The Last Rung on the Ladder - Stephen King, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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THE LAST RUNG ON THE LADDERTHE LAST RUNG ON THE LADDERI got Katrina's letter yesterday, less than a week after my father and I gotback from Los Angeles. It was addressed to Wilmington, Delaware, and I'd movedtwice since then. People move around so much now, and it's funny how thosecrossed-off addresses and change-of-address stickers can look like accusations.Her letter was rumpled and smudged, one of the corners dog-eared from handling.I read what was in it and the next thing I knew I was standing in the livingroom with the phone in my h8nd, getting ready to call Dad. I put the phone downwith something like horror. He was an old man, and he'd had two heart attacks.Was I going to call him and tell about Katrina's letter so soon after we'd beenin L.A.? To do that might very well have killed him.So I didn't call. And I had no one I could tell. . . a thing like that letter,it's too personal to tell anyone except a wife or a very close friend. I haven'tmade many close friends in the last few years, and my wife Helen and I divorcedin 1971. What we exchange now are Christmas cards. How are you? How's the job?Have a Happy New Year.I've been awake all night with it, with Katrina's letter. She could have put iton a postcard. There was only a single sentence below the 'Dear Larry'. 'But asentence can mean enough. It can do enough.I remembered my dad on the plane, his face seeming old and wasted in the harshsunlight at 18,000 feet as we went west from New York. We had 'just passed overOmaha, according to the pilot, and Dad said, 'It's a lot further away than itlooks, Larry.' There was a heavy sadness in his voice that made me uncomfortablebecause I couldn't understand it. I understood it better after getting Katrina'sletter.We grew up eighty miles west of Omaha in a town called Hemingford Home - my dad,my mom, my sister Katrina, and me. I was two years older than Katrina, whomeveryone called Kitty. She was a beautiful child and a beautiful woman - even ateight, the year of the incident in the barn, you could see that her cornsilkhair was never going to darken and that those eyes would always be a dark,Scandinavian blue. A look in those eyes and a man would be gone.I guess you'd say we grew up hicks. My dad had three hundred acres of flat, richland, and he grew feed corn and raised cattle. Everybody just called it 'thehome place'. In those days all the roads were dirt except Interstate 80 andNebraska Route 96, and a trip to town was something you waited three days for.Nowadays I'm one of the best independent corporation lawyers in America, so theytell me - and I'd have to admit for the sake of honesty that I think they'reright. A president of a large company once introduced me to his board ofdirectors as his hired gun. I wear expensive suits and my shoe-leather is thebest. I've got three assistants on full-time pay, and I can call in anotherdozen if [need them. But in those days I walked up a dirt road to a one-roomschool with books tied in a belt over my shoulder, and Katrina walked with me.Sometimes, in the spring, we went barefoot. That was in the days before youcouldn't get served in a diner or shop in a market unless you were wearingshoes.Later on, my mother died - Katrina and I were in high school up at Columbia Citythen - and two years after that my dad lost the place and went to work sellingtractors. It was the end of the family, although that didn't seem so bad then.Dad got along in his work, bought himself a dealership, and got tapped for amanagement position about nine years ago. I got a football scholarship to theUniversity of Nebraska and managed to learn something besides how to run theball out of a slot-right formation.And Katrina? But it's her I want to tell you about.It happened, the barn thing, one Saturday in early November. To tell you thetruth I can't pin down the actual year, but Ike was still President. Mom was ata bake fair in Columbia city, and Dad had gone over to our nearest neighbour's(and that was seven miles away) to help the man fix a hayrake. There wassupposed to be a hired man on the place, but he had never showed up that day,and my dad fired him not a month later.Dad left me a list of chores to do (and there were some for Kitty, too) and toldus not to get to playing until they were all done. But that wasn't long. It wasNovember, and by that time of the year the make-or-break time had gone past.We'd made it again that year. We wouldn't always.I remember that day very clearly. The sky was overcast and while it wasn't cold,you could feel it wanting to be cold, wanting to get down to the business offrost and freeze, snow and sleet. The fields were stripped. The animals weresluggish and morose. There seemed to be funny little draughts in the house thathad never been there before.On a day like that, the only really nice place to be was the barn. It was warm,filed with a pleasant mixed aroma of hay and fur and dung, and with themysterious chuckling, cooing sounds of the barnswallows high up in the thirdloft. If you cricked your neck up, you could see the white November light comingthrough the chinks in the roof and try to spell your name. It was a game thatreally only seemed agreeable on overcast autumn days.There was a ladder nailed to a crossbeam high up in the third loft, a ladderthat went straight down to the main barn floor. We were forbidden to climb on itbecause it was old and shaky. Dad had promised Mom a thousand times that hewould pull it down and put up a stronger one, but something else always seemedto come up when there was time . . . helping a neighbour with his hayrake, forin-stance. And the hired man was just not working out.If you climbed up that rickety ladder - there were exactly forty-three rungs,Kitty and I had counted them enough to know - you ended up on a beam that wasseventy feet above the straw-littered barn floor. And then if you edged outalong the beam about twelve feet, your knees jittering, your ankle jointscreaking, your mouth dry and tasting like a used fuse, you stood over thehaymow. And then you could jump off the beam and fall seventy feet straightdown, with a horrible hilarious dying swoop, into a huge soft bed of lush hay.It has a sweet smell, hay does, and you'd come to rest in that smell of rebornsummer with your stomach left behind you way up there in the middle of the air,and you'd feel . . . well, like Lazarus must have felt. You had taken the falland lived to tell the tale.It was a forbidden sport, all right. If we had been caught, my mother would haveshrieked blue murder and my father would have laid on the strap, even at ouradvanced ages. Because of the ladder, and because if you happened to lose yourbalance and topple from the beam before you had edged out over the loose fathomsof hay, you would fall to utter destruction on the hard planking of the barnfloor.But the temptation was just too great. When the cats are away. . . well, youknow how. that one goes.That day started like all the others, a delicious feeling of dread mixed withanticipation. We stood at the foot of the ladder, looking at each other. Kitty'scolour was high, her eyes darker and more sparkling than ever.'Dare you,' I said.Promptly from Kitty: 'Dares go first.'Promptly from me: 'Girls go before boys.''Not if it's dangerous,' she said, casting her eyes down demurely, as ifeverybody didn't know she was the second biggest tomboy in Hemingford. But thatwas how she was about it. She would go, but she wouldn't go first.'Okay,' I said. 'Here I go.'I was ten that year, and thin as Scratch-the-demon, about ninety pounds. Kittywas eight, and twenty pounds lighter. The ladder had always held us before, wethought it would always hold us again, which is a philosophy that gets men andnations in trouble time after time.I could feel it that day, beginning to shimmy around a little bit in the dustybarn air as I climbed higher and higher. As always about halfway up, Ientertained a vision of what would happen to me if it suddenly let go and gaveup the ghost. But I kept going until I was able to clap my hands around the beamand boost myself up and look down.Kitty's face, turned up to watch me, was a small white oval. In her fadedchecked shirt and blue denims, she looked like a doll. Above me still higher, inthe dusty reaches of the eaves, the swallows cooed mellowly.Again, by rote:'Hi, down there!' I called, my voice floating down to her on motes of chaff.'Hi, up there!'I stood up. Swayed back and forth a little. As always, there seemed suddenly tobe strange currents in the air that had not existed down below. I could hear myown heartbeat as I began to inch along with my arms held out for balance. Once,a swallow had swooped close by my head during this part of the adventure, and indrawing back I had almost lost my balance. I lived in fear of the same thinghappening again.But not this time. At last I stood above the safety of the hay. Now looking downwas not so much frightening as sensual. There was a moment of anticipation. ThenI stepped off into space, holding my nose for effect, and as it always did, thesudden grip of gravity, yanking me down brutally, making me plummet, made mefeel like yelling:Oh, I'm sorry, I made a mistake, let me back Up!Then I hit the hay, shot into it like a projectile, its sweet and dusty smellbillowing up around me, still going down, as if into heavy water, coming slowlyto rest buried in the stuff. As always, I could feel a sneeze building up in my...
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