Chapter 8: The Through-Stone

The wall reached through-stone height on the second day of April, and the dale was changing around it, the spring arriving in increments that you could measure by looking at the ground, the grass greening day by day, the first wildflowers appearing in the sheltered spots along the wall's base — celandines, their yellow faces turned to the sun, and the white stars of wood anemones in the shade of the standing wall — and the light was different now, longer, warmer, the sun higher in the sky, and the hours of the working day had expanded, Tom arriving earlier and leaving later, the wall gaining an extra hour of attention at each end of the day.

Through-stone height was the midpoint of the wall, the place where the two faces had risen high enough to need binding, and Tom had been thinking about the through-stones for days, turning them over in his mind the way he turned them over in his hands, each one a long narrow piece of limestone, thirty inches minimum, enough to span the full width of the wall, and he had sorted fourteen of them from the salvage pile, fourteen stones that would be set at intervals of two feet across the nine-yard gap, each one running from the outer face of one side to the outer face of the other, tying the wall together at its waist.

He set the first through-stone at the north end of the gap, at the junction between his new work and the original wall. The stone was thirty-two inches long and six inches deep and roughly rectangular, its surfaces flat enough to sit level across the top of the sixth course, and he lifted it — it was heavy, perhaps sixty pounds, the heaviest stone he had handled on this job apart from the foundation pieces — and set it across the wall, one end flush with the face on the east side, the other end flush with the face on the west side, the stone bridging the gap between the two faces the way a bridge bridged a river, spanning the space, connecting the two sides, making them one.

He stood back and looked at it.

One stone, lying across the wall, connecting the two faces. It was a simple thing, obvious, the kind of thing that anyone might think of — if you have two parallel structures you connect them with a cross-piece, the same principle as a rung on a ladder, a tie beam in a roof, a crossbar on a gate. But in a dry stone wall the through-stone was more than a connector. It was a declaration. It was the moment when the wall ceased to be two separate faces held apart by hearting and became a single structure, a unified thing, the two sides locked together by the stone that ran between them, and every through-stone after the first reinforced that unity, each one adding another connection, another tie, until the wall was bound at intervals along its length and the two faces could not separate, could not lean apart, could not fail independently, because the through-stones held them to each other the way — the way what? Tom thought about this as he set the second through-stone two feet from the first, and the analogy that came to him was marriage, the through-stone as the thing that bound two separate lives into one, the invisible connection that ran through the middle of the shared life, tying the two faces together, and he thought of Helen, of the through-stone that ran between them, the shared life, the shared house, the shared meals and shared bed and shared concern for the man in the farmhouse below, and he thought that their through-stone was strong, was sound, had been set twenty years ago when they married in the church in Reeth and had held through the years since, through the small failures and repairs that every marriage required, the minor collapses and rebuilds, the gaps that opened and were filled, and the through-stone held, the connection held, and the wall of their marriage stood.

He worked through the morning, setting through-stones, the heavy pieces going across the wall one at a time, each one requiring a preparation of the courses beneath it — the top of the sixth course had to be level where the through-stone would sit, and Tom spent time with the pinning stones, the thin flat wedges, shimming the face stones to create a level seat for each through-stone, adjusting, tapping, checking with the spirit level that he rarely used but that the through-stones demanded, because a through-stone that was not level would tilt, and a tilted through-stone would transmit its tilt to the courses above it, and the error would propagate upward through the wall like a crack through glass.

Arthur did not come to the wall. He had not come for four days, not since the rain, and Tom had stopped expecting him, had stopped looking down the hill for the dark figure with the stick, had accepted that the walks were over, that Arthur's legs would no longer carry him up the slope, that the disease had taken from Arthur the thing that Tom had thought it would take last, which was his contact with his land, his daily inspection of his walls, his morning walk across his fields. The last thing to go, Tom had thought. But it was not the last thing. There were other things that would go after the walking: the appetite, the strength to sit upright, the ability to hold a conversation, the capacity for pain, the awareness of being in a place, of being at all. These things would go, one by one, like courses being stripped from a wall, the coping first, then the top course, then the course below that, the man being reduced the way a wall was reduced when it was stripped back, course by course, until only the foundation remained, the irreducible base, the thing that was left when everything else had been taken away.

But Arthur was at the window. Tom could see him, a shape behind the glass, watching the hill, watching the wall, and Tom raised his hand and the shape behind the glass raised a hand in return, and the gesture was the same gesture that Arthur had made with his stick when he stood at the kitchen door, the same acknowledgement, the same connection, but diminished, reduced, the stick replaced by a hand, the doorway replaced by a window, the standing figure replaced by a sitting one, and Tom felt the diminishment in his chest, a tightening, a constriction, the feeling of something getting smaller.

He set the last through-stone at the south end of the gap in the early afternoon, the fourteenth stone spanning the width of the wall, and then he stood back and looked at the wall from the side, looking along its length, and he could see the through-stones protruding slightly from both faces, their ends showing as horizontal lines on the surface of the wall, regular intervals, every two feet, the binding stones, and the wall looked different now, looked stronger, looked like a wall that was held together rather than a wall that was simply stacked, and he felt the satisfaction of the through-stones the way he felt the satisfaction of the foundation course, the satisfaction of a structural element properly placed, a thing that would do its work invisibly for decades, holding the wall together from the inside.

He walked down the hill at four o'clock, earlier than usual, and went to the farmhouse door and knocked and went in. Arthur was in his chair by the range, the chair with the arms worn smooth, and the kitchen was warm and dim, the curtains half-drawn, the light from the window falling across the flagstone floor in a rectangle of gold that reached the edge of Arthur's chair and stopped, as though the light knew not to go further, not to illuminate too fully the figure in the chair.

"Through-stones are in," Tom said.

Arthur looked up. His face was thinner than it had been a week ago, the skin drawn tight over the bones, the colour wrong, a yellowish grey that Tom had learned to recognise as the colour of the disease, the colour of the organs failing, the bile backing up into the blood, staining the skin from the inside.

"All of them?"

"All fourteen. Spanning the full width."

"Good stone?"

"Good stone. Same stone that was in there before. I found twelve in the salvage pile. Got two more from the outcrop above the intake wall."

Arthur nodded slowly, his head moving as though it were heavy, as though the neck that held it was tired of holding.

"My father used to say that the through-stones were the bones of the wall," Arthur said. "Everything else is flesh. The through-stones are the bones."

"He was right."

"He was right about most things. Not everything. But most things."

Tom sat down at the table, not in the chair that Helen sat in when she visited but in the other chair, the chair that was further from Arthur, giving the man space, the way you gave space to an animal that was in pain, not crowding it, not pressing in, letting it have the room it needed to hold itself together.

"I brought you something," Tom said.

He put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out a stone, a through-stone, not one of the fourteen he had set in the wall but the fifteenth, the one he had found in the salvage pile and set aside because it was too short to span the full width of the wall, twenty-six inches instead of thirty, too short to use but too good to discard, a stone that was smooth and flat and heavy in the hand, the kind of stone that felt right when you held it, the kind of stone that had a presence.

He set it on the table.

Arthur looked at it.

"It's a through-stone," Tom said. "From your wall. It was in the section that came down. It's too short to go back in, but it's a good stone."

Arthur reached out and picked up the stone, and his hand was thin, the tendons visible under the skin, the fingers that had once gripped a shepherd's crook and a lambing rope and the steering wheel of a tractor now curling around the stone with a gentleness that was not weakness but recognition, the touch of a man who knew stone, who had handled stone all his life, who understood what he was holding.

"It's warm," Arthur said.

"I had it in my pocket."

Arthur turned the stone in his hands, the way Tom turned stones when he was looking for the face, and his eyes were focused, alive, the sharpness returning for a moment, the farmer who could read a ewe from fifty yards reading the stone in his hands, its grain, its weight, its colour, the slight fossils visible on its surface, the imprint of creatures that had lived in a tropical sea three hundred million years ago and whose shells had become this stone, this piece of the dale, this fragment of the wall.

"I can feel the wall in it," Arthur said.

Tom did not know what Arthur meant by this, or rather he did know but could not have explained it, the way a stone that had been inside a wall for a hundred and seventy years carried the wall with it, carried the memory of its place in the structure, the pressure of the stones above it and the stones below it, the contact with the hearting on both sides, the experience of bearing weight and being borne, of holding and being held, and that this experience was somehow present in the stone itself, in its surfaces, in its weight, in the way it sat in the hand, and that a man who knew walls could feel it.

Arthur set the stone on the arm of his chair, where his hand could rest on it, and he left it there.

"Tell me about the wall," he said.

So Tom told him. He described the through-stones, each one, where it sat, how it fit, the length and the depth of it, the way the two faces came together across the stone's surface, the way the hearting packed against its sides, the way the courses above would sit on its top, the weight it would bear, the role it would play in the wall's structure. He described the batter, the taper of the wall from thirty inches at the base to fourteen at the top, and the way the through-stones followed the taper, the ones near the base wider than the ones higher up, the wall narrowing as it rose. He described the hearting, the density of it, the care he had taken to fill every void, every gap, and Arthur listened with the attention of a man hearing news from a country he could no longer visit, a country that was three hundred yards away and twelve hundred feet above, a country that might as well have been on the other side of the world for all the chance Arthur had of reaching it now.

"And the grading?" Arthur said. "Jim was worried about the grading."

"Jim's always worried. The grading's right. I fixed it after he came."

"You fixed it."

"I took out the second course stones that were too heavy and put in the right ones."

"Jim made you."

"Jim suggested. I agreed."

Arthur smiled, a small smile that involved only the lower half of his face, the upper half too drawn, too tired to participate.

"Jim suggested. Aye."

They sat in the kitchen for an hour, Tom talking about the wall and Arthur listening, and the conversation was a kind of through-stone itself, Tom thought, a thing that connected the man to his land, that spanned the gap between the farmhouse and the field, between the chair by the range and the wall on the hillside, and Arthur's questions were precise and knowledgeable, the questions of a man who understood walls, who wanted to know not just what Tom had done but how he had done it and why, and Tom answered with the same precision, the same care, because he understood that he was not just reporting on the wall's progress but was carrying the wall to Arthur, stone by stone, course by course, bringing it down the hill and into the kitchen and setting it on the table between them, the wall as a shared thing, a thing that belonged to both of them, the farmer who owned it and the waller who built it.

Helen arrived at five, her car in the yard, and she came in and saw Tom in the kitchen and looked at Arthur and then at Tom and something in her face softened, a relaxation of the tension that she carried with her now on every visit, the tension of managing a dying man's care while managing her own feelings about the dying man, and she sat down and Tom poured tea from the pot on the range and they sat together, the three of them, the through-stone on the arm of Arthur's chair, the light fading in the window, the dale darkening outside.

"He brought me a stone," Arthur said to Helen.

"I can see."

"A through-stone. From the wall."

Helen looked at Tom and her eyes were bright, brighter than the room required, and she blinked and looked away and then looked back.

"It's a good stone," she said.

"It is," Arthur said. "It's a good stone."

They drove home together, Tom following Helen's car down the dale, the two vehicles in convoy on the narrow road, and the walls on either side were dark shapes in the dusk, and the river was high, still carrying the last of the rain, and the dale was quiet, the sheep settled for the night, the lambs with their mothers in the fields, and the walls stood in the growing darkness, the through-stones inside them holding the faces together, binding the two sides into one, the invisible stones doing their invisible work.

At home Tom went to the shed and stood in the doorway and looked up the dale, up the dark hillside where the wall sat in the night, the through-stones set, the wall bound, the structure sound, and he thought about Arthur sitting in his chair with the stone on the armrest, his hand on the stone, the through-stone that was too short for the wall but that was exactly the right length for the man, the stone that connected Arthur to his wall, that spanned the gap between the farmhouse and the field, between the living and the built, between the man and the thing the man had owned and walked and watched for seventy-eight years, and Tom thought that this was what a through-stone did, this was its purpose, to connect, to bind, to hold two things together that would otherwise be separate, and that the connection was not visible from the outside, was not something you could see by looking at the wall's face, but was there, was structural, was the thing that made the wall one thing instead of two.

He went inside and closed the door and sat with Helen in the kitchen and she told him about Arthur's medication, about the pain management, about the conversations she had had with the palliative care team in Darlington, and he listened and held her hand and the through-stone of their marriage held them together, the thing that ran between them, invisible, structural, strong, and outside the walls of their house the walls of the dale stood in the darkness, and inside those walls the through-stones held, and inside the farmhouse three miles up the dale Arthur sat with a stone on the arm of his chair and his hand on the stone and the warmth of the stone fading as the night came in, the warmth that Tom had given it fading, the stone returning to its natural temperature, which was the temperature of the earth, which was cold, which was always cold, and which the sun would warm again in the morning, and the hands of men would warm in the carrying, and the wall would warm in the standing, the south face catching the sun, the stone absorbing the heat and holding it through the day and releasing it through the night, the wall breathing, the wall living, the wall doing what Arthur could no longer do, which was to stand on the hillside and face the weather and endure.