Stone is the one thing on this place I'm not faking. The house I've been half-renovating since we bought it, the truck that runs on a good day out of spite. But a dry-stack wall I can lay with my eyes about closed, which is close to what I've got by seven o'clock in July.
The bank down where the yard meets the river has needed shoring since the first spring we were here. The Yadkin takes a little more of it every high-water, polite about it, an inch at a time. Five years of meaning to get to it.
That's the trade, though. You spend the daylight setting stone for people out toward the lake who want it done by the weekend, and you come home to your own that's been waiting since before the kids could walk. The good yards are somebody else's. Mine gets whatever's left.
Tonight there was a little left. Heat came off the day around six and I carried the level and the mallet down and started pulling stone off the pile I've been adding to for years without laying a course.
There's no hurry in it when it's yours. Nobody's paying, nobody's coming to look. You set a stone, you don't like the sit of it, you pull it back out and try it the other way. On a job that's lost money. Down here it's just the evening going by.
Crank came off the porch far enough to find the last shade and quit there. He watched me work a stone four different directions and offered nothing, which is about his level of help and about all I wanted.
Got four courses set before the light went. It's not much wall. You could step over it. But it's plumb, and it's mine, and it'll be holding that bank together long after the ones I built for money get sold with the house.
Sarah called down that supper was on. Left the level sitting on the top course, told the bank I'd be back, and I meant it the way you mean it about a thing you've put off five years. Which is to say the wall knows better. It'll get done the year I stop caring how it stacks, and I don't see that year coming.