by Tom De Haven
And now, on the morning of her funeral, Clark suspects that he might be going into town alone. But just before nine o’clock, his father appears in the kitchen wearing his black Sears and Roebuck suit and shoes. They embrace without a word, then set off together in the slat-sided Ford pickup truck. Mr. Kent does the driving, of course.
“Will you be saying any piece this morning?” he asks.
“No. No, I didn’t think I would. Will you?”
“No.”
They ride in silence for a couple of minutes.
“I liked what you wrote about your mother in the paper, son. That was good.”
“Thank you.”
More silence.
“But it was ’87, not ’88 when she came back here from Dakota Territory with her little sister and her pa—just like you wrote.”
“Mom told me ’88.”
“Trust me, Clark, it was 1887.”
Silence again, for several miles.
“How come you didn’t let me have a look at it before you sent that in?”
“I guess I forgot. I’m sorry, Dad.”
They’re in town now, coming up Union Street, half a block from the church, the cemetery with its small obelisks and listing headstones behind a black iron fence.
“Clark?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I was wondering why you put it in there that you’re our adopted son.”
“Because I am.”
“It never mattered.”
“I know that.”
“She loved you like you were her own flesh and blood.”
Clark nods.
“And you know I do too, don’t you?”
Clark nods again.
“It was a fine piece of writing, son. I sure couldn’t’ve done it.”
2
She cherished her family, and baked the world’s most delicious rhubarb pie. And her apple pie, too—the way she coated the crust with sugar, that you couldn’t beat. Simply could not. And she was always there in your time of trouble, with a kind word, a smile, a sincere offer of assistance. She was humble. She was gracious. She wrote the loveliest, the most thoughtful Christmas letters. She had moral fiber, real pioneer strength of character. And did everyone recall that wienie roast just before the war, the summer Mary Agel was afflicted by shingles, and Martha, always the friend in need, always the selfless one, stepped right up and volunteered to—
Mr. Kent doesn’t think he can stand too much more. Martha was all that everyone said, but she was also his wife of thirty-one years, his best friend, his soul mate, his complement, and she is five feet away from him now, confined forever in the plain wooden coffin she requested, and his heart is broken. Rhubarb pies! That woman made the sun come up. And he wants this ordeal to end, to go home, to be home, back in the house where her spirit is still present, will always be present, in the iron stove, the knotty pine wardrobe, the spoons, the hand-woven draperies and pillow covers, the stair treads, the floorboards, their bed. In everything.
He wants to go home with his son and grieve.
To Mr. Kent’s right, Clark sits hunched forward with his head bowed and his eyes closed. His knees are spread apart, and he’s gripped the edge of the pew seat. Branching veins have risen on the backs of his hands.
“… I can tell you, it wasn’t just poor Mary Agel who was grateful that day, it was …”
Below the drone of this latest panegyric, Mr. Kent detects a slight fracturing sound. When he turns his head, his glance instinctively dropping, he sees, in the foot-wide gap between his son’s curled hands, a split opening, breaching in the varnished oak-wood edging of their pew.
He touches Clark’s left elbow. Clark’s eyelids snap open. He flinches, jerks backward, and—
CRACK!
Aghast, Clark looks at the piece of broken wood in his hands, then blushes furiously as though discovering himself naked in public.
Calmly Mr. Kent takes the wood chunk, leans down, and sets it on the floor under the pew.
Behind them, Mr. Kent is well aware, the fifty or so congregants, town friends and neighboring farmers, are all still looking, still craning, still wondering what in God’s name … ?
It’s time, he decides.
Martha, stay close. I need you.
3
Clark looks around unhappily, back toward the church where two women—Mrs. Kackle and Mrs. Kemp—have come outside from what parishioners call the “confraternity room” and where, an hour now since the interment, a solemn repast is still in progress. Mrs. Kackle lifts an arm and beckons. “They want us to come in,” says Clark.
“I know it,” says Mr. Kent. “But I don’t think they’ll raise a fuss if we don’t, do you?” He slips into a trance of concentration, staring at the mound of rich brown earth in front of him. Then he shifts his eyes to Clark. “Take a walk with me? I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“You’ll find out.”
They leave the cemetery by a gate wide enough for a wagon to pass through, and where a small fieldstone building is filled with the implements of grave digging. Dan Tauy, a large man of sixty with long swept-back gray hair and ropy, powerful arms, stands in the doorway as they pass by. He doesn’t acknowledge them. Mr. Kent knows Dan still resents him for having made such a noise that time, years ago now, when the Indian was barred from worshipping in the church. He was humiliated by all the talk it caused, maybe even felt patronized. He didn’t, and doesn’t, need anyone to fight his battles. Well, so be it. Mr. Kent had done what he thought was right.
They walk down Union Street to Main, turn east there, and continue on. It is a warm summer morning, overcast and humid. On both sides of the exceptionally wide street automobiles are parked diagonally against the high curbs. Mr. Bleecher is out sweeping the sidewalk in front of his dry goods store. Where the Swede’s bakery used to be, the plate windows are soaped over on the inside, swirling around a square yellow sign that reads: FOR RENT. Idly, Mr. Kent wonders whatever became of the Swede, whose name he can’t recall now. He was Norwegian, really, but everybody just called him the Swede. Is he still in town? Maybe not. There are several more vacant storefronts. The radio repair, a lunchroom, even the shoe-and-boot repair: all of them gone.
Up ahead, Joe Diver, manager of the Jewel Theater, stands on a ladder affixing big letters to the bulb-ringed marquee. So far it reads: BRIDE OF FRAN.
Both Clark and Mr. Kent give wide berth to that ladder.
“Mr. Kent, Clark,” Joe Diver calls down, “my condolences on your loss.”
They both express appreciation for that.
Half a block on, Mr. Kent gestures to a pressed metal sign jutting out over the sidewalk: SMALLVILLE HERALD-PROGRESS. “I had an interesting talk with Newel Timmins the other week. He came out to the house to see your mom.”
“Mr. Timmins did? Where was I?”
“Taking your examinations, I guess. He was saying how he thinks you’re a pretty good writer.”
“Told me I was fair.”
Mr. Kent smiles. “He said he talked to you about doing some reporting for his paper.”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Proud of you, Clark. I think your mom would’ve got a big kick from your display of enterprise.”
“He only wants me for maybe a day a week. I can still work on the farm.”
“I’m pleased.”
“Are you?”
“We’ll manage.”
“Be only a day or two a week. Maybe three. But I’ll still work on the farm.”
“We’ll manage.”
By now they’ve arrived at the daftly grand town hall, a marble-and-copper faux chateau built thirty years ago when Smallville had aspirations to being declared the county seat. With its vaulted ceiling, cavernous gloom, and the deep-resounding echoes that it makes of every footfall, the place puts Clark in mind of some ancient European library where never in a million years would he feel welcome. The Kents are greeted by Vernon Sisk, lobby guard here for the pas
t eleventy-seven years. “Mornin’, folks!” he says, then fixes a proper hangdog scowl on his lined old face. “I was very distressed to hear about Mrs. Kent. She was a fine lady. A fine lady. We always had a nice little jaw wag ever’ time she came by to pay the taxes. She’ll be missed.”
“Thank you, Vernon,” says Mr. Kent.
Mr. Kent starts up the central staircase. Clark hesitates a moment, then goes up too.
In between the offices of the Assayer and the Town Clerk and set flush against the left-hand wall are several long glass-topped display cases containing photographs of the first few clapboard buildings on Main Street, some arrowheads, and the yellowed front pages of old newspapers describing historic floods and locust infestations, as well as celebrated crimes, including two cases of incendiarism, a poisoning, and a daring 1897 bank robbery. There is the rope used to hang Del Slatterly, who smothered his wife with a pillow in 1901; several Mauser cartridges carried home from the Spanish-American War by Smallville’s volunteers; the key to the original town jail; and assorted knives. There is a Kansas state flag the size of Clark’s thumbnail made from dyed kernels of rice by Mrs. Lettie Segar, wife of Dr. L. Kipling Segar, and a jagged but vaguely fin-or rudder-shaped fragment of burnished green metal, about the length of a man’s foot, but just an inch or so thick. The hand-lettered card placed nearby identifies this particular exhibit as the “Mystery Alloy,” and claims it dropped from the sky on June 5,1917, landing on property owned by Millard “Ike” Cayhall. Later “metallurgic scrutiny,” it says, failed to “discern” its “compositional properties.”
“There,” says Mr. Kent.
“That’s what you want to show me?”
“That’s it.”
“What am I supposed to see?”
“All that’s left of your wagon, son.”
“My wagon.”
“The one you fell off. Before your mother and me found you in the road.”
4
They didn’t find him in the road, of course, but in truth it wasn’t too far front the road. Few hundred yards.
“Right about there,” he tells Clark. “Or maybe …” Pushing through cornstalks, he squints for a moment. “No, right about there.”
Clark tromps by, turning in circles, peering down, searching for—for what exactly?
“But the thing itself, that hit down quite a ways … over … there.” When Mr. Kent stretches out his right arm, Clark eagerly sights along where his finger points.
“Who saw it first?”
“Your ma. I heard it, but she saw it coming in.” He gestures up.
“From which direction?”
“That’s my boy.”
“What?”
“The reporter. ‘From which direction?’ ” He turns all the way around. “From behind the house … to the front. So most likely from the southeast. And that’s an excellent question, Clark, because your mom and I both wanted to get it straight. For when we talked to the army. Or whoever came.”
“The army?”
“The war was on, Clark. We thought it was a bomb, from a zeppelin or some kind of airship. What else would we think?”
“A bomb.”
“That’s what it looked like, Clark. When we ran out here and saw it, the pair of us figured we were seeing the biggest, fattest bomb in the Kaiser’s arsenal. Then we just rabbited back this way, thinking we’d been lucky so far but any second it was bound to blow up. And that’s how we happened to find you. Naked as a jaybird. I nearly ran right over you.”
Clark opens his mouth but just keeps looking there, then over there, then back to the house, then over its roof, to the southwest.
“Let’s go inside,” says Mr. Kent. “Hot as it is, I could use a cup of coffee.”
It is about ninety-five degrees now. The heat bugs and crickets are loud, insistent, and Mr. Kent keeps slapping at mosquitoes as he trudges in silence next to Clark back through the corn, then across the road to the grassy yard, the porch, the house …
“So that piece of metal you showed me is all that’s left?”
“I never found anything more. After it blew up, it was gone. Except for the chunk fell on Ike Cayhall’s barn. I guess not on the barn, but pretty darn close.”
“Who’s Ike Cayhall?”
“Oh. He’s long dead. He used to own what’s Cure & Hurley’s now.”
“The cannery? That’s ten miles from here.”
“Or more.”
Clark spoons sugar into his coffee and stirs. “So that’s how come my birthday’s June fifth?”
“That’s how come. Though your mom said you looked at least eight months old, and the doctor in Tabor Lodge said you looked to be about a year. ’Course he also said you had the strength of a five-year-old. And the coordination, too. You grabbed hold of his eyeglasses and crumpled them.” Saying that, Mr. Kent is reminded of his own glasses, which he removes and cleans with a napkin.
“By Tabor Lodge you mean … ?”
“The orphanage there, yes.”
“I really broke his glasses?”
“That was the least of it. You were a holy terror. They’d put you in a crib and find you next morning two floors below in some classroom. Eating chalk.”
“Really?” Clark can’t help it: he grins. “Chalk?”
“Or—and your mother heard this from one of the nurses, the superintendent never told us about it, but supposedly you climbed some drapes and had yourself a grand old time hanging from the rod like Cheetah the chimpanzee. And when somebody climbed up to get you? You let go.”
“And?”
“Clark.”
“Right. And nothing.”
“They started calling you the superbaby. Pass the milk? Please and thank you.”
“But Dad …”
“Why’d we put you in an orphanage?”
“No. Well, yes, but …”
“Why didn’t we tell anybody?”
“Yes, but—where did you and Mom think it came from? Where I came from?”
“Where did we think you came from? Well … after we decided you weren’t part of a German bomb … since we figured no matter how savage we’d heard those Huns were, they weren’t bad enough to bomb us with babies …”
“Or dumb enough.”
“So we figured it was some kind of an airship, although Martha—your mom called it your cradle.”
“My cradle.”
“The truth? We thought somebody shot you off from someplace in Europe. Or South America. Or like … Kitty Hawk. And we expected to read about it next day in the paper.”
“But why would anybody put a baby inside an airship?”
“That’s what we wanted to know.”
Holding his cup with both hands, Clark stares dreamily at the coffee.
“Clark, it took us maybe thirty seconds to decide that you were ours, that you’d been given to us.” Mr. Kent clears his throat. “That’s the first thing. We’d never been blessed with children—I was almost fifty-two and your mother was … a little younger. And some things it gets too late to happen. But here was this gift. Here was you. So that’s the first thing you should know. We adopted you before we took you to any orphanage. As soon as we found you, that was it. You were our son.”
5
Clark has been out walking in an uncleared wood that starts just beyond the Kents’ Big Pasture and ranges cross-country over the next several miles till it thins out and skirts the Lang family’s dairy farm. He’s not sure who owns this wood, if anyone does; he never asked. He never asked about a lot of things.
He braces a foot against a blowdown in his path and pushes, intending to roll aside the big hemlock (actually, he most intended to vent some of the tension that crackles through him like electricity), but he pushes with too much force, and the tree snaps in two with a burst of dust, chips, and bark. Now look what he’s done! Torn the sole raggedly off his shoe and the leather upper to ribbons. Likewise a good sock.
Although the sun set a while ago, darkness has not
yet brought any relief from the heat and humidity. Heat never has bothered Clark (or cold, either), but he suffers whenever the humidity climbs and the air becomes saturated. Okay, not like other people suffer, but it makes him irritable. He feels that way now, but considering the day he’s had it’s probably not the humidity.
He buried his mom today.
He buried himself today.
And not six feet deep, six miles, and now he’s trying to claw his way out.
But which way is up?
Clark wonders what his father is doing right this second. Resting? (Mr. Kent doesn’t “nap,” he “rests.”) Maybe Clark shouldn’t have left him home alone, the man buried his wife this morning, but—
But Clark needed to get away, to think.
So far he hasn’t done too much of that. He’s tramped around all jittered up and ruined a good shoe. That he’s done, but think? No.
He sits down on a slab of granite jutting from the bank of a dry streambed. A coarse rind of lichen—the stuff looks like Wheaties—crackles under him.
The wood is utterly quiet. How can that be—in June? But it is, it is silent and still, and he is alone in that.
He is alone, period.
“Of course you’re not alone,” his father said to him earlier, after he’d told him the why of the orphanage (“Be pretty hard to explain you at our ages, son. So we left you at the doorstep, like in one of those cartoons you see. And so what? We always intended to come back, and we did”) and the how of his adoption (“It maybe wasn’t the only time your ma ever lied about her age, but for darn sure it was the only time she ever put a drop of color in her hair. I used it myself. So we got you, nice and legal. But if they’d said no, we’d’ve found some way to steal you back”).
“Of course you’re not alone, how could you even think such a thing?”
“Easy. You try coming from another planet.”