Man proposes, God disposes.
We did have the conversation, but the subject turned out to be completely different from what my father and I had planned while standing in the bank lobby.
On the drive home from the fair, a car flipped over in front of us.
It rolled several times before bursting into flames.
Dad slammed on the brakes and grabbed the fire extinguisher, while I was already running toward the wreck.
Through the rear window, I could see the back of the driver’s head.
I knew whose car it was.
Smallville was too small for me not to recognize the cars belonging to my classmates.
Whitney Fordman.
The same guy whose nose I’d broken yesterday.
The same guy who had threatened me earlier today.
The same guy who happened to be dating the girl I liked.
Naturally, I could have slowed down.
That would have solved a couple of minor problems.
As the saying goes, no man, no problem.
But no.
I ran toward the wreck as if the person trapped inside were someone I loved more than anyone else in the world.
Everything else was temporary.
Petty.
Dust.
What mattered was that a human being was sitting inside that burning car, and in a few seconds he was going to die right in front of me.
Good person, bad person, friend, enemy, rival, jealous asshole.
None of that mattered.
He was a person.
Life was simply too good a thing not to value, both in yourself and in others.
I reached the car and grabbed the door.
I had intended to open it normally, but it was jammed, so I had to put some force into it.
A little too much force.
The entire door came off in my hands.
Well, whatever.
There wasn’t exactly time to worry about that.
I ripped the seat belt apart, grabbed Whitney, and hauled him away from the wreck as fast as I could.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t fast enough.
I still hadn’t gotten used to my “speed.”
For some reason, whenever something happened suddenly, I kept forgetting to use it.
Even now, despite knowing exactly what my body was capable of, I’d instinctively run at the pace of an exceptionally fast and well-trained human being.
Then the gas tank exploded.
The blast slammed into my armored back.
Fire washed over me, followed by chunks of metal and debris.
I barely felt any of it.
Damn.
This body was getting better and better.
I liked it more every day.
Dad came running toward us.
When he tried to grab me, he burned his hand on my jacket.
Whitney coughed.
He was alive.
Good.
After we got Whitney to the hospital, Dad and I spent the entire drive home, and another hour after we arrived, trying to calm Mom down.
She’d been terrified for both of us.
She hadn’t shown it much, but she didn’t need to.
We could feel it.
Just as she could feel what was going on with us.
What else could you say?
***
Earlier that morning, Lex had arranged to purchase a fairly large order of food from our farm for his castle.
The order included fruit, vegetables, eggs, flour, and meat.
He’d paid in advance and even tried to add a little extra, but Jonathan had been completely unwilling to accept it.
Dad sold everything at exactly the same prices he would have charged any other customer.
Watching the two of them negotiate had been pretty amusing.
Either way, the extra money was welcome.
More importantly, it was honest money, and that mattered to both Dad and me.
If Lex, or more accurately the manager of his estate, liked the quality of our products and decided to make these deliveries a regular arrangement, that would be even better.
The biggest problem for farmers, and for small agricultural producers in general, wasn’t producing the goods.
It was selling them.
Growing something was only half the job.
You still had to find someone willing to buy it.
We couldn’t exactly abandon the farm and stand behind a market stall in town all day.
There was only one of us in two places, and somebody had to stay on the farm.
Hiring someone to handle sales was expensive and complicated, especially when you factored in the seasonal nature of agricultural work.
That was why small farmers were often forced to deal with large-scale buyers.
And those buyers knew exactly how desperate the farmers were.
They knew the farmers had limited options, so they rarely offered a fair price.
They had to make money too, after all.
That meant an order from Luthor, even one that was relatively small by his standards, was extremely useful for us.
Especially because he was paying retail prices.
It was real cash during the off-season.
Fruit, vegetables, eggs…
Those were easy.
Put them in boxes and transport them.
Meat was a little more complicated.
The “carrier” for the meat still had to be slaughtered and butchered.
Well, what did people expect?
A farm was a place where livestock was raised for slaughter.
That was simply the reality.
During the main season, it was obviously more profitable and convenient to take a large number of animals to a slaughterhouse and sell them to a buyer than to slaughter, butcher, and transport everything ourselves.
Small orders were different.
If Luthor wanted fifty kilograms of beef, he wanted fifty kilograms of beef.
He didn’t want us to bring him a calf on a rope and tell him to slaughter it himself.
Those thoughts drifted lazily through my mind as I led the calf away from the herd toward a distant shed.
Once we were out of sight, I killed it with a single, sharp punch to the head.
It was routine.
Especially for Clark Kent.
The reason was simple.
I had started school late.
Obviously, the United States had compulsory education.
Children’s school attendance was monitored, and schools were expected to make sure kids actually received an education.
But Smallville was practically a village, and people in small towns had a somewhat more relaxed relationship with regulations.
I had no idea exactly which loopholes Jonathan had used, or which crooked and straight paths he’d taken, but I hadn’t attended elementary school in the conventional sense.
I’d apparently been educated at home, or perhaps through some kind of external-study arrangement.
I didn’t actually start attending school until middle school, when I was eleven.
Why?
It was simple.
The moment Jonathan Kent had once seen me holding an enormous old oak bed over my head, the subject of me getting into a school fight became one of his and Martha’s greatest nightmares.
The bed hadn’t survived its close relationship with me, by the way.
Neither had quite a few other household objects.
The Kents honestly deserved a monument for raising me.
Imagine raising a little kid who could break an oak table with a slap, punch a hole through a wall by throwing a toy, and run around the house at supersonic speeds. This chapter was copied from novelping(.)com without permission.
Simply surviving next to a walking natural disaster like that required more than good luck.
So why am I mentioning all this?
Because I wasn’t allowed to attend school until I’d passed a rather unusual test my father had devised.
I had to prove that I could hit a bull without killing it.
It wasn’t easy.
For three years, from the age of nine until I was eleven, Jonathan stopped taking the cattle to the slaughterhouse.
Instead, he rented refrigerated trucks and transported already butchered beef carcasses.
It wasn’t a huge saving, but it was a saving.
Although, considering how much additional work the slaughtering, butchering, and preparation required, I eventually came to the conclusion that the savings probably weren’t worth the trouble.
What can I say?
Yes, it was cruel.
Yes, it was probably unhealthy for a child’s developing mind.
And it certainly wasn’t good for Jonathan’s adult psyche either.
Watching a nine-year-old boy stand there with an apologetic smile while wiping blood from his face after punching a bull’s head into pieces wasn’t exactly the sort of thing a father wanted to see.
But it was effective.
And it was easy for a child to understand.
I think Dad did the right thing.
The fact that I never killed or seriously injured another human being was entirely his achievement.
After that kind of preparation, I was the quietest and least confrontational student in middle school.
My teachers absolutely loved me.
And then yesterday, I had gone and started a fistfight at the school dance.
Afterward, the adults all seemed to have the same question.
Not for me.
For Whitney.
How in the world had he managed to push Kent that far?
Quiet little Kent.
The kid who never pushed anyone.
The kid who walked through school instead of running.
The kid who never raised his voice unless he had a reason.
Well, Whitney had certainly given me a reason.
And it wasn’t exactly a secret.
The ridiculous Scarecrow tradition was well known in Smallville, including among the adults.
That’s why I hadn’t been summoned to the principal’s office.
That’s why Whitney’s mother hadn’t stormed into the school demanding justice.
Quite the opposite.
She’d quietly approached my father near the beginning of the fair and apologized to him on behalf of her son.
When I found that out, I felt…
Well, embarrassed.
I wasn’t even sure what I was embarrassed about.
I’d done what I thought was right.
Yet somehow, it still unsettled me.
My peace of mind had been shaken.
Then Whitney came along with his threats and demands and put everything back into place.
He proved that what I’d done had been justified.
Still, remembering the dozens of cattle I’d slaughtered in those years left an unpleasant sediment at the bottom of my soul as I led the calf toward the shed.
But a farm was a farm.
Work was work.
And meat was meat.
So…
Sorry, kid.
I’ll make it quick.
You won’t suffer.