Chapter Text
THE KANSAS STAR
Smallville, Kansas, Friday Evening, April 6, 1917
U.S. OFFICIALLY AT WAR
WILSON TELLS PLANS FOR RAISING ARMIES
Approves of Conscription of 500,000 Men in Addition to Regulars
Jonathan sucked in his gut and wrestled with the fiddly brass buttons of the old blue tunic. He had one fastened, then another, and was halfway through the third when his vision was suddenly blocked by a golden biscuit dripping with raspberry jam and a generous smear of butter.
“Take a bite,” Martha commanded.
He dutifully opened his mouth, letting the air he had been holding escape in a huff, and bit down. Crumbs dusted the front of his uniform as he chewed.
“I swear these biscuits of yours are half the reason this jacket won’t shut,” he said, brushing at the tunic — still nearly as sharp as it had looked when he first drew it from the quartermaster’s stores back in ’98.
Martha poked him right in the stomach where his undershirt peeked through the straining buttons. “I was taught a woman keeps her man by keeping him fed.”
“Sure, by fattening him up so he can’t run away. I see through your schemes, Martha Kent.”
“Then have another bite,” she cooed, and pressed the biscuit back to his lips.
It was then that Clark made his displeasure known.
Imprisoned in his high chair, he strained with all his might to break free. First he pitched to the left, then to the right, shrieking at the top of his lungs. He wriggled at the leg openings as if he might slip clean through, then pushed upward, testing the tray that pinned him down. At last he flung his little body forward so hard that the tiny wheels beneath the chair squeaked and began to roll him steadily across the kitchen floor.
Jonathan calmly stuck out one boot and brought the escape to a halt, finishing the last of his buttons as though detaining an inmate was all in a day’s work.
At the stove, Martha tugged at her wrapper with one hand and stirred the porridge with the other. “Yes, yes, I hear you,” she said over the boy’s yelps. “You’ll have your share too — just give me a moment.”
Jonathan buckled his belt and sword into place while Martha stirred the pot, each lost in their own small task. Then — crack! The sound rang through the kitchen like a pistol shot. Jonathan’s body moved before his mind caught up. The high chair’s tray had split clean down the middle and Clark pitched forward, shrieking with wild delight as he tumbled. The sword clattered to the floor as Jonathan lunged and caught him mid-air, the child’s soft weight colliding against his chest.
“What happened?” Martha cried, spinning around, her hand gripping the collar of her wrapper.
“Chair gave way,” Jonathan said, breathless, shifting Clark onto his hip. The boy only laughed, triumphant at last in his jailbreak. “Old thing was bound to.”
Old was right. That chair had rocked him when he was a baby, packed tight in his parents’ covered wagon as they rattled out of Illinois. It had scraped across Missouri river-crossings, been hauled into Kansas Territory when all there was to see was grass and sky, and stood in the corner of a sod house with a dirt floor. His folks had kept it when they built the first frame house, and when he married Martha he brought it here. Nearly fifty years old, it had finally given way.
Jonathan settled Clark in his lap, balancing the boy against his chest as Martha set down a bowl of porridge. He dipped the spoon, held it before Clark, and felt the tug of surprising strength as the child yanked it into his mouth. Clark gummed the handle, porridge smeared across his chin, then smacked it noisily against the rim of the bowl. Jonathan laughed, letting him have his small victory.
Martha sat beside them, her dark braid trailing down her back. “You better hurry or they’ll start without you,” she said.
“I still got time,” Jonathan answered, but the minutes slipped away. When the clock tolled nine, he handed Clark back to her, grabbed his belt and sword, and stepped out into the sunlight. The July heat hit like an oven door swinging open. He saddled Rose, the black Percheron, sweat already gleaming on her flanks, and swung into the saddle. Martha hurried after him, lifting the old flag he had carried in Cuba. It bore forty-five stars, three shy of the Union now, but it was his — faded, sun-bleached, and still proud. He took it from her, raised it high, and with a sharp kick of his heels sent Rose galloping down the dirt lane, dust billowing in his wake as the flag snapped against the wide, blue prairie sky.
Martha went back inside the house. Clark had abandoned the blanket she had left for him and was now hurling himself from chair to table to stove, pigeon-toed and lurching, as if he meant to skip walking and leap straight into running. She set up her ironing board by the window and pulled the heavy flat iron from the stove, testing its heat with a quick drop of water that hissed away on contact. The sharp scent of hot starch rose as she pressed the pink calico smooth. It was factory-made and store-bought, a wedding gift from her parents; she had worn it when she and Jonathan rode in the back of his father’s cart to town the day the traveling preacher finally arrived, a month later than promised. She had worn it every Sunday since, though she had cut away the great leg-o’-mutton sleeves to remake it into something closer to the new, modern styles she saw in The Ladies’ Home Journal.
Clark clung to the rocking chair, his legs wobbling. He let go, leaned forward, then caught himself again. Two or three times he dared, and then—off! One rolly-polly leg shot forward and he bowled into her skirts, clutching her knees before plopping down square on his bottom. His laughter filled the room. Martha stuck out her tongue at him, and he laughed all the harder.
She finished her ironing and set about making the pair of them decent, made harder by Clark’s determined scheming to escape her questing hands. At last she managed to wrestle him into the brand-new baby dress his Tante had sewn, the bright blue sash tied firmly at his middle. His stockings and soft leather button shoes followed, though no sooner had she turned her back than he had tugged them both off and tossed them under the stove. Martha groaned, fetched them again, and won the second skirmish.
She worked herself into her own layers — shift, combinations, and then the corset she laced with practiced tugs. The pink calico went on next, though she had to crawl halfway beneath the bed in search of her missing button-hook, muttering an “Oy” when she smacked her head on the frame. Shoes buttoned, she unraveled the braid she had slept in and twisted her mousy-brown hair into a neat bun at the nape of her neck. A straw hat, secured with long pins, crowned her labors.
“There!” she announced triumphantly. But Clark, intent on plucking at the strings of his little sunbonnet, only blew a wet raspberry in reply. Martha laughed and bent to kiss his cheek. “Don’t we look as pretty as a picture?”
She packed the picnic basket with care: cold chicken wrapped in paper, hard-boiled eggs, pickles and sauerkraut in stone jars, a loaf of rye bread with a tin of schmaltz, slices of watermelon wrapped in cloth, and her crowning achievement — a rhubarb pie, baked from the last of the stalks she’d coaxed from the garden that spring. Its golden crust shone prettily in the sun slanting through the window.
And then it cracked. One chubby finger pierced straight through the top like a torpedo striking the Lusitania, emerging sticky with pink filling before vanishing into Clark’s mouth.
“Ah! No, you little scamp!” Martha cried, swooping in. She whipped the pie off the table and tucked it safe in the basket before her son could launch a second assault. Clark only squealed in delight, his face smeared with fruit, as if victory belonged entirely to him.
Finally, they were ready. With some juggling worthy of a circus act, Martha managed to shut the farmhouse door while balancing a jug of lemonade, the picnic basket, a folded blanket, and a wiggling baby. She carried the lot to the barn, hitched Betsy to the runabout, and settled Clark on her lap. The mare’s hooves beat a steady rhythm down the dirt lane, each strike raising little puffs of powdery dust that clung to Martha’s skirts and turned Clark’s black shoes gray.
By the time they reached town the sun was high and pitiless, washing the square in white heat. Dust hung in the air like gauze, stirred up by wheels and hooves and the restless feet of the crowd. Ladies waved paper fans or the lids of boxes against their flushed faces. The air smelled of coal smoke, trampled grass, and sweat. Boys darted between wagons with sticks of candy, their mouths stained red. Someone was roasting corn down the street, and the scent curled lazily through the square, mingling with the briny tang of the pickles being hawked from a barrel.
Martha steered the buggy past neighbors calling out greetings, and her eye caught the Ross family standing slightly apart from the throng — Mrs. Ross seated primly under a parasol, her son Peter asleep on her lap, while her husband stood beside her, arms folded across his chest, watching the square with that wary patience he had learned to wear. Across the way, the Langs had claimed a patch of grass; little Lana perched in her father’s arms, her wide eyes darting from flags to bunting to the brass buttons glinting on the veterans’ uniforms.
Martha drew up before her sister’s house. David leaned on the porch rail, his shirt sticking to his back in the heat, big-shouldered and serious for sixteen, his gaze fixed on the gathering crowd.
“Where’s your mother?” Martha called.
“She’s over there, helping with the bunting.”
“And you didn’t go with her?”
“I said I would wait for you.”
“You’re a good boy.” She climbed down with Clark in one arm and the picnic basket in the other. “Help me tie up the horse, would you, David?”
“Of course, Tante Marta.” He moved quickly, taking Betsy’s bridle with practiced ease.
By the time the horse was secured, the speeches had begun. The mayor stood on the steps of town hall, a broad man in a summer suit that clung damply to his frame. He lifted one hand for silence, the other clutching his notes. His belly swayed like a pendulum with each rolling sentence, his words carrying on the heavy air:
“Friends and neighbors, fellow citizens of Smallville! On this Fourth of July, one hundred and forty-one years since our forefathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, we too are called upon to give proof of our devotion to liberty. Our nation has entered the great struggle in Europe — not for conquest, not for glory, but for the rights of man and the safety of democracy! The tyrant’s hand reaches across the ocean, and we shall not stand idle while his armies trample the weak beneath their boots! Every boy who shoulders a rifle, every woman who tends a field or factory, every child who gathers pennies for Liberty Bonds — all are patriots, all are soldiers in this fight. Let us honor the flag today as our fathers honored it at Gettysburg, at Shiloh, at San Juan Hill, and as our sons will honor it in France. God bless America, and God keep safe our boys!”
The crowd roared. Flags shook in the blistering air. The brass band struck up “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” its notes ragged but earnest. Martha shifted Clark on her hip and pressed her free hand to her bonnet to keep it from sailing off in the wind.
David helped his aunt spread the blanket on the grass and dropped down beside her, long legs folded awkwardly. He hardly seemed to notice as Clark clambered over him, one fist buried in David’s thick brown hair, the other stuffed firmly in his mouth. From his perch, Clark gurgled happily and stared at the parade, his blue eyes wide at the spectacle of flags and brass.
The wagons rattled past, wheels creaking under their weight, the bunting snapping in the dry July wind. A clutch of Union veterans rode high, their faded blue uniforms buttoned loosely over withered chests, medals glinting against cloth gone shiny with age. The crowd cheered and clapped. Behind them came the Spanish-American men, stouter and more robust, their tunics a little moth-eaten from two decades of attic storage, but their steps still crisp. Jonathan marched at the front, the flag he had carried in Cuba hoisted high, his chin tipped up against the glare, the fabric snapping over him like a living thing.
And then came the boys. Some in patched trousers, others in Sunday best; no order to them, no rhythm in their marching. They kicked up little storms of dust as they tumbled along behind the veterans, colliding with each other, tipping their hats to the girls in the crowd, shouting, blowing kisses, grinning as though this were all a lark. They had signed their names just days ago, eager to prove themselves men. In a week they would be bound for Camp Funston. Today, they marched as if nothing could touch them, as if France were no further away than the next field.
“Miryam!” Martha called, waving when she spotted her sister and her husband picking through the crowd.
Miriam dropped the hand shading her eyes and grinned. Dr. Smith followed at a more leisurely pace, plucking a cornflower from the grass. “For you, Mrs. Smith,” he said gallantly, handing it off as he helped her down onto the blanket.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she smiled, tucking the flower into her hat brim before peering at the basket. “Is that your rhubarb pie I smell?” she asked in a sing-song voice, rubbing her hands together.
“Yes. I had to beat Jonathan away from it. Clark, though, snuck past my defenses—” Martha crossed her eyes at the boy, who was bouncing against David’s thigh, his cousin keeping him upright with a firm fist on the back of his baby dress.
They began fixing plates, half-listening to the schoolchildren tremble through the Declaration of Independence on the podium.
“Hello, wife! Hello, son!” Jonathan boomed, wobbling toward them and collapsing onto the blanket with a sigh. The sharp tang of liquor rode on his breath.
“And how exactly have you managed to get hold of spirits this early in the afternoon?” Martha demanded.
“The old Union boys had a bottle. We had to do something while we were waiting for the parade to start.” He brightened, lifting a finger as if sealing the case: “We were reliving our glory days.” He bopped her nose with it.
Miriam snorted. “What glory days? The war was over by the time you landed in Cuba.”
“Exactly. While those poor bastards—oh, pardon me, ladies—while those poor boys in the Philippines were getting shot at, I had months of sunny beaches, cigars, rum, and…” he leaned back, grinning, “…beautiful women.”
Martha arched her brow. “Funny, I don’t recall hearing about beautiful women in any of your stories over the last twenty years.”
“Now, now, no need to be jealous, Mrs. Kent. The girls from the barrio were muy bonita, but I preferred the ones from the shleletel.”
“The what?” Miriam asked.
“Shleletel.”
“Shtetl,” Miriam corrected.
“That’s not how Martha says it.”
“Martha speaks Yiddish about as well as you speak Spanish,” Miriam said dryly, ignoring her sister’s retort of, “Oh, bosher!”
“Un trago más, chica!” Jonathan laughed, louder than he meant to. Dr. Smith, chuckling, slipped him a flask. Jonathan lit up. “Why, thank you, Doctor.”
“You’re quite welcome, Mr. Kent.”
“Any more and you’ll be riding that horse backwards,” Martha told him primly.
“It’s fine,” Jonathan grinned, “Rosie knows the way home.”
There was a group of girls, sixteen to twenty years old, drifting between the families spread across the lawn. In white lawn dresses and gloves, parasols tilting above their heads like lilies, they giggled as they drew… something, Martha squinted her eyes trying to see, from the velvet bags at their wrists and pressed them into the hands of blushing boys.
Martha watched in puzzlement until they reached David. Alva Sigmundstad — the town beauty, tall and big-boned, her honey-gold hair piled high in true Gibson Girl fashion — stopped in front of him. David’s ears flushed crimson as she let her eyes linger, her teasing smile slow and deliberate. At last she plucked a white feather from her bag and held it out with mock ceremony.
“Here’s a gift for a brave soldier,” she said sweetly, before laughing sharp and cruel and skipping back to her friends.
It took Martha a heartbeat too long to grasp it. When she did, she sprang to her feet, her voice ringing across the lawn: “He’s only sixteen! He’s too young to sign up!” But Alva was already halfway gone, glancing over her shoulder with eyes alight in merciless delight.
David stared down at the feather as if it had burned him. He tried to throw it aside, but the July wind caught it, twirling it past his shoulder until it danced among the cornflowers.
“Don’t pay her any mind,” Miriam said quickly, laying a hand on her son’s arm. “You’re not a coward. You’re too young, and the army wouldn’t take you. She knows that. She’s an unkind little—” She bit the word off, not fit for company.
“And it’s a good thing too!” Dr. Smith added firmly. “I’ve seen what a bullet does to a man’s insides. I’ll not have my son cut open on the other side of the world for a war that has nothing to do with us.”
Jonathan’s voice, unsteady, grew somber. “It’s not just bullets. I never saw combat, but plenty of men in my company died of dysentery. Terrible way to go. We had to cut a hole in the mattress and put a bucket beneath while they—”
“Jonathan,” Martha interrupted softly, shaking her head. The picnic, the children, the bright day — it wasn’t the place.
Jonathan blinked, as if waking, his eyes still drifting far into memory.
Meanwhile, Clark clambered into David’s lap again, oblivious, his tiny fist tugging insistently at his cousin’s sleeve. The boy looked down at him and managed a smile, though he could still see the white feather dancing in his peripheral.
They talked and ate and laughed, and as evening fell the prairie sky lit up with fireworks. Clark turned at the sudden whistle — high, shrill, cutting through the air — and then flinched hard when it burst into a crack. His wide blue eyes caught the flare of green sparks raining above him. For a moment he only stared, frozen, his lower lip wobbling — then the scream tore free.
Jonathan and Martha had just enough warning to see his little hands reach out, desperate, before Martha scooped him up. He buried his in her collarbone, his sobs rattling through her chest.
“Shh, shh, it’s alright, baby. Mama’s here,” she murmured, rocking him, though each new explosion sent him trembling again.
“We best be getting home,” Jonathan said, his own voice low and certain.
They gathered their things and made their way to Dr. Smith’s barn. David helped hitch the runabout while Jonathan saddled Rosie. Together they moved off into the dusk, Martha guiding the buggy while Jonathan rode beside.
The prairie stretched flat and dark beneath the fading firework haze, their little white house rising out of it, stark and lonely. Cicadas droned from the roadside grass. A cool breeze stirred the wheat. Jonathan thought of the day he and Martha and the neighbors raised that house — bought for $500 from a Sears catalogue, the wood cut and shipped from a fancy factory on the East Coast.
He slipped a hand into his uniform pocket. His fingers closed around the little tin man he’d bought at a stall that morning, its green paint glowing in the dark. Just like the seller had promised. He hesitated, then urged Rosie closer to the buggy and held it out.
“What’s that?” Martha asked.
“A toy. Something for Clark.”
Clark had quieted now, though his face was still blotchy and he was hiccuping. He blinked at the strange green glow, then reached out, clutching the toy in both hands. He absently gnawed a little on the head, his eyes growing half-lidded.
Jonathan started to hum a little, his growing louder and soon the old words came rushing back to him– “Come along get you ready, wear your brand, brand new gown. For there’s going to be a meeting in that good, good old town where you knowed everybody, and they all knowed you. And you’ve got a rabbit’s foot to keep away the hoodoo.”
Martha swiftly joined in, their voices rolling harmony as she rocked Clark with one hand and held onto the reigns with the other, “Where you hear that the preaching does begin, bend down low for to drive away your sin; and when you get religion, you want to shout and sing. There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight! My baby!”
“There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!”
Lex stood on the crowded docks in his starched, green uniform, brass buttons gleaming, brand new. Around him pressed the mob of families and soldiers, the air thick with coal smoke and salt, with sweat and the sour tang of tar from the ropes. It was hot and sticky as their hot breaths puffed out cries and cheers and sobs. A brass band blared out “Over There,” flags fluttered from every hand, but Lex couldn’t hear it over the roaring in his ears. Sweat beaded along his lip and he shivered, inexplicably cold.
Lena stood in front of him. She looked a little watery, like a Monet painting, and Lex wondered if it was his eyes playing tricks on him. Her hair was pinned up instead of hanging loose down her back. The long hem of her dress made her look suddenly older, far too grown up. She was fourteen now — how old would she be by the time the war ended? Married, maybe. Gone from the house. And what would be left for him then, if he came back? Only that awful house and that awful man.
“Mother wanted to come, of course, but she was indisposed,” Lena was saying, words tumbling over each other in her haste. Her gloved hand clamped so hard around his wrist he was sure it would leave bruises. “And Father—well, you know Father.” Her blue eyes flashed with sudden steel. “You will write at least once a week. No excuses! And not like you do at home, scribbling two sentences and calling it done. I want real letters, Lex.”
“As you command, Helena of New Troy.”
“I do command,” she shot back, her grip tightening. “Promise me, Lex. Promise.”
The whistle shrieked. Lex turned toward the dull, gray liner looming at the pier, her black smokestacks belching coal. “I’ve got to go, Lena.”
But Lena clung harder. “Promise me. Don’t leave me all alone. I won’t survive if you leave me all alone.”
Lex’s chest constricted. “Nothing is going to happen. I promise.”
She flung her arms around his neck, crushing him in a hug. His stomach twisted with regret, bitter as bile, at the thought of abandoning her to that house, to Lionel.
“I’ve got to go, Lena,” he said again, gently prying her arms away. “The war will be over by Christmas, you’ll see.”
He let the crowd sweep him along toward the gangplank. For one last instant he could see the tips of her gloved fingers waving high above the throng, fragile and white, before the press of soldiers closed over her and she vanished.
Lex allowed the crush of green uniforms to carry him onto the deck. The ship loomed vast and dark, its glory days long past. Once, she had been the pride of the Hamburg-America Line, but now her gilt trim was painted over in dull wartime gray, her velvet lounges stripped bare, her cabins crammed with cots. The brass letters still spelled out her name along the hull: SS Columbia.
The air on deck was thick with coal smoke and the tang of brine. Lex stumbled into line with the others as an officer barked orders, driving them toward the starboard rail. There they crowded shoulder to shoulder, the deck groaning under the weight of hundreds of boys, each one craning for a last glimpse of home.
The band below struck up again, loud and brassy, and the crowd answered with a roar. Hats waved, handkerchiefs fluttered. The soldiers took up the song, ragged at first, then surging together:
“Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun! Take it on the run, on the run, on the run–!”
Voices cracked and broke, but they sang all the same, shouting down their fear. “Over there, over there! Send word, send word over there! That the Yanks are coming! The Yanks are coming!” Lex’s lips moved without sound. He gripped the rail with both hands, the paint flaking beneath his palms, the cold metal biting through his gloves. He leaned forward, searching, straining for a glimpse of Lena’s face among the blur of upturned eyes and waving arms. But he couldn’t find her. There were only strangers, faceless and unimportant.
He held on tighter, white-knuckled, until the whistle shrieked again and the deck shuddered beneath him. The Columbia heaved slowly from her berth, the water churning in her wake. Cheers rose from the dock, cheers from the deck, but Lex’s stomach sank as the gap widened, as the dock and all its waving hands slipped farther and farther away.
Lionel Luthor gripped the rail of the SS Columbia, staring upward in fear and awe at the colossal woman rising from the harbor. The statue gleamed brown-bronze in the gray light, her torch lifted high into the coal-smudged sky. He was twenty years old, with ten dollars in his pocket, and alone. Once he had lived in a fine townhouse in Munich, studying engineering at the university, his future decided. Then politics had turned sour, contracts dried up, and fortunes crumbled. His father dead, his mother sick, there had been nothing left to stay for.
And now he was here, a stranger in a strange land.
“Mama, I can’t see!” a plaintive voice cried out in Yiddish. It was close enough to German that Lionel caught the meaning. He turned to see a young family at the rail: the father carrying an older girl against his hip, the mother bent double with seasickness, one hand braced against the boards. The younger child — no more than three, in a rumpled dirndl and kerchief — tugged impatiently at her mother’s skirts.
“Be patient, Marta. Here, Miryam, hold onto the rail,” the father said wearily.
“Here, I’ll help you,” Lionel offered before he could stop himself. He bent, braced the little girl beneath her arms. “On three, ja? Eins, zwei, drei — jump!”
He swung her upward, setting her boots against the iron bar. She squealed with delight as she leaned forward, his hand steadying her back. Together they gazed across the water at the towering figure, offering shelter to the tired, the poor, to the huddled masses.