Chapter 4: Jim Pratt

Jim Pratt came on the Thursday, as Tom had known he would, because Jim always came. Word travelled in the dale the way water travelled, downhill and through every crack, and the news that Tom Ashworth was rebuilding the long wall at High Scar Farm had reached Jim in his cottage in Gunnerside within a day of Tom setting the batter frames, and Jim had waited three days before coming to look at the work, which was the correct interval, long enough to let Tom lay a few courses and establish his line, short enough to catch any errors before they were buried under subsequent courses and became permanent.

Jim drove up in his van, a Ford Transit that was older than some of the walls in the dale, its blue paint faded to a colour that was not quite blue and not quite grey but something between, the colour of distance, the colour of the far hills on a hazy day. He parked in Arthur's yard and got out and stood for a moment looking up the hill, squinting against the morning light, and Tom, working at the wall, saw the van arrive and felt the familiar mix of pleasure and apprehension that Jim's visits always produced, the pleasure of seeing the man who had taught him everything he knew, and the apprehension of having his work examined by the only person whose judgment he truly feared.

Jim was sixty-eight and retired, though retirement for Jim meant only that he no longer took commissions, no longer drove the Transit to job sites across the dale with his tools in the back and his flask on the seat. He still walled. He walled in his garden, where he had built and rebuilt the same ten-yard stretch of wall perhaps fifty times, taking it down and putting it up again for the pleasure of it, for the practice, for the feel of the stone in his hands, because Jim without stone in his hands was a man diminished, a man waiting, a man with too much space between his fingers.

He came up the hill slowly, not because he was infirm but because he was looking, his eyes on the wall as he climbed, reading it from a distance the way a doctor reads a patient's gait from across a room, the overall impression before the close examination. Tom watched him come and did not stop working, setting a face stone on the third course and tapping it level with the handle of his hammer, the stone settling into its seat with a sound like a door closing, definitive, final.

Jim reached the wall and stood looking at it. He did not speak. He walked the length of the rebuilt section, which was now four yards long and three courses high, about eighteen inches of wall above the foundation, and he walked it twice, once on each side, looking at both faces, and then he crouched at the north end where the new work met the old and ran his hand along the joint, feeling the junction between Tom's courses and the original wall, the place where the new stones sat against the old stones, the marriage of two different wallers' work.

"Morning, Jim."

"Morning."

Jim straightened and looked at Tom and then looked at the wall again.

"Your second course is heavy," he said.

"What do you mean, heavy?"

"Too many big stones. You've used face stones in the second course that should be in the fourth. You're front-loading the weight."

Tom looked at the second course, the line of stones sitting on the first, and he could see what Jim meant, or rather he could see what Jim saw, which was not the same thing, because Jim saw things in a wall that other people did not see, nuances of weight distribution and stone selection that were invisible to anyone who had not spent forty-five years with a hammer in their hand. The stones in the second course were large, larger than they needed to be, and Jim was right that they should have been higher up, that the second course should have been slightly smaller stones than the first and slightly larger than the third, the grading of stone from large to small following the wall from bottom to top, the weight tapering as the wall tapered.

"It'll hold," Tom said.

"Course it'll hold. Everything holds until it doesn't. The question is whether it'll hold well. Whether it'll hold for a hundred years or fifty."

"You're saying it won't hold for a hundred."

"I'm saying it'll hold better if you grade the stone properly. You know this."

Tom did know this. He had learned it from Jim, twenty-five years ago, when Jim had stood beside a wall in Arkengarthdale and pointed at a second course and said the same thing in the same tone, patient but definite, the tone of a man who was not angry but was correct, and who expected correctness from others because he had given it to them.

"I'll watch it on the next section."

"You'll watch it on this section. Take the fourth course stones out of the second and put second course stones in."

"Jim."

"Don't Jim me. You've got nine yards to build. You've done four. Take half an hour and fix the grading on the first four and you'll thank me at the end."

Tom looked at Jim and Jim looked back at him and neither of them smiled, because this was not a smiling matter, this was the matter of craft, of doing things properly, of not letting a shortcut or a laziness or a moment of inattention become a permanent part of a wall that would stand for generations, and Tom knew that Jim was right because Jim was always right about walls, infuriatingly, absolutely right.

"Put the kettle on, then," Tom said.

"I've brought a flask."

Jim went to the flat stone where Tom kept his tools and sat down and produced from his jacket a flask that was the twin of Tom's, the same make, the same size, bought from the same ironmonger's in Richmond that had since closed, and he poured tea into the cup that served as the flask's lid and handed it to Tom and then poured his own tea into a tin mug that he took from his other pocket, and they sat on the stones and drank and looked down the dale, and the morning was fine, the sky clear for the first time in days, the dale sharp and vivid in the spring light, the walls running across the hillsides in clean lines, white where the sun caught the limestone, dark where the shadows fell.

"How's Arthur?" Jim said.

"Managing."

"Aye. I heard."

"He comes up every morning. Walks the wall."

"He would. He's been walking walls since before either of us was born."

"He's selling the farm."

Jim drank his tea and said nothing for a moment.

"Who to?"

"Whoever Robert finds. Robert's the nephew."

"I know who Robert is. Solicitor. Leeds."

"Aye."

"Does he want it himself?"

"No. He wants to sell."

Jim looked at the wall, at the four yards of rebuilt stone sitting on the foundation, at the gap beyond it where the work had not yet reached, at the standing wall beyond the gap stretching away to the south along the hillside, and his face was still and his eyes were steady and he said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the wall did not say better, the wall that had been built by one set of hands and repaired by another and that would outlast the farm it enclosed, that would stand on the hillside after the sheep were gone and the farmhouse was sold and the barns were converted and the name Metcalfe was no longer spoken in this part of the dale.

"What's the point, then?" Jim said.

"What do you mean?"

"Building the wall. If the farm's being sold."

"Arthur asked me to build it."

"Aye, but what's the point? New owner might want a fence. Might want to take the wall down. Might want to build a bloody car park."

"Then they'll build a car park."

"And your wall?"

"My wall will be there. Under the car park. Under whatever they put on top of it. The stones will be there."

Jim looked at him.

"You sound like me," he said. "Twenty years ago. When they took the walls down on the Fremington road to widen it. I said the same thing. The stones will be there."

"Were they?"

"They put them in a skip. Sent them to a garden centre in Harrogate. Some bugger's using them as a rockery."

Tom laughed, a short laugh, more breath than sound, and Jim almost smiled, the corner of his mouth lifting a fraction, the nearest Jim Pratt ever came to a smile, which was not very near but was enough.

"Different," Tom said. "Arthur wants the wall. Arthur wants it built properly, to last. That's what I'm doing."

"And when Arthur's gone?"

"Then the wall's still there."

"For who?"

Tom did not answer. He drank his tea and looked at the wall and thought about the question and could not answer it because the answer was not a person, the answer was the wall itself, the wall standing on the hillside for its own sake, for the sake of the stones that comprised it and the gravity that held them and the craft that had arranged them, standing because it was well-built, because the hearting was tight and the batter was true and the foundation was sound, standing because that was what walls did when they were built properly, they stood, regardless of who owned the land beneath them, regardless of who walked the fields they enclosed, regardless of whether anyone cared or noticed or knew they were there.

Jim finished his tea and stood and put the mug back in his pocket and the flask back in his jacket and he walked to the wall and stood looking at the second course.

"Fix the grading."

"I will."

"And your hearting. Check it. Third course, south end. I can see a void."

Tom went to where Jim was pointing and looked and could see nothing wrong with the hearting, and then he put his fingers into the gap between the face stones and felt, and there it was, a hollow space behind the face stone where the hearting had not been packed tightly enough, a void the size of his fist where there should have been stone, and he felt a flush of embarrassment and irritation, embarrassment because Jim had found it and irritation because he had missed it, because he should have felt it when he packed the hearting, should have known by the sound of the hammer handle on the stones that there was a space behind them, a hollow that would collect water and freeze and push the face stone out and start the whole process of failure again.

"How do you do that?" Tom said. "How do you see it from ten feet away?"

"I don't see it. I feel it. The face stone's sitting wrong. It's tilted in at the top, a quarter of an inch. Which means there's nothing holding the bottom. Which means there's a void."

Tom looked at the face stone and could now see the tilt, a barely perceptible lean inward at the top, the stone's upper edge a fraction of an inch behind the string line, and he could see how the void behind it had allowed the stone to rock backward, to settle into the gap instead of sitting plumb against the hearting, and he understood that Jim had seen this — had read this — in the wall from ten feet away, the way a musician might hear a wrong note from across a room, a deviation so small that most people would not notice it but that to a trained ear was as loud as a shout.

He pulled the face stone out and repacked the hearting behind it, pushing in more small stones, tamping them down with the hammer handle until the space was filled, until there was no give, no movement, until the hearting was solid and the face stone could sit against it without rocking. Then he set the face stone back in place and checked it against the string line and it was true, flush, the tilt gone, the stone sitting where it should have been sitting all along.

"Better," Jim said.

They worked together for the rest of the morning, Jim not building — he never built on another man's wall, that was a rule he had established early and never broken, that each waller owned his wall and another man's hands had no business on it — but watching, advising, pointing out the things that Tom could not see or had not noticed, the small imperfections that would become large problems if left uncorrected, the slight errors of placement and packing that were invisible now but would manifest in five years or ten or fifty as a lean, a bulge, a failure. Jim was the quality control, the inspector, the second pair of eyes that every craftsman needed, the eyes that could see the wall not as it was but as it would be, the wall in ten years, in fifty years, the wall weathered and settled and tested by frost and wind and sheep and time.

They ate lunch together on the flat stone, Jim having produced from the Transit a paper bag containing two sausage rolls from the bakery in Gunnerside, and they ate the sausage rolls and drank more tea and talked about walls they had built, walls they had repaired, walls they had seen in other dales and other counties, the conversations that wallers had, the shared vocabulary of stone and batter and hearting that was their common language, the language that Jim had taught Tom and that Tom would one day teach to someone else, if there was anyone left to teach, if the craft survived, if the walls survived, if the dale survived in a form that required walls rather than fences, stone rather than wire, the slow work of hands rather than the quick work of machines.

"Do you remember the first wall I built?" Tom said.

"Arkengarthdale. Nineteen ninety-nine. Six yards of boundary wall for Jack Spensley."

"You made me take it down twice."

"Three times. You've forgotten the first time. I made you take it down before you'd laid two courses. Your foundation was a foot too far south."

"A foot."

"A foot matters. A foot over six yards is a foot. A foot over a hundred yards is a foot. It doesn't get less wrong because the wall gets longer."

"You were hard on me."

"I was right."

"You were both."

Jim looked at him and this time he did smile, a real smile, brief but genuine, the smile of a man remembering something that had mattered, a young man with a hammer learning the craft that would define his life, standing in a field in Arkengarthdale in the rain, taking down a wall he had just built because his teacher had told him to, and building it again, and taking it down again, and building it again, until it was right, until the foundation was in the right place and the batter was true and the hearting was packed and the courses were level, and the wall stood, and Jim had looked at it and said "Aye, that'll do," which was the highest praise Jim Pratt ever gave, the four words that meant perfection, or as close to perfection as stone and hands could achieve.

"I never thanked you," Tom said.

"What for?"

"For teaching me."

"Don't be soft. I didn't teach you. The stone taught you. I just stopped you making a mess of it while you were learning."

Tom smiled and Jim did not smile again, the quota having been met for the day, and they sat in silence for a while and listened to the dale, to the wind and the sheep and the curlew, and then Jim stood and brushed the crumbs from his jacket and said he was going.

"I'll come again next week."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to. I want to see you fix that grading."

He walked down the hill, not slowly but not fast, the walk of a man who had spent forty-five years on hillsides and whose knees bore the record of it, and Tom watched him go and then turned back to the wall and began the work of fixing the second course, lifting out the stones that were too large and replacing them with smaller ones, grading the stone properly, the way Jim had taught him, the way Jim had insisted upon, the way that was right.

It took him an hour to fix the four yards he had already built, an hour of lifting and replacing and repacking the hearting, an hour that felt like a step backward, like undoing work he had already done, but that was in fact a step forward, a correction, an improvement that would be invisible in the finished wall but that would be present in its structure, in its ability to stand, in its resistance to the forces that would act upon it over the decades, and Tom knew this, knew it because Jim had taught him, and Jim had taught him because someone had taught Jim, and that someone had been taught by someone before him, the knowledge passing from hand to hand like a stone passed from one waller to another, each man adding something and taking nothing away, the craft accumulating like courses in a wall, each generation building on the one below it.

He worked through the afternoon, the corrected section behind him, the new work ahead, and the wall rose another two courses before the light began to fail, and when he stood back and looked at it in the late afternoon sun the wall was good, the faces true, the grading correct, the hearting packed, and he could see Jim's influence in it as clearly as he could see his own hand in the placing of each stone, the teacher present in the student's work the way the original builder was present in the wall that Tom was rebuilding, invisible but structural, unseen but essential, the hearting of the craft.

Arthur did not come up that afternoon. Tom noticed his absence the way you notice the absence of a sound you have grown accustomed to, the silence where the tapping of the stick should have been, the empty hillside where the dark figure should have been climbing. He looked down at the farmhouse as he packed his tools and saw the lights on in the downstairs windows and the curtains drawn, and he thought about Helen, who would be making her rounds in the dale, visiting patients in their homes, measuring blood pressure and changing dressings and having the conversations that district nurses had, the conversations about medication and symptoms and how-are-you-feeling-today, and he thought about the conversation she would have with Arthur, which would be different from the others, which would be careful and precise and full of the things that were not said, the way a wall was full of the stones that were not seen.

He drove home in the last light and Helen was already there, her car in the drive, and he went in and she was sitting at the kitchen table with her hands around a mug of tea and she looked at him and he knew.

"What is it?"

"He had a fall. This morning, in the yard. After you'd gone up the hill."

"Is he all right?"

"He's bruised. Nothing broken. But he's weaker, Tom. He's losing weight."

Tom sat down across from her and she poured him tea from the pot and he wrapped his hands around the mug and they sat together in the kitchen and the light went out of the window and the dale disappeared into darkness and the walls went with it, invisible, standing, holding the world in place.

"Jim came today," Tom said.

"How is he?"

"Same as ever. Found a void in my hearting. Made me fix the grading on the second course."

Helen smiled. "He'll never change."

"No. He won't."

And there was comfort in that, Tom thought, in the constancy of Jim Pratt, in the reliability of his criticism, in the certainty that Jim would find the flaw and point to it and insist that it be corrected, because that was what Jim did, that was who Jim was, the man who held the standard, the man who would not let the work be less than it should be, and in a world where everything changed — where farmers died and farms were sold and walls fell down — Jim's refusal to accept anything less than rightness was a kind of anchor, a foundation stone, a thing you could build on.

Tom finished his tea and went out to the shed and hung his tools on their pegs and stood in the doorway and looked up the dale, up the dark hillside to where the wall sat in the darkness, three courses high, nine yards to go, the foundation sound, the hearting tight, the grading corrected, Jim's approval pending, and he thought about the conversation he would have with the wall tomorrow, the conversation of stone against stone, hand against stone, the conversation that had been going on for centuries and that would go on for centuries more, the conversation that did not need words because it had something better than words, which was stone, which was weight, which was the fit of one thing against another, the invisible holding the visible, the hearting holding the wall, the wall holding the field, the field holding the farm, and the farm held by the man who walked its walls each morning with his stick, the man who was not there today, who had fallen in the yard, who was sitting behind drawn curtains in the fading light, who was dying, who was the hearting of this place, who was the invisible thing that held the visible thing together, and without whom the visible thing would fall.