The Left Foot

by Jim Clark, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Nan Beveridge stopped number three at twenty past ten on the Thursday, and nobody in the shed saw why.

She did it the usual way, a hand on the handle and a pull towards her, and the loom ran down and stood. The other three went on. Forty looms went on along the shed, and the shafting went round overhead with the belts slapping, and the noise did not change at all, because one loom less in that noise was like one bucket less in the Forth.

The cloth on number three was huckaback towelling, white, forty inches wide. She ran her eye along the fell where the last pick had gone in. It was clean. She put her thumb on it and it was clean under her thumb too. She looked at the shuttle sitting in the left box, and the pirn in it half run, and the weft coming off it as it should.

She stood a moment longer with her hand on the breast beam. Then she went to find Tam.

---

Tam Kinnear had eighty looms, and when one of them stopped it was his. He was a long, bent man of fifty with a pencil behind his ear that he never used and a tin of Fisherman's Friends in his top pocket that he used all day. He was under a loom at the far end with only his boots out.

Nan kicked the sole of one of them, gently.

He came out on his back and looked up at her and said, with his mouth, not his voice, What?

Nobody in the shed used their voice. You could have shouted in Tam's ear and he would have seen your face go red and that was all. The weavers talked with their lips, large and slow, and a girl who had been there six months could hold a whole conversation across three alleys about what she had said to her mother on Sunday.

Number three, Nan said.

What's it doing?

She opened her mouth to tell him and found she did not know.

---

He came anyway. He always came. He walked up the alley behind her with his rag hanging out of his back pocket and stood at number three and looked at it the way he looked at all of them, as if it had said something rude about his mother and he was waiting for it to say it again.

He looked at the fell. He looked at the shuttle. He took the shuttle out and turned it in his hands and ran his thumb down both sides of it and along the tip, and put it to his eye and sighted down it as if it were a gun. He put it back. He looked at the picker on its spindle, the block of buffalo hide the shuttle hit at the end of every flight, and pressed it with his thumb to see how far it had worn hollow. He looked at the check strap. He got down on his knees and looked at the picking tappet on the bottom shaft and the cone on it, and felt the bowl, and got up again with oil on his knees.

He started her.

Number three ran. The shuttle went across and back, across and back, a hundred and forty times a minute, too fast to see as anything but a grey wink between the boxes. The reed came forward and laid each pick into the cloth, and the healds rose and fell, and the cloth crept onto the roller at the front so slowly that you would have to come back after your dinner to be sure it had moved at all.

Tam watched it for a full minute with his arms folded. Then he stopped it.

She's sweet, he said.

She's no.

He did not argue. That was the thing about Tam. Another tuner would have argued, or laughed, or looked along the shed at the other weavers with his eyebrows up. Tam took a Fisherman's Friend out of the tin and put it in his mouth and looked at her.

Tell me, he said.

---

There were things Nan knew about number three that she could not have said to anybody.

She knew it through her feet, mostly. The floor of the weaving shed was boards on joists, and the looms stood on the boards, and every loom in the shed shook it all day long, so that if you put a cup of tea down on the window sill the tea stood up in rings. Forty looms. You would think it would all be one shaking, the way it was all one noise. It was not. Her own four came up through her own boots, each one with its own beat, the way you can tell your own children's feet on the stair. Number one was a big steady thump like a man splitting kindling. Number two had a little double in it. Number four was light. Number three had always been the sweetest of them, very even, and she had never once thought about it, any more than you think about your own breathing.

At twenty past ten something had gone wrong in it.

Not every time. That was the trouble. She had stood a good ten minutes with her eyes on number one and her feet on number three before she would believe it. It ran sweet, and sweet, and sweet, and then there was a thing like a step that is not quite where your foot expected it. Then sweet again for a while. Then the step.

She said it to Tam as near as she could.

Like a stone in your shoe, she said. But no all the time.

He thought about that, sucking the sweet.

Is it the pick or the beat-up?

She did not know what to tell him. She knew the words. She had heard him and the other tuners use them for nine years. But the words were for the loom from the outside, and what she had was from the inside of her boots.

He saw that she did not know. He did not ask it again. He said, instead:

Where is it? In you.

She thought. Then she lifted her left foot an inch off the boards and put it down.

Tam looked at her foot for a long moment.

Then he started the loom again, and he did not look at the cloth, or at the shuttle, or at any of the places he had looked before. He went round to the left end of number three and stood there with his hand flat on the frame, a little below the box, with his head down and his eyes half shut, as if he were in a kirk. He stood like that for two minutes, three. Nan watched the side of his face. Once she felt the step come up through her own boot, and she looked at Tam, and his face did not change.

He stopped the loom.

I cannae feel it, he said.

It's there.

I believe you.

He stood a moment longer. Then he went down on his knees at the left end and got his spanner out.

---

Two years before, in the April, a shuttle had come out of number three.

It happened sometimes. A shuttle went across the loom faster than a man could throw a stone, a pointed piece of boxwood the length of your forearm, tipped with steel, with a pirn of weft in it, and it was held to its course by the warp under it and the reed behind it and nothing else, and once in a long while, for a broken end or a bad pick or a split tip or no reason that anybody ever found, it did not arrive at the other box. It went out, over the guard, into the alley.

It had gone out of number three and over the alley and taken Jessie Hutton on the side of the head where she stood at her own loom with her back turned.

She had not died. She had been off seven months and when she came back she did not come back to the weaving shed. She went to the cloth warehouse, where the women sat at the long tables by the windows and passed the finished webs over the light and marked the faults with chalk, and it was quiet there, and she wore her hair a different way.

The factory inspector had come. He had taken the shuttle away in a paper bag and taken number three to pieces with Tam, and then he had written in his report that the tip of the shuttle had been split along the grain, in a way that could not have been seen, and that the guard had been as the regulations required, and that no blame attached to the weaver. Mr Dewar had read Nan that sentence out of the report in his office, twice, the second time slower, as if she might not have understood it the first time.

She had understood it. She had gone back to her four looms.

She stood ever after to the right of number three, not to the left, out of the line the shuttle had taken, though Tam had told her it was no more likely to come out that side than the other. She took the long way round to the canteen, past the warehouse door. Not every day.

---

Tam had the left picking stick off and on the boards. It was a length of hickory as thick as your wrist, with the picker strap at the top of it and the shoe at the bottom where it bolted to the shaft, and it was this that swung up and struck the picker and drove the shuttle across, every second pick, all day, thirty and forty thousand times a day. It was black with oil and fluff, and it looked like every other picking stick in the shed.

Tam wiped it with his rag, slowly, all the way down, the way you would wipe a dog's leg to look for a thorn. He held it to the window. He turned it.

Then he put one end on the boards and the other in his two hands, and leaned on it, a very little.

Nan saw it open. A line, fine as a hair, came out of the black about a third of the way up, slanting along the grain, and then it went away again when he took the weight off. He did it again. The line came, and went.

He did not say anything. He held it out to her and she took it, and leaned on it herself, as he had, and watched the line come and go under her own hands.

It would have run that way a day, maybe, or a week. Every second pick the stick came up and hit, and every hit opened the crack a hair and closed it, and once in a while it opened a hair more and the pick was a fraction soft, and the shuttle went across a fraction slower, and came into the far box a fraction late, and the whole loom, all its iron and its wood and its shafts, felt that fraction and passed it down into the floor. And then one morning at full swing the stick would have gone.

Tam took it back from her. He went away down the shed to the stores and came back with a new stick, clean and yellow, and fitted it, and set the strap, and got down at the tappet and set the stroke, and took a good while about it, with Nan standing by not saying anything and the rest of the shed going on around them. Then he started number three.

He did not look at the loom. He looked at Nan.

She stood where she always stood, at the right end, with her hand on the breast beam and her eyes on the cloth. She stood there through two hundred picks, three hundred. It was very even. It was a big quiet thing under her feet that did not have a single step in it.

She nodded.

Tam put the old stick under his arm and went away down the alley to the loom he had been under when she found him, and got down, and in a moment there were only his boots.

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Mr Dewar came through the shed after the dinner hour, the way he did on a Thursday, in his brown suit with a clipboard, walking down the middle of the shed slowly with his eyes on the clipboard. He stopped at the stores. He came on. He stopped at number three.

He had heard about it from the storeman, about a picking stick that had been changed with nothing broken, and he wanted it explained. He shouted. He was not a weaver and he had never learned not to, and he was a decent man and he made his face as plain as he could, but Nan only caught one word in three.

Kinnear says you found it, he said, near enough.

Nan looked along the alley. Tam had come up out of the loom at the far end and was sitting on his heels wiping his hands, looking at them.

Tam found it, Nan said.

He says you stopped the loom with nothing wrong with it. How did you know?

She thought about telling him about the stone in the shoe. She thought about lifting her left foot off the boards an inch, in front of Mr Dewar with his clipboard, and the girls in the next alley watching her do it. She felt the heat come up the back of her neck under her headsquare.

I didna know, she said. It was just no right.

Mr Dewar looked at her for a while. He looked at number three. He wrote something on his clipboard, and Nan never found out what it was, and he went on down the shed.

When he had gone Nan went to number one, where the pirn was running low, and changed the shuttle.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Iacōbō Clark per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Jim Clark, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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