A Rhinestone Button (31 page)

“Ignore them,” said Ed. “Don’t make eye contact.”

“Whoo-hoo, pretty boy!” The driver blasted the horn. “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

The kid in the back reached out with the shepherd’s crook, hooked Job behind the knees and brought him stumbling to the sidewalk. Ed grabbed hold of the crook and yanked it out of the kid’s hand. “You looking for a piece of this?” he yelled. He smacked the side of the truck with it, leaving a dent.

“Jesus,” said the driver. “This guy’s nuts.”

“You don’t know the half of it!” Ed took a stride towards the truck. The driver put his foot to the gas and sped away. He yelled, “Faggots!”

“Shit,” said Ed. He threw the yellow crook after the truck and it landed in the middle of the road. The car behind honked. Ed leaned down and took Job’s arm to help him up.

But Job pushed him off, pulled himself erect. “Leave me alone!” he said.

Ed took his arm and tried to lead him to his truck. “Come on.”

“Get away from me!”

“This is ridiculous. Blame those assholes, not me.”

Job leaned against a power pole, waiting for the dizziness to pass, and watched a man in a wheelchair whiz by, pulled by two huskies. “I’m going to be sick,” he said.

“Well, puke here then, not in my truck.”

“I want to use a washroom.”

“Why didn’t you use it when we were in the pub?”

“I didn’t think I was going to be sick then.”

Ed put his shoulder under Job’s arm, staggered with him into a nearby café and past the tables to the men’s washroom, a single toilet in a room with a mirror and sink. Ed waited outside.

Job spit into the toilet, but now that he was here, he couldn’t vomit. He rinsed his mouth out with a handful of water and washed his face. Then stared at his own reflection, thinking of the boys with the shepherd’s crook, the rage in their faces. What Crystal had said about Darren getting beaten up by his father, how it made him act the way he did. How Jason was acting out now. On it went from one generation to the next. If Job had had a son at the age Jacob had, he likely would have used the strap, or even beaten a boy in rage, just as Abe had beaten him. He thought of how he’d acted with Ben the day before, as he broke up the ice in the water tank. The things he’d said and the rage that had burst out of him wasn’t really him. It was Abe. And not Abe. It was Abe’s father, and who knew who else’s before him, on down the line. But how could he escape it? Job, overcome by another wave of nausea, sat on the covered toilet and stared at the sign above the doorknob that read
This door-knob is a bit sticky. It will open with fiddling
.

When Job pulled the truck into the form and got out, Jerry’s dog leapt up and left muddy paw prints down the thigh of his jeans. He kicked the dog away and stood a moment, looking over the yard. There were no vehicles there; no one was home. He’d make himself coffee to warm up with, and nuke a beef sandwich in the microwave, and maybe spend a half-hour in the house alone. But he was surprised by a compulsion to knock. He felt like a trespasser, stepping inside. It smelled of Old Spice, the scent of his dad on Sundays. A fry pan sat on the stove, still coated with white grease from bacon cooked that morning. A cup and greasy plate sat on the table and a fork lay on the floor. As if his father had just dressed and gone to church, and left his breakfast dishes for Job to clean up. Job ripped off a sheet of paper towel and wiped the fry pan clean, then set it back on the stove. He washed the few dishes in the sink, running a thumb over them to make them squeak, hoping for a sheen of pastels. None appeared. He wiped the table free of crumbs and swept the floor. Then stopped himself and sat at the kitchen table. This had never been his house; it had never stopped being his father’s house. The place seemed shrunken in, stifling. A playhouse for children. He couldn’t imagine having lived here with his parents and Jacob. Where was the room?

Job put the broom back in the hall cupboard and took out the vacuum cleaner to suck up the crumbs from beneath the table, then left it running in the middle of the kitchen. He leaned back into one of his mother’s metal-legged chairs with his hands in his lap, fingers locked, and listened. But felt no glass egg in his hands.

The dog barked and scratched at the front door, and Job felt a blast of cold air at his neck. Lilith was at the door with her back to him, a finger pointing at the dog. “Sit!” she ordered. “Stay!” The dog sat and stayed. When Lilith turned, she looked from the vacuum to Job. “What are you doing?” she said. She closed the door as Job yanked the plug from the vacuum and tugged the cord to let it snake back into the housing. Lilith covered her mouth with her hand when he looked up.

“Just a little tidy-up,” he said. He walked the vacuum into the hall closet.

“I would have done it. I keep a good house.”

“I never said you didn’t.”

Lilith, still in her coat, picked up a washcloth and turned her back to Job to scrub the kitchen counter, though it was wiped clean. Job scratched his scalp and felt the confusion of dealing with this woman: a pressure at the back of his skull, two hands pressing a melon.

“Well, don’t just sit there!” she said finally, with her hand over her mouth. “You’re as bad as that Wade friend of yours, just sitting, staring, like you know better. Like you’re one up on everyone else in the room. So superior.”

A surprise, to be thought of this way. He liked it. Wade must like it as well. What was Wade without his silence? If he spoke he was only a poorly dressed parts salesman.

Job stood and put a hand on Lilith’s shoulder, and she started to cry. Job remembered this. Will’s hand on his shoulder, the smallest kindness bringing on tears. “What’s the matter, Lilith?” he said.

She ran an index finger under her nose and wiped the finger on her coat. “Somebody at Bountiful Harvest found out Ben started the fire. Pastor Divine came down yesterday to say they were cutting support for the project. Volunteers didn’t want to give their time if Ben was just going to burn everything down. He said if Jacob couldn’t control his own son, then he couldn’t possibly have the leadership qualities it would take to run the halfway house. Jack fired him. What are we going to do?”

Job watched a drowsy fly land in the condensation that fogged the kitchen window. As it struggled to escape the dampness, it ended up with both wings stuck to the water, sliding down the glass.

“I was always afraid Ben was going to do something like that while Jacob had a church. He nearly burned our house down once, and set the yard on fire. Jacob had to tell the board he’d had an accident with the barbecue. Then I go and duct-tape that awful kid’s head to his desk.” She tapped her chest. “I’m the reason we had to leave.”

Lilith cried, blew her nose, cried some more. “I think sometimes I did it to get Jacob’s attention. Isn’t that childish? I was just so tired I couldn’t think straight. Any time I tried to talk about how much I hated never having time to ourselves or a day off, he just said the same thing, over and over. ‘We’ve all got to make sacrifices for God’s work.’ And he was right. We do. I was wrong to complain. It’s just I feel like I can’t ever do enough. God is never going to be happy, is he?”

The fly slid farther down the windowpane until it dropped to the sill. Job watched as it struggled to right itself. When it did, he pressed it flat with his thumb.

Lilith yanked a sheet of paper towel from the roll and blew loudly. “Then this morning I had an appointment to get my dentures fitted and they kept them, to do some work on them.” She let her hand drop from her mouth. She wasn’t wearing her dentures. She sobbed, her voice rising to a squeak. “And then this policeman stopped me for speeding and I didn’t have any teeth in, so I didn’t say anything, I just handed him my driver’s licence. Then I panicked and drove off.”

“You drove off?” Job laughed.

“With him standing there, holding my driver’s licence.”

Lilith laughed and cried, a combination that came out like hiccups. A relief, to see her laugh. It made everything seem manageable. For a moment. The dog barked and scraped a paw on the door. “Where’s Jacob?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are the cows fed?”

“They were bawling this morning when I left.”

“I guess I should get out there, feed them. Make sure they’ve got water.” He went to the hallway and sat on the bench to put on his boots.

She tossed the paper towel into the white, square garbage can in the hall. “Where are you going to sleep tonight? You want to have supper with us?”

“I’m not hungry. I’ll sleep in the cabin.”

“It’s got a hole in the roof.”

“I’ll make do.”

As Job dropped a round bale into the feeder, Jacob drove the station wagon into the yard. He was walking
across the road as Job parked the tractor. “Schultz phoned yesterday,” he said. “He said he thought the bull was out, down by the lake.”

“You didn’t go check?”

When Jacob shrugged and looked away, Job headed to the pumphouse for the hip waders. He’d take the tractor down. Likely the bull was in the lake. Jacob shouted after him. “Want help?”

“No.”

The bull was dead, its body floating between the ice and the lake’s shore, its head below water and only its massive back protruding. Job hooked one end of a chain to the drawbar of the tractor and dragged the other end with him into the icy water. Hip waders kept the water out, but the cold was sharp enough to take his breath away. He grasped the bull by the tail and pulled it closer to shore, then plunged a hand down into the cold water to slide the chain around the animal’s leg. As he was walking back to the tractor, he remembered the terror in the beast’s eyes when he got into the water with it the fall before, and the feel of its monstrous head leaning into Job’s calming scratch. He wondered at its final moments.

Job cranked up the heat in the tractor to warm himself, sped up the engine and pulled the body of the bull up the muddy bank and then up the road. He’d call the rendering truck and have the body taken away.

The drab yellow prairie stretched out to meet a grey sky. There wasn’t yet a hint of green in that landscape. The only colour was the orange of the snow fences in the fields along the roads. Trees were still leafless and wouldn’t green out until the beginning of the next month, and even then it
could freeze or snow right into June. Just the year before, Godsfinger had had a dump of snow in May that was so heavy it broke the Sunstrums’ mayflower tree—already in bloom—in two. He’d taken a chainsaw to it, and it was now a stack of firewood by the cabin.

Job had dragged the body of the bull to the yard before he noticed he was shaking. Cold perhaps. Or nerves humming with fatigue. He wanted a hot shower, and a bed and a place that was familiar, his own.

He opened the door to the hired hand’s cabin and startled a pigeon. It flew up through the hole in the roof; under the gap Carlson had opened in the attic, the gyproc had become soaked and caved in, leaving an open patch of sky above Job’s head. There were pigeon droppings on the floor, but other than the hole and the smell of smoke, there was little evidence of the fire inside the cabin. He brought in wood and kindling and newspaper from the piles stacked in the barn and got a fire roaring in the stove. Then he crossed the road to the house.

Jacob was in the living room, sitting in Abe’s green easy chair with his feet up, reading a paper. “The bull’s dead,” said Job. When Jacob didn’t turn to look at him and kept reading as if he hadn’t heard, Job said, “You might have saved him, if you’d checked.” Jacob snapped the newspaper and turned a page.

Job found extra sleeping bags and his mother’s blow-dryer in the attic of the house and hauled them out to the cabin. He swept away bits of charcoal and pigeon droppings and arranged the sleeping bags on his bed. Then he plugged in his mother’s blow-dryer, tucked himself into layers of flannel and switched the blow-dryer on. It ran for a
moment, but it didn’t produce a cylinder in his hands. Then it sparked, sent up a plume of smoke and died.

He unplugged the blow-dryer and lay shivering, looking up at a star-studded evening sky through the hole in the roof. It seemed foolish, now, to sleep in the cabin. But he didn’t want to face Jacob, to ask him if he could sleep on the living-room floor as they watched the late-evening news. He felt profoundly sorry for himself and gave in to the urge that had followed him for much of the day, and cried.

He woke deep in the night to a chorus of coyotes howling. Above him, through the hole in the roof, northern lights pulsed in hues that were at once saturated and iced, like lime and raspberry sherbet. Startling colours to find in a night sky. He wrapped himself in a sleeping bag and stepped outside to watch as brilliant red bands of aurora pulsed inward from each side towards the corona directly overhead. A heart beating in the sky. He couldn’t take his eyes from the sight. He felt rapture in his chest, a tingling thrill up his back. How had he watched this display all those nights and missed this awe? And this terror. As the corona moved across the sky, the pulsing heart shifted to ghostly strands of coloured light, spectres that seemed to rush down on him with such speed that he felt the pumped-blood fright of the chased.