trajectory CHAPTER TWO: TIES THAT BIND
Most days on the Kent farm were full enough. There was work to be done - far more than was meant for two people alone, but the yields from that work afforded them little help. Martha feared for her overworked husband and threw herself into the farm's maintenance alongside him, leaving almost nothing of the space between sunsets to reflect on the absence that neither of them could really understand feeling.
They didn't talk like they used to, exchanging warmth and wit with ease and eagerness, but there was no love lost between them. They'd slipped into a comfortable age, in which they saw no mystery to require much conversation, and little conflict to ignite it. With only the two of them, in relative isolation, life was harmonious by both necessity and design. Though Jonathan sometimes felt he'd kept Martha from being who she could have been - the affluent and successful lawyer that her father had wished and expected her to be - and she in turn feared that she was not enough help to him, they felt content in one another.
Most days.
But there was one day, each October for the past twelve years, on which the one emptiness that haunted them and kept them from feeling truly complete thrust itself into the foreground. On that day, though the business of life went on, each part of it felt a little less purposeful. Jonathan would reflect bitterly on his home, his legacy, how he toiled day after to day to preserve what had been handed down to him, acutely aware he didn't have anyone to pass it along to himself.
Martha ached to fill her arms and heart with the life of someone who would depend on her, who would come to her with triumphs and defeats and need both her counsel and her praise. A little face to nurture, to watch grow, to become what only a child raised by her and Jonathan could be.
They'd considered adoption. Almost every year at this time they discussed it again, really only in the hope that this would be the year that they would find the face they'd been searching for. They contacted agencies, sometimes adding themselves to lists only to ask to be removed later. Though nearly desperate to open their home to a child who needed them, they inexplicably knew that it was meant for only one child. Something indefinable held them back, binding them to a lost boy that was never theirs, a pair of smiling eyes set into a preternaturally serene face that had been snatched from their grasp before he was really in it. Jonathan and Martha Kent longed to share their lives and their quiet rooms with that surely boisterous and ebullient presence, and no amount of trying to replace that image could quell that thought.
They had a sense of destiny.
Inevitably, after applications had been filed and petitions had been signed, one or both would find themselves in the storm cellar, peeling back an oil cloth that covered the secret of the child they'd known for less than an instant. Somehow, though they seldom gave voice to it, they both knew that the boy was meant to be there, with them. No child they saw could replace the image that had already been burned into their memories.
The only hope they had was to believe they'd find him again.
"Jonathan, no!" Martha hoarsely insisted, holding her husband back by the elbow as he pulled his well-loved jacket on over the t-shirt he'd been sleeping in. "You can't go out there by yourself, you don't know who might be out there - or how many there are!" The worry on her face was evident, even in the half-light of the moon filtering through the kitchen curtains.
"I'll be fine, Martha, it's probably just a dog or something caught in that bale of chicken wire," he protested lightly, placing a hand on the doorknob as he made a move to investigate the scuffling sound they'd both heard coming from the barn. "We've found stranger things holed up in there."
"Well, then I'm going with you," Martha asserted.
"No, you wait here, I'll be right back," Jonathan ordered. "I'm sure it's nothing."
Martha nodded, long-familiar with her husband's protective attributes. "You're sure it's safe?" she queried in open concern, her eyes widened with unease.
"Of course I'm sure, nothing to worry about," Jonathan answered with a "scouts' honor" expression and an affirming kiss on her forehead.
"Good," Martha said with a stalwart nod of her head. "Then there's no reason I shouldn't go with you," and she ducked under his arm and through the door before he could object again.
Jonathan Kent, you really should have seen that coming. With a sigh that commingled the small defeat with his undiminished admiration for his wife's boldness and wit, he followed her to the barn, the requisite baseball bat clutched firmly in hand.
Martha paused just outside the gaping entrance to the structure, letting Jonathan take the lead as they advanced inside. There were always flashlights in the tool chest, which stood nearby, so he gingerly slid the drawer open, taking one light for himself and one for Martha.
Jonathan cast the beam over the main level, finding everything in dormant order as expected. Even the chicken wire, which he'd been chiding himself for not putting away properly as he brushed his teeth that evening, lay undisturbed and unoffending to any unfortunate wildlife - though he didn't remember having left it rolled so neatly. He toured the room cautiously, peering around corners and under workbenches laden with newly-whitewashed shutters for the house. He'd been meaning to paint them for years, but the work of the farm never eased long enough, and there were barely enough hands to get it done. He'd made time now, as a gift for Martha. He couldn't give her finery, but he could give her crisp white shutters.
"I don't see anything," Jonathan reported, turning a circle in the center of the room and letting the beam of light follow his eyes. He'd almost decided that it might have just been the wind at the loft window again, making the always-closed doors clatter against their hinges, when the blue-white light fell on something just barely visible on the floor of the loft, near the top step. Something almost completely obscured by a dusty horse blanket slung over the rail.
Something that moved.
"Jonathan!" Martha exclaimed when they both heard something scramble, and the foot that Jonathan had seen retreated from view.
Jonathan leapt up the stairs two at a time, arriving at the top to find a dark, frail figure clawing desperately at the locked window. "Give it up, you're caught," Jonathan ordered. "Who are you? What do you think you're doing here?" He advanced on the intruder, expecting retaliation, and was surprised when the slender image retreated into a shadowy corner, stealthily, quietly - fearfully.
Jonathan looked over his shoulder to find Martha had come up as well, and was standing with a hand over her heart as she apprehensively watched her husband step precariously closer to their uninvited guest. "Jonathan," she whispered, though she didn't know why.
"Stay back, Martha," Jonathan directed with an open-handed arm stretched toward her. He moved in on the huddled being in the corner, who plainly had more fear of Jonathan than he himself possessed, especially now that there seemed to be no threat. He let the light wash over the darkly-clad boy - it must be a boy, for the shoulders belied that much - and knelt before him. "Who are you?" Jonathan repeated with much softer intonation. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm sorry," came the boy's muffled words, spoken through his knees where he'd hidden his face, his head covered with a newsboy cap. "I was just - I was going to sleep here, I would have been gone by morning."
Jonathan reached a hand out to the boy's shoulder, but he gasped and shied away, pulling further into the corner and tucking his chin deeper against his chest.
"I'm sorry - so sorry - I wouldn't have been any trouble, you wouldn't have known I was here if I hadn't gotten tangled in the chicken wire - but I got it all rolled up again, I'm sorry!" The boy - about fourteen years of age, if Jonathan were to venture a guess - clearly expected dire repercussions for his actions.
He got tangled in the chicken wire and rolled it up again in ninety seconds? There's not a scratch on him. But closer examination did indeed reveal evidence of clothing that had lost a skirmish with the mesh's raw edges. "It's okay, I'm the one who left it out," Jonathan appeased, offering a compassionate smile that gathered in the warm creases around his eyes. "How did you get it rolled up so fast?" He needed to gain something of a rapport with the youth; there was clearly no forcing him out of the loft. They needed trust.
The boy finally looked up, his brow furrowed in confusion. "Why should it have taken longer?"
But the words were lost to Jonathan - it was only the lips they passed through that he noticed, the eyes, the dark locks protruding from the beneath the gray cap. They wore the guise of strife and struggle now, but he remembered them spread with serenity, a smile with promise… that little face.
Jonathan fell back from his knees, colliding with the floor but keeping the light trained on the boy's face. "Mar… Martha…" he beckoned, barely able to summon a whisper, let alone the full force of his voice. Martha! He could only cry out on the inside.
Martha rushed to his side, all of her concerns about how he'd been pushing himself to do the work of ten men converging in one fearful moment. His demeanor was stricken, as if his heart were in the clutches of a crushing vise. The doctor warned you about straining yourself… But then Martha looked at the boy.
The little face.