and managed to learn something besides how to run the ball 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 the truth I can’t pin down the
actual year, but Ike was still President. Mom was at a 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
was supposed 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 told us not to get to playing
until they were all done. But that wasn’t long. It was November, 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 of frost and freeze, snow and sleet. The fields
were stripped. The animals were sluggish and morose. There seemed to be funny little draughts in the
house that had 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 the mysterious chuckling, cooing sounds of the
barnswallows high up in the third loft. If you cricked your neck up, you could see the white November
light coming through the chinks in the roof and try to spell your name. It was a game that really only
seemed agreeable on overcast autumn days.
There was a ladder nailed to a crossbeam high up in the third loft, a ladder that went straight down to
the main barn floor. We were forbidden to climb on it because it was old and shaky. Dad had promised
Mom a thousand times that he would pull it down and put up a stronger one, but something else always
seemed to come up when there was time . . . helping a neighbour with his hayrake, for in-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 was seventy feet above the straw-littered barn
floor. And then if you edged out along the beam about twelve feet, your knees jittering, your ankle
joints creaking, your mouth dry and tasting like a used fuse, you stood over the haymow. And then you
could jump off the beam and fall seventy feet straight down, 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
reborn summer 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 fall and lived to tell the tale.
It was a forbidden sport, all right. If we had been caught, my mother would have shrieked blue murder
and my father would have laid on the strap, even at our advanced ages. Because of the ladder, and
because if you happened to lose your balance and topple from the beam before you had edged out over
the loose fathoms of hay, you would fall to utter destruction on the hard planking of the barn floor.
But the temptation was just too great. When the cats are away. . . well, you know how. that one goes.
That day started like all the others, a delicious feeling of dread mixed with anticipation. We stood at the
foot of the ladder, looking at each other. Kitty’s colour was high, her eyes darker and more sparkling
than ever.
‘Dare you,’ I said.