You Can't Take It Back

The Last Rung on the Ladder, deathbed regrets, and the lost girl

Good morning!

personal story

If you’re new here, this is The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. Currently we are making our way through King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. This week we cover “The Last Rung On the Ladder.” If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read “The Man Who Loved Flowers” for next week.

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Larry’s childhood home is in Hemingford Home, Nebraska

For those not familiar, this little town shows up in a number of other King stories. It is the home of Mother Abigail in The Stand, the town next to Gatlin from this collection’s previous story, “Children of the Corn.” Ben Hanscom, the boy genius turned architect from It, moves there after he and his mother leave Derry. It is mentioned in The Cell, and is the town where the story “1922,” a novella from the collection Full Dark, No Stars, takes place. One of King’s recent novels, Billy Summers (2021), features the town towards the end of the novel, when Billy and Alice Maxwell stop there.

We get Maine. After all, King grew up there. But what’s with Nebraska?

King’s fascination with Nebraska started young, at only ten years old, when he first heard about Charles Starkweather, a spree killer who was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and who murdered 11 people with his 14-year-old girlfriend, when he was 19 years old. He kept a scrapbook, gathering all the newspaper clippings he could find.

As a child, Stephen King was haunted by images of Starkweather, kept a scrap book of headlines about him, and has stated that he became a horror writer as a result of the fear he felt.

—McArthur, Jeff. “Story That Made Stephen King a Horror Writer Now a Book of Its Own.” 27 June, 2013. Newswire

And here is this quote from The Guardian when journalist Tim Adams interviewed King after the life changing accident that almost took his life.

TA: What was the motivation behind you keeping a scrapbook on Charlie Starkweather, the serial killer?

SK: Well, it was never like 'Yeah go Charlie, kill some more.' It was more like 'Charlie: if I ever see anyone like you, I'll be able to get the hell away.' And I do think that the very first time I saw a picture of him, I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outrider of what America might become.

From that time on, he’s always felt a pull to the heart of America. It’s a place his characters come from and go to. Some are righteous, like old Mother Abigail in The Stand or Billy Summers from the novel of the same name. In today’s story, there is no good and evil character. Just the messy realness of life that is somehow more painful than any murderous monster could ever be. Today, we meet Larry and Kitty.

A divergence in the collection

This story, first published in this collection, falls (I would argue) into the literary category, a side of King that is not celebrated in pop culture, but is notable to anyone who has read the breadth of his work. King broaches suicide often, but one of the more powerful stories, “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” (cheerful right?), doesn’t come close in terms of impact for me personally.

It was gut wrenching, as I believe it is for many readers, not only because of Kitty’s end, but the sadness of her life leading up to it. We watch her go from a playful pigtailed girl with enough faith to swan dive from the beam of a barn, to a lonely call girl who can’t really see the point in living anymore. So many people who start out so trusting and open are beaten down by life circumstances and bad decisions.

With each year of life, I’m astounded to see where the people I grew up with have ended up. Some are the poster children for redemption, wrangling a bad childhood into ambition to succeed and overcome. But others have stumbled, and the obstacles they face now, more difficult than ever to rise above. There are “the statistics.” People raised in a bad home who go on to make bad decisions, and have children that they raise in a bad home.

Our Kitty sadly seems to fall into the second category. A girl with high hopes, whose dreams are shattered, one broken promise at a time. Larry, ever the hero in her eyes, fails to rescue her in the end, too busy to see past his own ambitious career path, which brings him success, but not in relationships. Both of them, in the end, are alone.

This story is a reflection and a lesson, a painful portrait of the choices we make that haunt us. Is there a way forward for our character Larry, who saved his sister in his childhood barn, but couldn’t save her from her life, or in the end, herself?

The Letter

I got Katrina’s letter yesterday, less than a week after my father and I got back from Los Angeles. It was addressed to Wilmington, Delaware, and I’d moved twice since then. People move around so much now, and it’s funny how those crossed-off addresses and change-of-address stickers can look like accusations.

This is where we find Larry, standing in his living room with a letter from his sister Kitty, phone in hand and ready to dial their father. But he can’t bring himself to do it. He knows the news will break his father’s heart, and the sad truth is that he has no one else to call. He has an ex-wife and no close friends. And now, no sister.

His father and him have just come back from a visit to L.A. where Katrina, Kitty to him, worked as a call girl. Until she dove off a building, plummeting to her death.

The Barn

Larry thinks back to his childhood in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, where he and Kitty grew up on a farm. Their roads were all dirt, and their school was only one room. They walked there, and in the spring, they walked barefoot.

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.

The barn thing is a game Larry and Kitty liked to play when their parents were out. They would climb a rickety old ladder all the way to a beam in the center of the barn. It stood seventy feet above the floor, and they were forbidden to climb on it.

But that fateful day, they found themselves alone, Larry with a list of chores, a few for Kitty to pitch in on. They finished them quickly, and turned to other things to fill their time.

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 warmest place was the barn, so Larry and Kitty make their way there to play their little forbidden game. It involves climbing the forty-three rungs up to the cross-beam, edging their way out over the enormous pile of hay in the middle of the barn floor, then dropping into the center of it.

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.

They play until the light changes, and they realize it’s almost time for their parents. to return. Larry climbs up for one last jump. This time feels different. The ladder sways more, and he hears the nails loosening. Once he gets to the top, he feels real fear that the thing will break. But he jumps and lands in the hay safely, just like before.

When he emerges, Kitty is already halfway up. His calls for her to come down do nothing. She wants her last swan dive, but she doesn’t get it. Not then. The rotted ladder snaps, leaving her hanging on to the last rung, her feet dangling in the air. Larry does the only thing he can think to do. He grabs handfuls of hay, and moves it underneath her.

When Kitty can hold on no longer, she falls, and Larry hears a sickening thwack against the wood. He rushes to her, knowing deep inside that she’s dead. Thankfully, he is wrong. Kitty is alive. Her ankle is broken, but Larry saved her life.

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…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.”

The Career Man

Throughout the story we learn that Larry and Kitty grew up and grew apart. Kitty found love early and married young, while Larry went off to law school. Kitty’s marriage fell apart, and she asked Larry to come. He couldn’t, couldn’t miss classes in law school where the competition was so tight that even a few days meant you’d fall behind.

She remarried, and then divorced again. She wrote, and asked him to come see her. Only he couldn’t. He was working at a big law firm and trying to make partner. Leaving, even for a few days wasn’t an option.

Larry got married, and then divorced, and Kitty and him lost touch for a long while. He moved, and then moved again. And her letter didn’t come until after he and his father had flown out to see her for the last time.

This collection has had a few characters who mirror Larry in their career ambition. It seems to be a theme in King’s writing. The man so driven to succeed that he sacrifices everything else on that altar, never realizing how important the people in his life are to him until it is too late.

Somehow it never ended until nine days ago, when Kitty jumped from the top story of an insurance building in Los Angeles. I still 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 theater tickets from a really good show…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.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately … and what I’ve decided is that it would have been better for me if that last rung had broken before you could put the hay down.

She waited…and he didn’t come

When Larry receives Kitty’s letter, bent and scuffed up from handling and postmarked two weeks before her jump, he realizes she waited. She sent him the letter, and then she waited for him to come rescue her.

Yes, I guess she must have got tired of waiting…But not even that is the reason sleep comes so hard now. When I close my eyes and start to drift off, I see her coming down from the third loft, her eyes wide and dark blue, her body arched, her arms swept up behind her.

She was the one who always knew the hay would be there.

This one stuck with me

I have my own personal story of regret after I didn’t answer a phone call from a loved one who died that night. I remember exactly where I was when I saw her number pop up. It was evening, and she was drunk most nights. I didn’t want to deal with a slurring, emotional conversation that she likely wouldn’t remember the next day. I was too busy.

I remember waking early to a voicemail telling me she had died. It was an overdose.

I later learned she had called everyone, but no one had answered except my little sister.

“I love you,” she had said, and that was it.

That last day she was happy. She bought her neighbors groceries and cat food. She called everyone to say she loved them.

And I was too busy.

Some lessons come too late.

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How did you all like this one? I think it may be the saddest King story I’ve ever read.

Every part pricks some memory or place of guilt, reminds us of the people that we have overlooked when they needed us most.

The strange foreshadowing of Kitty nearly dying as a child, only to mimic that brush with death in her own suicide. The irony of Larry finding out too late, knowing he could have saved her, realizing that she trusted that the hay would always be there.