A Rhinestone Button Read online

  Trips to Edmonton or Wetaskiwin or Leduc were painful, overwhelming. The roar of passing vehicles filled his hands with rough shapes, one barely registering before another took its place. Car honks exploded in blinding white light, like the flashbulbs of cameras aimed at him. The shrill whine of an ambulance siren drove needle points into his cheeks. Music thumping from car stereos or blasted from cafés threw rings of colour at him. All of it blending, expanding, like balls of cookie dough flattening in the oven, obscuring his view, grabbing his attention. He came home from these few trips exhausted, swore to shop in Godsfinger, if at all.

  In winter, Job loaded up the silage wagon from the pit where the silage was stored and dispensed it into the feeders. On very cold days the tractor often wouldn’t start and he’d spend hours fiddling with the machinery. It was sometimes a day or two before he could feed the cattle.

  If he could bring the cows to the feeder, rather than the feed to the cows, it would save a lot of work. So that’s what he did. He converted the rectangular silage pit into a feeder by placing steel feeding panels at one end. The silage in the pit was ten feet deep and usually fell towards the feeding grate as the cattle ate away at it, replenishing the supply.

  The feeder worked, though Abe argued it shouldn’t. Daily. When he came to Job once again complaining that the stack of silage was about to topple over and crush the cows eating with their heads through the feeding panels, Job said, “I’ll get right on it.” But didn’t. He went into the house to put on morning coffee.

  He was standing on the stoop to call his father in for a cup and a warm cinnamon roll when he heard the woomph of silage falling and the screech of twisting metal that shot out fingers of lightning in all directions. He ran to the feeder and found the tractor still running. Abe had been about to knock the wall of silage down and was chasing a cow from the feeder when the silage overhead collapsed, crushing him under the feeding panel. Job pulled Abe out from under it and ran to the house to call for an ambulance. He returned with a blanket that he lay over his father.

  Abe’s voice was a whisper, but still prickly. It brought up goosebumps on Job’s arms. “It hurts to breathe,” he said.

  “You’ll be all right. The ambulance is on the way.”

  “If you’d built that thing right, it wouldn’t have collapsed on me. Didn’t I tell you it was gonna collapse?”

  At the hospital, all the chairs in the waiting room were taken. Job leaned against the wall and found some comfort in smoothing the invisible sphere that the electric hum of fluorescent lights overhead produced in his hand. He sat in the first chair to come free, then gave it to an elderly woman. Leaned against the wall again until he grew tired. Sat in a kiddy’s chair at a table of toys and watched a boy of three drive a car over the stomach of a teddy bear.

  His father was on the operating table with an aortic aneurysm. The young doctor had explained how the blow to Abe’s chest had caused the blood vessel to balloon out like a blister on an old tire, ready to burst.

  Job felt so heavy he thought he’d never be able to stand again. He stayed sitting, even as he felt the touch on his arm and looked into the face of the doctor, her hair hidden under a green surgical cap. “Mr. Sunstrum? I’m sorry. Your father didn’t make it.”

  He hugged his knees and watched the child playing with the toys on the table, and started to cry, though he felt no emotion, nothing at all. The boy, noticing his tears, offered him the teddy. “Bear?” he said.

  Job, alone on the farm. He turned down offers of help from Godsfinger men, supper invitations from their wives. He blamed himself for his father’s death. Thought everyone else did too.

  He felt nothing in his hands when listening to the vacuum. Its hum no longer produced the feel of a glass egg, and Job became less inclined to use the machine. Weeks of grit accumulated on the kitchen floor. The congregation’s singing was muddied and yellow, like the colours of a photograph left too long in the sun, and Job stopped going to church. No one phoned or stopped by to check on him. He walked through his days with the feeling that at any moment he might become lost, and no one would know to search for him, or care.

  It was Barbara Stubblefield who contrived to steer Job back into the fold. A big woman, at least five foot ten. Heavy set. Square face. Bifocals. A taste for sweater sets. She was quick to criticize an unkempt lawn, a messy house. On the other hand, she’d nailed her collection of promotional caps that farm-supply salesmen had given her to the tops of fence posts bordering Correction Line Road. Over the years, kids had painted faces on the fence posts under the hats, so now there was an army of clowns standing at attention along her property line.

  The consensus after Emma’s death had been that Barbara would end up with Abe. It wasn’t often a widow and a widower ended up living side by side like that, both with teenaged sons ready to work the farm. But Abe had never asked Barbara out to a pancake supper, and had in fact avoided her at church.

  She believed she’d been healed of her borderline diabetes by a television evangelist who read her prayer request for healing during his broadcast. Members of the church, however, attributed the cure to the fact that Barbara had given up coconut-coated marshmallows in compliance with her doctor’s orders to lose weight.

  Barbara was a poultry farmer, so she began, as always, with a chicken. Once a week, on Friday mornings, she stopped in on Job before heading to the ladies’ auxiliary meeting. She dropped a frozen fowl on the table and announced, “There’s your dead bird,” and talked of little other than church as Job stared at her red, cracked hands. She wouldn’t take money for the chicken, so he had to listen. There was no getting around it.

  One Friday morning Barbara brought her son Will over, and dropped him off as she went to the auxiliary meeting. Will had moved back from B.C. to take over his mother’s poultry farm. Barbara, now sixty, was moving into a postwar bungalow in the middle of Main Street, and she’d taken on the job of mayor, as no one else wanted it.

  Will came sporting a beard and smoking an Old Port cigar and talked animatedly about his travels around British Columbia, working in logging camps and mills. He carried the conversation, a trait Job was always thankful for. They took a stroll to look over Job’s herd. The cows ran away when they saw Will coming, a near stampede to the end of the pasture.

  “You’ve got old man’s cows, eh?” said Will. “Never see anybody else. Only used to you and your ways.”

  “I guess,” said Job, thinking of the days, years before, when he farmed with his mother and father. The cows wouldn’t run then, even when a semen salesman wandered down to find Job and Abe in the fields, offering caps and brochures. His cows had betrayed him. Will knew he was without friends.

  From then on Will came over on Friday mornings instead of Barbara, bringing a frozen chicken. He drank coffee and offered Job compliments on his baking, and talked farming for the most part, markets and prices, his hopes for the poultry, but he managed to slip in a word or two about the goings-on at church. Whose son had married. Whose father had died. Then, two months after his return, he finally got around to it. “Why not ride to church with me Sunday morning,” he said. “Pick you up at nine-thirty?”

  Job agreed, recognizing the net that had caught him. But he was surprised at the effect of the service. Friendly, familiar faces greeted him. The smell of the church, of old wood and years of coffee, canned milk, comfort. The singing produced, for Job, that pool of sound, splashed with the individual voices of the congregation. Radiating circles, Will’s voice spruce blue-green, Barbara’s blue-violet. Rings of colours spreading, blending with all the others. Filling his visual field, projected, out there. Real. With the colours came the excitement, the certainty. God.

  Two

  Job accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal saviour. Again. Coffee and hand-shaking afterwards. Mumbles of “Glad to have you back, Job,” and “Good to see you.” Slaps to the shoulder. Community.

  At home he found the glass egg back in his hands when he turne
d on the vacuum cleaner. Saw the pastel sheen when he ran a finger around the rim of a glass or squeaked a clean dish. A remembrance of his mother’s voice. He found a new enthusiasm for keeping house.

  He thought for certain that Will would drop him as a friend now that he was back at church. Another fish caught. He was right. Will stopped coming over on Fridays and sat with others at church. Never offered him another frozen chicken. But Job was hungry for a friend. He invited Will for supper, with the excuse that he owed Will a cheque for the barley he’d trucked over the week before. Job started cleaning house at noon. Cooked a dinner of fried chicken, a bowl of potatoes whipped with butter, peas grown in his own garden that he served with fresh baked buns on his mother’s best china and glassware. Candles out, table shining like a candelabra.

  He gave up on Will arriving at all by eight. At nine, Will turned up four hours late with an excuse about running into one of his old buddies in Edmonton. The chicken had gone cold and greasy in the fridge, peas to mush. Job apologized, offered to microwave him a plate. When Will declined, said he’d eaten in the city, Job apologized again, made tea and put out a plate of frozen shortbread, then sat staring at it, unable to come up with anything to say. He wished he were adept at conversation, quick with a joke.

  “I like your jars,” said Will, pointing at the gallon jars lined up along the tops of the cupboards, in which Job stored beans, dried peas, pastas, flour, cornmeal and rolled oats.

  “Pickle jars,” said Job. “I get them from Crystal, at the Out-to-Lunch Café.”

  “Ah,” said Will.

  They sat in silence for some minutes.

  “Well,” said Will. “It’s getting late. Sorry about supper.”

  “No, no,” said Job. “I’m sorry it’s cold.”

  “All right then. I’ll see you later.”

  Will had left the driveway before Job realized he hadn’t given him the cheque for the barley. Will would think him stupid, or he’d think Job was trying to get out of paying him. That Job was holding a grudge because Will had turned up late. Job rolled it over in his mind and didn’t sleep that night; he tossed and turned on guilt and hurt. He got up at five, emptied the macaroni out of one of his pickle jars, the beans from another, and took them and the cheque over to the poultry farm when he knew Will’s hired hand, an acreage kid with pock-marked cheeks, would be doing chores. He handed him the cheque and the jars to give to Will when he woke.

  Later in the day Will came over, said Job needn’t have gone to all that trouble. He knew he’d get the money sooner or later. Did he really want to give up the jars? Job felt foolish and apologized again. Said sorry when Will insisted there was no need to apologize. Felt stupid for it.

  “Look,” said Will. “I’m sorry I missed supper. Why don’t I make up for it? Come by the house tonight. I’ll cook.”

  It was the first of many dinners. Will made Job sit at the kitchen table as he served beef stroganoff, hamburgers, Beef Rouladen, having completely lost the taste for chicken himself.

  At times, when Will hugged Job goodnight, or laid a hand on his shoulder, asking if he wanted more coffee, another slice of lemon loaf, Job was moved to tears and had to look away. Thankful for his small kindnesses, thinking himself undeserving. He wondered that the friendship endured.

  Job tried to grow a beard like Will’s and failed, took up cigars instead. He didn’t smoke them but chewed on the tip as if he were just getting around to it. He kept a package in the freezer and took them out when Will stopped by for coffee. He believed they made him seem worldly, well-travelled, as Will appeared. But he gave them up, as did Will, when Stinky Steinke, heading the church board, pointed out that the constitution forbade smoking.

  Then, one Sunday, a year after Will’s return, despairing that her son would never find a wife and give her grandchildren, Barbara Stubblefield invited Penny Blust, the daughter of a friend from Leduc Pentecostal, to come to Godsfinger Baptist. She was a petite girl of nineteen, with blonde hair cut just above the shoulder and held back with barrettes. Clear pink skin and pale blue eyes. A tight, permanent smile already etched into her face. She seasoned her conversation with phrases that few at Godsfinger Baptist would use. “The Lord is leading me into the ministry,” she said when Will asked her what she was going to do now that she was out of school. “Not as a pastor, of course, but maybe the youth ministry, or working with children. Or maybe I’ll go overseas, into missions. I tried doing home care, you know, helping out cripples, old people in their houses. But I relied on myself, didn’t take it to the Lord, couldn’t handle cleaning pee off the floor around toilets. So I figured I’d take a year or two off, before going to Bible college. Work at Dad’s Dairy Queen until I’m a little more spiritually mature.”

  Barbara had Penny sit between her and Will and kept Job safely on her left. She invited Penny and Will over for supper. Within a week she had Will take Penny to a movie in Edmonton, and in a month got him bringing the girl flowers.

  Job once again spent his Saturday nights alone, listening to the vacuum cleaner, smoothing the glass egg in his hand. He felt dispensable, a friend of convenience.

  One Saturday evening Will was at the door, dressed in a town shirt, tugging at his beard, asking Job to chaperone Penny and himself at the movie that night, and for nights to come. “We want to save ourselves for marriage,” he said. “We’re afraid—I’m afraid—if we spend too much time alone we’ll succumb to temptation.”

  Job nodded. Given half a chance he would succumb himself.

  So it was that Job found himself accompanying Will and Penny on most of their dates. Penny seemed flattered by the attention of two men. She hugged them both when Will dropped her off before driving Job home, and kissed Job on the cheek. In the dark of the movie theatre she often took Job’s hand as well as Will’s. The fact of her hand in his seemed a near impossibility, a hummingbird miraculously caught in flight.

  Job built his herd, bid on new blood at the Ponoka auction. Went into pure breeds for a couple of years, for the status; left because of the expense. Finally fell back on the cow-calf operation. He made a fair living and saved a bit. Joined a Tuesday-night Bible study, held in Will’s kitchen, and brought baked goods to church and community dinners, even though, as a bachelor, he wasn’t expected to. He canned crabapples and made saskatoon jam and gave the jars away at Christmas, tied in bows, just like the women of the church did.

  He kept to the women, baked alongside them in the church kitchen, made squares, pies and muffins to sell with theirs to raise money for the church. He was told by the women that he’d make a wonderful husband, and if they were younger they would snap him up for themselves. He was told by the men he’d make someone a fine wife. That bothered him. But still, he felt a part of something. Though he did not have a wife and family, at least he had friends.

  Three

  Then came a year when his tightly coiled life popped its twine and unravelled like a round hay bale dropped to asphalt from a speeding truck.

  First, Jacob. He phoned from the Edmonton airport on a March morning, just as Job came in the house from checking for new calves in the calving pen. “I need a ride home,” he said. His voice prickling across Job’s arms as Abe’s had.

  Job tugged at the twisted cord of the telephone, said, “Sure.”

  “I’m waiting at luggage claim. See you in half an hour.”

  As he drove up to the airport, Job figured his brother was making the trip home by himself, taking time to finally settle the estate. Jacob hadn’t been home since Abe’s funeral three years before, when he brought his wife, Lilith, and their eight-year-old son and stayed a week. Jacob had met Lilith, the daughter of a missionary family posted at Frog Lake, at Bible school. He had brought her to Godsfinger just once before bringing her home to marry. Lilith gave birth to Ben six months later. Jacob claimed he was a preemie.

  The week of the funeral, Jacob and Lilith slept in Abe’s room and Job gave up his bed to Ben. He slept out in the old hired hands cabin on
a folding cot. Ben was family, sure enough: pretty face so much like Job’s, on a meat loaf of a body. Oversized hands and feet. His nails were chewed to the quick and he had the nervous habit of plucking the hairs from his arms. When he told a story, waving his hands in the air, Jacob told him, “Look at you, talking with your hands like a Frenchman.” A thing Abe had said.

  Lilith spent two hours in the bathroom each morning, came out painted up, eyebrows sketched on, hair glistening with spray. She wore dentures, not because her teeth had rotted, but because she had thought her own teeth ugly and had them all yanked.

  Lilith, Jacob, Job and Ben sat around the kitchen table for most of those days, eating sliced meats and cheeses, homemade buns and squares, leftovers from the church-basement reception that had followed the funeral. Around them the kitchen was pretty much the same as it had been when Emma was alive. A metal-legged table sat in front of the window overlooking the vegetable garden. Beside it there was a cabinet with sliding glass doors that housed Emma’s good china and glasses. The only new addition was the microwave sitting on a shelf over the portable dishwasher.

  The cupboards, installed the year Job’s grandfather died and Abe took over the farm, were painted white with square metal pulls. On the walls, framed pictures of grain elevators made from wheat, a calendar, a photograph of the farm taken from the air.

  Jacob talked and talked, of the church where he was pastor and his small accomplishments, but not of Abe. Though he’d thought of Abe’s safety deposit box straight away and asked Job for the key. Abe had made Jacob executor to his will and had left no special instructions on leaving the farm to Job. He’d made it clear he wanted things split evenly between the two boys, though he had talked as though Job would be the one to take over.