Will North

by Water, Stone, Heart (v5)

  Andrew stared at him for a moment, finally saying, “It's not that simple.”

  “Isn't it? Remember what you were telling me at the Welly last Wednesday? About honest, vernacular architecture, and livable communities, and local materials? That's not a scholarly pursuit, lad, that's your passion, even if you're too blind to see it. And while I'm at it—and I promise this'll be the last of it—let me tell you something else: You were born to work with stone. Never seen anyone take to it so naturally. You and the stone understand each other, is how I see it. And I think you know that.”

  Andrew didn't know whether this was salesmanship or just more of Jamie's Zen, but he felt honored nonetheless. “Look, I hear you, Jamie; I just think it's … I don't know… crazy. Not to mention that if I didn't show up at school next month, that would probably be the end of my career.”

  Jamie nodded. He'd said more already than he was used to saying to anybody. But something about the American got to him, as if perhaps he were the son Jamie'd never had.

  “Right then,” he said, “here's my fallback position …”

  Andrew lifted a skeptical eyebrow.

  “What're you doing Monday?”

  Andrew laughed hard. He'd planned on seeing a bit of the county before he left, but the truth was, he really would prefer to work some more on the hedge. He hated unfinished business. And he could hardly turn Jamie down now.

  “See you in the car park at eight,” Andrew said.

  “Good lad,” Jamie said.

  Andrew clapped an arm around his friend, gave him an awkward, sideways guy hug, thanked him for the lessons and the drinks, and took his leave.

  Flora had been watching this exchange while serving customers at the two bars, and now she sidled over to Jamie.

  “What are you up to, you old rascal?” she asked.

  Jamie smiled, but it was a tired smile. “Looking for a successor, Flora; looking for a successor.”

  “You retirin'?”

  “No, luv, just thinking ahead. Plus, I like that chap. Good man, that one.”

  Jamie paid the bar bill and turned to leave.

  “See you again Monday, Jamie?”

  Jamie looked at her for several moments, as if something was dawning on him, then grinned. “If not sooner,” he said.

  Flora knew there was something going on between Nicola and Andrew, and it puzzled her that the girl would stay holed up where she was, knowing the man was at the adjacent bar. When all the crew had left, she mixed an unrequested gin and tonic and slapped it down in front of her younger friend.

  “My shout,” she said about the drink, “but only if you tell me what the hell's going on between you and the American.”

  Nicola slumped. “Is my private life such public knowledge?”

  “No, just to me and those who care about you, which includes … oh, I don't know … maybe half the village?”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Hang on; gotta pull some bloke a pint.”

  Nicola stared at her drink, watching the condensation bead on the outside of the glass and slide down to the bar. She knew Wednesday night had gone all pear-shaped. She woke up in bed the next morning, fully dressed and alone. Andrew had asked her about Johnny. What did he know? What had she said?

  Flora was back. She said nothing, but her look was a question. Nicola sighed.

  “I'm just wrestling with some old ghosts, is all,” she said.

  “Meanwhile, I'd like to wrestle with that old goat, Jamie,” Flora quipped. It was meant to be funny, to lighten the mood, but it failed. She tried again.

  “Nicki, let me tell you something from my long years of romantic experience.”

  This, at last, made Nicola smile.

  “The calendar is a bum way to measure the passage of time. Time's more like the Valency out there,” she said nodding toward the door. “It just rushes by—slower some days than others, I'll grant you, but wicked fast nonetheless. And it don't give much of a damn about your history … or your ghosts. I'm not sayin' this because I'm so wise, luv; I'm sayin' it because I haven't been, and an awful lot of time has passed under my bridge and I've been standin' on it alone. That Andrew of yours—”

  “He's not ‘that Andrew of mine.’”

  “That Andrew of yours,” Flora continued, ignoring her, “is not the kinda man who's gonna hurt you. Ain't got it in him, for one thing. And cares for you a lot, for another. Like Jamie does me. I know he does; he just hasn't tumbled to it yet, poor sod. You been solitary so long—leastways as long as I've known you—I don't think you even remember what it's like to have a warm body beside you … and I'm not countin' that dog of yours, however clever he is. I'm not tellin' you this because I know so much about havin' someone to comfort me; I'm tellin' you this because I know so much about not havin' someone to comfort me. I'm givin' you the benefit of my experience. You live by yourself long enough, you get used to it. Live by yourself too long, and you get so set in your ways you can't abide being with someone else. And then you get to thinkin' that's just fine with you, that you like it that way …

  “Hold your water, Harold, I'll be with you in a sec,” she called to a regular at the other bar.

  “… but that's an illusion, luv. We aren't meant to live solitary. Isn't natural. Not how we're made, especially us women.”

  “But—” Nicola interjected.

  “I know, I know; he's leavin'. That any reason why you shouldn't have a few moments of togetherness? Of happiness?”

  Flora left her with that, to tend to the impatient Harold.

  But, of course, it wasn't Andrew. Or even Jeremy. It was goddamned Johnny, whom she'd loved and admired so deeply as a child, and hated and feared so profoundly as an adolescent. Goddamned Johnny, who made everything ugly. Goddamned Johnny, who got himself killed before she'd ever had a chance to confront him as an adult, and demand acknowledgment, and extract apology, and confer forgiveness. Goddamned Johnny.

  Nicola slapped some money on the bar, well more than she owed, and left. Randi, who'd been asleep at her feet, roused himself and followed—with a head-down, shambling gait, as if the weight upon his mistress was upon his shoulders as well.

  As the south-westerly flow crossed Cornwall, surface frictional effects caused the flow to decrease and back over the land. A convergence line then developed between the moderate southwesterlies over the sea and the light southwesterlies over Cornwall. This convergence line formed almost parallel along the North Cornwall coast, and just inland at Boscastle.

  Boscastle Flood Special Issue,

  Journal of Meteorology 29, no. 293

  twelve

  Early Saturday morning, Andrew stood at the kitchen window and waited for the teakettle to boil. Roger and Anne's house was invisible, drowned in a miasma of milky white. In the meadow across the road, one of Roger's steers materialized from the fog and, just as suddenly, vanished.

  Andrew welcomed the mist; he had a walk planned that would take him up along the high ridge east of the River Valency, then west to the coast and High Cliff—said to be the highest in England. The fog would keep the air cool for what he could tell from his Ordnance Survey map would be several steep climbs.

  After a breakfast of fresh eggs from the farm and crusty bread, he tossed a water bottle, a rain jacket, and the map into his day pack, laced up his boots, and stepped out his door. Lee was not waiting for him on her wall, which came as a disappointment. Apparently, she drew the line at sitting on cold, damp rocks.

  He struck off along a narrow, single-track road that skirted a wood in which huddled Minster church, one of the four ancient churches in the parish. The lane carried on high above the Valency valley, on this morning slumbering beneath its blanket of fog. As if to mimic the mist, the verges along the lane were frothy with the faded, hip-high heads of cow parsley, punctuated here and there by the attenuated magenta spires of fireweed. After a mile or so, the lane dipped steeply into a rocky ravine, climbed up again, and zigzagged through a tiny hamlet of slatest
one cottages and barns called Treworld, then stretched out across the shoulder of the valley again. A little farther on, the road descended a second time, into a deep, bosky glen magical in the mist with lichen-encrusted trees and moss-covered rocks and outcrops. At the bottom, another tributary to the Valency clattered downhill to the river valley below. He sat on the bridge here for a while and watched a pair of pudgy, white-bibbed dippers doing their curious bobbing “curtsy” to each other and then plunging right into the fast-flowing stream to feed, using their wings to “swim” underwater.

  At Lesnewth, Andrew stopped to visit the fourth ancient church in the parish, St. Michael and All Angels. The original Saxon church here had been nestled into the steep hillside beside a stream to hide it from Danish invaders. After the Norman Conquest, a new church was built on the foundations of the older one, but when he entered through its side porch, Andrew discovered yet another essentially modern interior, the decaying church having been stripped and rebuilt in 1862. All that was left of the Norman church was a tiny window set into a thick wall. The church was deserted, flowers from an earlier service wilting on the altar. He sat on one of the simple benches, wondered what had happened to the ancient carved-oak pews, and mourned the widespread “restoration” of parish churches by the Victorians. He couldn't help but think of the parallel with Henry VIII's dissolution and pillaging of the great Catholic monasteries in the mid-sixteenth century. From an architectural point of view, only the scale of the destruction was different.

  He left a few coins in the donation box and drifted out of Lesnewth feeling somehow diminished, rather than uplifted, by the visit to the church. He could almost hear Jamie's voice reminding him of his own passion for protecting what was genuine in vernacular buildings. Andrew knew he wasn't a Luddite; he wasn't opposed to progress or even modernization. In fact, he'd used a lot of new technology on his own house in Philadelphia, while at the same time lovingly restoring its original nineteenth-century facade. What he was opposed to, he was learning, was the loss of architectural heritage and, even more, the departicularization of authentic places—the loss of character to what was, in effect, simply the latest architectural fad. There was an ache in his heart for the places that were still real, for the places that still seemed to function at human scale.

  Just outside of Lesnewth, a signpost pointed to a footpath that cut across a meadow to another lane that led to the village of Tresparrett, where there was a pub Andrew thought he might try for lunch. He was halfway across the field when a voice called out to him. He peered downslope and there was Roger, sitting atop an open all-terrain vehicle, a knit cap pulled down over his head against the mist, surrounded by mahogany cattle. Andrew walked down the hill toward him and, at just that moment, the sun began to burn through the fog. This was a phenomenon that fascinated him; the fog didn't drift away like clouds, it evaporated, like steam from a city manhole cover in winter: there one moment, and then gone.

  “Running away from home?” Roger called, climbing down from the ATV.

  “It's my day off,” Andrew said. “No hedge building on Saturdays; it's a rule in Cornwall, I understand.”

  “Not on my farm, it isn't; when are you starting?”

  “Starting?”

  “On my hedges, man! They need attending to!”

  Andrew laughed, and then realized they were being surrounded by large, quietly chewing cattle that seemed to think the two of them were the most fascinating phenomena in Cornwall. Roger caught his momentary flash of concern.

  “Needn't worry about these fellows; sweetest breed in the country.”

  “What are they? I have to say they're beautiful beasts.”

  “They are, aren't they? These are Devon Rubies. Might well be the oldest cattle breed in Britain. There are records suggesting that they date back at least to pre-Roman times. Practically prehistoric.”

  “How'd they survive?”

  “By evolving to be naturally disease-resistant and brilliant grass feeders. Don't need grain or supplemental feeds, and yet they still produce finely marbled meat. Used to be raised as both beef cattle and as dairy cows, but now it's mostly for the meat. You go to any independent butcher in England and they'll tell you it's Devon Rubies they prize most. Most of our beef, though, we sell directly from our farm store and to a few high-class restaurants.”

  “How'd you come to choose them?” Andrew asked, patting the curly forehead of one of the steers.

  “The National Trust gave me no choice. This is their land, see, like most of the land on either side of the Valency, and along the coast. I lease it from them. They wanted Devon Rubies because they're easy on the land. They're smaller than most other beef cattle, and they're gentle browsers, so they don't tear up the ground. Ideal for conservation, which is what the trust's all about. As far as the trust's concerned, they're basically lawn mowers. Plus, they're almost impervious to our tough winter weather. They're out in the fields nearly year-round. Wonderful animals.”

  Roger walked among his cattle, stroking their backs, patting their rumps, talking gently to them, even as he was inspecting them. It seemed to Andrew that cattle and farmer regarded each other with equal affection. Andrew hadn't spent a lot of time with Roger, but he respected and liked the man. There was a gentleness in Roger not unlike that of his cattle, a sweet temper matched with quiet competence. Quick to smile, rawboned and muscular, with thinning blond hair, he was like a sinewy and slightly more talkative version of Burt, and Andrew wondered if spending one's days with your animals and measuring time by the seasons didn't bring about a gentleness in men you didn't find elsewhere.

  “Where you off to?” Roger asked.

  “The Horseshoe in Tresparrett, for lunch.”

  “Want a lift?”

  “Sure! Buy you a pint?”

  “Sure!”

  “Then I believe we have a deal, my friend,” Andrew said climbing onto the back of the ATV. Roger engaged the gears and they were off, bumping across the field so ruggedly that Andrew thought he'd lose his teeth before he had a chance to use them on lunch. They reached a gate in the stone hedge bounding the field and Andrew hopped off to let the vehicle through. He closed the gate again and climbed back on, and they rocketed noisily down the lane toward the river below, with Andrew peering over Roger's shoulder like a vigilant farm dog. At the bottom, there was no bridge over the river; the road simply plunged under the water and climbed out again on the opposite bank. Roger didn't even slow down; they plowed through the stream, which was less than a foot deep, sending curtains of water flying off to both sides.

  Andrew was laughing. “What the hell was that?” he shouted above the motor's din.

  “Cornish car wash!”

  “Come on …”

  “A ford. We call it a ‘splash’ around here.”

  “There's a surprise!”

  At the top of the hill, they whipped a quick left turn and promptly entered the little hamlet of Tresparrett. The Horseshoe Inn was a low, whitewashed stone cottage just off the main road, on the left. It was just opening.

  “Good day to you, Derek!” Roger shouted to the bearded fellow behind the bar as they entered.

  “Tha' looks a mite dampish, there, Roger; been playing in the splash again, have you? I just finished moppin' the floor, I'll have you know.”

  Derek nodded to Andrew and winked. “Some folks never grow up, eh?”

  “Derek, Andrew; Andrew, Derek,” Roger said by way of introduction. “Him and me go back a ways.”

  “And it never gets any better,” Derek said, smiling.

  “Derek's never got over losing Anne to me, you see. Sweet on her, he was, weren't you, lad?”

  “And who wouldn't have been, I ask you! How is your fine lady, then?”

  “Oh, tolerable, Derek. Tolerable,” said Roger. But he was grinning.

  Derek shook his head and, addressing Andrew, said, “Haven't a clue why she chose him. Nor why she's stuck it out with him this long. Horrible fate for a nice girl. Horrible.�
�

  “Just a guess, mind you, Derek,” Roger shot back, “but maybe she didn't want to marry a bloke whose sole ambition in life was being the landlord of a boozer like this place.”

  Derek drew himself to full height, which was only about five-foot-six. “I'll have you know the Horseshoe is no boozer, sir. We've live jazz on weekends and panini sandwiches at luncheon!”

  Roger was loving this. He turned to Andrew and said, “Goes off on his hols to Rome, and the next thing you know it's fancy foreign names for a cheese and onion bap!”

  Andrew stepped in. “Panini, is it? Let's see that menu! And in the meantime, a pint for my ill-mannered friend and me and whatever you're having as well, Derek.”

  Derek made a slight bow. “I see you're a gentleman, Andrew, and a generous one at that. But you might think more carefully about the company you keep.” He slid a lunch menu across the bar to Andrew, and none to Roger. Andrew could tell this was a routine the two men had been running for years, perhaps since their school days. Roger had a packed lunch, he said, so Andrew ordered a bacon and Brie panini for himself. While it was being grilled in the kitchen, the two old friends caught up. He envied them their long friendship and their rootedness to this part of Cornwall. Like many Americans, Andrew had bounced around from one part of the country to the other, wherever school and work led him. When someone asked him where he was from, he never knew how to answer. Where he was born? Where he'd lived the longest? Where he'd lived last? And there was a related question, one he suspected was more important still: Where did he belong? What were the bits and pieces of being that gave you a sense of belonging someplace—the way Roger and Derek so clearly belonged here?

  Andrew and Roger took their pints to a table and, after delivering the panini—which was excellent—Derek drifted off to tend to new arrivals.

  “That's nice work you lot have been doing down there by the harbor,” Roger said as Andrew ate.