The Wallbuilder

The stones remembered where they wanted to go. That was what Frank said, and people assumed he was being poetic, but he wasn't. Frank didn't do poetic. Frank did walls. He had been building dry stone walls in the Yorkshire Dales for forty years. No mortar. No cement. Just stone on stone, fitted by hand, held in place by gravity and the specific bloody-mindedness of a man who believed that if a wall couldn't stand on its own, it didn't deserve to stand at all. I hired him to rebuild the wall along the south boundary of my property, which had collapsed in a section about fifteen metres long. It had been collapsing gradually for years, bulging outward like a slow exhalation, until one night in February it let go entirely and deposited itself across the lane in a pile that looked, in the morning light, like the wall had simply decided to lie down. Frank came and looked at the pile. He walked its length. He crouched and picked up a stone and turned it in his hands, then put it down and picked up another. "These are good stones," he said. "They didn't work very well as a wall." "The stones were fine. The wall was wrong." I asked him what the difference was. He looked at me the way a mechanic looks at someone who's asked why their car won't start while holding the keys the wrong way round. "A wall is an argument," he said. "You're trying to convince stones to do something they don't naturally do, which is stand in a line. They'd rather lie in a field. They've been lying in fields for thousands of years and they were perfectly happy. You're asking them to change careers." He started the next morning at seven. I watched from the kitchen window with coffee. He sorted first. This took most of the first day. He arranged the fallen stones into groups I couldn't understand — not by size, not by shape, but by some quality that was visible only to him. Face stones here. Hearting there. Throughs in their own pile. Capstones separate. He handled each one individually, turning it, feeling its weight, finding its centre of balance. "You're introducing yourself," I said, and he looked at me as though I had said something unexpectedly sensible. "Something like that." The building started on day two. He worked without a string line, which I mentioned. "String line tells you where the wall should be. I already know where the wall should be." He placed a stone. "The old wall told me." He could see the old wall in the foundation course, which hadn't moved. He could read it the way I might read a sentence — the grammar of the stonework, where it was heading, what it was doing, why the section that collapsed had collapsed. The stones on the western end had been set wrong, he said. They were fighting each other. Two large stones had been placed face to face, pushing outward, and eventually the push had won. "Stones don't compromise," he said. "You have to negotiate for them." I stopped pretending to do other things and watched openly. He placed each stone with both hands, setting it, shifting it slightly, testing it with a push. If it moved, he took it out and tried another. If it held, he moved on. The wall rose in courses: big stones at the base, smaller as it went up, the hearting packed tight into the middle. No gaps. No wobble. Each stone locked into its neighbours like a handshake. He worked for four days. He did not play music. He did not talk unless asked a question, and even then his answers tended to arrive several minutes after the question, as though they had to travel some distance to reach him. On the last afternoon, he set the capstones. These went on top, vertically, like teeth. They finished the wall, locked the top course, and gave the whole thing its profile — the silhouette that you see from a distance, running across the hillside, that looks effortless and is not. He stepped back. The wall ran clean and straight along the south boundary, joining the old sections on either side so precisely that you couldn't see where the old ended and the new began. Fifteen metres of Yorkshire limestone, standing in a line, convinced. "How long will it last?" I asked. "Depends." "On what?" He considered this while he packed his tools. The mallet, the chisels, the trowel he used for clearing dirt from stone faces and nothing else. "On whether anybody messes with it." He closed the toolbox. "Leave it alone and it'll outlast both of us. That's the deal with stone. You do the arguing once. After that, it's settled."