A Rhinestone Button

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  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.

  Twenty

  It was already nearly the end of July, and Job was on the tractor, wondering where the days had gone. He was turning over an old hayfield of brome grass and alfalfa that was thin from winterkill; plants had died off in the harsh winters and no longer produced enough forage to make the harvest worthwhile. He planned to work over the field several times that summer, with the disk and later with the cultivator, to break up the sod, and to replant with barley the next spring.

  At the headlands, the space at the end of the field where he turned the tractor around, a thought came to mind as he glanced over to the fenceline. It was a fence his grandfather had built, one that Abe, and later Job, had repaired, replacing wire and fence posts as needed. But the fenceline itself had remained there for more than sixty years. When Job was a boy, lightning had travelled along this fenceline, electrocuting the unfortunate cow that had been pushing through the wires to munch on grain in the next field. As a consequence, Job never mended fences under a stormy sky. Abe had told him how that length of fence had been part of the telephone line in his youth; the barbed wire had carried crackling voices up to the house. Now, turning the tractor at the headlands, the notion occurred to Job that the wire might still carry those voices, that if he hooked a telephone up to the barbed wire, he might overhear conversations from decades past. Then it dawned on him that he’d had this exact thought at this very point at the headlands six years before when he last disked the field. Would he have the same thought again in his forties? In his sixties? His father had often complained that with farm work, one year was so like the next that the years seemed to nest in one another and collapse into one, like the plastic cup he owned that was made up of rings and folded down into a pillbox. An effect that made the years at once stand still and speed by, without much change. A thought Job found suffocating.

  He straightened the tractor out and headed back down the field, vibrating with the bounce of the tractor wheels over upturned sod. Behind him, red-billed Franklin’s gulls lifte
d and fell as they followed the tractor, feasting on a banquet of newly churned worms and insects. A crow hopped along in front of the tractor, playing a dangerous game of chicken, for no good reason that Job could see. The bird didn’t appear to be after bugs. A hawk swooped down and plucked a scurrying mouse from the field as a magician might pluck a rabbit from a hat. Job hadn’t seen the mouse until the moment the hawk, still in flight, reached with its claws for it. Maybe it was the mice the crow waited for, though, like Job, the crow was not as adept as the hawk in spotting them. The crow watched with Job as the hawk flew off with his prize.

  Jerry’s dog sniffed along the edge of the field near the fence, then ran off barking at someone walking down the road. Liv. Job lifted a hand to her and she scaled the fence, the dog leaping and barking around her. She marched across the field, lifting her feet high to navigate the turned sod, holding her long skirt up to keep it from the dirt. She wore a wide straw hat on her head. From a distance she could have walked out of the turn of the century. The wife traversing the field to bring lunch to her husband, who was busy with horse and plow. Job swung the tractor around to meet her, before pulling to a halt and turning off the engine. He jumped down into broken sod, and still feeling the vibrations of the tractor running through his body, he steadied himself like a sailor stepping from a ship onto land. The smell of hot earth. Grit the tractor threw up stuck to his sweaty face. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow.

  “Isn’t this Jerry’s dog?” Liv said, patting the dog down.

  “Yeah.” Job didn’t explain. The effort seemed beyond him. He’d phoned Jerry several times, begging him to pick up the dog. Jerry said, “Take him to the SPCA, shoot him, I don’t care.” But Job couldn’t bring himself to shoot it, and the effort of hauling it all the way to Leduc to the SPCA seemed just too much. The dog was everywhere Job was, running after the tractor as he worked the soil and seeded, and later as he brought in his first hay crop. The dog scratched at the door at night, and streaked Job’s work jeans with muddied paws. Job had tied the animal up but found it running alongside the tractor later in the day with the gnawed rope dangling from its collar. The yard was littered with scraps of white hair that fell from the dog once the weather warmed up. The limp bodies of the gophers it caught and carried around all day as trophies rotted on the lawn.

  “Jerry hardly ever comes into the café any more,” said Liv. “I guess Debbie’s got him going elsewhere.” The dog brought a stick and dropped it at Liv’s feet. She threw it and watched the dog run. “Never see you at the café any more either.”

  “I do most of my shopping in Edmonton these days.”

  “Ed says he sees quite a lot of you.”

  “We catch a movie now and again. I make a lot of meals at his place.” Without access to his own kitchen, Job had craved the opportunity to cook, and Ed seemed happy enough to have a meal waiting for him when he came home from work. He’d given Job a spare key and hadn’t taken offence when Job refitted his kitchen with a few pots and pans and kitchen utensils. Job had even catered a couple of dinner parties Ed had had in his apartment, with friends he invited over from work and a guy he’d met at one of the neighbourhood pubs and cultivated an interest in, a dark, barrel-chested soccer player named Claude who had a fascination with tropical fish. After Ed and Claude had started dating, Job had made himself much more scarce. He was busy with field work in any case.

  Job waved a hand at the grass of the coulee bank beyond the field. “Why don’t we go have a sit,” he said. “I could use a break.”

  They walked to the bank with the dog loping after them, and sat looking over the valley and lake below. Jerry’s dog lay beside Liv, and she stroked his hair as they talked. “I saw Jacob on the street the other day,” she said. “He’s lost a lot of weight.”

  “He’s working at Hanke Bullick’s feedlot, feeding silage and doing pen checks, looking for sick animals.”

  “Jesus, really? Never thought he’d do that kind of thing.”

  “Not so different than what we grew up doing. But it’s pretty miserable work for not much pay. All those animals crowded together in the muck.”

  “And the stink,” said Liv.

  “He pretty much hates it.”

  “Why is he doing it then?”

  “He couldn’t find work. He wanted to sell the farm, but Lilith said if he made her move again she’d leave him.”

  Liv laughed. “Good for her!” She brushed white dog hair from her hands. “I know Ben wanted to stay. He’s often said how sick he was of leaving his friends behind every time they had to move. Which was quite often, as I understand it. He still comes over to my place and visits with Jason. He never told me about his dad working at the feedlot, though.”

  “I think he’s embarrassed by it.” But Job was only guessing. Other than waving hello from across the road, or nodding at them as he passed by the house on his way out to the fields, he saw little of his brother’s family. The last dinner he’d eaten with them was at Easter.

  “I guess if Jacob did sell, you’d have to give up farming,” said Liv. “Or would you start again?”

  “No.”

  “So what would you do?”

  “I don’t know. Cook, maybe. Own a restaurant.” Now that he’d said it, the notion of having a restaurant of his own sent a thrill running through him. It occurred to him he’d never truly owned a thing in his life. Even the truck he drove was his father’s castoff. But he owned this new idea of himself, a cook, owning a restaurant. It was a rhinestone button, tight in his first. A new thing, to know what he wanted. He looked off to the side, at the fence posts crowned with rocks as if the weight anchored the posts from floating off. “Crystal told me you and Darren split,” he said.

  “Yeah, again, eh?” She laughed. “It’s for good this time. We had this big blowout after he came home saying we were going to a party at Hanke Bullick’s one night. I never liked Hanke and I was all set for a relaxing evening. I said I wasn’t going to go but he was welcome to go by himself. Darren just sort of freaked out. He said I had to go. When I said, ‘Oh, no I don’t,’ he pushed me down on the couch. He said, ‘What would it look like if I went to the party alone?’ He went into this rant, yelling and yelling, and threw one of my vases against the wall. I didn’t say anything. When I saw my chance I ran to the bathroom and locked myself in. He kicked the door for a while. Eventually I heard him leave the house.

  “In the morning he came in and sat at the kitchen table and asked me if I still loved him. I said no. He asked me why, what he had done wrong? After all those counselling sessions he still didn’t have a clue. I told him he was killing me, that he’d been trying to kill me off for years, and he had this moment of lucidity, where I think he understood. Then he was at it again, hollering. Finally he said, ‘Don’t you love me?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ He went quiet for a while, and then he left. He filed for divorce that week. And that was it. I thought he’d go crazy or something and wouldn’t let me go. Like those stories you hear of women all the time, stalked by their exes. But he’s been pretty good. I think it helped that he’d never stopped seeing Rhonda Cooper. Isn’t that crazy? I’m grateful to Rhonda. I even feel sorry for her.”

  Below them, a coyote trotted across the valley floor, its nose to the ground. Jerry’s dog watched it with its tongue lolling and ears up but didn’t chase after it.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t phone or come by earlier,” said Liv. “I just had to let things settle, you know?” She plucked a piece of dry grass and twirled it between her fingers. “Jason’s away, on a haul with his dad. You could stop by this week, if you want.”

  Orange-winged grasshoppers flitted, clicking, in the buffalo bean. It was here, right below him, that the deer had run up and down the coulee walls for the joy of it. The thump and crunch of their hooves on snow and earth, their hot breath creating puffs of steam behind them. Job felt like one of those deer now, his heart beating against his chest as though he’d run up that
coulee wall himself. A thrill of joy running through him. But he kept his voice calm. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try to make it over.”

  That night Job got on the phone and asked Jerry if he could stop by the next day and have him look at the truck starter, to fix it finally. He couldn’t take Liv out on a date if he was afraid the truck wouldn’t start. But he had a second motive. On the way to Jerry’s, the dog rode in the back of the truck, blinking into the wind. It leapt from the box, recognizing home, as Job slowed to turn into Jerry’s driveway. The smell of spilled diesel, rusting iron. The yard strewn with the skeletons of vehicles and spare parts. Stacks of tires, and hubcaps nailed to the barn wall. Jerry’s metal shop was a huge, dark mouth. On hearing Job’s truck, he walked from the shop wearing blue welder’s coveralls, wiping his hands on a rag. The dog raced for him, leapt up to his chest and licked Jerry’s face. A reunion. “Goddamn it, Job. You have to bring the dog?”

  “Your dog.” The look on Jerry’s face. Surprise. Appraising. “Your responsibility,” said Job. “You take care of it.”

  Jerry stuffed the rag into his pocket and scratched the dogs head. “All right. Let’s take a look at your truck.”

  As Jerry worked, Job drank a Styrofoam cupful of coffee that tasted of oil. “Something I’ve been wondering for ages,” he said. “How come your dad went up front every altar call? What’s he feeling so bad about? Is it your mom being institutionalized? Does he blame himself?”

  Jerry straightened up and scratched the side of his nose, leaving a black streak there. “What? Hell no. He knew Mom was nuts when he married her. Just wasn’t much to choose from.”

  “What then?”

  “Masturbation. He just can’t seem to get a handle on it.”

  A day later, Job was at Liv’s door, wearing Ed’s leather jacket and the sunglasses he normally only wore in his truck. Ed had offered to dress him up, to make him look the part of a lover. He had him pose in his apartment kitchen, leaning against the doorway with one hip strutted out. Job wasn’t sure if Ed was helping or trying to make him look like a fool. Likely both, though Job had decided to believe the former. He needed friends. He settled himself in position against Liv’s door frame, attempting the nonchalant look Ed had demonstrated. The look that said, “I want you, but not that badly.” “So as not to scare her off,” said Ed, a phrase he’d repeated as if he were afraid of the possibility. Job balanced a large box on that jutted hip. He didn’t like the effect, too much like a woman carrying a child, so he shifted his weight and dropped the box to his side.