“No.”
“Good. I’ll take Josh with me. He can’t climb the ladder yet.”
Dutifully Bobby had crossed the yard, opened the big door, walked by the vacant stalls, the long feeding trough, the center gutter for washing the place down, to the far end where the ladder was. He’d brought his AWOL bag, his records, a dozen magazines he’d kept, a hundred articles he’d cut from the newspaper but hadn’t read beyond the first paragraphs.
He put his hand on the latch to Grandpa’s barn-loft office, hesitated. It had been years since he’d been inside, years since he’d helped his grandfather raise the seven-sectioned bay window to the framed opening, pulling so eagerly on the line that ran through the pulley blocks, one on the superstructure Grandpa had built on the roof, one through the bindings that Gran
