It's Superman! A Novel Read Online Free PDF

to pray for a miracle, even when he knows it’s—what? Hopeless? Hopeless. Nevertheless, he can ask, can’t he?
    And so he does, again.
    Sitting down on his side of the bed and kicking off his shoes, Mr. Kent stretches out in his clothes again. A dull ache spreads through the small of his back. A bunion throbs on his left foot. A tiredness shudders through him.
    He should sell the farm. Clark won’t be staying, he knows that even if his son doesn’t yet. Sell it for whatever he can get and move into town. And do what? Does he have to do something? Open a grocery store, then. Which is what he intended to do before he met and married Martha Clark. Their land, this land here, was her family’s, just a parcel of what had once belonged to her father.
    He shifts around, trying to get comfortable, hoping to ease the chronic ache in his back, then leans over, careful not to wake Martha, and blows out the Aladdin lamp. In the darkness he thinks again how foolish he was for not wiring the house for electricity when crop and pork and beef prices were high and he could have afforded that sort of thing. Not that electric light meant much to him, it meant nothing, but Martha would’ve enjoyed it. Her being such a great reader. It would’ve saved her eyesight. Was from reading all those books by gasoline lamp that finally gave her pretty green eyes a permanent squint. Green eyes. His mother had green eyes, too.
    And thinking of his mother—whom he loved and who died in her thirty-ninth year, diphtheria—he can’t help but remember his father, whom he did not love, though he tried to show the proper and natural respect, even when it was difficult, even when he was treated more like a slave than a son. His father working him on that miserable land near Tillerton that he leased from a suitcase farmer, working him from before sunrise till late at night. Working him half to death. A difficult man, Silas Kent, an angry, prickly, unlucky man, and finally a demented one who deliberately slashed himself across his abdomen with a butcher knife while standing in front of a mirror.
    During the years when Martha, who so yearned to conceive, would sometimes cry out in dull anguish at the first sign of her monthly visitor, Mr. Kent would feel only relief; guilty, unseemly relief. He didn’t know how to be a good father—he knew what it meant, was supposed to mean, but not how to be one—and feared he would become, over time, not just a disappointment to any children of his own, but also the object of their confused outrage and hostile pity. No. Better he was childless.
    Then Clark arrived.
    Mr. Kent pushes himself up in bed and wedges a pillow behind his back.
    Oh, Jonny, it’s a miracle, isn’t it? It was meant to be, wasn’t it? Oh, look at this poor, poor beautiful baby boy. Oh, Jonny, they can’t have him back! You won’t let them take him back, will you, Jonny?
    “They.” “Them.”
    No, Martha, they can’t have him. If they come, I won’t let them take him back.
    “Back.”
    Back where?
    Our son, Jonny! At last! God is good, God is great. God has blessed us!
    But had He? Had He, really?
    Clark changed their lives, filled them with new feelings, chances, and chores, glad ones mostly. There was no denying Martha was a good mother; born to it, as she’d always known. And Clark, no man and woman could have gotten a better son, even if sometimes—especially as a young boy—he seemed remote, unhappy, preferring solitude to the company of schoolmates, to the company of his parents. Catch him when he didn’t know you were looking—his eyes fixed upon his hands or his knees, a point on his bedroom wall or a knot in the table—and his expression was inscrutably morose. He’d see you and smile, and those were the times when Mr. Kent’s heart came nearest to breaking, because those smiles were so awkward and so pretended.
    When Clark was four and five and six years old he rarely spoke, just mumbling out a few words and shaking