Suddenly she realized that the hard part was all over now. All she had to do was…let go. It really wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t…anything special. It just was. She was trying to bring back Barnes one last time—that little memory of him had been fun, why not go out with a little fun? She tried to remember his coloring—orange would be too bright, rust too drab, scarlet too vivid. His head was a combination of green, yellow, and gold, all blended, and his breast and wings a kind of carmine red? No, not carmine. He was just a little red rooster, overly pugnacious, an ingrate. He could have been a beautiful bird if he hadn’t gotten into so many fights. He got his comb ripped off by a raccoon he’d caught stealing eggs in the henhouse, a big bull raccoon that Barnes had fought tooth and nail until Fred ran into the henhouse with his .410 and killed the thieving intruder. Those eggs were precious. They were income. Mr. Barnes was a hero that day. She remembered how he used to strut around the barnyard. He always had his eye on all of the hens; they were his main priority, some thirty to forty of them, depending. They were his harem and he was the sheikh. Boy, was he ever. She remembered jotting down marks on a pad of paper one day when she was home sick with chickenpox. Each mark represented an act of rooster fornication. In less than a day, Mr. Barnes had committed the sexual act forty-seven times that she could see—and she didn’t have the whole lay of the land from her window by any means. Why, he often went out roving and carousing with hens on other farms. There were bitter complaints from the neighbors. Barnes really could stir things up. She had to go out on her bicycle and round him up. Mr. Barnes was a legend in the country. Mr. Barnes thought the whole world belonged to him and beyond that—the suns, the stars, and the Milky Way—all of it! Did it feel good or was it torment? It must have been a glorious feeling, she decided. Maybe that was what Arthur Schopenhauer was driving at in his theory about the Will to Live. Mr. Barnes was the very personification of it.