A Rhinestone Button Read online

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2003

  Copyright © 2002 Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2003. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2002. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  has been applied for.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36387-9

  v3.1

  For Floyd

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Once upon a time, in the land of Uz, there was a man named Job. He was a man of perfect integrity, who feared God and avoided evil.

  BOOK OF JOB

  One

  Job Sunstrum felt sound, and saw it. He held the hum of a vacuum cleaner in his hands: it was an invisible egg with the smooth, cool feel of glass. A sensation so real he followed its curve with his finger. He left the vacuum sitting in the kitchen, running, occasionally for hours at a time. Listened to the vacuum’s whirr with his eyes closed and smoothed the glass egg in his hands. He rose from these sessions calmed, refreshed, clearheaded. Untroubled, for a time, by the fear and guilt that dogged him.

  Others might have called this pastime meditation, but not Job, as contemplation of nearly any kind other than prayer was discouraged in the circles he travelled. “It’s not good to leave the mind empty,” said Pastor Ludwig Henschell from his pulpit at Godsfinger Baptist. “An unoccupied mind is the playing field of the devil.”

  The voices of the congregation as they sang a hymn produced, for Job, concentric rings of colour, like the rippling circles falling rain created on the surface of a slough. His friend Will’s voice was the deep blue-green of a spruce tree. Stinky Steinke’s was the blue-black of a crow’s wing. The sopranos’ circles were small and brilliant, in dazzling whites, yellows, peaches, pinks. Penny Blust’s was the colour of pink lemonade. The altos tended to the purples, like Barbara Stubblefield’s, the blue-violet of flowering borage. Circles of colour that rippled outward, blended with one another. A vision Job experienced out there, projected a half foot in front of him, as if onto a transparent screen through which he saw the world around him.

  Job sometimes stopped singing, lost his boundaries of self to the pool of colours, in the same way that he expanded, then dissipated, into the expanse of prairie and arching sky as he drove the paved roads. He startled awake to his shrunken self when the hymn came to an end, just as he did while driving when he met an oversized stop sign or rumble strips, a series of bumps on the asphalt that warned mesmerized drivers of an upcoming intersection. But when he was submerged in the congregation’s singing he also felt a certainty, a thrill of recognition as if he had unexpectedly seen a beloved on a strange street in an unfamiliar city. The passion of aha! Of eureka! Though what it was he knew, what it was he had discovered, he couldn’t say. It was a feeling that lasted for just a moment after the song was over. A knowing. At these times he knew God was real with the same instinctive confidence with which he knew how to breathe.

  It was a phenomenon he kept to himself. He had tried telling his best friend, Will Stubblefield, when they were still children. Job and Will waited for the school bus together at the Sunstrum mailbox. Sang with each other in the junior church choir. Competed against one another with their 4-H calves at Whoop ’er Up Days. Visited each other’s homes after school, slept in each other’s bedrooms, and once when they were twelve they spent the night out in the field together, though Job’s mother had made Jacob, Job’s older brother, join them to make sure they didn’t get into trouble. Plagued by mosquitoes and smelling of insect spray, they snuggled in their sleeping bags and, with Jacob snoring beside them, waited for a show of northern lights.

  Just before midnight the adventure took a turn. “I’m cold,” whispered Job. “Mosquitoes driving me crazy.” He wondered at his brother’s blissful sleep, how the mosquitoes’ whine and bites didn’t wake him. At fourteen, Jacob had grown stinky and large with burgeoning manhood. Job watched his step with his brother, anticipating his moods as he did his father’s. Just as his father would inflict the strap, Jacob would trip him up or wrestle him to the ground, twisting his arm behind his back.

  “Let’s zip our sleeping bags together,” said Will.

  Job listened a moment to hear that his brother was still asleep. “I don’t know.”

  “It’ll be warmer.”

  Job, who was used to doing as he was told, or merely asked, zipped his sleeping bag to Will’s as quietly as he could for fear of waking Jacob, who, he sensed, would put an end to this sleeping-bag business. Jacob rolled over, snorted. The boys eased their way into their bed and Job pulled the edge of the sleeping bag over his face, to warm his nose, to ward off the insistent mosquitoes.

  “You ever kissed a girl?” said Will.

  Job weighed his answer briefly, and decided to answer truthfully. “No.”

  “Me neither. Let’s practise. With our pillows.”

  Job felt a queasy warning in his stomach that he felt each time he was about to step into unknown territory. The whole of Job’s sexual education, as provided by his father, had been delivered in two sentences: “Keep that thing in your pants,” and, after Abe had shot a feral tomcat dead just as it was mounting a barn cat, “That’s what you’ll get if I ever catch you screwing around.” He knew his father suspected that he had begun to abuse himself. One cold night, Job had taken his mother’s blow-dryer from the bathroom cabinet and used it to warm himself under the blankets. The warmth was a relief, but it was the hum of the blow-dryer he enjoyed most. It generated a smooth cylinder in his hand, one he could run his hand up and down. It had the feel of glass, as if he were holding his mother’s clear glass rolling pin, one of the few wedding presents that had survived the years. He closed his eyes and stroked the cylinder, visible only to him, enjoying its smoothness, thrilling at the knowing that came along with it. He didn’t hear his father’s knock and Abe walked in on him, blow-drying his thighs under the covers, stroking his invisible cylinder, his knees making a tent of the blankets.

  “Stop that!” said Abe.

  Job pulled the blow-dryer out from under the covers, turned it off. “What?”

  Abe waved a great paw at him. “Whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “I was just warming up.”

  “That’s your mother’s
blow-dryer, for God’s sake. It’s just sick.” Abe slammed the door shut behind him.

  As Will rolled on his belly and nuzzled his pillow, Job watched in the half light, listening to his brother’s breathing, hoping Jacob was still asleep. He felt Will’s hand on his thigh. “It’s okay,” said Will. “If we’re just pretending.”

  “Pretending?”

  “Like you were a girl.”

  “I’m not a girl.”

  “No, I mean like if you were a girl, and I was a boy. Or if I were a girl. See?”

  Job didn’t see. A familiar fuzzy confusion descended on him. Here was another thing he couldn’t fathom. It was as though everyone else, at school, at church, in town, was operating under a different knowledge than he was. For reasons he was unsure of, but were certainly his fault, he had been left out. He stared up at the sky, the muscles of his legs and arms held stiff as Will touched his private place. It didn’t occur to him to object, say no, and after the first wave of fear, Will’s touch felt good. He relaxed a little, lifted his nose from the flannel of the sleeping bag for fresh air.

  “Look at that,” said Will, as if his hand weren’t someplace private, as if he were scratching his leg. “Beautiful.”

  Above them the sky breathed ghostly northern lights. At first the greenish-white lights hung like draperies between him and the night sky. But soon the corona moved directly overhead. Job was no longer facing the curtain of light; he was under it, as if he were lying beneath the draperies, gazing at the swirl of fabric from below.

  “They’re all right,” Job said, to deflect what was going on in the sleeping bag. “But I like the colours of the dishes better.”

  “Huh?” said Will.

  “The dishes? When you wash them? That squeaky sound? The colours are better, like in an oyster shell.” Job loved doing dishes, the wash of transparent colours very much like those his mother’s voice produced. If he’d had things his way, Job would have spent all his time in the kitchen. As it was, his mother, Emma, snatched Job in from outside chores on the pretence of helping him with his homework and they baked together, then ate whole pans of cinnamon buns by themselves, on the sly, before washing the dishes to hide the evidence. Job found reasons to help Emma out in the kitchen to listen to her voice, the sheen of colours sliding across his view like the shifting gloss of northern lights but in the pastel colours of blue, pink and yellow found in soap bubbles or in Emma’s opal ring. A vision almost exactly like the one Job enjoyed when running a wet finger around the rim of a glass.

  Will stopped his fumbling under the covers, moved his hand away. “What are you talking about? What colours?”

  “You know, when you run a finger over a dish when you’re washing it? Or around the rim of a wet glass, and it rings? I like those colours better.”

  “Colours?”

  It was at that moment that Job realized others didn’t see the world as he did, didn’t feel and see sound. Once, when his mother asked why he liked washing dishes so much, when she couldn’t even bribe Jacob to do them, he fumbled for words to describe the wonder of the colours he heard, the feeling of aha!

  His mother ignored him, as she did when she thought he was talking nonsense, and went on chopping carrots.

  He tried explaining to his father how he knew the cows were in heat, often before the bulls knew, by listening to their bawls. “Their bellow goes really dark when they’re in heat,” Job told his father, “like chokecherry.” He meant the colour of chokecherries when they were ripe, near black and shining.

  “Chokecherry?” Abe asked, his voice prickling on Job’s arm.

  Job nodded. “Its shape changes too. It’s more like a flag. Don’t you think?” This making perfect sense to Job, that a cow would want to advertise when it was time.

  Abe shook his head, wandered off chuckling.

  His parents’ reactions were strange, but it hadn’t occurred to him until this moment, lying in the sleeping bag with Will, that they didn’t see the world as he did, that they didn’t hear colours. The best his parents and Will could hope for was this night sky, stars flickering through the greens and reds of the northern lights.

  The aurora twisted, pulsed. At times seemed close enough to touch. He found himself relaxed, lulled, drifting, asleep.

  After that night Job never invited Will for another sleep-over, and their friendship began its slow decline. In past summers he and Will had run down the coulee hill on the Sunstrum farm to the lake below, thrown off their clothes and swum naked in the muddy water. One Halloween they stuck a pair of rubber boots into one side of a round bale in the Sunstrums’ field by the side of Correction Line Road, a stuffed shirt and John Deere cap out the other, a reminder of the nightmare farmers faced of being pulled into the baler and rolled into a bale themselves. Together they had filled a mayonnaise jar with moths, then smuggled the jar into the Leduc movie theatre and let the insects loose to flutter up to the projection booth, their huge, flickering shadows cast upon the screen.

  When Job’s prettiness earned him the nicknames Pansy and Fairy, Will wouldn’t have anything more to do with him; he avoided Job at church and ignored Job’s stilted stabs at friendly chatter as they waited for the school bus in the winter dark. He stood several yards away and kicked snow so those riding on the bus could plainly see he and Job were not friends.

  Job’s mother, Emma, was killed when Job was thirteen, as she and Abe tried to pull-start a tractor. Emma was on the 730 Case, pulling the 930 Case that Abe was riding. When the tractor was rolling at sufficient speed to get it going, Abe took his foot off the clutch, and the tractor skidded for that moment it took to turn the engine over. The chain between the two tractors went suddenly taut and snapped. It whipped back and hit Emma in the head. She was dead before the ambulance arrived.

  Godsfinger women brought casseroles, cookies, squares and sausages; they filled the fridge, then the freezer. Godsfinger men took turns harvesting Abe’s second hay crop, then his grain, and stood kicking dirt beside him. They didn’t expect talk. Abe felt blessed by friendship the first week, sick in the gut the second, took to bed the third week and shot Barbara Stubblefield’s dog the fourth. Everyone, even Barbara, understood. The dog had been killing Abe’s bantam chickens that ran loose around the yard. You can’t break a dog of that once it starts.

  Abe cried at night, and his boys heard him through the thin walls of the house, but he didn’t tolerate their tears. When Job, smelling the cinnamon buns the church ladies brought, began sniffling in the kitchen, Abe slapped the table and demanded, “Quit that or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

  Job learned to hold the tears in, raising his eyes to the ceiling and biting an indent into his lip that took months to heal. But the tears still came, at odd times, as he worked his numbers in math class. Or struggled to concentrate on what Mrs. Walsh was telling him in English. Not thinking of his mother. Kids sniggered. Teachers led him by the arm into the hall and patted him on the shoulder, then left him alone with his perplexing tears. It felt like punishment. The shame of being singled out and left in the hallway, the embarrassment of having to return.

  He was plagued by a series of illnesses: stomach aches and sore throats; rashes and a spotted tongue. A speeding heart that woke him sharply from sleep, or brought him up short as he strode to the house. Heart palpitations that left him feeling faint and weak, afraid for his life. He cooked and baked to calm himself. The pans of almond squares and cinnamon buns he had made with his mother when she was still alive. His mother was still here, in the kitchen. Her presence in the tidy, childish handwriting on her recipe cards, the Band-Aid she’d stuck over the word devil in the devil’s food cake recipe in her Joy of Cooking. Her smell in the apple pies he made, loaded with cinnamon. Her voice in the squeak of the dishes he washed, the sheen of pastels though which he saw the kitchen.

  Job, like Emma, was slender and possessed a white-blond head of curly hair that cascaded past his ears in ringlets. His delicate, heart-shaped face gave him
an angelic prettiness. Farmers in the area called him Pretty Boy or Princess.

  Abe avoided looking Job in the eye because he saw his wife there, in Job’s sweet face, in the curls that framed it. He forced crewcuts on him. Job stared at the sign above the barbers mirror that proclaimed You won’t find a better barber until you reach the next world, and ground his teeth, but said nothing.

  In high school, he had endured nipple twists from boys who danced circles around him with limp wrists or called down the hall, “Hey, Princess, where’s your purse?” In the locker room, after scoring a goal on his own net, Job even took ribbing from the guy named Chuck with the harelip. “Look at this guy. There’s hardly a hair on his body. What do you do? Shave your legs?”

  Job felt a kinship with his biblical namesake. Perhaps God, in a fit of pride, had been tempted into another wager with Satan over the faithfulness of a good servant and was testing him. But instead of the boils He’d inflicted on the biblical Job, which could, in these modern times, be cleared up with lancing and antibiotics, God had imposed on Job Sunstrum this prettiness. Anywhere else Job’s good looks might have won him friends and his choice of wife. But Job lived in big-farm country, where many men lost a finger to a sickle on a mower or to a spinning auger by the age of thirty-five. They wore baseball caps, given to them by farm-implement or bull-semen salesmen, with promotional slogans like Western Breeders or Snap-On Tools, or simply Case. Men were not pretty in Godsfinger, Alberta.

  Job felt like the gimpy calf in his father’s herd. Some congenital failure of the ligaments had made the calf walk awkwardly upon its knuckles, to fall to its knees when standing still for any length of time. It hobbled behind the herd, never keeping up, and called plaintively to its mother when left behind. It couldn’t compete at the grain trough or at the round-bale feeder and was bunted out of the way by the other calves. It learned to eat alone. To live apart.

  Jacob left home to attend a Saskatoon Bible college, set on becoming a preacher, and Job spent his late teens and early twenties nearly cloistered on the farm. He didn’t drive much because he found the effort fatiguing. The steady rumble of gravel hitting the undercarriage of his father’s Ford created a tumble of shimmering blue spheres, rolling and bouncing like lottery balls. He knew the balls weren’t really there but found himself batting them away as he fought to concentrate on the road.