She was better than sixty feet above me, her blue-jeaned legs kicking wildly at the blank air, then
barnswallows cooing above her. I was scared, all right. And you know, I still can’t watch a circus aerial
act, not even on TV. It makes my stomach feel weak.
But I knew what had to be done.
‘Kitty!’ I bawled up at her. ‘Just hold still! Hold still!’
She obeyed me instantly. Her legs stopped kicking and she hung straight down, her small hands
clutching the last rung on the ragged end of the ladder like an acrobat whose trapeze has stopped.
I ran to the hayrnow, clutched up a double handful of the stuff, ran back, and dropped it. I went back
again. And .again. And again.
I really don’t remember it after that, except the hay got up my nose and I started sneezing and couldn’t
stop. I ran back and forth, building a haystack where the foot of the ladder had been. It was a very
small haystack. Looking at it, then looking at her hanging so far above it, you might have thought of
one of those cartoons where the guy jumps three hundred feet into a water glass.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
‘Larry, I can’t hold on much longer!’ Her voice was high and despairing.
‘Kitty, you’ve got to! You’ve got to hold on!’
Back and forth. Hay down my shirt. Back and forth. The haystick was high as my chin now, but the
haymow we had been diving into was twenty-five feet deep. I thought that if she only broke her legs it
would be getting off cheap. And I knew if she missed the hay altogether, she would be killed. Back and
forth.
‘Larry! The rung! It’s letting go!
I could hear the steady, rasping cry of the rung pulling free under here weight. Her legs began to kick
again in panic, but if she was thrashing like that, she would surely miss the hay.
‘No!’ I yelled. ‘No! Stop that! Just let go! Let go, Kitty!’ Because it was too late for me to get any more
hay. Too late for anything except blind hope.
She let go and dropped the second I told her to. She came straight down like a knife. It seemed to me
that she dropped forever, her gold pigtails standing straight up from her head, her eyes shut, her face as
pale as china. She didn’t scream. Her hands were locked in front of her lips, as if she was praying.
And she struck the hay right in the centre. She went down out of sight in it – hay flew up all around as
if a shell had struck – and I heard the thump of her body hitting the boards. The sound, a loud thud, sent
a deadly chill into me. It had been too loud, much too loud. But I had to see.
Starting to cry, I pounced on the haystack and pulled it apart, flinging the straw behind me in great
handfuls. A blue-jeaned leg came to light, then a plaid shirt . . . and then Kitty’s face. It was deadly pale
and her eyes were shut. She was dead, I knew it as I looked at her. The world went grey for me,
November grey. The only things in it with any colour were her pigtails, bright gold.
And then the deep blue of her irises as she opened her eyes.
‘Kitty?’ My voice was hoarse, husky, unbelieving. My throat was coated with haychaff. ‘Kitty?’
‘Larry?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘Am I alive?’
I picked her out of the hay and hugged her and she put her arms around my neck and hugged me back.
‘You’re alive,’ I said. ‘You’re alive, you’re alive.’
She had broken her left ankle and that was all. When Dr Pederson, the GP from Columbia City, came
out to the barn with my father and me, looked up into the shadows for a long time. The last rung on the
ladder still hung there, aslant, from one nail.
He looked, as I said, for a long time. ‘A miracle,’ he said to my father, and then kicked disdainfully at