The Swire

by Jim Clark, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The plaster went from Wattie Laidlaw's knuckles to his elbow, and he held the arm out from his body as if it belonged to a neighbour and he had been asked to mind it.

"Dod'll take them," he said.

It was half past six and still dark in the kitchen. Rain came off the hill in sheets and worked at the window. Rab's mother had the porridge on and did not turn round.

"Dod's not here," Rab said.

"He'll be here."

The clock above the range said twenty to seven. The sale at Kelso started at ten, and the Cheviot shearlings were in the ring before eleven, and it was fifteen miles, and the first three of them were the hill track and the Swire.

His father had come off the ladder at the stackyard on the Tuesday. He had not shouted. Rab had found him sitting against the wheel of the cart with his face the colour of suet, holding his wrist in his other hand, and he had said, "It's broke, I think," the way he would say the wind was in the east. The doctor in Morebattle had set it and told him six weeks. Six weeks took him past the sale. It took him past most of the autumn.

At ten to seven Rab went out to the byre and stood in the door looking down the track. There were no lights on it. The rain ran in the ruts and the ruts shone.

When he came back in his mother was setting the bowls down. She put his down harder than she needed to.

"You'll wait for Dod," she said.

"Dod's got the dipping at Hindhope. He said he'd come if he could."

"Then he'll come."

"Mother."

She looked at him then. She was a small woman with forearms like a man's from forty years of buckets, and when she looked at you like that you remembered every gate you had left open since you were six.

"That's three miles of hill with six tups on the back," she said, "and the bend at the Swire like the side of a house, and it's teeming. And you're nineteen."

"I've been down it a hundred times."

"Not with a load. Not in this."

His father ate his porridge one-handed and said nothing at all, which was its own kind of saying.

---

At half past seven Dod Renwick had not come and the tups were in the pen by the trailer, steaming. Rab had brought them in from the park behind the house with the dog, Fly, working low and wide in the wet, and they stood now with the water running off their backs and their white faces turned all the one way, as tups do when they are thinking about nothing.

Six North Country shearlings. Number fourteen was the one. He stood an inch taller than the rest and he carried his head the way his sire had, square, with the ears up. His father had picked him out as a lamb from the gate, with the light behind him, and had said, "That one," and nothing else, and had been right.

Wattie came out in his coat with the empty sleeve flapping and leaned on the pen.

"Fourteen goes in last," he said. "So he comes off first. Dinnae let them see him tired."

"I know."

"I know you know."

Rab backed the Land Rover to the trailer with his father not watching him and dropped the hitch on the ball first time. He wound the jockey wheel up and pinned it. He checked the pin twice, because his father was not watching, and then he put the ramp down and the tups went up it one after another with Fly at their heels, five of them clattering on the boards, and fourteen last, who stopped at the top of the ramp and looked back at the house as if he had left something in it.

"Gaun," said Wattie, and the tup went.

Rab put the ramp up and dropped the bolts. His mother was at the kitchen window. He could see the shape of her through the wet glass.

"You'll go down on the box," his father said. "Second gear, low ratio. Let the box hold her."

"Aye."

"And keep off the verge at the Swire. The grass there's like soap."

"Aye."

His father looked at him a moment longer. Then he went to the window and tapped it with the knuckle of his good hand, and went inside.

---

The track left the steading through the top gate and ran level for half a mile along the shoulder of the hill, with the burn on the left below and the sheep on the right above, and in the level part there was nothing to do but keep her straight and listen to the trailer. He could hear the tups shift when the wheels dropped into a pothole. He could feel it too, in the small of his back, through the seat: a weight that went one way and then came back a moment late. He had not thought of a trailer as having opinions. This one had.

Then the track tipped over the edge and went down.

The Swire was what the old folk called the neck of ground between Blackhaugh hill and the Craig, and the track went through it in a long fall to the left and then a short bend back to the right, hard against the dyke, with the drop below it to the haugh. Dry, in summer, empty, he had taken it at thirty when he was twelve and his father was at the mart. Wet, loaded, he had never taken it at all.

He went into the fall in second, low ratio, with the engine holding her, and it was fine. The gearbox whined and the speed stayed where it was. He kept his hands loose on the wheel. The rain was so heavy the wipers only moved it about.

Two-thirds of the way down the fall the speed began to creep. The box was holding the Land Rover but it was not holding the trailer, and the trailer was pushing. He felt it before he saw it on the needle: a lightness in the steering, as if the front wheels had become a little less interested in what he was asking them.

He put his foot on the brake.

He put it on hard, because the bend was coming and the dyke was coming and his mother was at the window a mile back in his head. The Land Rover bit. The trailer, which had no brakes of its own, did not. It came on, the full weight of six tups and their boards and their wet fleeces, and he felt the tow-hitch take it and shove, and the back of the Land Rover stepped out sideways, toward the verge, toward the soap.

He held the brake harder. That was all his foot knew to do.

The back wheels touched the grass. He felt that too, the exact moment, as you feel a step in the dark that is not there: the tyres went quiet, and the whole outfit began, very slowly, to turn.

Ye're aye on that brake like it owes ye money.

It was Dod's voice. Dod in the tractor yard at Hindhope, two summers ago, Rab on the old Fergie with a bogie of bales behind, coming down the hill into the yard with the bales jostling and his foot jammed down, and Dod walking alongside with his hands in his pockets, not hurrying. Ye're stood on it, son. Ye're stood on it and she's skiting. Let her roll a wee bit. Let her come back to ye.

He let the brake off.

It was the hardest thing he had ever made his foot do. Every part of him said the dyke and the drop and his mother. He let it off, not all the way, just enough that he could feel the pedal again instead of the floor under it, and the back wheels, which had been sliding, began to turn. He felt them take hold of the grass and then the edge of the track and then the stones. The trailer, which had been shoving, stopped shoving, because the Land Rover had stopped fighting it, and they came straight together, the two of them, and went on down as one thing.

He touched the brake again, lightly, early, before the bend, and let it off, and touched it, and let it off. Not later. Not harder. Less, and sooner, and then nothing.

The bend came. He turned into it with a quarter of a turn on the wheel. The dyke went past his right elbow a yard away, grey and running with water, every stone of it. The trailer followed him round as if it had never had an opinion in its life.

At the bottom of the Swire the track flattened out beside the haugh and he stopped there with the engine running and sat for a minute. His hands were all right. It was his right leg that was shaking, from the knee down, and he watched it with interest as if it was someone else's, and waited for it to stop, and it did.

In the trailer behind him the tups were quiet.

He got out in the rain and walked back and looked through the slats. Six white faces, all turned the one way. Fourteen at the back where he had put him, with his ears up.

He looked back up the track. On the bend at the Swire, on the green verge above the drop, there were two long dark scars in the grass where his back wheels had been. They stopped short of the edge by about the length of a man.

He got back in and drove to Kelso.

---

The sale field was on the haugh by the Tweed, and it was mud from the gate to the ring. Lorries and trailers stood in rows along the hedge, and the pens ran in long lines of hurdles, and everywhere there were men in caps and men in hats and the smell of wet wool and tobacco and diesel and the frying from the van by the gate. Rain fell on all of it equally.

Rab found the Blackhaugh pen with the number his father had written on the back of an envelope, and backed the trailer up to it, and the tups came down the ramp with fourteen first. A man in the next pen, a big Teviotdale man with a face like a ham, looked at fourteen and then at Rab and then round about, for Wattie.

"Where's your faither?"

"Broke his wrist."

"Did he." The man looked at the trailer, at the mud up its sides, at the Land Rover. "You come down the Swire wi' that the day?"

"Aye."

The man nodded slowly, and said nothing more about it, and offered Rab a cigarette, which Rab did not take, and lit one himself.

The ring was a square of rails with a straw floor and a box for the auctioneer, and round three sides of it the men stood packed on boards raised in steps, so that from inside the ring you looked up at a wall of faces and caps and pipe smoke. Rab had stood among them since he was small. He had never been inside.

When the lot before theirs went out he took fourteen by the horn and the jaw and walked him to the gate.

He knew at once it was wrong. The tup did not like the noise, and he did not like the boards under his feet after the grass and the trailer, and he did not like Rab's hand on his horn gripping harder than it had all morning. He planted his front feet at the gate and threw his head and Rab had to lean his whole weight to get him through.

Inside the ring it was worse. The auctioneer was saying the name of the farm and his father's name and the breeding of the tup, and four hundred men were looking, and Rab could feel the heat come up his neck under his collar, and the tup felt it too. He fought every step. Rab hauled him round the first side of the ring with his heels dug into the straw and his arm aching and the tup's head up and his eyes rolling white, and somebody on the boards laughed, not unkindly, and Rab's face burned.

He thought: he looks like a bad tup. He looks wild and narrow. Nobody can see what he is.

Halfway down the second side, without deciding to, he loosened his hand.

He did not let go. He just stopped gripping. He let his hand sit on the horn the way it sat on the wheel at the top of the Swire before the fall, and he slowed his own feet down, and he stopped looking up at the boards and looked at the straw instead, a yard in front, where the tup was going to put his feet.

The tup stopped fighting. It took about three steps. He dropped his head and then lifted it again, square, the way his sire had carried his, and his ears came up, and he walked. He walked round the third side of the ring beside Rab as if they had been doing it all their lives, and stood when Rab stood, and turned when Rab turned, and showed the men on the boards the length of his back and the set of his legs and the white of his face, and the auctioneer, who had been talking fast, slowed down and started again.

Rab never heard the bidding properly. He heard numbers, and a voice from the top step at the back, and another voice by the rail, and the numbers going up, and the voices going back and forth like two men splitting logs, and then the hammer.

"Hundred and forty guineas. Mr Elliot, Linhope."

The man with the face like a ham was at the rail as Rab brought the tup out. He did not say anything. He put his hand on fourteen's back, once, and took it off.

---

The other five sold after dinner, steadily and without any trouble, at prices his father would call fair. Rab telephoned the house from the box at the bridge end and his mother answered.

"He made a hundred and forty," Rab said.

There was a silence on the line, and then he heard her turn from the phone and say it into the kitchen, and heard his father say something he could not make out.

"Your father says was the Swire all right," she said.

"It was fine."

Another silence. "Come home, then."

---

He came home in the last of the light with the empty trailer rattling behind him like a cart full of pans. The rain had stopped somewhere past Morebattle and the cloud had lifted off the tops, and the hills stood up brown and close in the cold air, every dyke on them drawn in black.

He took the Swire in first, low ratio, climbing, with the empty trailer skipping on the stones behind him.

At the bend he slowed and looked at the verge.

The two scars were still there in the grass, darker than they had been in the morning, filled with water now, two long lines pointing at the drop. He sat looking at them with the engine running. When he came into the yard there was a light in the byre and his father was standing in the door of it with a torch in his good hand. He did not say anything. He walked past Rab to the trailer and shone the torch along the near side, along the mudguard and the tyre and the wheel, slowly, front to back. Under the lip of the mudguard, where the road had not reached it, there was a wad of grass and black hill mud packed in tight. Swire grass. There was no other verge like it between Blackhaugh and Kelso.

Wattie looked at it for a long time with the torch.

Then he switched the torch off, and in the dark Rab heard him put his hand flat on the side of the trailer, and leave it there a moment.

"Your mother's got the kettle on," his father said, and went in.

---

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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