As the sun set, the sky turned orange, then red, across scattered clouds like flowers at bloom. The land below stretched as far as the eye could see, warm summer breeze tangled forever with waving grasses.
Under that sky had roamed all manner of man, and once, vast herds of bison. The Niukonska, people of the middle waters, laid claim to these lands. The French settlers called them Osage, as they had made a home near the Osage river, in what would eventually become Missouri, on the planet Earth.
Tan-skinned warriors, fiercely tall, feathered and painted, they fought with lances decorated with the blood of their enemies: the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Kickapoo. The Kiowa, once gathered up in the weathered crags of the Wichita Mountains and slaughtered to the last woman and child.
In bitter battles for land, the Cherokee rode into Pasona and Pasuga, the Osage men away to hunt, and murdered or captured the woman and children, old and infirmed, burned, looted, leaving nothing behind save vultures, black and opportunistic. When the hunting parties returned to the scorched plain that had been home, the Osage men set ambush, and for twenty years extracted gory revenge.
White men, the Spanish, the French, English turned American, came for fur, for railroads that moved cattle from the north to Texas. The Americans, with the Cherokee, drove the Osage to Kansas, where corn turns to wheat, soft in the summer, hard for the winter, abandoning Missouri, Arkansas, and, for a time, Oklahoma.
Smallpox ravaged their numbers.
The Osage allied with Armstrong Custer against the Cheyenne.
Civil War turned their horses and food into war and famine.
Lawrence, Kansas, burned to the ground.
Kansas seemed at ease to both reservations and freed slaves, Exodusters, and provided a base for the subjugation of all the first nations.
An Osage man married an American woman, with little regard to customs or approval. They settled in this land, Kansas, to put blood, war, famine, and that subjugation to the past.
There was born a son, who grew up, a generation after the Osage, the Choctaw, the Kickapoo and Kiowa, the Cherokee, and the Cheyenne. Then, a generation after the native man married the American woman, the land turned to dust and blew away.
Raised in dust, in drought, in hardship, Jack Kent, breathing dirt, spent his seventh year on Earth watching the soil change day to night, watching his father's farm turn to ruin, and watching his mother gasp a last, labored breath, her lungs choked with the land wrested from the Osage a hundred years before he was born.
He spent that summer killing rabbits. Black tailed jackrabbits, no natural predators left, starving, eating what's left of the grasses, were herded into pens, ten thousand or more at once, and all the children of Smallville, Kansas, met them with sticks and stones, clubs, axe handles, and hammers. The rabbits' screams were like the cries of infants, their corpses piled in barbed wired corners to rot.
The fortunate jackrabbits suffocated in the open, the dust so thick headlights were swallowed up and men couldn't find their porch from the yard.
Less than ten years later, Jack's father and step-mother went to Coffeyville, to work maintenance, and secretarial work for the Army, and Jack went off to kill Nazis. The barren farm was a bitter reminder of everything they had fought for and everything they had lost.
Jack returned to Smallville some years later, to lay his father to rest in the overgrown yard where he grew up, his step-mother long since passed.
Standing at that forsaken farm, his hands rough, calloused, stained with the blood of man and beast alike, Jack set to work restoring the only happy place he had ever known. He woke before the dawn and quit as the glorious yellow sun settled red in the west.
The years peeled away, until, finally, again, soft wheat grew in the summer and hard wheat grew in the winter.
Jack's son Jonathan, born with the rebirth of a nation, knew hard work, but never knew hardship. Jonathan buried Jack next to his father, secure in the knowledge that Jack had lead a worthwhile life and had spent the last decade at peace. He had rose just before dawn, and every evening he watched the sunset, sometimes sharing a cigarette with Jonathan. He told Jonathan stories about the land and its bloody history, about his parents, and their parents, about the worth of human life, the will to fight and do right.
Jonathan loved the farm and, because of that, it was in good hands. Strong hands, worn thick from hard work.
He married Martha Clark, who he had known since they chased each other in Elementary school. Martha had no skill or desire for farming, but she was good with numbers, and under her guidance, the farm modernized, prospered, flourished.
He didn't remember how many miscarriages she had before they gave up having children, but she did. When pregnancy became a chore, when her fear outweighed her excitement, she knew it was time to move on. She became quieter then.
He would find her at the gravestones, planting flowers, clearing off leaves. Sometimes talking quietly to Jack. Perhaps there was a heaven and he gave her comfort from the afterlife.
Clark didn't know how he arrived in their lives, only that they told him he appeared when they stopped looking. He knew his mother was almost always happy, as if he had been left under the Christmas tree by elves.
His parents doted on each other, shared a kind of love he could only hope to capture one day. They spoiled him, told him about the farm, about his grandparents, about Kansas. Occasionally they told him about mankind's ability to destroy each other over scraps of land, when there was room enough for everyone.
They got him pets, a dog, several farm cats, a hutch full of rabbits with silly names. He learned from a young age to care for them, instilled with a sense of worth, a sense of empathy for all God's creatures, and the difference between pets and food.
Like his mother, he didn't take to farming, a source of exaggerated consternation from his father. Nor, however, did he take to numbers. The playing field for his parent's bragging rights was still open.
He was a sensitive child, but stood up for himself. He was selfless, but firm in conviction, and he knew the difference between right and wrong. He made mistakes, as all children do, but, he took the lesson well.
Like Jonathan, Clark had caught his mother talking to Jack once or twice. He wished he had known his grandfather, but Clark lived in the present. Secure in where he came from, in where he was going.
In high school, he studied medicine, perhaps to be a vet, perhaps a doctor.
The day Clark laid Jonathan to rest, beside Jack, beside his grandfather, his mother's sunflowers caught the last of the golden light. Martha rocked slowly on the porch, silent, as she'd been for nearly the day. Jonathan's lap cat, the mackerel tabby, pushes his head against her calf, over and over again, providing solace for them both.
Clark kept his distance, he knew his mother.
Over the next few days Clark focused on the farm, crawling numb from bed before dawn, pushing back up on the porch at sunset. He cried, sometimes with embarrassment, holding his hot face in the crook of his arm, or squinting his eyes in hopes they'd hold in tears. Sometime he cried openly, proudly, loud enough his mother would hear, perhaps his father, as well.
Martha talks again, sliding into it like she never quit. Small talk, at first, then gradually, beautifully, stories about his father. Her husband. The son of Jack Kent and grandson of a man beaten down by very land he pledged his soul to.
Clark, into his 20s, sat with his mother on the porch, sometimes sharing a cigarette, sometimes stories about his father that she didn't know.
The mackerel tabby was buried in the flower garden, nutrients for the sunflowers.
Looking back, these were his favorite memories of his mother. Not the laughter of when he was young, or the look on her face when she saw him each morning. Not the joy she took in flirting with her husband, or the quiet she took in the end of each day.
It was the evenings on the porch, after his father died.
When he was old enough to understand her sacrifices, her pain, her happiness. When he watched her sadness turn to comfort, then anticipation when her time grew near. When she had told him all the stories a hundred times over, until he felt like he had lived all the lives down the generations shared with him. A land that had cycled between blood and dirt, now cycled between wheat and sunset.
She was the last Kent to be buried on the farm.
In the future, it became a historical site, the plaque brushing away the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Kickapoo and the Kiowa (once gathered up in the weathered crags of the Wichita Mountains and slaughtered to the last woman and child.) It brushed away the French and the Spanish, the unusual union between Osage man and American woman. It brushed away rabbits and Nazis. Dust so thick it sent people to early graves, and blotted out the sun. It even brushed away Jonathan and Martha, and their joy of watching ravaged land succumb to amber waves of grain.
Here is the Kent Farm, it reads. The birthplace of Earth's greatest hero, Superman.
Clark, however, never forgot the stories his father told him and his mother repeated. He never forgot the bitter, savage lessons learned from man's history and the very land itself.
He never forgot his mother's smile, on that last day, of having lived a joyous life. Her calm as she closed her eyes for the last time, his hand in hers. Her skin as thin as tissue, her bones riddled with arthritis.
He cried openly then, with no pretense of otherwise.
And then he woke up.