A Rhinestone Button Read online

  Jacob told Job he didn’t want the farm. “I’ve got my church, and like Dad kept telling me, I’m not farmer material.”

  Job remembered his father had put it more bluntly. “He’s useless,” Abe had once said, right in front of Jacob, who stood behind him at the kitchen door, wilting in his rubber boots. Jacob’s crime, that time around, was to break the handle of a spade clean in two. He was handicapped by clumsiness, his limbs growing faster than his capacity to control them. But instead of awkwardness, Abe had seen in Jacob the chief reason for the farm’s failure to prosper. “You’re trying to ruin me, aren’t you?” he’d asked Jacob. “Trying to make me go broke!”

  Before Emma’s death, Jacob might have been his mother’s kitchen help, while Job did chores outside with his father, but Jacob had lacked skill there as well: he’d knocked freshly canned jars of saskatoons to the floor, splattering purple berries across yellow linoleum. Dishes slipped from his thick fingers and cracked on the Arborite counter. Emma had thought him purposeful, trying to get out of helping her, and chased him from the kitchen.

  Jacob was a copy of his father in build if not in talent. A belly that strained the buttons of his shirt. Hands and feet of a giant on a six-foot frame, giving him the bearing of a troll. A head too big even for that inflated body. He’d been called Moose at school. Meat loaf. Later, after he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and personal saviour at Godsfinger Baptist Camp, he was called Friar Tuck, less for his piousness than the frequency with which he bought candy at the tuck shop. Job had seen strangers on the street stop and gape at his brother.

  “You’ll have to go to a lawyer and settle things,” said Job. “I won’t be able to take out a loan until you do.”

  “You’ve got cows to sell. You’ll be all right.”

  “What if a tractor breaks down, or I have to buy equipment?”

  “I’ll get right on it,” said Jacob, but didn’t. He took on a church in Ontario, then another in Saskatchewan. Always had a reason why he couldn’t come home.

  As he drove to the Edmonton airport, Job figured he’d finally get things settled. But Lilith and Ben were waiting at the luggage carousel alongside Jacob. Lilith’s dress rumpled, cheeks splotched from crying. Ben silent, his pretty face a mask. Beside them a pickup load of luggage: suitcases and boxes of clothes; downhill skis; a birdcage; boxes of Jacob’s pastoral files and books; Lilith’s sewing machine; the disassembled crib that had been Ben’s; photo albums wrapped in plastic grocery bags; garbage bags full of quilts Lilith had made from old dresses; the brown stoneware dishes Abe had given them as a wedding present, packed in their original box. All of their lives folded, bundled and stacked.

  “We’ll be staying awhile,” Jacob said.

  Job picked up one of the boxes, loaded it onto a trolley. “How long?” he asked.

  “Not sure. Just ’til we can get back on our feet.” He gave Job a half hug, one arm around the shoulder. Job was surprised to see tears in his brother’s eyes. “Sorry it was such short notice. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Job didn’t ask what had happened, and his brother didn’t volunteer. He bought Jacob and Lilith an old station wagon from Jerry Kuss, moved a few of his things into the old hired hand’s cabin, where he shifted thirty years of accumulated junk into one corner to make way for the cot, a table, a couple of chairs. He let Jacob, Lilith and Ben take over the house. They seemed to expect that he would and it seemed the thing to do. There was no plumbing in the cabin, and Abe had plowed over the outhouse that had once served it. Job had to run to the house to use the facilities, and once there, he had his sister-in-law to contend with. It was simpler to stand behind the cabin to relieve himself.

  Job was taking his first whiz of the morning behind the cabin when Ben came looking for him. The squeak of dry snow underfoot, like the sound of Saran Wrap being balled up, shooting off a cloud of transparent blue. Job hurriedly arranged himself and was zipping up his jeans when Ben turned the corner on him. “Dad needs help. He’s got a calf that won’t come out.”

  Since his arrival, Jacob had been some help over the calving season, checking on the cows in the morning so Job could sleep in until seven-thirty or so. But he needed help with every small problem that arose. Job took the midnight and three o’clock watch, checking for signs the cows were close to calving, assisting them in labour, and warming newborn calves under a heat lamp if necessary.

  Job walked with Ben towards the calving pens. Around them a flat landscape covered in barley-stubbled snow. The farm was miles from the buzz of a highway, in a blanket of quiet so thick Job could hear the pit-a-pat the chickadees made as they hopped along the branches of the cottonwood and willow his grandfather had planted around the farm as a windbreak. The flit flit of their wings as they flew from branch to branch left blushes of tawny rose in the air.

  “Got any matches?” Ben asked him.

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a girl.” Something Jacob had told Job at nearly every visit.

  “What do you want matches for?”

  “No reason.”

  A crow flew up from a fence post as they passed. The first crow Job had seen that year. His mother had always said that you should look to the first crow of the season to tell you what your year would be like. If you saw a crow resting, then you could look forward to a relaxing year. A crow flying in the air made for a busy time. A crow coming in for a landing meant things would slow down after a fast start. Job couldn’t remember what a crow taking off meant.

  “Is it true you didn’t talk ’til you were just about five?” asked Ben.

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Dad says he talked for you. You’d point things out and he’d tell your mom what you wanted.”

  It was a story Jacob had brought up at every family gathering, gatherings that were few and far between after he left for Bible college. Job had once asked him why he didn’t come home more often. “It’s the old prodigal son thing,” Jacob had said. “I get a better reception if I’m not around too much. If I’m always home, Dad won’t give me the time of day.”

  “When Dad went to school you talked all at once, right?” Ben asked. “like you’d known how to talk all along.”

  “That’s the story.” As Jacob told it, Job’s first words had been, “Can I have a glass of milk?” When his mother asked him why he hadn’t talked before he said, “I didn’t have to.” Jacob had always been the talker in the family. While other boys played football at noon hour, Jacob holed up in the library to read the encyclopedia, and after school lectured Job on whatever he had learned that day. He was Job’s only playmate until Job went to school.

  While Jacob wouldn’t play football with the other boys, he would toss a ball around with Job after school, or rough-house on the lawn before chores. Job often gave up on these games; he was so much smaller, and would always lose, but Jacob would bribe him with gum or offer to take over some chore if Job would only keep playing. They would trip each other up, jump on each other’s back, shove and push and throw each other down in the shadow of the looming silos.

  The Sunstrum farm was split in two by Correction Line Road, running east to west. The occasional driver heading into Godsfinger had to drive right through the Sunstrum farmyard. A few months following Emma’s death, Abe had taken advantage of that bit of luck by painting Jesus is Lord! on one of his two silos, and Hallelujah! on the other. As an afterthought, on the roof of his barn he painted This is cattle country. Eat beef.

  Job kept meaning to paint over the lettering on the silos, or better yet to take the silos down. He agreed with the sentiment all right, but the enthusiasm of the four-foot lettering embarrassed him. In any case, the silos weren’t of use any more. They had long ago been replaced with the cement silage pit that Job had converted into a feeder. The silos were becoming dangerous; the soil beneath them was giving way to their weight a
nd each year both silos leaned farther south. The summer before, Job had been forced to climb them in order to wrap cables around them both, to tether them to steel rods forced into the ground to secure the silos from collapsing.

  “My dad won’t let me have any,” said Ben.

  “What?”

  “Matches.”

  “You a firebug?”

  “No.”

  “I was a firebug,” said Job. “Got me in a lot of trouble with my old man.”

  “You were a firebug?”

  Job had started setting fires following his mother’s death, after his father had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. He lit brush piles and the garbage in the burn can at first, made it his job to fire up the tank heater in the stock tank. Fires his father couldn’t fault him for. But he later carried boxes of Redbird matches in his pocket so that when the compulsion hit, he could simply light a match and drop it in the dry grass around the farm.

  It was the sound of fire that drew him first. The pops and crackles of a flame filled his vision with tiny explosions, a private display of fireworks, silvery white and tinged with green, like the back of a poplar leaf blowing in the wind. With the fireworks came brief, intense bursts of excitement, oddly mixed with a peaceful feeling. It was the eureka! he’d found nowhere else for a time following his mother’s death.

  “I nearly set the cabin on fire once,” he said. “Got it out though.” A grass fire Job had lit had licked up the wall of the hired hand’s cabin, sending panicked mice scurrying from under the building, darting between Job’s feet as he beat the fire with a wet burlap bag. He managed to get the fire out by himself, but the west wall of the cabin was scorched black. He was strapped for that fire as he was strapped for almost every fire he set.

  “I lit this fire in the garbage can,” said Ben. “Sparks from it set our lawn on fire and burned the lawn furniture and Mom’s plants. Dad beat the crap out of me because he said I’d nearly burned the house down and it wasn’t even our house. It was the church’s, and how was he going to explain it to the church board? He lied. He told them he’d been cooking on the Hibachi when a fire started. He said he didn’t want them to think he didn’t have his son under control.”

  “Look, you like fire, you can have the job of keeping the fire going in the stock tank heater. But don’t light any other fires. Okay?”

  “Cool!” Ben picked up a fist of snow, patted it into a ball. “Dad didn’t want to come back to the farm, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “He said he didn’t have any choice. We didn’t have any money, no place else to go. Mom wants to stay. She doesn’t want Dad to go back into preaching ’cause she’s tired of moving from church to church. She says she’s tired period. She says she’s tired of Dad.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean that.”

  “She said it was Dad’s fault she duct-taped that kid’s head to a desk.”

  “She duct-taped a kid’s head to a desk?”

  “He was hyperactive. Always running all over junior church. So she got real mad and duct-taped him to his desk. She had to cut the duct tape out of his hair and his parents asked how come his hair was cut funny and they found out and they yelled at Mom, and Dad got fired because he couldn’t control his wife and we had to come here.”

  “She thought that was your Dad’s fault?”

  “Because he’s a preacher and she’s his wife and she has to be nice all the time because everybody’s always watching everything she does. She says sometimes she wants to explode. She says sometimes she feels like killing somebody.” Ben hurled the snowball at the silo that read Jesus is Lord! Missed. “Dad kind of gave in. Said he’d stay on the farm and give it a try.”

  Jacob was kneeling on the straw of a calf pen, working behind a cow that was lying on its side. He stood when he saw Job, let him take over. The calf’s legs were just sticking out the cow’s back end. Chains above the calf’s hooves with pull handles hooked to the chains. The cow still tied by its halter to the corner post. Sloppy. Job untied the halter, let the cow’s head drop. She wasn’t going anywhere. He repositioned the chains above the calf’s ankles, ran a second loop above the hooves to distribute the load; the feet were already swollen from too much pulling. “Hand me that rope,” he said. Jacob passed it to him, and Job slung it over his shoulder. “Hear you might be staying awhile.”

  Ben glanced at Job and kicked a frozen cow patty, but said nothing, his face flushing red. A look on Jacob’s face that Job had seen on his father’s, before he got the strap. Job regretted he’d said anything. He knew Ben would be in for it now.

  Job rolled up his sleeves, wet his arms with water from the pail Jacob had brought with him, then with birth fluid from the cow’s vagina for lubrication. The smell of cabbage and liver. “So you’re staying.”

  Jacob held the top of his right arm, as if nursing an injury. His hands the size of dinner plates, the colour of ham. “I don’t know what else to do. We’re broke. I doubt I can find another position after what happened. I’m sure Ben told you about that as well.”

  Job said nothing. He reached into the cow’s vagina to check for the position of the calf’s head. When he didn’t find it laying on the legs, he pushed back against the base of the calf’s neck.

  “What’re you doing?” asked Ben.

  Job grunted from the strain. “Head isn’t coming. Got to push the calf back, to reposition it.” Not an easy thing, pushing against the cow’s contractions. But it had to be done, and quickly, or the calf might die. The cow too, by the look of her. She’d pushed for ages and was bawling high and long in pain, a noise that created a shower of brown sparks in front of Job, like a spray of dirty water from a garden hose. “You’ve just been pulling on the two legs here,” he said.

  “Yeah, so?” said Jacob.

  Job didn’t bother trying to explain. He’d only end up making Jacob look foolish in front of his son. The calf’s head was bent back. Jacob could have pulled for hours and got nowhere. It seemed he’d forgotten the basics, that he needed three things to pull a calf: two feet and a head, or two feet and a tail. He should have reached in to make sure both feet were from the same calf, and that it wasn’t twins, that he wasn’t pulling one leg from each.

  Job grabbed hold of the calf’s nose, and held its jaw so its bottom teeth wouldn’t cut into the uterus. He swung the head around, so it rested on the front legs. Worked the rope in around the calf’s head, behind the ears.

  “Okay, tug gently on the chains.”

  Jacob took both handles, pulled.

  “Gently!”

  With his left arm still up the cow, Job held the calf’s head with his left hand, and tugged on the rope with his right, as the calf was pulled from the cow, slid to the ground. A gush of amniotic fluid. The sweetish smell of newborn calf.

  The calf’s tongue was sticking out, swollen and blue. Job hauled the calf up by the back legs, held it as high as he could.

  “He’s got to make sure the fluid drains from the lungs,” Jacob explained to Ben. Hoping to save face, Job thought, to appear like he knew a thing or two about this business.

  Job lay the calf back on the ground, pushed the tongue back in and covered the calf’s mouth, then blew into a nostril to clear the way and get the calf breathing. It snorted, drew breath. Thrashed. He grabbed the old cow’s head and pulled her off her side so she was lying normally and had an easier time breathing. Then he washed in the bucket of water and took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his hands. He felt the confidence of being in his element. He knew cattle. A skill Jacob didn’t possess. “The calf was in a normal position except its head was dropped to the side. When that happens, it doesn’t matter how much you pull. Calf won’t budge. It’s a common mistake, if you haven’t calved much.”

  “Well,” said Jacob. “Learn something new every day.” But he didn’t look happy about it.

  “So what would you do here?” said Job. “Build a herd? You never took much interest in farming.”


  “More to the point, I was never much good at it, right?” said Jacob. “Yeah, well. Remember that story Grandma Sunstrum always told? About how her dad sent her into the field to pick rocks with her brothers, and she came home saying she couldn’t find any rocks? Sometimes I didn’t know what I was doing, but sometimes I just wanted to get out of the work. I wanted to read my books. I hated working with Dad. All he did was yell at me.”

  “You know you’re welcome to stay awhile,” said Job. I can sell a few cows and hire you for the summer if you want. I could use a hand with field work.”

  “I’d appreciate that. Anyway, I don’t know that I’d end up farming. It may come down to selling this place.”

  “But Dad was born into this house,” said Job. “Granddad built it. We can’t hand it over to strangers.” Or more to the point, what would he do without the land? Who was he without this farm? He’d imagined he’d live his life here, as his father had. It was an assumption Abe had planted in him, one that he’d never questioned.

  “I’m not saying we will sell. I’m just saying it may come down to selling. In the future. We’ll have to settle my part of the inheritance sooner or later. You could always buy me out.”

  “The bank isn’t going to loan me the money to buy you out. My income isn’t enough.”

  “You could sell a quarter.”

  “We’ve only got the two quarters. I need it all to keep the operation going. An investor may buy it and rent it back to me, but that’s a long shot. In any case, the house is on one quarter, the outbuildings on the other. If I sell either one I’ll have to go to the expense of building.”

  “You see how it is,” said Jacob. “If you aren’t going to buy me out, then we’re going to have to find a way to share the land.”

  Job took a step back into a steaming cow patty. Felt his heart tattoo a rapid beat. He saw the months, maybe years, before him, living in that shack, eating canned tuna sandwiches, without mayonnaise, because he didn’t want to deal with Lilith, who’d taken over his own kitchen. He wouldn’t be able to bring a woman home to entertain, or promise her anything. He felt as he did when he drove the tractor too close to a slough and was pulled in, one back tire spinning uselessly, the other still on firm ground but arching its way inevitably into mud.