the hay I’d put down. He went out to his dusty DeSoto and drove away.
My father’s hand came down on my shoulder. ‘We’re going to the woodshed, Larry,’ he said in avery
calm voice. ‘I believe you know what’s going to happen there.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I whispered.
‘Every time I whack you, Larry, I want you to thank God your sister is still alive.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Then we went. He whacked me plenty of times, so many times I ate standing up for a week and with a
cushion on my chair for two weeks after that. And every time he whacked me with his big red
calloused hand, I thanked God.
In a loud, loud voice. By the last two or three whacks, I was pretty sure He was hearing me.
They let me in to see her just before bedtime. There was a catbird outside her window, I remember that.
Her foot, all wrapped up, was propped on a board.
She looked at me so long and so lovingly that I was uncomfortable. Then she said, ‘Hay. You put down
hay.’
‘Course I did,’ I blurted. ‘What else would I do? Once the ladder broke there was no way to get up
there.’
‘I didn’t know what you were doing,’ she said.
‘You must have! I was right under you, for cripe’s sake!’
‘I didn’t dare look down,’ she said. ‘I was too scared. I had my eyes shut the whole time.’
I stared at her, thunderstruck.
‘You didn’t know? Didn’t know what I was doing?’ She shook her head.
‘And when I told you to let go you. . . you just did it?’
She nodded.
‘Kitty, how could you do that?’
She looked at me with those deep blue eyes. ‘I knew you must have been doing something to fix it,’ she
said. ‘You’re my big brother. I knew you’d take care of me.’
‘Oh, Kitty, you don’t know how close it was.’
I had put my hands over my face. She sat up and took them away. She kissed my cheek. ‘No,’ she said.
‘But I knew you were down there. Gee, am I sleepy. I’ll see you tomorrow, Larry. I’m going to have a
cast, Dr Pederson says.’
She had the cast on for a little less than a month, and all her classmates signed it – she even got me to
sign it. And when it came off, that was the end of the barn incident. My father replaced the ladder up to
the third loft with a new strong one, but I never climbed up to the beam and jumped off into the
haymow again. So far as I know, Kitty didn’t either.
It was the end, but somehow not the end. Somehow it never ended until nine days ago, when Kitty
jumped from the top storey of an insurance building in Los Angeles. I have the clipping from the L.A.
Times in my wallet. I guess I’ll always carry it, not in the good way you carry snapshots of people you
want to remember or theatre tickets from a really good show or part of the programme from a World
Series game. I carry that clipping the way you carry something heavy, because carrying it is your work.
The headline reads: CALL GIRL SWAN-DIVES TO HER DEATH.
We grew up. That’s all I know, other than facts that don’t mean anything. She was going to go to
business college in Omaha, but in the summer after she graduated from high school, she won a beauty
contest and married one of the judges. It sounds like a dirty joke, doesn’t it? My Kitty.
While I was in law school she got divorced and wrote me a long letter, ten pages or more, telling me
how it had been, how messy it had been, how it might have been better if she could have had a child.
She asked me if I could come. But losing a week in law school is like losing a term in liberal-arts
undergraduate. Those guys are greyhounds. If you lose sight of the little mechanical rabbit, it’s gone for
ever.
She moved out to L.A. and got married again. When that one broke up I was out of law school. There