Chapter 5: Lambing

The lambs came in the second week of March, the first one arriving at two in the morning on a Tuesday, a single lamb from a Swaledale ewe in the shelter of the lambing shed, the birth quick and clean, the lamb on its feet within ten minutes, wobbling on legs that were too long for its body, its fleece wet and dark, its bleat thin and high in the cold air of the shed. The agricultural college lad, whose name was Daniel and who was nineteen and earnest and slightly afraid of Arthur, had been sitting on a bale of straw reading a textbook on ruminant nutrition when the ewe began to strain, and he had done what the textbook said to do, which was to watch and wait and not interfere unless the birth was complicated, and the birth was not complicated, and when it was over he texted Arthur, who came down from the farmhouse in his dressing gown and his boots and stood in the doorway of the lambing shed and looked at the lamb and the ewe and the lad and said nothing, because nothing needed to be said, the lamb was alive, the ewe was licking it, the lad had not panicked, and the lambing season had begun.

Tom heard about it from Helen at breakfast.

"Arthur rang. First lamb, two o'clock."

"Ewe all right?"

"Fine. Single lamb. Daniel managed."

"Arthur was there?"

"He went down when Daniel texted. He shouldn't be out at that hour in this cold."

"He's been out at that hour in worse cold for sixty years."

"That's not the point."

Tom knew what the point was. The point was that Arthur's body was consuming itself, the cancer in his pancreas spreading to his liver and his lymph nodes, the weight falling off him week by week, the energy draining from him like water from a cracked trough, and that getting up at two in the morning to stand in a cold lambing shed was not what his body needed, was in fact the opposite of what his body needed, but that what his body needed and what Arthur needed were two different things, and Arthur needed to be in the lambing shed when the first lamb came, because that was what he had done every spring for sixty years, and he would do it this spring because it was the last time he would do it, and because some things mattered more than what the body needed.

Tom drove up to High Scar Farm in the early light, the dale still in shadow, the sun not yet above the eastern ridge, and the lambing shed was lit, a yellow rectangle of light at the bottom of the yard, and he could hear the ewes inside, the low guttural sound of sheep in labour, and the higher sound of the lamb that had been born in the night, bleating for its mother, the sound carrying across the yard in the cold air. He parked the Defender and walked past the shed and looked in and saw Daniel sitting on the bale with a mug of tea, his eyes red with tiredness, his face young and uncertain, and the ewe and her lamb in the pen beside him, the lamb suckling, its tail wagging in the frantic way that lambs' tails wagged when they found the teat.

"All right?" Tom said.

"Aye. Three more due today, Arthur reckons."

"He's usually right."

Tom walked up the hill to the wall, his tools over his shoulder, and the morning was cold and clear, the sky pale blue, the grass stiff with frost, and his boots crunched on the frozen tussocks as he climbed. The wall was waiting for him, three courses high at the north end, two courses at the south where he had not yet caught up, and the string line was taut between the batter frames, describing the face of the wall at the fourth course, the line that he would build to today, setting stones against the string, following it, the string his guide and his judge, the thing that told him whether a stone was right or wrong, in or out, true or false.

He worked through the morning, laying the fourth course on the section he had already built and extending the lower courses to the south, the wall growing in two directions simultaneously, upward and along, the way a paragraph grows in two directions, the sentences getting longer and the meaning getting deeper. He thought about the lambing as he worked, about the lambs arriving in the shed below him while he set stones on the wall above, the parallel labours of birth and building, and he thought that there was something in common between the two, something about bringing a thing into the world that had not been there before, about the patience required, the waiting, the moment when the thing appeared — the lamb from the ewe, the course from the stones — and the satisfaction of seeing it there, alive, present, real.

Arthur came up at ten, later than usual, and he moved more slowly than he had the previous week, the stick bearing more of his weight, his breathing audible from twenty yards away, a rasp that Tom could hear over the sound of his hammer. He reached the wall and stood and looked at it and his face showed nothing, the face of a man who had long ago learned to keep his feelings inside, like hearting, invisible, structural.

"Grading's better," Arthur said.

"Jim was here yesterday."

"I know. I saw his van."

"He found a void."

"He would."

Arthur stood watching for a while, and Tom could feel his gaze on his hands as he worked, the attention of a man who understood the craft even if he had never practised it at Tom's level, who knew what good work looked like, who could tell the difference between a stone well-placed and a stone merely placed.

"Three more ewes this morning," Arthur said. "Two singles, one twin."

"Good."

"Daniel's managing. He's green but he's willing."

"That's all you can ask."

"It's not all you can ask. You can ask for experience. But you can't have what you haven't got."

Tom looked at Arthur and saw that he was talking about more than Daniel, more than lambing, talking about the thing that could not be given or bought or transferred, the thing that came only from years, from the accumulation of days spent doing the same work on the same ground, the knowledge that lived in the hands and the eyes and could not be written down or taught in a classroom. Daniel could learn to lamb. Daniel could not learn sixty years of lambing. That knowledge would go with Arthur, would leave the dale when Arthur left it, would be lost the way the name of the Wensleydale waller who had built this wall was lost, gone into the ground, gone into the past, gone.

Arthur walked the standing wall to the south, tapping the copings with his stick, and Tom listened to the rhythm of the tapping and worked and did not speak, and the morning passed in the sounds of the dale, the hammer and the stick and the sheep and the wind and the curlew, the sounds layered over each other like courses in a wall, each one distinct, each one part of the whole.

The lambs came steadily through the week, three or four a day, the ewes labouring in the shed while Tom laboured on the wall, and in the evenings Helen would come home from her rounds and tell Tom about Arthur, about his weight, his appetite, his pain, the things she could tell him as his wife and the things she could not tell him as his nurse, the line between personal and professional blurring further each day, the two identities merging the way the two faces of a wall merged in the hearting, becoming one thing, inseparable.

"He's eating less," Helen said on the Thursday evening.

"He never ate much."

"Less than that. A few mouthfuls. He sits with the plate and pushes the food around and then scrapes it into the bin when he thinks I'm not looking."

"Does he know you see?"

"He knows I see everything. He doesn't care. He's past caring about what I see."

Tom thought about this, about the privacy of dying, the way a man withdrew from the world piece by piece, the way the surfaces of his life fell away — appetite, vanity, the care about appearances — leaving the essential thing, the core, the hearting. Arthur was being stripped back, Tom thought, stripped back to the foundation, to the thing that remained when everything else was taken away, and what remained was the farm, the fields, the walls, the sheep, the morning walk up the hill with the stick, the daily inspection of the wall. That was Arthur's hearting. That was the invisible centre around which the visible life had been built.

On the Friday evening Tom drove up to High Scar Farm after he had packed his tools, drove down the hill and parked in the yard instead of heading home, and went to the lambing shed. The shed was warm, heated by the bodies of forty ewes penned in the straw, the air thick with the smell of lanolin and ammonia and the sweet smell of fresh straw that Daniel had spread that afternoon. Fourteen lambs had been born that week, thirteen alive, one stillborn, a single from a young ewe that had laboured too long, the lamb coming out grey and limp, the ewe licking it with desperate persistence for twenty minutes before Daniel had taken it away.

Arthur was in the shed, sitting on the bale where Daniel usually sat, his stick propped against the pen beside him, his cap on his knee. He looked smaller than he had a month ago, his jacket hanging looser on his shoulders, his face thinner, the bones more prominent, the cheekbones and the jawline showing through the skin like stones showing through thin soil. But his eyes were the same, sharp and clear, watching the ewes with the steady attention that was his defining characteristic, the gaze that missed nothing, that saw the slight limp in a ewe's hind leg or the change in her breathing that meant the lamb was coming.

"How are they?" Tom said.

"Thirteen from fourteen. That's not bad."

"The one you lost?"

"Malpresentation. Head back. Daniel tried to turn it but he was too slow. It happens."

"Aye."

Tom sat down on another bale and they sat together in the lambing shed, the two of them surrounded by ewes and lambs, the shed lit by a single bulb that hung from the rafters and threw a yellow light over the straw and the animals and the two men, and outside the darkness was complete, the dale invisible, the walls invisible, everything invisible except this one lit space where life was being produced, where the ancient transaction of birth was being conducted as it had been conducted every spring for as long as there had been sheep on these hills.

"I watched you today," Arthur said. "From the kitchen window. I couldn't come up."

"You don't have to come up every day."

"I know I don't have to. I want to."

"You were tired."

"I'm always tired. Tired's the default now. Everything else is the exception."

Tom said nothing. There was nothing to say to this that would not be false or inadequate, nothing that would honour the fact of what Arthur was telling him, which was that his body was failing, that the disease was advancing, that the energy he had taken for granted for seventy-eight years was draining away and would not return, and that the walks up the hill to the wall, the walks that were the rhythm of his days, the walks that connected him to his land and his walls and the work that Tom was doing, were becoming harder, were requiring more of him than he had to give, and that soon they would stop.

"Wall's looking good," Arthur said. "From the window."

"It's coming on. Fourth course. Should be on the fifth by Monday."

"Jim happy?"

"Jim's never happy. But he didn't find anything today."

"That's happy, for Jim."

They sat in the shed for another half hour, watching the ewes, watching the lambs that had been born that week stumble and suckle and sleep, the small bodies curled in the straw, their fleeces drying to white, their legs folded beneath them, and the ewes standing over them with the patient possessiveness of mothers, nosing them, licking them, the bond between ewe and lamb established in the first minutes of life and maintained through the weeks and months that followed by the sound of the lamb's bleat and the smell of its wool, each ewe knowing her own lamb, each lamb knowing its own mother, the identification absolute, unerring, a knowledge that was not learned but inherited, coded into the animal at a level deeper than thought.

Tom drove home through the dark dale, the headlights of the Defender picking out the walls on either side of the road, the coping stones catching the light and releasing it, and he thought about what Arthur had said, that tired was the default now, and he thought about the wall, about the way a wall bore its weight, the way each course pressed down on the course beneath it, adding its weight to the accumulated weight of the courses below, and he thought that Arthur was like a wall bearing too much weight, a wall whose foundation was sound but whose courses were being pressed down by a force that the wall had not been built to resist, a force that came from inside rather than outside, from the body rather than the weather, and that the wall was yielding, course by course, the face stones shifting, the hearting loosening, the structure settling and spreading under a weight it could not bear.

Helen was reading in bed when he got home.

"You went to the farm."

"Sat with Arthur in the lambing shed."

"How is he?"

"Tired. His word. He says tired's the default."

Helen put her book down and looked at him.

"He's got weeks, Tom. Maybe a couple of months. The oncologist called me today."

"You."

"His district nurse. Me."

"What did they say?"

"They said what they always say. That the disease is progressing. That the pain will increase. That there are options for managing the pain. That at some point he'll need more support than I can give him alone."

"A hospice."

"Or palliative care at home. If he wants it."

"He'll want to stay."

"I know."

Tom undressed and got into bed and lay in the dark and thought about Arthur in the lambing shed, sitting on the bale in the yellow light, his stick beside him, his eyes on the ewes, watching for the signs that he had watched for all his life, the signs of labour, the signs of life arriving, and Tom thought about the strangeness of it, the man watching life come into the world while life was leaving his own body, the lambs arriving as Arthur departed, the farm filling with new animals as the farmer emptied out, and he thought that the dale was like that, a place where things came and went at the same time, where walls fell and were rebuilt, where sheep were born and died, where the seasons turned and the years passed and the stone remained, the stone that was always there, that was always the same, that did not come or go but simply was, the unchanging substance beneath the changing surface of things.

He slept and dreamed of stones. He dreamed of lifting stones from the ground, one after another, an endless succession of stones, each one heavy, each one different, each one requiring a different grip, a different angle, a different effort, and he set them in a wall that grew as he built it, growing upward and outward, and the wall had no end, it stretched across the hillside in both directions, disappearing into fog on both sides, and he built and built and the wall grew and grew and the stones kept coming, rising from the ground as though the earth were producing them, pushing them up to the surface the way the frost pushed stones to the surface of a ploughed field, and in the dream the work was not tiring but sustaining, the rhythm of lift and place and fit feeding him rather than depleting him, and the wall was good, the batter was true, the hearting was tight, and the string line ran into the fog in both directions and there was no end to the wall and no end to the work and no end to the stones, and that was right, that was as it should be, because a wall was never finished, a wall was always being built, always being repaired, always being rebuilt, the work going on as long as there were hands to do it and stones to be lifted and ground to be covered.

He woke in the early morning, the dream fading, the room grey with the first light, Helen asleep beside him, her breathing steady, and he lay still and listened to the silence of the house and the sounds of the dale beyond it, the river, the sheep, the early birds, and he thought about the wall waiting for him on the hillside, three courses high, the fourth begun, the stones sorted and stacked and ready, and he thought about the lambs in the shed, the new ones that had come in the night, the lives that were starting as Arthur's was ending, and he thought about the hearting, the invisible stones inside the wall that held everything together, and he thought that the hearting of this dale was not the stone or the walls or the farms or the sheep but the people, the people who had lived here for generations, who had built the walls and farmed the sheep and walked the fields, who had put their hands on the stone and their feet on the ground and their lives into the land, and who, when they left, left a void, a hollow space inside the wall where the hearting should have been, a space that could not be filled because the stones that had filled it were gone, were unique, were irreplaceable, were Arthur.

He got up and dressed and went downstairs and made tea and drank it standing at the window, looking out at the dale in the early light, and then he filled the flask and made sandwiches and went out to the Defender and drove up the dale to High Scar Farm to build a wall.