A Rhinestone Button (2 page)

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.

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.