Stephen King - The Last Rung On The Ladder

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 27.76KB 10 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

THE LAST RUNG ON THE LADDER

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. Her letter was

rumpled and smudged, one of the corners dog-eared from handling. I read what was in it and the next thing I

knew I was standing in the living room with the phone in my h8nd, getting ready to call Dad. I put the phone

down with something like horror. He was an old man, and he'd had two heart attacks. Was I going to call him and

tell about Katrina's letter so soon after we'd been in L.A.? To do that might very well have killed him.

So I didn't call. And I had no one I could tell. . . a thing like that letter, it's too personal to tell anyone except a

wife or a very close friend. I haven't made many close friends in the last few years, and my wife Helen and I

divorced in 1971. What we exchange now are Christmas cards. How are you? How's the job? Have a Happy New

Year.

I've been awake all night with it, with Katrina's letter. She could have put it on a postcard. There was only a

single sentence below the 'Dear Larry'. 'But a sentence can mean enough. It can do enough.

I remembered my dad on the plane, his face seeming old and wasted in the harsh sunlight at 18,000 feet as we

went west from New York. We had 'just passed over Omaha, according to the pilot, and Dad said, 'It's a lot

further away than it looks, Larry.' There was a heavy sadness in his voice that made me uncomfortable because I

couldn't understand it. I understood it better after getting Katrina's letter.

We grew up eighty miles west of Omaha in a town called Hemingford Home - my dad, my mom, my sister

Katrina, and me. I was two years older than Katrina, whom everyone called Kitty. She was a beautiful child and a

beautiful woman - even at eight, the year of the incident in the barn, you could see that her cornsilk hair was

never going to darken and that those eyes would always be a dark, Scandinavian blue. A look in those eyes and a

man would be gone.

I guess you'd say we grew up hicks. My dad had three hundred acres of flat, rich land, and he grew feed corn and

raised cattle. Everybody just called it 'the home place'. In those days all the roads were dirt except Interstate 80

and Nebraska Route 96, and a trip to town was something you waited three days for.

Nowadays I'm one of the best independent corporation lawyers in America, so they tell me - and I'd have to admit

for the sake of honesty that I think they're right. A president of a large company once introduced me to his board

of directors as his hired gun. I wear expensive suits and my shoe-leather is the best. I've got three assistants on

full-time pay, and I can call in another dozen if [need them. But in those days I walked up a dirt road to a one-

room school with books tied in a belt over my shoulder, and Katrina walked with me. Sometimes, in the spring,

we went barefoot. That was in the days before you couldn't get served in a diner or shop in a market unless you

were wearing shoes.

Later on, my mother died - Katrina and I were in high school up at Columbia City then - and two years after that

my dad lost the place and went to work selling tractors. It was the end of the family, although that didn't seem so

bad then. Dad got along in his work, bought himself a dealership, and got tapped for a management position

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Ste...20-%20The%20Last%20Rung%20On%20The%20Ladder.html (1 of 10)7/28/2005 9:03:28 PM

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Stephen King - The Last Rung On The Ladder.pdf

共10页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stephen King - The Last Rung On The Ladder

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: