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 if everybody didn’t know she was
the second biggest tomboy in Hemingford. But that was 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. Kitty was eight, and twenty
pounds lighter. The ladder had always held us before, we thought it would always hold us again, which
is a philosophy that gets men and nations in trouble time after time.
I could feel it that day, beginning to shimmy around a little bit in the dusty barn air as I climbed higher
and higher. As always about halfway up, I entertained a vision of what would happen to me if it
suddenly let go and gave up the ghost. But I kept going until I was able to clap my hands around the
beam and boost myself up and look down.
Kitty’s face, turned up to watch me, was a small white oval. In her faded checked shirt and blue denims,
she looked like a doll. Above me still higher, in the 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 to be strange currents in
the air that had not existed down below. I could hear my own 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 in drawing back I had almost lost my balance. I lived in fear of the same thing
happening again.
But not this time. At last I stood above the safety of the hay. Now looking down was not so much
frightening as sensual. There was a moment of anticipation. Then I stepped off into space, holding my
nose for effect, and as it always did, the sudden grip of gravity, yanking me down brutally, making me
plummet, made me feel 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 smell billowing up around me, still
going down, as if into heavy water, coming slowly to rest buried in the stuff. As always, I could feel a
sneeze building up in my nose. And hear a frightened field mouse or two fleeing for a more serene
section of the haymow. And feel, in that curious way, that I had been reborn. I remember Kitty telling
me once that after diving into the hay she felt fresh and new, like a baby. I shrugged it off at the time –
sort of knowing what she meant, sort of not knowing – but since I got her letter I think about that, too.
I climbed out of the hay, sort of swimming through it, until I could climb out on to the barn floor. I had
hay down my pants and down the back of my shirt. It was on my sneakers and sticking to my elbows.
Hayseeds in my hair? You bet.
She was halfway up the ladder by then, her gold pigtails bouncing against her shoulderblades, climbing
through a dusty shaft of light. On other days that light might have been as bright as her hair, but on this
day her pigtails had no competition – they were easily the most colourful thing up there.
I remember thinking that I didn’t like the way the ladder was swaying back and forth. It seemed like it
had never been so loosey-goosey.
Then she was on the beam, high above me – now I was the small one, my face was the small white
upturned oval as her voice floated down on errant chaff stirred up by my leap:
‘Hi, down there!’
‘Hi, up there!’
She edged along the beam, and my heart loosened a little in my chest when I judged she was over the