'It's the best wall I've ever seen, and I've been looking at walls for seventy-eight years.' Those were his words."

Tom felt the words enter him and he felt the weight of them and the warmth of them and the fit of them, the words sitting in his chest the way a through-stone sat in a wall, spanning the width, connecting the two faces, and he did not speak because there was nothing to say that would add to the words, nothing that would improve upon Arthur's assessment, and the silence held the words the way the hearting held the wall.

Jim finished his tea and stood and went back to the garden and Tom followed and they stood at the wall, the ten-yard wall, the practice wall, the wall that was and was not a wall, the wall that served no purpose and served every purpose, and Jim picked up his hammer and turned to the courses he had laid that morning and looked at them and said, "That through-stone's sitting wrong."

Tom looked. The through-stone looked right to him, looked level, looked well-placed, the stone spanning the wall's width, the ends flush with both faces, the surface flat, the seat solid.

"It's half an inch proud on the west face," Jim said.

Tom looked again and this time he saw it, the fraction of an inch that Jim had seen instantly, the tiny protrusion of the through-stone beyond the face, the imperfection that was invisible to anyone who was not Jim, the flaw that only the builder could see because only the builder knew what the perfection should look like, the ideal wall that existed in Jim's mind and against which every real wall was measured and found wanting.

Jim set the end of his hammer against the through-stone and tapped it, gently, the way you tapped a pin into a gap, the precise application of force, the tap moving the stone a fraction of an inch, the protrusion disappearing, the face becoming true, the imperfection corrected, and Jim stood back and looked at the wall and his face showed nothing, neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction, the face of a man who had been correcting imperfections for fifty years and for whom the correction was as automatic as breathing.

"I'm going to take it down again," Jim said.

"The whole wall?"

"The whole wall. Tomorrow. I'll start again."

"Why?"

Jim looked at Tom and the look was the look of a man who had been asked a question that he had asked himself ten thousand times and that he had answered ten thousand times and that the answer was always the same, always insufficient, always incomplete, the question being one of those questions that could not be answered but only responded to, the way a stone could not answer the question of why it fit but could only demonstrate the fitting.

"Because I want to see if I can do it better," Jim said. "Every time I build it I learn something. Every time I take it down I see what I did wrong. And every time I start again I try to do it right. I've never done it right. I've done it well. I've done it sound. But I've never done it right. And I won't. I'll die before I build the perfect wall. But the trying is the thing. The trying is the craft. The craft is not the wall. The craft is the reaching for the wall."

Tom looked at Jim and Jim's face was old, was lined, was the face of a man who had spent sixty years in the weather and the stone, the face weathered like a coping stone, the surface worn by the years the way the stone was worn by the rain, and beneath the weathered surface the structure was sound, the hearting was tight, the man was solid, was himself, was Jim, was the thing that Jim had always been and would always be.

"Frank Dinsdale said the same thing," Jim said. "He said, 'The perfect wall is the one you haven't built yet.' He was right. He was always right about walls. Wrong about everything else. Wrong about women and wrong about money and wrong about whisky. But right about walls."

Tom smiled and Jim smiled and the smiles were small, were dale smiles, the expression that was not a grin but a slight movement of the lower face, the acknowledgement of the shared understanding, the recognition that both men knew what the other knew, that both men had been shaped by the same stone and the same craft and the same chain of hands, Frank to Jim to Tom, the chain that would continue, that would find the next hand, that would pass the hammer and the knowledge and the reaching.

They stood in the garden for an hour, Tom watching Jim build, the way Tom had watched Jim build twenty-five years ago in Arkengarthdale, the same watching, the same pleasure, the same attention, and the wall rose under Jim's hands and the stones found their places and the hearting was packed and the face was true and the wall was good, was sound, was Jim's, was the fifty-first iteration of the same wall built from the same stones by the same hands, and each iteration was different from the last because the hands were different, were a day older, were a day closer to the stillness that would come, and the wall was a record of the hands, a diary of the craft, each rebuilding a page, each course a sentence, the wall speaking the language of stone, the language that Jim had spoken all his life and that would fall silent when Jim's hands fell still.

Tom left in the early afternoon. He shook Jim's hand in the yard, the grip still strong, still the grip of a waller, the hand hard and calloused and sure, and Jim said, "Come again," and Tom said, "I will," and the words were not a promise but a statement, a fact, the way the wall was a fact, the way the stone was a fact, the way the dale was a fact, and Tom drove home through the dale and the walls stood on either side of the road and Jim's wall stood in Jim's garden and Arthur's wall stood on the hillside above High Scar Farm and the walls were all connected, were all part of the same structure, the same craft, the same chain of hands, the same reaching for the thing that could not be reached but that the reaching for was the purpose, was the work, was the hearting of the life.