Family Secrets
The House in Smallville Hides Much
Obviously, I’m not a fiction writer. I’m certainly not very good at it. That’s a trick that I wish I could pull off, the ability to be creative on demand, as a regular thing. I’m a “get out of my fucking head” writer, and this is something that occured to me. I’ve learned over the years, better to get it out, even if it’s ridiculous. So here is this foolishness.
Superman, the Kents, and Pete Ross are all copyright of DC and whomever else owns their copyrights. I think I came up with Phil Barnes, M.D., but maybe not. Definitely came up with Ev.
I would like to thank Zach Snyder and Henry Cavill for being willing to not endlessly try to recreate what Christopher Reeve once did so well. Better to risk failure than make the same thing forever. Brandon Routh might agree. I’d also like to thank Zach Snyder for this scene that got me thinking about what it was like for the Kents to make Kal-El into Clark Kent.
“I think it’s broken”
“What do you mean Jonathan?”
“Clark reached out and grabbed my finger. Next thing I know, I hear a crack, it feels numb, and well, look at it”
“Are you saying Clark…that a baby…broke your finger just by grabbing it?”
Jonathan Kent hesitates to answer, even with the reality of his finger, it’s ridiculous. “…Yes…yes…I am.”
They both look at the infant, all smiles, blue eyes, and the beginnings of what will be almost jet-black hair reaching up for them. They won’t say it, not to each other, certainly never to Clark, but they feel fear. The kind of fear no parent should feel, no parent on earth has ever felt. The fear that their child is far stronger and stranger than they can imagine. They both look at each other and think about tantrums and pouting and door-slamming.
“Jonathan…what do we do?”
“What do you mean?”
“An infant just broke your finger by grabbing it. That’s not the first thing he’s done that a human, much less a baby shouldn’t be able to do. He never gets a bump or a bruise. He barely notices falling down. How do we…how do we raise him to live around people, who will be afraid of him or shun him or worse? How do we raise an alien to be human?”
Jonathan stares at his child, then down at his finger for long seconds.
“We…we teach him. We teach him how to live in a world that will be glass figurines and houses of cards. We teach him how to manage his emotions and why he can never give in to anger.”
“…or happiness.”
“Or happiness.”
Those last two words break their hearts as thoroughly as Jonathan’s rapidly swelling index finger.
Luckily, breaks, bumps and bruises are normal on a farm. Jonathan has never gone a year without needing to be bandaged up for something. Most families have multiple sets of crutches and reusable casts. “Pastoral” never meant “easy”.
“I Hurt Mama!!”
Clark, now a toddler, huddles in the corner of the living room, too upset to cry, horrified at the look on his mother’s face. Martha, pale with the pain of three broken ribs, draws on the reserves you get from a life of farm labor, straightens up, and says “No honey, not really. I’m okay, see? All smiles!”
Jonathan, hearing Martha’s cry of pain from where he was working the barn, rushes in, sees right through his wife’s pretense, then looks at Clark, in the corner, tears starting to well in the child’s eyes. The boy’s face is contorted by a look Jonathan hasn’t seen in decades, a look he thought he left behind in the deserts his country once sent him to.
It’s the look of someone who’s just realized just how capable they are of causing pain. He also sees the odd cast to Clark’s eyes, the way the boy seems totally focused on Martha.
“What happened?” he asks, his tone as calm and light as humanly possible.
Martha inhales, shallowly. He knows that inhale, it’s the way you breathe when you’ve messed up your ribcage. His cows regularly give him reason to breathe that way. “He…he tied his shoes for the first time. He was so excited, he came running in to show me. I told him what a smart boy he is and held my arms out for a hug. He…forgot. He hugged me the way he wanted to.”
If this were new, she’d sound far more shattered. But this has been their life with Clark ever since his ship crashed on their farm. Everything is devoted to teaching him how to live with people infinitely more delicate than he is. They have learned to master their emotions on levels that would make a Zen master jealous. Clark is sensitive to their emotions, but still lacks the control to master that sensitivity.
No one really notices this change in the Kents. At his emotive best, Jonathan Kent is the embodiment of taciturn, and Martha has always been one for quiet displays. A small smile from her is the equivalent of squealing joy from others. People see the Kents as they’ve always seen them, because it’s what they want to see.
Slowly, calmly, a smile he only half-feels on his face, he sits down next to the boy. Clark shrinks back, afraid of what he might do to his father. Jonathan reaches out to the boy, to rub his back. Clark flinches at the touch, but doesn’t try to move away. Physical contact has always soothed him more than any lullaby or blanket.
“Clark,” he says, “your mom’s okay. She’s gonna be a little sore for a bit, you’re a very strong boy.” Clark shakes his head, slowly, deliberately, never taking his eyes off of his mother. “No…mama’s…broke. I broke mama.” The tears now flow freely down his face, the most visible sign of what he’s feeling.
“Jonathan?”
“Yes?”
“I can’t explain it…but where Clark’s looking…it’s warm”
Jonathan looks at his son’s eyes for a minute. He slowly waves his hand up and down in front of them. Clark doesn’t react. As his hand goes in front of the boy’s eyes, he feels it, a zone of warmth, like the heat lamps he uses in the barn during the winter.
“Clark…Clark…son…look at me”
The boy turns his head slowly, unwillingly, as if his mother will run away the instant he’s not looking at her. The warmth follows his gaze.
“Son…look at me where you were looking at your mother. Am I…broke…too?”
Clark stares at the lower part of his father’s torso. Jonathan can feel himself getting warm over the area his son is staring at.
“No daddy. You’re not broke. Mama is broke, I broke her…I’m…I’m…bad”
Without thinking, as any father would, Jonathan pulls the boy into his lap, burying his face in his son’s hair.
“No son, you’re not bad. You’re a good boy. What happened was an accident, and we’ll help you be more careful so it doesn’t happen again, but you’re not a bad boy. You’re a good boy, you’re our good boy, and we love you.”
Martha slowly, painfully sits next to them, facing opposite her husband so she can put an arm around her son, who’s now softly crying. “Clark, you’re a good boy.” she says. “We’re a family, you’re our son, and we love you.”
If anyone had told her, when they were first married, that she’d be sitting on the ground listening to Jonathan Kent, who had barely said ten words when he proposed to her, telling his son what a good boy he is and how much he loves him, over and over, she’d have laughed. But perhaps more than she does, Jonathan understands, instinctively, that Clark somehow knows he’s different, and so he makes sure to tell the boy just how much he’s loved as much as possible.
Martha knows about bonding, for both babies and the livestock they raise. She’s watched friends and family raise their children, helped out. The Kents have always been willing to be the sitter of last resort for their neighbors. But this is different. The Kents realize they’re not just bonding with Clark as a family, but bonding Clark to humanity. Creating the ties he’ll need as he gets older, so he doesn’t feel like any more of an outsider than he has to.
As Clark calms down, and realizes that he’s still loved, and that his parents still think he’s a good boy, Jonathan reaches into his jacket pocket for his cell to call Doc Barnes and let him know that another accident had happened, that they’ll be coming into his office.
They leave the question of a boy who can see broken ribs for later.
“How much can we trust you?”
No doctor ever wants to hear that phrase, because nothing good ever comes from that phrase. It’s three years before Clark will break his mother’s ribs in his joy over tying his shoes for the first time.
Phil Barnes, M.D., one of two doctors in Smallville sits in his office, looking at Jonathan Kent. He’s tempted to make a joke, but the look in Jonathan’s eyes strangles that impulse. Whatever is going on, there’s nothing funny about it.
“Jonathan, I’ve been you and Martha’s doctor for almost twenty years now, I think I’ve…”
Kent cuts him off with a quick shake of the head. “This is different Doc. This is…I have to know. How much can we trust you.”
“I took an oath Jonathan, to always keep my patients’ trust.”
Jonathan stares his doc dead in the eyes, never wavering or looking away. “I knew a lot of men in the Army who’d taken oaths to never take a life. They still killed. I have to know. How. Much. Can. We. Trust. You.”
Doc Barnes thinks a minute. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he knows the man in front of him, possibly better than Martha does. “Jonathan, if it’s something illegal, or even close…” he trails off, unwilling to fully voice the possibilities. Sometimes, in this part of the country, of wide open spaces and closed people, things go wrong. People go wrong, and you can never tell until after the damage is done.
Jonathan laughs, the most un-humorous sound a man can make and still call it laughter. “No Doc, I promise, it’s not illegal. I’m not even sure if that applies. I just need to know that if I take you into this, you’ll never tell anyone. Not your wife, not your kids, not your priest. You’ll never write it down more than you have to, and when you die, it goes with you.”
There’s a long pause. “Jonathan…I’m your doctor, and I’m your friend. If you need me to keep my eyes open and my mouth closed…you’ve got that.”
Jonathan Kent sits back and exhales as though a massive weight has been lifted. “Thank god…I need you to follow me out to the house. Bring your bag. Bring a couple of syringes too, ones you can afford to lose.”
“Jonathan…what’s going on?”
“I can’t tell you doc. I can’t even begin to explain it. You have to see it.”
Doc Barnes watches the needle snap on the boy’s arm. The child, a year old at the most, doesn’t react at all. Unsurprising, since the needle barely dented his skin, much less broke through it.
He looks at Jonathan and Martha, waiting for them to tell him what he suspects.
The couple looks at each other and Martha nods, then collects the baby, Clark, she said his name was, and sits him on her lap, arms around him as though she fears someone will try to snatch him out of their living room.
“Doc, you remember that meteor that crashed out on my back 40 a couple weeks past?” “Sure I do Jonathan, it lit up the sky. Everyone was talking about it.” “It…wasn’t a metor. It was a spaceship. Clark was in it, the only passenger.”
If he hadn’t just snapped two needles on an infant’s arm as though they were made of spun sugar, he’d have been planning how to get the Kents into psychiatric treatment. But the broken metal in his hands tells him that however fantastic this sounds, it’s real.
Jonathan pauses, takes a deep breath, as though what he’s about to say next is something he’s afraid to say out loud. “He’s an alien, Phil. He’s not human. He looks human, but he’s not. You’ve seen how hard his skin is. He’s strong too. This finger?” Jonathan waves a well-braced and wrapped finger at him. “He did that. With less effort than you’d use to pour coffee.”
Barnes shakes his head, unable to really process this. “Okay, so if he’s an alien…what do you want from me?” “Help”. That’s Martha, barely clamping down on the desperation she feels. “If he grows like a…human, he’s going to need to go to school. They’ll want vaccination records.” She starts slowly rocking back and forth, as much for her as for Clark.
“Even if you could give him a shot, would it work? Or would it make him sick?” She talks faster, almost stumbling over her words, weeks of anxiety tumbling out. “We need…books and help on how to manage our temper, our emotions, help on how to teach him to manage his. If he’s that strong, if he’s what we’ve seen…he’s going to have to learn how to pretend to be human. We can’t do it all on our own, we barely know where to start.”
The enormity of what his friends face hits Doc Barnes full force. “You’ll…you’ll need adoption papers. I can’t fake a pregnancy Martha, everyone knows you two can’t have kids. But I think I can come up with something that will give you a believable adoption. And Ev’s been on me to try all that meditation crap she likes so much, so I’ve got a house full of books on how to stay calm in a forest fire.” They all smile a bit at that, Mrs. Barnes’ fascination with various eastern religions is well known in Smallville.
A thought hits him. “Martha…have you tried to cut his hair?” “Phil, he’s a baby, he’s barely got any hair.” “That’s going to change, and if his hair’s as tough as the rest of him, I don’t think a set of Fiskars is going to do you much good.” Jonathan thinks a moment. “I may be able to do something about that. I dug out a hole for the ship that brought him under that old barn my granddad built. The metal on it’s hard, but it melted a little when it crashed. I think I can make some scissors out of that in my forge. Hopefully, if they both come from the same place, we can use them.
“Lucky you’re a packrat” the Doc says. “Lord, don’t encourage him” says Martha and they all laugh at that. It’s not all that funny, but they need that bit of normalcy, badly. It’ll be a long time before any of them see normal again.
Barnes stands up to leave. “Well, I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time on faking a set of medical records. Just tell me he’s the only one.” “So far he is Doc.” “Good. I don’t think I could handle a passle of super-babies.” They all laugh again, and Barnes exits through the kitchen door. He’s able to hold off the shakes on the drive home, barely, until he pulls into his garage. “Dear Jesus…an alien.” He looks up at the roof of his truck long and hard. “God…I know they say you never give us more than we can handle. But I think this time you’re pushing it a bit.”
“Going Camping?”
Jonathan looks at Mr. Ross, caught completely off-guard by the question. “Pardon?” The owner of Smallville’s main supply store laughs a bit and waves at the items Jonathan has set on the counter. “Metal plates, cups, mugs, steel silverware…looks like you’re taking the whole family camping”. Jonathan returns the laugh, happy that his friend has provided the perfect response. “Yep. Clark’s old enough now that I think a camping trip with his mother and it’d be a fun thing to do this summer. I can get away for a few days without the farm falling apart.”
They both chuckle at that, and Jonathan leaves the store with his box of gear. It’s not until he gets in the truck that he lets out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He knows no one other than the doc knows about Clark, but the low-level paranoia him and Martha live with never really goes away. With Clark a summer away from first grade, it’s starting to move up from low-level.
The metal tableware was Martha’s idea, after Clark had destroyed even heavy stoneware. “Jonathan, just get some metal things. He needs something sturdy enough that he can learn how to be delicate.” The look on his face had exasperated her. “Clark is probably strong enough to lift the truck at this point, you can’t expect him to suddenly be able to deal with glass or pottery. It’s the same as for any other child, only for him, “unbreakable” is a bit more than a plastic sippy cup from the Witchita Wal-Mart.”
That, he’d understood, so he’d drove into town to Ross’s Tractor Supply to get the things they’d need.
It’s gotten easier in some ways. Clark’s more aware of his strength, and the constant calm they live under has ensured that he rarely gets close to a tantrum. Their parents think they spoil the boy rotten, but he’s well-behaved, quiet, and polite, even at his age, so the complaints are more pro forma than anything else.
In other ways…well, Clark being able to see through things (everything but lead, they’ve learned) was a bit of a problem. Clark being able to set things on fire with his eyes…that one took some work. Fortunately, either kind of “vision” requires a conscious effort to use, so they’ve gotten good results by treating it the same way they broke him of picking his nose.
There’s been some mild disagreement about how to explain Clark to the teachers at Smallville elementary. Doc Barnes suggested they let the school know Clark is mildly autistic, which would cover a plethora of Clark’s behavioral oddities, but the Kents are not happy with this. They know autistic kids, Martha’s helped their parents out regularly, they love those kids to death, but saying Clark is “on the spectrum” as a cover story, just to explain him being different, is something that sticks in their craw for reasons they can’t quite articulate. Eventually, they’ll just decide that he’s “sensitive” which is true enough.
“Sensitive” will explain as much as “autistic” and won’t be a lie.
They have fewer visitors these days. Makes it easier to keep Clark’s “training course” set up in the living room. The “obstacle course” as the Kents refer to it is an odd one. Rather than being full of rugged things like ladders and walls and mudpits, it’s a collection of things that you’d see almost anywhere. Silhouettes of people and small animals, stacks of glasses and china, a perfectly ordinary door, a window, and…a hand. Made from a well-worn rubber glove, sometimes full of gelatin, or those toy “snap ’n’ pops” that Ross sells around New Year’s and the 4th of July.
It’s a course designed to teach Clark how to function in a world that he’s literally alien to. A world that, as he grows, (thankfully at a “normal” rate) is less and less able to hurt him. Other than a bit of queasiness if he spends too much time near parts of the ship he landed in, something the Kents attribute to vague memories of how terrifying re-entry must have been, there’s almost nothing of Earth that can affect him, much less harm him.
Clark’s never had a cold, or even a runny nose. The allergies that sometimes drive Martha spare (“I’ve grown up around wheat fields, how am I allergic to them?” is her usual gripe, to which Jonathan smiles and remembers to pick up extra benadryl when he runs into town) never affect Clark. While there are foods he doesn’t particularly like (liver, most notably. He’s seen it raw, he won’t even try it), there’s nothing he’s allergic to. It’s a nice counterbalance to the inability to vaccinate him by needle. Doc Barnes just filled out the forms at the right time, fed Clark oral “vaccines” in front of his nurses while feeding them a line about Clark being terrified of needles, so they could truthfully say he’d been vaccinated if asked. They didn’t need to know it was sugar water and a bit of food dye for color.
The obstacle course is something Clark deals with daily. He’s gotten quite good at it. It’s designed to help him be hyper-aware of bumping/brushing into things & people, and how hard to squeeze when shaking hands with people. None of this is “natural” for Clark. He’s had to work harder than any child his age should have to work at things like “Shaking hands without crushing them” and “how to bump into people like a human.”
None of these are things anyone normally has to learn beyond basic politeness. But if Clark gets a handshake wrong, or bumps into someone too hard, he could cripple them. At the same time they’re teaching him to be hyperaware of his body and how he moves, they’re working even harder to teach him how to not hear everything for miles. That’s where the books on meditation have been a lifesaver.
For a small child for whom having a cat meowing five miles away be just as loud as it is for the person who’s lap it’s sitting in, all the noise made by humans, animals, and the weather is almost traumatic. But, they’ve slowly helped him learn to control his hearing as much as he controls the more active aspects of his vision.
In many ways, at the age of seven, Clark Kent could give a stereotypical Shaolin Monk a run for their money in the meditation and focus areas. He wakes before his parents now, and spends that time, dead quiet for everyone else, sitting in his bed, going through the meditations that help him block out the sounds of a planet that never truly sleeps.
He’s gained a reputation of being a shy child. But he’s not shy. He’s watching, the way his parents have taught him to. How fast the other kids run. How high they jump. When to cry, when to shake it off. Months before starting first grade, Clark Kent has learned more about how people interact with their world than most of the faculty of Kansas State.
The Kents are grateful that Clark isn’t human or close to it. A human boy of Clark’s age would never be able to handle any of this at the level he has to. But Clark is far smarter and more mature than a human boy his age would be, and from what they can tell, has a nigh-perfect memory.
It’s not all testing. It’s not all day-in/day-out drills. There’s love, too. As the Kents have taught Clark how to be human, Clark has taught them how to be more free with their feelings. They’re hardly touchy-feely outside of the house, but inside, hugs and kisses are given and accepted freely, and it’s okay to make a mistake. “Messing up is just God’s way of reminding you that you’re not perfect and you have to always try harder.” is Jonathan’s philosophy.
By giving Clark the freedom to make mistakes, and a safe space in which to make them, they avoid what would be the horrible mistake of teaching him that he either has to be, or worse, is perfect.
Clark will learn more, and grow more, and over time, become the man the world looks up to, the man who will sacrifice himself to keep his world safe. Then, somehow, he’ll come back. As Superman, he’ll speak of Earth as his “adopted” world because he has to. The danger to his mother is too great to do otherwise.
But in the moments he’s alone with her, they quietly share the truth: this is his home, not Krypton. This small, backwards planet under a middling yellow sun, not the former glory of one of the most advanced planets in the galaxy. Clark may have been born on Krypton, but he will always be from Earth.