Chapter 37: The River

He walked the river on a Thursday evening in June, the evening long, the light lasting until ten, the dale in its full summer dress, the grass deep, the meadows thick with buttercups and pignut and the tall grasses that would be cut for hay in July, and Tom walked the riverbank instead of driving the road because the evening was too good for the Defender, too warm, too still, too full of the green light that came off the water and the fields and the leaves of the ash trees that lined the Swale, and he wanted to be in the dale rather than passing through it, wanted to feel the ground under his boots and the air on his face and the sound of the water in his ears.

The Swale was low. Summer low, the lowest it had been since the previous July, the water clear and shallow, running over the stones of the riverbed in a continuous murmur that was not quite silence and not quite sound, the voice of the river reduced to a whisper, the winter roar compressed to a summer hum, and Tom walked along the bank and watched the water and the water showed him things that the road could not show, the dale from below, the dale from the inside, the dale as the river saw it.

The river was the dale's foundation. Tom thought about this as he walked, thought about the way the river had carved the valley, the way the water had cut through the stone over millions of years, dissolving the limestone, eroding the grit, scooping the valley out of the solid rock the way a waller's hands scooped the earth from a foundation course, clearing the base, exposing the stone, creating the space in which the wall would stand. The river had created the dale the way a waller created a wall, by removing what was not needed, by taking away the stone that was in the way, by carving the shape out of the solid mass, and the dale was the river's wall, the structure that the water had built by subtraction rather than addition, the valley made not by piling stone up but by washing stone away.

He passed the fields below the village, the Holme, the flat ground by the river, the Viking word, the field that Arthur had named for Helen in the kitchen with the notebook open on the table, and the Holme was green and flat and the water marks from the winter floods were visible on the grass, faint lines of darker green where the silt had been deposited, the river's high-water mark, the record of the winter written on the field the way the courses were written on the wall, each line a layer, each layer a history.

The riverbed was limestone. He could see it where the water was shallow, the flat beds of stone visible through the clear water, the same stone that the walls were built from, the same Yoredale limestone, the same three-hundred-million-year-old rock, but here in the river the stone was different, was shaped by water rather than by hands, the surfaces smooth, the edges rounded, the sharp corners that a waller needed worn away by the current, the stone becoming river stone, cobble, the round stones that were no good for walling because they would not sit flat, would not grip, would roll and slide and refuse to stay in place, the water having removed from the stone the very quality that the waller required, the angularity, the roughness, the friction that held the dry wall together.

Tom stepped into the river. The water was cold, summer-cold, the cold of water that had come from springs on the fell above, water that had been underground, in the dark, in the stone, and the cold seized his ankles and his boots filled and the water ran over his feet and the cold was sharp and clean and the riverbed was solid under his soles, the stone firm, and he stood in the river and looked at the dale from the water's level, from the river's perspective, and the dale looked different from here, looked taller, the hills rising steeply on either side, the walls high on the hillsides, the coping stones dark against the sky, and the dale was a channel, a groove, a passage carved in stone, and the river was the thing that had carved it, was still carving it, the water working on the stone the way the frost worked on the wall, slowly, patiently, taking the dale deeper year by year, century by century, the valley growing the way a wall grew, by increments, by the accumulation of small changes that were invisible in the moment but that over time produced the structure, the shape, the thing that was.

He climbed out of the river and walked on, the water squelching in his boots, the wet socks cold against his feet, and he followed the river upstream, toward High Scar Farm, the river leading him the way the road usually led him, the water finding the route through the valley the way the road found the route, following the contour, following the lowest ground, the path of least resistance, and the river and the road ran parallel, sometimes close, sometimes separated by fields and walls, and Tom walked between them, in the space between the water and the tarmac, in the green margin, the buffer zone, the hearting of the valley floor.

He thought about water and stone. He thought about the way they needed each other, the way the river needed the valley and the valley needed the river, the way the water shaped the stone and the stone shaped the water, the current directed by the banks that the current had created, the river flowing through the channel that the river had cut, and the relationship was circular, was recursive, was a wall that built itself and then stood inside itself, and Tom thought that the dale was this, was a thing that had created the conditions for its own existence, the river carving the valley and the valley directing the river and the stone becoming the soil that grew the grass that fed the sheep that grazed the fields that were bounded by the walls that were built from the stone that the river had carved from the hillside.

He reached the bridge below High Scar Farm at eight o'clock, the light still strong, the sun low in the west, the shadows long, and he stood on the bridge and looked upstream and downstream and the river flowed beneath him, the brown water carrying its load of silt and dissolved limestone, the invisible freight, the mineral cargo that the river transported from the hills to the sea, the dale's substance being carried away molecule by molecule, the dale dissolving, the dale being exported, the dale leaving itself one particle at a time, and the process was so slow that it was invisible, was geological, was happening on a timescale that made human life a flash, a blink, a single frame in a film that ran for millions of years.

He looked up the hill at the wall. Arthur's wall. The wall was visible in the evening light, the coping stones dark against the pale sky, the line of stone running along the contour, and the wall looked as it always looked from here, small, distant, a mark on the hillside, a line drawn by men, and Tom thought about the wall and the river and the difference between them, the wall being a thing built up and the river being a thing carved down, the wall being addition and the river being subtraction, the wall being the work of hands and the river being the work of water, and the two processes were opposite but the two results were the same, were both structures, were both things that had shape and purpose and duration, the wall standing on the hillside and the river running through the valley, each one the product of patience, each one the product of time, each one the product of the same stone worked by different forces.

He climbed the track to the farm and walked through the yard. The yard was clean, the cobbles swept, the Harrises' Range Rover parked beside the barn, and the farmhouse windows were lit with a light that was not Arthur's light, was a different colour, warmer, the light of new bulbs in new fittings, the light of renovation, and Tom walked through the yard and did not stop, did not knock on the door, walked past the house and up the path to the wall.

He reached the wall in the last of the light. The sun was on the horizon, the sky orange and pink and the blue of deep evening, and the wall was warm, the south face holding the day's heat, the stone giving back the warmth that the sun had given, and Tom put his hand on the coping and the stone was warm under his palm and the warmth was the warmth of the day and the warmth of the stone and the warmth of the wall that he had built for a man who was gone.

He walked the length of the wall. Nine yards. Twenty-eight coping stones. His hand on each one. The walk that was a reading, a checking, the waller's inspection, the annual assessment, the hand finding each stone and asking it the question that the hand always asked, which was are you holding, are you standing, are you doing your work, and each stone answered yes, each stone was in its place, each stone was holding, and the wall was sound.

He sat on the stile. The step-stones were firm under him, the through-stones spanning the wall's width, and he sat on the top step and looked down at the dale, the valley spread out below him in the evening light, the river a ribbon of silver in the valley bottom, the fields green and gold, the walls dark lines dividing the green, the village a cluster of roofs, the smoke from the chimneys going straight up in the still air, and the dale was beautiful, was itself, was the thing that it had always been.

The light faded. The sky darkened. The first stars appeared. The wall was warm against his back and the stone held him and the dale held the wall and the evening held the dale. He sat on the stile that he had built in a wall that he had built on a hill that the river had carved from the stone that the sea had made, and the chain of making ran from the Carboniferous sea to the stile he sat on, three hundred million years of process, of force, of the patient work of water and frost and wind and gravity, and his wall was a moment in that chain, a single link, a brief intervention, the work of his hands added to the work of the river and the frost and the Wensleydale gang, the wall holding its place in the sequence, the wall standing in the evening the way it would stand in the morning and the morning after that and the morning a hundred years from now.

He stood and walked down the hill in the dark, his boots finding the path by feel, the path that his feet knew, that Arthur's feet had known, and the dale was dark around him and the river was audible below, the murmur, the whisper, the water running through the stone, through the dale, through the night, the river that never stopped, the water that was always moving, always carrying, always carving, the river doing what the river did, which was to flow, and the wall doing what the wall did, which was to stand, and between the flowing and the standing the dale existed, the valley held open by the two forces, the force that moved and the force that stayed, the water and the stone, the river and the wall.