Chapter 38: The Second Spring

March came again.

A year since the wall had fallen. A year since Tom had driven the Defender up the track to High Scar Farm and seen the gap from a quarter mile below, the dark absence in the line of stone, the sky showing through the place where the wall should have been. A year since Arthur had stood at the gate to the home field with his stick and watched Tom cross the yard and said, "Went in the night. I heard nowt." A year since the first stone, the first course, the first morning of the work that would become the work that defined his life.

Tom drove up the dale on a Saturday, the first Saturday of March, the dale in the same state it had been in a year ago, the same grey-brown of late winter beginning to turn to the grey-green of early spring, the same mist on the higher ground, the same black-faced sheep in the same fields, the same walls running along the same hillsides, and the sameness was not monotony but was continuity, was the dale being the dale, the dale doing what the dale did, which was to persist, to continue, to turn through its seasons the way the earth turned through its orbit, the repetition not a repetition but a renewal, the same season arriving in a different year and finding the same ground and the same stone and the same sky and the same walls.

He was not going to High Scar Farm. He was going to Keld, to Thwaite's gap, to the new commission, the twenty yards that waited for him at the head of the dale, and the driving was the same driving, the same road, the same Defender, the same flask on the passenger seat, the same tools in the back, the same clink and rattle of the hammer and the chisel on the corrugated floor, and Tom drove and the dale passed around him and the year that had passed was in the dale and was not in the dale, was present in the absence of Arthur and in the presence of the Harrises and in the through-stone on the shelf in the hallway and in the hazel stick beside it and in the notebook beside the stick, was present in the things that had changed, but the things that had not changed were more numerous, were the majority, were the stone and the water and the walls and the fields and the sheep and the sky and the ground, and these things did not know that a year had passed, did not measure time the way men measured time, in days and months and anniversaries, but measured time the way stone measured time, in the slow accumulation of weather, the lichen growing a millimetre a year, the coping stone wearing a fraction of a gram thinner each decade, the wall settling a fraction of an inch deeper into the ground each century.

He passed High Scar Farm without stopping. He looked up the track as he drove past and saw the yard and the farmhouse and the barn and the Harrises' Range Rover, and he looked up the hill and saw the wall, and the wall was there, was standing, the coping stones visible against the sky, the line of stone running along the contour, and Tom looked at the wall for the two seconds that the road allowed and then the road turned and the wall was gone, was behind him, was in the rear-view mirror for a moment and then was not, and he drove on, up the dale, toward the new gap.

But in those two seconds the wall had told him what it always told him, which was that it stood, that it held, that the hearting was sound, that the through-stones were binding, that the coping was shedding the rain, that the wall was doing its work, the work that Tom had built it to do, the work that it would do for a hundred years, for two hundred years, the work of standing.

He thought about the year. He thought about the year the way he thought about a wall, the year as a structure, a thing that had been built, course by course, day by day, the year rising from the foundation of the previous March through the courses of the spring and the summer and the autumn to the coping of the winter, each season a section of the wall, each month a course, each day a stone, and the year was complete, was finished, was coped, and the coping was today, was this March morning, was this drive up the dale, was the beginning of a new year that would be built on the foundation of the old year the way a new course was built on the foundation of the course below it, each year sitting on the year beneath it, the weight accumulating, the structure rising.

The year had held things. The year had held Arthur's death and Arthur's funeral and the through-stone on the shelf and the sale of the farm and the coming of the Harrises and the visit to Jim and the new commission at Keld, and the year had held the ordinary things too, the Sundays and the meals and the garden and the dripping tap that Helen had fixed herself and the raised bed by the back door and the runner beans and the walks to the pub in Richmond and the evenings in the kitchen with the tea and the talking and the not-talking, the ordinary substance of a life, the hearting of the year, the invisible things that filled the space between the visible events.

He reached Keld at nine. The village was small, a few houses, a chapel, the river loud here, the Swale narrow and fast, running through the rocks with a sound that was not the murmur of the lower dale but a rush, a roar, the sound of water falling over stone, and Tom parked in Thwaite's yard and got out and stood in the cold air and breathed.

The air was different here. Thinner. Colder. The air of the high dale, the air that had come from the west, from the fell tops, from the open ground above the last walls, the ground that was not enclosed, that was common, that was wild, the ground where the curlew nested and the hare ran and the stone showed through the thin soil like bone through skin, and the air tasted of peat and moss and the cold mineral breath of the limestone, and Tom breathed it and felt it enter him and felt the year's weight ease slightly, the way the weight of a stone eased when you found its balance point, the stone becoming lighter in the hands, not lighter in fact but lighter in the holding, the balance making the weight manageable.

Thwaite came out of the house and they nodded and walked up the hill together, the two men climbing the same slope they had climbed in February, and the hill was the same hill but different, the grass greening slightly at the base, the first signs of the spring that would come, and the gap was there, on the upper boundary, twenty yards of absence, and Tom's tools were on his shoulder and the weight was the right weight and the morning was the right morning and the work was waiting.

He began.

He stripped back the damaged ends, working from the top down, the same method, the same movements, the coping stones lifted off and set aside, the face stones removed, the hearting gathered and sorted, the wall being taken down so that it could be built up, the destruction that preceded the construction, the stripping back that preceded the laying on, and the stones came off the wall and into his hands and he read them the way he had read every stone he had ever handled, feeling the weight, seeing the face, finding the place.

The morning was cold and the work warmed him and the wall gave up its stones and the stones went onto the piles and the piles grew and the gap widened, the wall being stripped back to sound wall on both sides, and Tom worked and the dale was around him and the river was below him and the sky was above him and the stone was in his hands.

He thought about Arthur as he worked. He thought about Arthur every day, still, the thinking not a grief now but a presence, a companion, the dead man walking beside the living man the way the standing wall stood beside the gap, the presence and the absence side by side, and Arthur was in the stone because Arthur had been a man of stone, a man whose life had been bounded by stone walls and floored with stone flags and roofed with stone slates, a man who had lived inside stone his whole life the way the hearting lived inside the wall, and the stone remembered him, held him, kept him, the way the stone kept the fossils, the way the stone kept the memory of the sea.

At noon he stopped and ate his sandwiches and drank tea from the flask and sat on the flat stone beside the gap and looked down the dale. The dale stretched away below him, the valley running south toward Richmond and the plain beyond, and the walls ran with it, the dark lines on the green hillsides, the walls running in every direction, dividing the dale into its fields and pastures and intakes and commons, the walls that were the dale's structure, the dale's skeleton, the dale's hearting made visible.

He could not see Arthur's wall from here. Keld was too far up the dale, the hills between them blocking the view, and Arthur's wall was three miles down the dale on the hillside above High Scar Farm, invisible from this distance, hidden by the curves of the valley, and Tom thought about the wall he could not see and thought about the hearting that could not be seen and thought that the two invisibilities were the same kind of invisibility, the invisibility of the thing that was there but that was hidden, that was present but that was not apparent, that was doing its work in the dark, in the interior, in the space between the faces.

He finished his tea and stood and went back to the wall and picked up the first stone of the afternoon, a face stone, heavy, roughly rectangular, the face dressed by the hammer of the original builder, the stone that had been in this wall for a hundred and seventy years and that would be in this wall for a hundred and seventy more, the stone that carried the handprint of the dead and that would receive the handprint of the living, Tom's hand on the stone, the stone on the wall, the wall on the hill, the hill in the dale.

He set the stone on the foundation. The stone sat there. The stone was right.

He reached for the next.

The work was the same work. The work was always the same work. The stripping back and the laying on, the sorting and the grading, the packing of the hearting and the setting of the face and the spanning of the through-stones and the crowning of the copings, the work that his hands had done for twenty-five years and that his hands would do for twenty-five more if the hands held, if the back held, if the body held, and after his hands there would be other hands, the hands that he did not know, the hands that were not yet born, the hands that would come to this dale and find these walls and lift these stones and set them back in their places, the hands of the future waller, the man or the woman who would stand on a hillside in Swaledale and look at a gap and feel the tug of the work, the pull of the stone, the call of the wall.

The afternoon passed. The courses rose. The hearting was packed. The face stones sat against the string line, true, level, the wall growing under Tom's hands the way Arthur's wall had grown, the way Jim's wall had grown, the way every wall in the dale had grown, stone by stone, course by course, the slow accretion, the patient building, the work that could not be hurried and that would not be stopped.

At four o'clock the light began to change, the March light, the light that was longer than it had been in February but that was still short, still measured, still rationed by the season, and Tom set the last stone of the day, a face stone on the second course, and he stepped back and looked at what he had done, three yards of wall, two courses high, the hearting packed, the face true, and the wall was small, was the beginning, was the foundation of the thing it would become, and the thing it would become was a wall, was a structure, was a line of stone on a hillside that would stand for a hundred years, for two hundred years, and the wall would be his and would not be his, would be the dale's, would belong to the landscape the way Arthur's wall belonged to the landscape, the wall becoming part of the hillside, part of the fell, part of the stone, the man's work absorbed into the dale's substance, the temporary hands producing the permanent thing, the mortal making the enduring, the living building the thing that would outlast the living.

He gathered his tools and walked down the hill and the dale was around him and the evening was coming and the walls stood on the hillside and the river ran in the valley and the first star appeared in the eastern sky, pale, solitary, the evening star, the star that marked the end of the day and the beginning of the night, and Tom walked down the hill toward the yard and the Defender and the road and the drive home.

He drove down the dale. He passed High Scar Farm and looked up the track and the wall was there, invisible now in the dusk, the coping stones lost in the dark sky, but Tom knew it was there, knew the wall was standing, knew the hearting was holding, knew the through-stones were binding and the creep hole was closed and the stile was solid and the twenty-eight coping stones were interlocking, leaning against each other, holding each other up, the stones that could not stand alone standing together, the partnership of stone, the community of stone, the wall.

He drove home and parked in the drive and took his tools from the back of the Defender and put them in the shed and went inside and Helen was in the kitchen and the kitchen was warm and the light was on and the tea was made.

"How was the first day?" she said.

"Good stone. Sound foundation. It'll be a good wall."

"Good."

He sat at the table and Helen sat across from him and the tea was between them and the evening was around them and the house held them and the dale held the house.

In the hallway the through-stone sat on the shelf beside the hazel stick and the notebook, the three objects together, the stone and the wood and the paper, the wall and the walk and the knowledge, the three things that held Arthur, and the through-stone was warm, was always warm, the stone absorbing the heat of the house, the warmth of the hallway, the radiant warmth of the life that Tom and Helen lived inside these walls, the stone holding the warmth the way it had held Arthur's warmth, the way it had held the warmth of every hand that had ever touched it, the warmth accumulating in the stone the way knowledge accumulated in the hands, the way courses accumulated in a wall, the way years accumulated in a life.

Outside, the dale darkened. The walls stood in the gathering night, thousands of miles of wall, the walls of the dale, the walls of the fields, the walls of the farms, the walls of the churchyard and the garden and the bridge and the barn, all of them standing, all of them holding, the face stones in their places, the through-stones spanning, the hearting packed, the copings shedding the weather that was always coming, the rain and the frost and the wind and the snow, the weather that would come tomorrow and next week and next year and next century, and the walls would stand against it, would endure it, would absorb it and release it and remain, the walls standing because they were well-built, because the hearting was tight, because the hands that had built them had known their craft, had learned it from the hands before them and had passed it to the hands after them, the chain unbroken, the knowledge alive, the work continuing.

The wall stands.

The hearting holds.

The work goes on.