A Rhinestone Button (34 page)

As Job drove into the farmyard, Jacob was just getting out of his car, pulling his briefcase from the passenger seat. “Some storm brewing, eh?” he said. “Knew we were in for something yesterday when I saw a flock of sparrows in the lilac bushes. Swallows were flying low.”

Job slammed the truck door. “What did you do to Will?”

“Why? What’s the matter with him?”

“It’s like he’s drugged or something.”

“
Drunk
,” said Jacob. “Drunk on the Holy Spirit.”

“I didn’t recognize him.”

“I suggested he get rid of the beard.”

“He’s so skinny.”

“He’s been having a little trouble with his appetite and sleeping. Probably the effects of the Holy Spirit working on him. I’m sure he’ll bounce back soon.”

“But he’s so changed.”

“Of course he is,” said Jacob. “He’s totally dependent on the Lord now, the Holy Spirit. That changes a man’s appearance.”

Job heard a deep whine. He thought at first it was machinery in the distance, or an electrical line. But he found the source: over the roof of the house there was a mass of mosquitoes, a great ball of moving bodies, thick enough to darken the storm cloud behind. Job kept an eye on the mosquitoes, ready to hightail it should they decide to descend. “You know Will’s living with his mother?” he asked.

“I suggested it. If he were a drug addict in need of treatment, you’d see the need for watching that he didn’t get into the drugs again, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess.”

“That’s exactly the situation we have here. He’s got an addiction. And he needs help getting over it. So Barbara and I are watching that he stays away from people and places and ideas that would lead him astray. Where were you last
night, anyway? I didn’t hear your truck come in. You did come home, didn’t you?”

Job didn’t answer. He watched the great swarm of mosquitoes and braced himself for a lecture. Jacob sniffed the air. “You got a fire going in the burn can?” he said.

“No. Why?”

Jacob looked around the yard and caught sight of a thin plume of smoke rising from the back of the house. They both took long strides, Job taking the lead. They turned the corner and there was Ben, watching the flames from a wood fire he’d built lick up the siding on the house. He didn’t run or explain. Just crossed his arms and watched as Jacob and Job stomped the fire out.

His town shoes blackened, his face red from exertion, Jacob swirled around and grabbed Ben’s shoulders. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

Ben made a sound like a laugh and went limp in Jacob’s hands.

“You think this is funny? You think all this damage you cause is funny? You think ruining my position in this community is funny? Do you
want
to go to hell? Do you? Do you?” Shaking him.

Ben pulled himself free, a surprise to Job, and to Ben, by the look of it, that he was able. “I hate this house. I hate this farm.”

“It’s not yours to hate. You’ve got no right.”

“I hate you!”

“How dare you talk to me like that!” Jacob’s voice was shrill and spittle flew from his mouth. He tugged off his belt with his right hand and held his waistband with his left. “Pull down your pants,” he said.

“No.”

Jacob lifted the belt over his shoulder like a whip, but Job yanked it from his hand and threw it to the ground several feet away. The two brothers stared at it, a brown snake, as though it had leapt from Jacob’s hand by itself.

Ben ran to the front of the house. The screen door squeaked open, and the door of Job’s old bedroom banged shut. The yard light flickered on. Above them a sky like boiling rags. The drone of mosquitoes from the roof.

Lilith came out in a yellow dress and shoes with heels that punched holes in the lawn. “What are you two doing out here?” she said. “You’ll get yourself hit by lightning, then what will I do? It’s time to head over to the church.”

“Church?” said Jacob.

“To help Ruth and Wade set up for the wedding, remember? We said we’d be there by now. Job, Ruth phoned. She wants you to come in whatever you’re going to wear tomorrow. She said she wants to make sure the best man doesn’t look prettier than the bride.”

Job stepped from his truck to the gravel of the church parking lot wearing the new dress shoes and blue double-breasted suit Ed had helped him pick out. He stood a moment outside the church, hoping Liv might catch sight of him dressed up, though he sweated in his new suit and wished for shorts. The flying saucer, the hot-air balloon, was nowhere in sight; Job imagined that the pilot, seeing the storm, had landed it in one of the fields. Beyond the community hall, a single sunflower, head and shoulders above the surrounding crop, bloomed in the midst of Steinke’s field of flowering canola. Above, a storm blackened sky, so dark that the town lights
flickered on. Ants, their blood hot, sped across the gravel under his feet. The air was thick with electricity: the smell of ozone, a metallic taste on Job’s tongue.

Ruth called when she heard the church door open. “We’re downstairs!”

Job rattled down the concrete steps to the basement, sounding to himself like a woman in heels; he wasn’t used to the clack of dress shoes. Wade was on a chair, and Ruth stood with her arms up, the two of them on either end of a streamer they were taping over the head table. Ruth turned when they were done. “Thank heavens,” she said. “I thought Wade and I were going to have to decorate this place by ourselves.”

“So?” Job held out his arms.

“You look fine. I had nightmares that you would turn up in that frilly shirt you wore to grad and upstage me.” It should have hurt. But it didn’t.

From outside he heard tires on gravel, and car doors slamming. Jacob, Lilith and Ben shuffled down the stairs, Jacob carrying a box of small white vases of roses Lilith had hastily picked from the bushes in front of the house. “Sorry we’re late,” said Lilith.

“Well, I’m just glad you’re here,” said Ruth, taping another streamer in place. “I’ve got to get these up before rehearsal. Pastor Henschell will be here in about an hour. You and Ben can put the roses out, centred on the tables. Jacob, blow up the balloons, will you? The helium canister is by the door and there’s a box of balloons on that last table. Job, you want to get going on those pompoms?”

Jacob dragged the helium tank over to a table, put the lips of a balloon to the nozzle and tied a full balloon to a
chair so it wouldn’t float to the ceiling. The balloon was pink with purple writing:
Congratulations! May all your dreams come true!

Job slipped off his suit jacket and sat on the concrete floor beside the box of plastic pompoms. They were packaged flat and had to be ruffled into shape. He looked up at Jacob now and again, assessing his anger, the damage done. Jacob locked gazes with him once as he fixed a string to a white balloon that read
Life is sweet with you by my side
. The balloon slipped from the chair he tied it to, bounced against the ceiling and was drawn into the overhead fan, where it popped.

Job felt the rumble in the concrete floor against his behind before he heard it. The low vibrations of an approaching freight train carried through the concrete of the floor, though no train should have been running at that hour. Then he heard it, a distant, deep roar that created spots of molten orange just in front of his face, like fire in the sky as the sun dipped below the prairie horizon. “What is that?”

“What?” said Jacob.

Job brushed off his dress pants and trotted up the basement stairs to the front door. Wind licked up dust and bits of paper, pushed and pulled Steinke’s canola crop and bowed the sunflower. Lightning flashed and thunder banged hot on its heels. The first few pellets of hail initiated a deluge. Lights throughout town blinked out. Suddenly it was there, illuminated by the blue-white flashes of downed electrical transformers. A looming finger dropped from a fist of cloud, twirling towards them. Job cried down the stairs, “Tornado!”

“What?” said Jacob, heaving himself up the stairs.

Job pointed as Ben, Lilith, Wade and Ruth joined them on the front steps under the awning to stare at the thing. A roar like jet engines that produced, for Job, licks of harvest moon, streaks of shining yellow and puddles of orange like liquid metal. With the colours came the first blushes of certainty Job had felt in months, a light thrill of knowing.

“It’s coming right for us,” said Jacob.

Lilith headed back down the dark stairs, her hand clutching Ben’s shirt sleeve, dragging him down with her. “We’ve got to get into the cold room,” she yelled. “It’s solid concrete.”

They all disappeared down the stairs, leaving Job alone on the front steps of the church. He leaned into the door frame in order to stand, as the force of the wind nearly knocked him over. It was exhilarating, and deafening: a roar the exact colour of a harvest moon, when thousands of prairie combines kicked dust into the atmosphere, colouring the moon a shining deep red-orange. He coughed dust, and his ears popped as the tornado careened into Steinke’s canola field. Canola blossoms spiralled upwards, clockwise, turning the tornado momentarily yellow. Job felt the air pull from his lungs and felt himself lifting, losing his footing, even as he clung to the door frame. Lightning banged overhead and reached out like the legs of a spider across the sky.

Then a black spiral snaked its way up the tornado as Bullick’s house and yard were sucked upwards. Debris, like a swarm of bees, rolled together as if orchestrated by one mind. Shattered two-by-fours. The branches of trees. Sheets
of siding. A truck. A hot-water tank. The roof of a barn flapped like the wing of a bird before disintegrating. A duck floundered through the whirling air; its flapping slowed, and it lost momentum, clicking through its movements like an image projected in slow motion. Around it, debris hung suspended in place, as if the tornado were about to reverse itself and send Bullick’s house snaking back down. But the tornado didn’t unwind. It simply stopped.

Quiet. The colours of the tornado hang still in the air in front of Job. Puddles of molten orange, streaked with shining yellow. He touches the colour and his hand sinks into orange. Colour bleeds up his arm and runs into him. He becomes orange, becomes yellow, becomes light. He becomes air, and churning wind. He feels himself balloon outward in all directions until he doesn’t feel himself any more. He is all there is. It is all himself.

Bliss.

A shift. A disconnection. A lack, a loneliness. A movement from light to form. A hand, a foot. Stomach. Gender. Self. He laughs and finds voice. Remembers the taste of orange. All at once, everything falls into place.

A hand on his shoulder. Jacob. “Job!” Job saw him shout, but didn’t hear. All around them the thud of falling objects: chunks of wood, slabs of concrete, sheets of siding. A canoe bounced off Job’s truck and landed whole on the parking lot that was now a lake of mud. Power poles along the road fell one after the other.

Jacob grabbed Job’s arm, pulled him back into the church and down the basement stairs. They stumbled through the dark, pushing tables aside and tripping over the legs of chairs. Above them the crash and tinkle of glass,
the snap of two-by-fours and all around a roaring. Job’s molten orange was brilliant in the dark. But even brighter inside him was a profound excitement, a presence he had only one word for: God. He fell. Jacob dragged him across the concrete floor and pushed the metal door of the cold room shut behind him. Job’s ears popped. A freight train chugged towards them. The snap and thunder of disintegrating boards. Then, nothing.

A crack of light under the door. Behind him in the dark, Jacob, Lilith, Ben, Wade and Ruth murmured to one another that they were all right. Job yanked the door open and stepped into sky. He stumbled over layers of debris at his feet, the wreckage of the church. The organ sat on a pile of studs, insulation and plywood. The church roof sat almost whole out in the mud of Steinke’s field. Pews were on end in the graveyard. Children’s chairs from the nursery were flung into surrounding fields. The canoe that had fallen from the sky was now cradled in a poplar, but Job’s truck was gone. Everything was cast in a green-yellow light.

Job picked his way through mud and debris, careful not to get his new shoes dirty, and headed down Main Street, the yellow blossoms of Steinke’s canola crop showering down on him like confetti. Shingles were torn from the roof of the community hall, and paint was lifted from the sides of Barbara’s house as if it had been sandblasted. Trees were knocked over, their roots clutching air like tortured hands. On the trees still standing, wads of pink insulation hung like Christmas-tree ornaments. The strings of Ruth’s wedding balloons were caught in a rosebush, wrapped around the mirror of a truck and snagged in a crabapple tree. Many of the balloons were still full of helium. Job found a torn
garbage bag on the road and collected them, thinking Ruth would want them.

Bullick stumbled through the alley between the community hall and the co-op coated in dirt, carrying a piece of siding in one hand, a chunk of two-by-four sticking out of his shoulder. The brilliant red of blood oozing over mud. Job waved a hand to get his attention. “Got something on your shoulder there, Hanke.”

Bullick looked back at his shoulder, at the wood sticking out. “Oh, thanks.” But tucked the siding under his useless arm and bent to collect another piece.

A few windows were knocked out of Liv’s place, and the bird feeders were gone. Job pulled a balloon from her caragana hedge and added it to his collection. Liv picked her way out of the basement door and joined Job on the lawn, in the shower of yellow petals. She held her hands out to them, as if to a welcome rain after a dry spell. Yellow in her hair. “You okay?” she said.

“Fine.”

“What you up to?”

“Ruth’s balloons.” He tied a knot in the top of the garbage bag, put it down, and it took flight, sailing into the air above them. It struck Job as funny. He went to all that effort collecting the balloons, only to have them fly off. Wasn’t that just the way of things? He laughed.

Liv laughed a little and said, “What?”

But Job was off, stumbling past the co-op, where a small crowd had gathered outside. Steinke was among them, still drinking his coffee. Crystal came out, refilled his cup and went back inside. Job waved a hand at them and they all waved back, as though they were watching a parade. Liv
caught up to Job and walked with him down Correction Line Road, the gravel strewn with yellow flowers. “You sure you’re all right?” she said. “Weren’t hit by something?”