Chapter 36: The Next Wall

The call came in February, the month before the anniversary, the month when the dale was at its lowest, the days short, the light thin, the ground frozen or sodden or both, the month when Tom's hands were idle and his mind was not, the month when he sat in the kitchen and thought about walls and about the wall on the hillside above High Scar Farm and about the through-stone on the shelf in the hallway and about the man who had held it.

The caller was a farmer called Thwaite. Michael Thwaite, Keld, the upper dale, the head of the valley where the river was narrow and fast and the hills closed in on both sides and the walls climbed the steep ground at angles that seemed to defy the stone's wish to lie flat, the walls built by men who had carried each stone up a slope that a sheep would think twice about, the walls at the top of the dale where the weather was worst and the stone was hardest and the farming was the most difficult in England.

"I've a gap," Thwaite said, on the phone, his voice the voice of a man who did not enjoy telephones and who would not be using one if the gap could be communicated by any other means. "Top boundary. Above the intake. Twenty yards."

"Twenty yards."

"Aye. Went in December. The frost. Been meaning to call."

"I'll come and look."

"When?"

"Tomorrow."

Tom drove to Keld the next morning, the Defender climbing the dale, the road narrowing as it climbed, the valley closing in, the river louder, closer, running beside the road in places, the water brown with peat, and the walls on either side of the road were darker here, the stone different from the lower dale, harder, grittier, the millstone grit mixing with the limestone, the geology changing as the altitude increased, the stone telling a different story, a story of different seas, different depths, different pressures.

Thwaite was in the yard, a man in his sixties, short, thick, the body of a man who had spent his life on steep ground and whose legs were heavy with the muscle of climbing, and he wore the same clothes that Arthur had worn, the tweed cap and the brown jacket and the Wellington boots, the uniform that had not changed, the dale's dress code, the face stone of the farmer's identity.

"Tom Ashworth."

"Michael Thwaite."

They shook hands, the brief grip, the assessment, each man taking the measure of the other's hand, the roughness, the strength, the calluses, the hands telling each other what the faces would not say.

"Bad gap?" Tom said.

"Bad enough. Come up and see."

They climbed the hill together, Thwaite leading, his pace steady, the pace of a man who climbed this hill every day and who would climb it every day until he could no longer climb it, the pace that Arthur had maintained until the disease had taken it from him, and Tom followed, the tools over his shoulder, the weight of the hammer in his right hand, the familiar weight, the weight that had been the weight of his days for twenty-five years.

The gap was on the upper boundary, the fell wall, the wall that separated the enclosed land from the common, the same kind of wall as Arthur's wall, the same purpose, the same age, the same builders perhaps, the Wensleydale gang or their cousins or their competitors, the itinerant wallers who had criss-crossed the dales in the mid-nineteenth century building the enclosure walls that divided the open fell into the fields that the dale still used, the walls that were the skeleton of the landscape, the bones of the dale.

Twenty yards. Tom looked at the gap and felt the familiar feeling, the assessment, the calculation, the eye measuring the damage and the mind calculating the work, and the gap was large, was twice the size of Arthur's gap, twenty yards of collapsed wall, the stones scattered down the slope, the hearting spilled, the face stones lying on the grass in the attitudes of their falling, some face-up, some face-down, some on their edges, the stones having found their resting places the way a body found its resting place, the weight settling, the stone accepting the ground it had landed on.

"Frost?" Tom said.

"Frost and water. There's a spring behind the wall. Comes out of the hillside. Keeps the ground wet. The frost gets in every winter."

Tom looked at the ground behind the wall and could see the spring, a dark wet patch on the hillside where the water seeped from the ground, the water that had been the wall's enemy for a hundred and seventy years, the water that had found the wall's hearting and had frozen there and had pushed the stones apart, year after year, decade after decade, the patient work of water and frost, the two forces that destroyed walls, the two forces that shaped the dale.

"I'll need to drain it," Tom said. "Cut a channel behind the wall. Run the water to the side. Otherwise the new work'll go the same way."

"My grandfather did that. Fifty years ago. Put a ditch behind the wall. It's silted up."

"I'll clear it."

Thwaite nodded. The nod was the agreement, the contract, the dale handshake that was not a handshake but a nod, the acknowledgement that the work would be done and the price would be fair and the wall would stand, and the nod held more weight than any written contract, held the weight of the dale's trust, the trust that was the hearting of the community, the invisible substance that held the social structure together.

"When can you start?" Thwaite said.

"March. Second week."

"That'll do."

Tom looked at the gap and the gap looked back at him, the absence, the void, the space where the wall should have been and was not, and the gap was not Arthur's gap and the wall was not Arthur's wall and the farmer was not Arthur and the dale was the same dale but different, was the same stones but a different arrangement, and Tom felt the tug of the new work, the pull of the gap, the thing in him that responded to collapse the way a nurse responded to illness, the instinct to repair, to rebuild, to set the stones back in their places and close the opening and make the wall whole.

He drove home through the dale and the driving was the driving he had done a thousand times, the Defender on the narrow road, the walls on either side, the river below, the hills above, and he drove and thought about the new wall and thought about Arthur's wall and thought about the difference between them and the sameness of them, the difference being the farmer and the place and the size of the gap and the sameness being the stone and the craft and the hands and the work, the work that was always the same work, the rebuilding, the setting of stone on stone, the packing of hearting, the making of the wall, and the work would begin again in March, in the month when everything began, the month of the first stone and the first lamb and the first green of the spring, and Tom would drive up the dale and park in a yard and carry his tools up a hill and stand beside a gap and begin.

He told Helen that evening.

"New job. Keld. Twenty yards."

"Twenty yards. That's a big gap."

"Aye. Bigger than Arthur's."

"How long?"

"Three months. Maybe four. There's drainage work."

Helen looked at him across the table, the look that she gave him when she was reading him, the look that was the nurse's look and the wife's look combined, the look that saw the surface and the interior, the face and the hearting, and she said, "You're pleased."

"I'm pleased."

"Good."

He was pleased. He was pleased the way a stone was pleased when it found its place in a wall, which was to say not pleased in the human sense, not pleased as an emotion, but pleased as a condition, a state of being, the state of being in the right place, doing the right thing, the state of fitness, of belonging, of the thing being what it was meant to be, and Tom's hands were meant to be on stone and his eyes were meant to be on walls and his days were meant to be on hillsides, and the new commission was the confirmation of this, the evidence, the through-stone that connected the past to the future through the present moment.

In March he began.

The morning was cold, the ground hard, the sky grey, and he drove up the dale to Keld in the early light, the Defender loaded with tools, the flask on the passenger seat, the road climbing, the dale narrowing, and the walls on either side of the road were the walls he had passed a thousand times, the same walls, the same coping stones catching the headlights, the same boundary between the road and the field, the same stone, and he drove past them and they stood and he drove and the morning opened around him, the dale opening the way a wall opened when you stripped it back, revealing the interior, revealing the structure, the dale showing itself to him in the grey light of the March morning.

He parked in Thwaite's yard and got out and stood in the cold air and breathed and the air was the air of the upper dale, colder, thinner, sharper than the air of the lower dale, the air of the high ground, the air that the stone breathed, the air that the walls stood in, and he lifted his tools from the back of the Defender and slung them over his shoulder and walked up the hill.

The gap was waiting for him. Twenty yards of absence, twenty yards of the wall's failure, the stones scattered, the hearting spilled, and Tom stood beside the gap and looked at it and felt the thing he always felt at the beginning of a job, the thing that was not quite excitement and not quite apprehension but was both, was the waller's response to the wall's need, the craftsman's response to the commission, the hands' response to the stone, and the response was a readiness, a leaning forward, a reaching for the first stone.

He stripped back the damaged ends. He worked from the top down, lifting the coping stones off first, setting them aside, the same movements he had made at Arthur's wall, the same method, the same care, the hands doing what the hands knew, the routine coded into the muscles, and the stripping was not destruction but preparation, not demolition but diagnosis, the waller reading the wall the way the nurse read the body, looking for the sound structure beneath the damaged surface, looking for the point where the old wall was still true, still plumb, still tightly hearted, the point where the new work could begin.

He found it three feet back from the gap, the point where the face was true and the hearting was tight and the courses were level, the sound wall, the wall that had resisted the frost, that had held while the twenty yards beside it had failed, and he stripped back to this point on both sides and stood between the sound walls at either end and looked at the gap, the full gap, the space that he would fill.

He cleared the drainage ditch. He dug with the pinch bar and the spade, cutting a channel behind the wall line, six inches deep, running the water to the side, away from the wall, the channel giving the spring a path that did not pass through the hearting, the water diverted, the enemy redirected, and the work was muddy and cold and the ground was heavy with water and Tom's boots sank into the peat and his hands were black with mud and the mud was the dale, was the decomposed stone, the limestone and the grit broken down by three hundred million years of weather into the dark soil of the upper fell.

He laid the first stone on the second day.

The foundation was there, as it had been at Arthur's wall, set into the ground by the original builders, the stone solid, unmoved, and Tom knelt beside it and cleared the soil from its surface and felt for cracks, for movement, and the foundation was sound, was the same sound foundation that the Wensleydale gang had set a hundred and seventy years ago, the stone as solid as the day it was placed, and Tom set the first face stone on the foundation and the stone sat there, fitting, right, the weight settling, the face true.

One stone.

The beginning. The always-beginning. The first stone of the wall that would rise under his hands over the weeks and months of the spring and the summer, the wall that would grow from one stone to a hundred stones to a thousand stones, from one course to seven courses to the wallhead and the coping, the wall that would close the gap and mend the boundary and restore the line that the frost had broken, and the wall would stand, would endure, would be there after Tom was gone, after Thwaite was gone, after the farm had changed hands and the dale had changed and the years had passed, the wall standing the way Arthur's wall stood, the way all the walls stood, patient, solid, the hearting tight, the through-stones set, the coping shedding the rain, the wall doing what a wall did, which was to stand.

Tom set the second stone beside the first. The two stones touched. The joint between them was a thin dark line, the hairline gap that was not a flaw but a feature, the gap that allowed for movement, for breathing, for the wall's response to the weather and the seasons and the years, and the two stones sat on the foundation and the foundation held them and the ground held the foundation and the dale held the ground and the world held the dale.

He picked up the third stone and turned it in his hands, looking for the face, and found it, and set it beside the second, and the wall began.

The wall began the way every wall began, the way every spring began, the way every morning began, with a single act, a single stone, a single moment of the hands finding the weight and the eye finding the place and the stone finding its seat, the first stone of the new wall, the first word of the new sentence, the first breath of the new day, and the dale was around him and the hills were above him and the river was below him and the walls of the dale ran in every direction, thousands of miles of wall, and every wall had begun this way, with a single stone set on a foundation by a man whose hands knew what they were doing even when his mind did not, and the work continued, the work always continued, the work was the hearting of the life, the invisible thing that held the man together, the thing that gave his days their structure and his years their meaning, and the work would go on, would go on until the hands stopped, and then the wall would stand, and the next man's hands would come, and the next stone would be lifted, and the work would continue, and the wall would rise, and the hearting would hold.