The Last Rung on the Ladder

“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.”

These lines introduce the theme of Family Ties Versus Financial Success. The mother’s death starts to dissolve the bonds between the members of Larry’s family and indirectly leads to another family tragedy, Katrina’s death by suicide. These lines also demonstrate Larry’s lack of interest in maintaining family relationships at the time, though the word “then” points to Larry’s change of heart on the subject.

“And then you could jump off the beam and fall seventy feet straight down, with a horrible hilarious dying swoop, into a huge soft bed of lush hay. It has a sweet smell, hay does, and you’d come to rest in that smell of reborn summer with your stomach left behind you way up there in the middle of the air, and you’d feel…well, like Lazarus must have felt. You had taken the fall and lived to tell the tale.”

Like many other aspects of the story, these lines juxtapose the innocent joy of childhood with the tragedy of death. The reference to Lazarus, a biblical figure who was raised from the dead, foreshadows Katrina’s fall into the small pile of hay where she is miraculously spared from death, as well as her later death. They point to Larry’s desire to undo her death, to save her the way Jesus saved Lazarus.

“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.”

In this philosophical comment, Larry refers to the two times Katrina misplaces her trust. In the first, she assumes that the ladder will hold her weight, and in the second, she believes that Larry will always be there to save her.

“She stood, poising on the toes of her old low-topped Keds, hands out in front of her. And then she swanned. Talk about things you can’t forget, things you can’t describe. Well, I can describe it…in a way. But not in a way that will make you understand how beautiful that was, how perfect, one of the few things in my life that seem utterly real, utterly true. No, I can’t tell you that. I don’t have the skill with either my pen or my tongue.”

On a surface level, this quote demonstrates the perfection of the moment when Katrina dove into the hay, a perfection so great that Larry can’t convey it in words. The quote also points to Larry’s general inability to express how he feels, particularly to Katrina about how much he cares for her. As an adult, he responds to her letters, but he does so with excuses for why he cannot visit her and does not seem able to express the love he carries for her until it is too late.

“The rung she was standing on gave way, and then both sides of the ladder split. For a moment the ladder below her, which had broken entirely free, looked like a ponderous insect—a praying mantis or a ladderbug—which had just decided to walk off. Then it toppled, hitting the barn floor with a flat clap that raised dust and caused the cows to moo worriedly.”

This description contains vivid imagery to convey the tension of the scene. King first creates the sense of time standing still in the moment before the ladder falls, then compares the falling ladder to a living creature, an insect casually strolling away. The clap of the ladder hitting the ground and the startled mooing of the cows complete the sensory depiction of this dramatic event.

“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.”

This quote demonstrates the level of trust that Katrina places in her brother, following his directions immediately without knowing what he had done to help her. It also shows the recurring motif of Katrina’s blond hair, which symbolizes her beauty and childhood innocence. Finally, the description of her falling forever foreshadows her eventual death.

“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.’”

This quote reveals Katrina’s faith in her big brother, which he has earned by his quick action in moving the hay beneath her. By the end of the story, though, this statement is no longer true. Larry has failed again and again to take care of Katrina, which ultimately leads to her death.

“It was the end, but somehow not the end. Somehow it never ended until nine days ago, when Kitty jumped from the top story of an insurance building in Los Angeles.”

Katrina’s happiness in life peaked as a child. Her fall from the ladder, though terrifying, also proved to her that she had a brother who loved her and would do anything to help her. Not long after this event, she experiences a downward spiral from which she never recovered.

“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.”

Larry compares the clipping to something heavy that he is obligated to carry with him, because that is the feeling of his regret. He will have to carry the knowledge that he could have saved his sister for the rest of his life. This also reveals two important facts: that Katrina had become a sex worker, and that she died the same way she used to dive into the haymow: headfirst.

“I could never really believe that it was really Kitty who was writing them, you know, no more than I could really believe that the hay was really there…until it broke my fall at the bottom of the drop and saved my life.”

Katrina initially has great faith in the world. Larry, on the other hand, never has much faith in the world around him. This leads him to be more cautious as he jumps from the beam into the hay, and it also leads him to value economic security over family ties.

“I kept thinking: Gee, I’ve got to write Kitty and tell her that I’ve moved. But I never did.”

Larry’s regret centers around this inaction. Larry had not been purposefully cruel to Katrina, but the fact that he never got around to updating his address with her shows his lack of attention to their relationship or her needs.

“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.”

Toward the end of the story, Larry finally reveals what Katrina’s letter said. These lines evoke one of the key themes of the story, Regret. While Katrina’s death had been tragic before Larry received the letter, her letter forces him to acknowledge that he could have prevented her death, as he had when she was a young girl, if he had put more effort into their relationship.

“Yes, I guess she must have gotten tired of waiting. I’d rather believe that than think of her deciding I must have forgotten. I wouldn’t want her to think that, because that one sentence was maybe the only thing that would have brought me on the run.”

These lines indicate how much Larry still cares for his sister. Even though he lost touch with her over the years; if he had known how close she was to ending her life, he would have immediately gone to see her. He hopes that Katrina knew that he would have come, because the alternative, that she believed that he had forgotten how he had saved her once and would not bother to do so again, was too awful to contemplate.