A Rhinestone Button (35 page)

“No. I feel fine.” He did feel fine. Euphoric.

“You going to check on the damage at the farm?”

“Damage?” He couldn’t think what she’d be talking about. He wasn’t sure why he was heading to the farm. It just seemed important to get there.

They passed what was left of Dithy’s yard, her house nothing but rubble, her husband’s whirligigs scattered for a half-mile. Dithy herself sat on an orange couch on her lawn, petting a cat laid across her lap. She called, “Yoo-hoo!”

Liv waved. “You okay?”

“Fine, fine.”

“Sorry about the house.”

“It was insured.”

“That cat okay?”

“Don’t think so. It’s dead.”

“You need anything?”

“No, no. You two young people run along. Enjoy yourselves.”

Along the road a dozen eggs in a carton, all of them whole. A picture of Jesus from a junior-church classroom, ripped nearly in half. Half a nursery chair. A toddler’s white boot. A crazy quilt wrapped in the arms of a tree. Will’s renters on what had been their lawn. A petite woman in a business suit, and her children, a boy and a girl, sat on chairs, watching their father try to start a lawn mower. The man waved. Behind them the garage still stood, but the house was gone. One of Will’s poultry barns was flattened, but the other was whole. Machinery around
the yard was left untouched by the storm. There were dead chickens on the road and feathers everywhere. Chickens wandered the yard and pecked at gravel, and a few of them strutted around naked, like strippers in high heels, their only feathers at the tops of their heads. The hot stink of chicken manure.

At the Sunstrum farm, there was mud everywhere. The whale was still on the fence post and Jonah waved and waved. The vacuum cleaner hung in a spruce, and a kid’s chair from the church rested in the middle of the yard. The house was nothing but foundation and debris, and the barn had collapsed from the middle inward, as if a giant had sat on it and the barn couldn’t take the weight. The metal of the new granaries had unfurled and twisted around trees near by. The hired hand’s cabin was simply gone. Only the two silos were left standing.
Jesus is Lord! Hallelujah!

A creature covered in mud ran across the yard towards Job, mewing. Grace. She was shivering, skinny, pregnant. Job picked her up, sat in the child’s chair, and cradled and petted her. He found himself crying over the cat, at having found her again. Then he caught sight of his feet. “My new shoes!” They were wet through, covered in mud, ruined. He looked up at Liv. “I wanted to look nice for you.” He saw that his suit was also covered in mud. It had been all along and he hadn’t noticed. At that moment he registered the devastation around him, as if the world had suddenly come into creation. The yard and fields around him were strewn with splintered boards, twisted metal, bits of tortured machinery, insulation and the bodies of cows. The cows still alive grazed among the bodies as if nothing had happened. But even this seemed achingly beautiful. Job
waved a hand at it all and laughed at the absurdity. “And I’m worried about my shoes.”

Liv knelt beside him, hugged him, rocked him, smoothed his muddy hair as he rubbed Grace dry with the inside of his suit jacket and put the cat to the ground. The cat mewed and mewed. “I know this really isn’t the time for this,” said Liv, “but I wanted to apologize, for the way I acted this morning. Ed called, and as we were talking he said he thought you’d never been with a woman before. Not all the way, in any case.” She took his muddy face in both her hands. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

They sorted through rubble for a time, waiting for Jacob or help to arrive, piling salvaged items on the concrete steps. One of Lilith’s dresses. The copy of
Nervous Christians
jammed with bits of pink insulation. A suit jacket. Ben’s guitar, with its strings plucked and curled. An iron. Graduation photos of Jacob and Job. A torn family portrait taken when they were still boys: Abe, grim, wearing the suit he’d be buried in. Emma putting on a smile, one hand clenched in a fist. Both Jacob and Job in their tight, nervous grins.

He found his mother’s clear glass rolling pin cradled in the kitchen drawer in which he’d kept it. Miraculously intact. He smoothed his hand over it, wrapped it in a mud-stained blanket and placed it carefully on the steps. He picked up Abe’s cowboy hat from the rubble and put it on. Liv wriggled her nose. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“No.” He took it off and fiddled with the red feather tucked into the band. He thought of his father wearing the hat and playing cowboy in the mirror. He’d wanted to ride the rodeo circuit and got stuck raising sheep on his own father’s farm. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever done a thing
I wanted,” said Job. “Not a single, goddamned thing.” He tossed the hat back into the rubble. “What am I going to do?”

“You could stay at my house, until you get back on your feet.”

“Your place?”

“You can sleep in the spare bedroom tonight. And after that, we’ll see.”

Job waved a hand. “No, I mean, what am I going to
do?
” He didn’t know
what
he wanted; he had never considered what
he
wanted. He didn’t know where to start. And already he was forgetting the tornado, not that it happened, but the order of things, the details. He knew he’d felt awe and carried a profound light within himself, but he couldn’t capture the feel of it. He was surprised at how quickly the moment had drained away. He was already on to the next, wondering at his future.

The end of April, and fields thawed into gumbo. Above, what Liv called a Monty Python sky: perfect white and fluffy clouds receding in size into an infinite blue horizon. Liv lifted a beer and said that from such a sky she expected an immense foot to descend and stomp them all flat with the squishy, rude noise of a boot stepping into a cow patty. “God’s foot?” asked Will.

“Don’t start,” said Liv.

It was under this sky that Job, Liv, Jason, Ben, Will and Jerry had gathered in the stubble of Will’s barley field for a Godsfinger tradition: the junk party. They sat on a row of folding lawn chairs on a low hill that afforded the best view of Correction Line Road. The best view of Job’s place as well, for this was the day the silos would be taken down.

The Stubblefield farm auction was over; the auctioneer’s trailer was gone. Members of the ladies’ auxiliary had folded and carted their tables from Will’s garage and enlisted their husbands to haul away the coolers of pop and the barbecues on which they’d broiled burgers and wieners. In the back of Will’s pickup was a mess the local auctioneer called Nellie’s Room, a pile of junk that wouldn’t fetch a dollar: a bicycle without pedals or a chain, rolls of tarpaper, the broken handles of garden tools, a rusted submarine tank heater,
stovepipes and bits of scrap metal, half bags of moulding seed, a seized slough pump, useless bits of leftover fencing wire, and household odds and ends. Below the junk party, sitting on the side of Correction Line Road, was a toaster that hadn’t worked for years. Will had polished it up with his shirt before placing it there, then ran back up through the caragana that hid the lawn chairs on the hill from view. The toaster caught the sun and winked.

Will wore his Mackinaw, his chin covered in a stubble of new growth. He’d gained back most of the weight he’d shed and lost the haunted look, though from time to time he still tried to talk Job into finding a fellowship to attend. Will had found himself an apartment in Edmonton and was attending a church in the city that he said little about, only that it was more comfortable than Jacob’s new church or Godsfinger Baptist had been. Jacob called Will a backslider, a black sheep, an ink blot. Job assumed he and Will had had a falling out but had never heard the details, and he didn’t ask for them. Job had seen Barbara Stubblefield cross Main Street rather than meet her own son on the sidewalk. Job crossed the street himself if he saw Jacob walking down it. He was tired of his brother’s sermons and demands that Job attend service on Sundays. “How do you think it looks having my own brother refuse to come to my church?” Jacob asked him.

Jacob had put a down payment on Hosegood’s sausage factory, and was in the process of renovating the second floor into a large apartment and the first floor into a church, all with the weekend volunteer labour of the church’s membership. He’d been holding Sunday services in the midst of sawdust and construction for months, ever since Pastor
Henschell, too close to retirement to start over, had handed his resignation to the board. A few members of the old Godsfinger Baptist congregation attended Jacob’s church, as the closest Baptist church was in Leduc. But most of Jacob’s flock were newcomers, acreage people, or families moving into new subdivisions.

Ben and Jason sat on the ground at Liv and Job’s feet. Ben scratched the belly of Jerry’s dog with his foot as Liv unwound her long hennaed hair from the bun she kept it in during her day serving at the tea house. Her orange broomstick skirt was fanned out over her legs, her orange silk tank top shining in the sun. Goosebumps on her arms. The vulnerability of her stubby, exposed toes in her leather sandals made Job want to pull her close and never let go.

From across the road, on the Sunstrum farm, came the roar of machines: Caterpillars and scrapers, buggies and a track hoe digging out a slough. The clack of tracks and grind of metal scraping on rock. Dump trucks and gravel trucks came and went, cleaning up the rubble, smoothing out ground, now that the earth had thawed. A couple of Johnny-on-the-spots. A survey team of two men. And a foreman watching it all, with his hands on his hips, from the rubble that had once been the house.

“So how’s it feel?” Liv asked Job. She pointed at the machines with her beer bottle. “Seeing the farm turned into a golf course.”

Job shrugged, felt his eyes sting. It made him weepy to think of it, the land his grandfather had homesteaded sold to strangers. But there it was, progress. And the sale had let him do what he wanted. He’d sunk a little of his part of the insurance settlement and the sale of the land into a half
share of Liv’s tea house and set up the kitchen the way he wanted. He had a tidy sum in the bank, even after taxes. He felt like a rich man. All that money, tied up in land.

The Sunstrums’ had been the first of the Godsfinger farms hit by the Black Friday tornado to sell. It was the coulee that wrapped up the deal, the view of the lake. They’d sold to an Edmonton developer named Schlitt, who was turning the property into a golf course with a subdivision all around, for those hungry for a game of golf after a hard day’s work in Edmonton. A sign where the mailbox had been said so:
Future Home of Schlitt Estates. Golf Lover’s Paradise!
A man swinging a golf club. Rolling greens beyond. The future clubhouse at the top of the coulee, where Job had watched deer run for the joy of it, to feel blood thumping through their veins. Locals had already taken to calling the place “Shit Estates.”

Bullick’s feedlot was the second to go, sold to a developer who risked October snows to bang up a tidy street of roofed boxes and was at it again now. Rumour had it he’d already sold all the houses planned for the development. Dithy Spitzer had bought one. Families living in ten others already. Liv and Job’s tea house was booming, filled with visitors from Edmonton who came to check out real estate and stopped for lunch. A few Out-to-Lunch Café old-timers came to the tea house too, mostly the younger married couples, out on dates. Liv and Job had hired Ben to bus on weekends along with Jason, and to wash dishes after school.

A red Mustang roared down the road but slowed when it came upon the toaster. They all sat forward in their lawn chairs and watched. When the car sped on, they booed and
hooted. Jerry’s dog, excited by the shouts, leapt up and barked, put its front paws on Jerry’s lap and licked his face.

Liv leaned forward to get a look at Jerry. “Where’s Debbie?” she asked him. “Figured she’d want to see the silos coming down. Or is she too good for us?”

Jerry clapped his hands, yelled, “Git!” and wiped muddy paws from his jeans. “She left me last weekend,” he said. He pulled a beer from the cooler and avoided looking anyone in the eye. “She said I couldn’t bring her all God had in mind for her and that she’d found her true soulmate in a welder from Stony Plain.”

Liv caught Job’s eye, grinned, and raised her beer in a toast.

From across the road the buzz of an angle grinder droned as a workman cut the last of the anchor bolts of the first silo. Then a minivan drove down Correction Line Road, with a kid in a car seat in the back. The van slowed and stopped. A woman in a wide-shouldered business suit and blue pumps got out, looked around, picked up the toaster and trotted back to the driver’s side, holding it like a football. She sped off.

Will jumped and raised his arms. “Touchdown!” he said, and did a little dance. They all hollered. Will clinked Job’s beer with his plastic Thermos cup and took a swig before choosing his next item from the back of his pickup: a transistor radio that hadn’t produced a tune for a decade. He ran it down the hill and left it by the side of the road.

A catskinner on a D4 Cat ran the loader into the first silo.
Jesus is Lord!
Job pulled a Coke and a Bud from the cooler. He handed the Coke to Jason and popped the beer open, then took Liv’s hand in his. A flock of ducks flew low
overhead, their wings whistling. Northern shovellers with bills like spatulas, shiny olive heads and splotches of reddish brown on their bellies. Job paid close attention now and noted details. Since the Black Friday tornado, he’d been searching out and collecting moments like this one as if they were photos, mementos, knick-knacks found in the tornado debris. Junk to anyone else. Precious to him. He replayed these moments daily, while lying in the bath or just before sleep, to keep the images fresh in his mind.