Listening In A Hurry
Theo had a notebook.
For the next six weeks — until the demolition was scheduled — he came to St Anna's every afternoon after school. He sat on a different stone each day. He listened. He wrote down what the stones remembered.
At first he wrote names. The paving stone gave him fifty-three names from before 1900. The hearthstone gave him a list of words in Latin that, when he showed his Latin teacher at school, turned out to be a fragment of a Roman household blessing.
Then he wrote stories. The chapel stone — patient, very old — told him about a winter in the seventeen-hundreds when the village had nearly starved, and a young woman had walked over the moor to the next village and brought back a sack of grain, three times, in a snowstorm.
Theo wrote it down. He showed his grandmother.
"Where did you learn that?" she said.
"I sat with it," said Theo, which was the closest he could come to telling her without sounding like he had imagined it.
His grandmother looked at him a long time. She said: "I was always told stones don't speak. Maybe somebody was wrong."
By the end of the six weeks, Theo had a notebook full of names, fragments, and stories. He had also done something else.
He had gone to the parish council. He had brought his notebook. He had asked, very politely, if he could be allowed to keep the paving stone. Just that one. He would pay, he said, with what he had