A Rhinestone Button

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Four

  Then Ed. The summer following Jacob’s return, Job dropped in on Will early one morning, unannounced, and found Ed sitting at the kitchen table in nothing but his Stanfield’s. Morning bristle on a wrestler’s chin, dark ruffle of chest hair, arms as thick as thighs. He made no attempt to cover himself. Will had answered the door in a terry bathrobe. “This is, ah, Ed. He’ll be staying with me. Working with me.”

  Ed didn’t act like a hired hand, didn’t live in the trailer on the other side of the yard but moved right into the house with Will, ate every meal with him. Made supper alongside Will when Job was over. It was clear Ed wasn’t a guest; he was family in a way Job wasn’t. Although Ed didn’t impose himself when Job went out with Penny and Will, he was there, in the kitchen, during the Tuesday-night Bible study when Job found himself complaining, again, about the lack of eligible young women in the area.

  “You just need to get out more,” said Ed.

  Job supposed this was true. Other single men his age drove up to Edmonton discotheques looking for a date. Or went to the Godsfinger Bar and Grill for a beer and bum darts, a game in which contestants put quarters in the fabric of their butt cracks, walked a space, then released the quarters into a cup; or chicken bingo, for which bets were placed as to where on a numbered grid the bird in question would take a shit. Or, as a last resort, single guys went to the karaoke nights at the Godsfinger community hall, where residents sang from lyrics typed onto recipe cards. On the Saturday nights that Job didn’t go out with Will and Penny, he stayed in his farm kitchen with his cat in his lap, listening to his vacuum cleaner.

  “Even if I found somebody, how would I entertain?” said Job. “I can’t bring a woman into that cabin.”

  “A girl would understand,” said Will. “It’s just a temporary situation.”

  All of them were crowded at the kitchen table. Job in jeans and a Sunday shirt. Wade in his NAPA Auto Parts cap and Jerry Kuss in his white cowboy hat, neither thinking to take them off inside the house. Penny in a sweatshirt with a picture of a cat on the front. Ruth Swanson, sitting head and shoulders above them all, with the hands of a basketball player. Ed in jeans and undershirt, though there were ladies present. Will in his Mackinaw, itching his beard. A duck, wearing a diaper, sat on his foot.

  Job took a sip from his coffee. “Jacob’s talking about staying, running the farm.”

  “He’s no farmer,” said Will. “Never was.”

  “I know it. He knows it. But they’ve had some problems. Lilith wants to stay put for a while.”

  “You happy about that?” said Will. “Farming with him?”

  Job shrugged. “What choice do I have? Dad left half the farm to him.”

  “Even if he does stay, that’s no reason why you can’t go out, have a little fun,” said Ed.

  “Yeah, but who with?”

  Godsfinger wasn’t brimming with single women. Job had found his one and only date at Jacob’s wedding reception, held at the Godsfinger community hall. Amanda Krumm was a second cousin from Saskatchewan; when Job watched her from across the community hall, she gave him the eye in return. As they petted in his father’s pickup behind the hall, it never occurred to him that she might try to take his shirt off. He didn’t notice she’d undone several buttons until she spoke.

  “Your chest is so smooth. And your arms. What do you do? Shave your arms?”

  “No.”

  She ran a finger down his cheek. “And the skin on your face, it’s so soft, like a woman’s. You don’t have to shave, do you?”

  There was wonderment in her voice, as if she had just seen a rare eastern bluebird, flitting cerulean in the lilac. It was true, at nineteen he shaved only occasionally and even then he shaved just for himself, to say he could. His beard was a scattering of downy white hairs.

  “You are a man, right?” She giggled. It rose like hiccups and wouldn’t stop. Job asked politely if Amanda would please leave the truck and then he drove himself home, abandoning his father at the reception, though there’d be hell to pay. He knew his embarrassment would be all over that hall within the hour.

  “Why not put an ad in the personals?” Ed asked.

  Job took a sip from his coffee, didn’t bother answering.

  “I’m serious,” said Ed. “That’s how I hooked up with Will.”

  Around them the kitchen was more or less as Barbara had left it, though nowhere near as tidy. Three days’ worth of dishes in the sink. Stacks of newspapers in the corner. A bag of Pampers Newborns on the counter. Two weeks of grit underfoot. But the walls, the tops of cupboards, and the fridge, were covered with Barbara’s fridge magnets and framed inspirational sayings, knick-knacks. Chickens, mostly. A ceramic-chicken cookie jar on top of the fridge. A chicken mobile dangling above the window. Thirty or more sets of chicken salt-and-pepper shakers scattered here and there. Gifts from friends who felt it necessary to give her chickens for her birthdays and at Christmas. Barbara had once told Job that she had never liked these chicken trinkets but felt duty bound to display them all, in case one of the friends who’d given them should drop by. She’d left it all when she moved into town, bought everything new. But didn’t want Will to throw anything out.

  “It’s one thing to find a job through a newspaper ad,” said Penny. “It’s another to find a wife that way. It’s sort of desperate.”

  “Who said anything about a wife?” said Jerry. “Why not just someone to have a few laughs with. A little hootchy-kootchy.”

  Jerry had little trouble finding women, though he couldn’t seem to hang on to them. He had the cowboy look that the local women went for. Brilliant blue eyes in a sunbaked face. He’d opened a country mechanics shop in his father’s old machine shed. Scraped a meagre living until he went back to church and joined the local Christian businessmen’s association, and changed his business name from Kuss Repairs to Good Samaritan Towing and Repairs. Business went up thirty per cent.

  “Exactly,” said Ed. “I’m just talking about someone to get out with, so you’re not always hanging your sorry ass around here.”

  “How about Liv?” said Ruth. “You seem to get along with her.”

  Liv worked at the co-op, waitressing in the café, manning the tills in the grocery, and had a habit of sitting at Job’s table when things were slow, sharing a coffee and a bit of gossip with him. She sliced him larger pieces of pie than the other waitresses did. Spooned on bigger dollops of whipped cream, ice cream. She’d moved to town with her husband, Darren Liebich, several years before, just after Darren’s mother had died and left him the family home in the centre of Godsfinger, a grand turn-of-the-century two-storey house with elaborate fretwork on the veranda and upper balcony. Darren was a trucker and wasn’t home much. He and Liv had a son about eleven or twelve, Ben’s age, named Jason. Liv had an easy way about her, a ready laugh that produced, for Job, a fall of tiny silver balls. He liked her. She was one of the few women his age, other than Penny and Ruth, who he felt comfortable talking to.

  “She’s married,” said Job.

  Will picked up the duck, put it on his lap, stroked its head. “She and Darren split. Mom said his truck was parked over at Rhonda Cooper’s several nights in a row.”

  “She doesn’t mow her lawn,” said Penny. “There were complaints. Barbara said she gave Liv a warning. If she doesn’t tidy up her yard, Barbara’s going to fine her.”

  Will put the duck on Ed’s lap, stood to get the coffee pot. “That’s my mom.” Barbara not only judged and awarded ribbons on the vegetable and flower arrangement entries at the fall fair, but placed sticky notes on the winners and losers alike with what she felt were helpful criticisms: These carrots should have been cleaned better and had the hairy root ends cut off, or, on Liv’s blue-ribbon flower arrangement, in which she had used a pretty yellow button flower, Tansy is a noxious weed. Why you used it is beyond me.

  “She is pretty,” said Job.

  “She’s fat,” said Penny. “You’re not really thinking of
asking her out?”

  “I’d ask her out,” said Wade. “If I were you.”

  They all turned to Wade and waited for him to say more. But he put a whole almond square in his mouth and chewed. Wade and Jerry were best friends, though what kept the friendship going was anyone’s guess. Wade worked in the Leduc auto-parts store that Jerry frequented, and Job supposed that was how the friendship between the two had been struck. But while Jerry grated, Job liked Wade. He didn’t expect talk, rarely spoke. There was something in his manner that demanded respect. Maybe it was his silence. Like Proverbs said, “Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.”

  Job reached for Ed’s lap to stroke the duck’s head but yanked his hand back when the bird lunged for him. “I don’t think she’s fat,” he said.

  “She’s got thick ankles,” said Penny. “And she dresses weird.” Liv wore ankle-length skirts with sandals in summer, army boots in winter, when the other women wore jeans and sweatshirts adorned with pictures of cats and horses or dressed for Sunday in frocks from Kmart. She’d let her hair grow to her bum, dyed it red with henna, kept it in a thick braid for work and wore dangling earrings so heavy they stretched the holes in her earlobes. Stinky Steinke called her a hippie.

  Penny crossed her arms. “She’s always got scruffy kids hanging around her place.”

  “They’re visiting her son, Jason,” said Ed. “And she volunteers for that crisis line, helps kids out. I like her. I’d say go for it, Job.”

  Job glanced at Penny. “Nah, she’s damaged goods,” he said, and realized at once this was something his father had said of a woman with a history, something he disliked his father for.

  Jerry snorted, shook his head. “I guess going to the bar is out.”

  Job didn’t bother answering. The few woman who set foot in the Godsfinger Bar and Grill: sixty-year-old, chain-smoking Beulah, who filed her nails to a point and took trips to Vegas and cruises to Alaska. Pamela Wragg and the Reddick sisters, who participated in the bar’s sporting nights, in games of bum darts and chicken bingo.

  “There’s always Crystal,” said Will. He grinned. The co-op’s Out-to-Lunch Café was run by the cook, Crystal Briskie. Her real name was Janice, but following her divorce, when she’d reverted to her maiden name, she’d felt a change in her first name was also in order. She was a short, chunky woman in her mid-fifties whose fashion was inspired by Dolly Parton. Blonde hair piled on her head. Cleavage showing even as she deep-fried the hand-cut potatoes. She wore spiked heels while she worked, and never failed to complain that her feet were sore. She didn’t go to church and Job gathered she didn’t have much use for religion. She once told Job, “You need to find yourself a good woman who’ll take care of you. Give you some loving. It’ll change everything. Make all that church business look like the nonsense it is.”

  Job often took his coffee into the kitchen to talk with her while she cooked and sometimes helped her out, ladling up soup or flipping burgers. The sound of sizzling patties on the grill, bursts of orange and red that blended into each other like the food colouring his mother had dropped into vinegar to colour Easter eggs. “Why don’t you come work for me?” she said. “Better yet, take over running this place. I’ve had it with the complaints.” He liked that she enjoyed his company. He liked that she found him useful in the kitchen. But she was fifty. And smoked. And never went to church, and had two sons nearly his age.

  Will refilled Job’s cup.

  “So why not ask Ruth out?” said Jerry.

  It was a cruel thing. Ruth looked out the window. Job studied his coffee. He’d given some thought to asking Ruth out. With her obvious physical strength and her no-nonsense spirit of mind, she would have made an excellent farmer’s wife. But just standing next to her made him feel inept. He didn’t like the thought of asking her to get the Kellogg’s box down from the top shelf.

  “Ah, I’m just joshing,” said Jerry. “You’d look like a couple from a mock wedding.”

  Ruth, and then Job, laughed from relief, for there it was, the truth of the matter.

  “If I wasn’t seeing Will, I’d go out with you,” said Penny. “What I mean is, it’s just a matter of you meeting some girls. You’re gorgeous.”

  Will put the coffee pot back on its hot plate. “Penny’s right, you’re a good catch,” he said. “Just nobody knows it. I think putting an ad in the personals isn’t such a bad idea.”

  Job played with the handle of his cup, stared down at his wavering reflection in the coffee. He didn’t share the same ruggedness of the local men, like Reuben Brostom, who had once killed nine gophers with one shot. Or Rusty Gronlund, who, after his arm was chopped off at the elbow when he tried to yank wet hay out of a clogged baler, had driven himself, and his severed arm on ice in his beer cooler, the half-hour drive to the hospital. But Job had his own charms.

  Will sat back down and Ed handed him the duck. Job reached for the duck again, trying to make friends, but pulled a throbbing finger from its beak. It was a mallard. He’d given Will the clutch of eggs it had hatched from. A nest he’d run over with the mower the summer before, killing the mother duck, who, in her broodiness, wouldn’t fly off the nest to save herself. Job was too late to rescue the mother but gathered three unbroken eggs. Took them over to Will, who’d tucked them under a broody hen. Will was there to watch them hatch and he peeled the last of the egg away from this duck. Made a pet of him. First around the yard, later in the house so he wouldn’t fly off in the fall. Barbara demanded that Will diaper the bird, for it was she who cleaned the house, twice a month. Insisted on it.

  Will held the duck’s beak closed together a moment, as punishment, and put it to the floor.

  “How about that radio show,” said Ed. “ ‘Loveline.’ You ever listen to it?”

  Job shook his head.

  “The first part of the show they interview people who call in, one at a time. Others call in and try to convince the host why they should go out with one of the people interviewed. They’re all trying to sell themselves. The only thing is they stopped taking farmers because most of them lived too far away. But we could work that out somehow. It’s on tonight. We could phone.”

  “No, no.”

  “I’ll phone for you. Set it up.”

  “No. Please don’t.”

  “Leave it alone,” said Will. “Why not let us get on with our Bible study?”

  “Fine,” said Ed. He grabbed a couple of Job’s almond squares, strode from the kitchen, clicked on the television in the living room.

  Job, Will, Wade, Jerry, Ruth and Penny got down to the business at hand: determining the will of God. They had gone through the Bible-study course “Figuring Out the Will of God” twice in the last year, and Job was still confused. He knew how to ask in prayer. But how to be sure of God’s answer? Why could he never get a clear sign from God, when others who shouldn’t be certain claimed with confidence that God had spoken to them? Edith Spitzer waylaid people on the street, announced that God had told her to pass on a message, then lectured them on the dangers of mowing over outdoor electrical cords or making toast next to the kitchen sink, or on the importance of wearing safety goggles.

  Edith, or Dithy as she was called—among other things—had lost her husband, Herb, and all her children when their car was hit by a train at the Millet crossing. With the loss of her family, Dithy Spitzer became obsessed with the safety and health of others. She fancied herself a traffic cop, strode out into the street to stop a car if she saw a pedestrian waiting to cross, or if she thought the car was going too fast. After years of ushering her off the street, the RCMP had given in to her fantasies and presented her with a fluorescent vest so at least she would be seen. On to it she’d fashioned a holster, in which she carried a water pistol that she fired at drivers who didn’t yield to her frenzied demands to stop.

  Just last week she’d grabbed Job’s arm as she met him in front of the co-op, whispered, “God told me to tell you that you’ve
got to get out more.” When he yanked his arm away, walked on, she pulled out her water pistol and shot him in the back of the head.

  Job’s was a problem that had long vexed the faithful. Gideon himself had felt it necessary to ask God for a sign, and then test the sign he got. He laid a fleece on the ground overnight, asked God to put dew on the fleece and not on the ground if God backed his plan to save Israel. And God did. But that could have just been condensation. So Gideon laid out the fleece a second night, and asked God to put dew on the ground this time and not on the fleece. A sure sign. In the parlance of Job’s community, testing God’s will in this manner was called putting out a fleece.

  Job knew he shouldn’t bring simple decisions before God: like, what socks should he wear? What should he cook himself for dinner? But he knew he had to ask God for help in making any major decision, like, should he buy a new truck? Job’s truck was a moody red Ford that had belonged to his father and only started when God moved it to. He kept meaning to take the truck over to Jerry’s to get the starter fixed, but found it useful for ascertaining God’s will. If the truck turned over he went into town. If it didn’t, he didn’t.

  An hour into the study, Ed called from the living room. “Hey, Job. Phone.”

  “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” said Will.

  “Who is it?” Job asked. The duck followed him into the living room, its diapered tail swinging back and forth.

  “How should I know?” said Ed.

  Job took the phone, said “Hello?” Listened to music for a few moments. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Job from Godsfinger. I’m Roly Redman and you’re live on ‘Loveline.’ So, Job, tell us about yourself. I understand you’re in real estate.”