The Hayloft. A 1950s Mystery

barn acted as rungs of a ladder that gave access to it.
    I quickly climbed the ladder until my head was even with the window. The bottom half of the window slid up to open. I released my grip on the top rung with one hand and tried to push the window up. It was stuck. I hit the crosspiece of the window with the heel of my hand in an upward direction, trying to unstick it. The window didn’t move, but my hand hit one of the dirty panes and broke the glass.
    A quick look at my hand revealed that I had suffered only a minor cut. The broken glass was no help, because the panes were much too small for us to go through. But if I could break the six panes of glass on the bottom half of the window and the wooden crosspieces that held the panes in place, we could get through the opening.
    I looked down and saw that my brothers and Kate were now standing on the bales below me. The women were hampered by their tight skirts, but the men were helping them climb up the bales.
    “I need to break the window,” I said to Tom, Archie, and Kate. “Has anybody seen the pitchfork?”
    The pitchfork was used to move the hay in the haystack. Hopefully, it was in the hayloft.
    “I saw it the last time we were up here,” Kate said. “It was between the haystack and the north wall.”
    Before I could say anything, she made her way quickly through the jumble of bales to the edge and slid down them to the floor. She disappeared from my view. That side of the hayloft was not yet on fire, thankfully, but the smoke had reached it. I hoped the pitchfork was still there. I prayed she would find it and make it back all right. Tom went to the edge of the bales, probably wondering whether he should follow her. And perhaps wondering what she meant by talking about the last time we were in the hayloft.
    For several seconds, I held my breath and wondered whether I should send Tom down into the smoke with her, or go myself. No, I couldn’t take the time to get down from the ladder. Maybe I should try to break the window with a hay hook instead of the pitchfork. I was about to ask Archie to hand up a hay hook when I saw Tom grab the handle of the pitchfork as it was lifted up to him. Kate had found it.
    Tom made his way among the bales, which were piled helter-skelter from when I had been searching for the necklace, trying not to trip and stick himself with the pitchfork. While I cringed as the pitchfork swung wildly with his movements, he made it to a spot below me and handed the pitchfork up, handle first. The other end consisted of three sharp metal tines.
    I gripped the handle like a javelin, with the tines facing the window, pulled my arm back as far as I could, and made a sharp thrust at the window. The force of my thrust threw me against the wall of the barn, and I almost dropped the pitchfork and fell off the ladder. I clung to the top rung of the ladder with one hand and renewed my grip on the pitchfork with the other.
    I checked for damage. I had broken two more panes of glass, but more important, I saw a crack in the wooden frame that held the glass in place. I thought I could knock it out and clear a hole large enough for us to crawl through.
    Everybody had made it to the top of the bales now. I heard my father telling the women to take off their stockings. My father and Uncle Jeff fired questions at me about whether I could break through the window. I assured them that I could. But could I do it fast enough? Looking back across the hayloft, I saw tongues of flame lapping up the sides of the haystack. The smoke became thicker every second.
    I thrust the pitchfork at the frame of the window several times, being careful not to do it so violently that I would fall or lose my grip on the fork. I made a break in the frame and worked on enlarging it enough for us to get through. I also knocked out all six panes of glass in the half-window to keep us from cutting ourselves.
    “That should do it,” Uncle Jeff called from below. “There isn’t time for neatness.”
    He had carried a section of the rope that hung from the rafters over to the ladder. He climbed the ladder, holding the rope between his body and the wall. I handed the pitchfork down to my father and reached my hand down to take the rope from Uncle Jeff. I had to shove the rope through the gap in the window and then keep threading it until the end of the rope that was resting on the bales in an untidy coil went through the window and dropped down toward the ground.
    It would have