Free It's Superman! A Novel by Tom De Haven Page A

Smallville, Kansas; Dr. Thomas B. Calais (pronounced: “Callus”) will officiate.
    Clark, however, isn’t sure his father plans to attend.
    It’s not that Jonathan Kent is unreligious, or anti-religion, he just has no truck with sectarianism, with doctrine, with trifling dos and fiddling don’ts. Never has had. Not in his makeup. And he is not a Christian, either, although he is probably as familiar with the New Testament as anyone in town, “Dr. Tom” included. He’s fond of the narratives, admires their hero, often quotes from the parables, and once told Clark that the bedrock of his personal philosophy—if an ordinary American farmer with an eighth-grade education ever could presume to use such a word or claim to have any such highfalutin a thing—is the Sermon on the Mount.
    Certainly Mr. Kent believes in God, in a conscious life after death, in the sodality of souls. After his own plain and pell-mell fashion he regularly ponders spiritual matters. Over the years of his life, particularly during the long winter nights of those many years, he has read a number of books with Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, and even Spiritualism in the titles. And all of those paths, so far as he can tell, have their good points.
    Beginning some time ago, however, Mr. Kent made the mistake of sharing a few of those good points. During the general gab at church suppers and picnics, he would casually mention something he’d come across in the Talmud or the Bhagavad Gita, or something Mohammed or Mary Baker Eddy had said, but soon enough he realized it was just earning him a reputation as a contrarian, a crackpot. Dr. Calais’s immediate predecessor once called him an infidel, but he did it with a tiny smile, so it didn’t amount to anything serious. And since Mr. Kent could appreciate the social value of church membership, he might well have continued accompanying his family, at least semi-regularly, to Tomahawk Methodist services and functions had it not been for a couple of things he found impossible to ignore.
    First was that damn temperance statue. Imagine spending the congregation’s money to erect a seven-foot concrete skeleton of King Alcohol holding aloft a bottle of whiskey! It was plain foolishness, and Jon Kent let everyone know how he felt. Dr. Calais, though, had not appreciated the input, which included two long letters published in the Smallville Herald-Progress.
    And then there was the unforgivable business with Dan Tauy. For Mr. Kent it was the last straw when that supercilious prig Tom Calais told the Chippewa handyman that while he could maintain—at a salary too low to be called even a pittance—the church building and cemetery grounds all week long, he and his family could not worship with the congregation on Sunday; they were not welcome.
    That did it. Mr. Kent never again set foot in the Tomahawk Methodist Church.
    Naturally, he wished Martha had joined him in his boycott, but he recognized that he’d put her in a difficult position. After all, it was her grandfather, R. H. Clark, who’d founded the church, back in 1879, when the original town site was plotted out. So Martha continued to attend services, though sporadically, until her illness. Clark usually went with her.
    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