Miracle Monday Read Free Page B

the students were all at school. The rest of the ride was uncommonly quiet. Halfway through the morning, all the students who were on the bus, except for Clark, seemed to have forgotten the incident. Clark left school that day at lunchtime.
     
 
    Jonathan Kent was planning on liking his new career. He was supposed to have gotten rid of the farm years ago on doctor's orders, but the advent of a son had delayed that. It's just plain common sense that a little kid can't keep a big secret in a small town, and little Clark's secret was as big as they come. Doc Hill told Jonathan then that if he kept up the hard work he wouldn't live to see another president sworn in. Well, he'd lived to see two or three, he couldn't remember exactly how many it'd been. All he'd needed was a boy to share the work and to call him Pa.
    Clark was older now, though, and he could keep his own secrets; and running a general store right in town just a few blocks from home was lots better for body and soul than pitching hay—as long as Martha kept the books straight. Jonathan was rearranging his display of detergent boxes from alphabetical order to size places for the second time this week when the pay phone near the door rang.
    "Kent's General Store, Jonathan Kent here."
    "Jonathan, is that you?"
    "It was when I answered the phone. Don't see any reason it'd change now. Something wrong, Martha?"
    "It's Clark."
    "What about Clark?"
    "He came home early from school. He's running a fever."
    Jonathan was about to say something to the effect that boys get sick sometimes, but then realized that Clark had never been sick before. "You suppose your thermometer could be wrong?" he asked his wife.
    "The temperature is the least of it. He walked in red-eyed and he hasn't stopped crying since he got here. He's in his room under the covers and shivering and he won't tell me what's wrong. Jonathan, I think it could be some sort of unknown ailment we can't do anything about. That's the only sickness I can imagine him getting. I don't know whether or not to call Doc Hill."
    "Lyndon? No, don't call him. I'm afraid he might still remember breaking a needle on Clark's arm when he was a baby. We'd have a devil of a time explaining if it turned out to be some space bug giving him the shakes. Just keep him warm until I get there and we'll figure out what to do."
    Jonathan was a strong man, Martha knew. Underneath his glasses, his mild manners, his sheepish grin was the boy who had spirited her off in his buggy to a justice of the peace when he couldn't convince her father he could support a wife; the man who had taken a hundred twenty acres of the rockiest thicket in Kansas and twisted it into a wheatfield and a home; the husband in whose face she found love and prayer and hope when she had despaired over being unable to give birth. Middle-aged and childless, Martha Clark Kent grew to want no more from life than to grow old in the company of this unshakably good man. Then, as happened to Abraham's aged wife Sarah, the Heavens gave her a son.
    Someday soon she would learn the origin of her son, the toddler she and Jonathan had found in an object she thought was a falling star one afternoon when they were on their way to look over a used tractor. She would learn of his flight from a dying planet, cast off into space by his parents. She would even learn the name of the planet—Krypton—and the names of the parents- Jor-El and Lara. But for most of the time she knew her adopted son, Martha Kent would know no more about him than that the boy had had, when she first saw him, the most angelic face she had ever seen. She wondered if all angels rode falling stars when they came to Earth.
    Before Jonathan closed the gate of the picket fence, Martha had already flown out the door and into his arms with a "Jonathan! Jonathan!"
    "Now what's all this about the boy being sick?" he asked as he fairly carried her back through the door.
    "He won't talk to me. He may be delirious. He made his