A Rhinestone Button (8 page)

“If there
were
aliens,” said Ben, “and they weren’t like Dad said, devils, then God would have made them too, right?”

“I suppose. If there were aliens. God even made Satan.”

“But we look like God. The Bible says we were made in God’s image. Right?”

“Right.”

“So, what does the aliens’ god look like?”

“It’s like your dad says. There are no aliens. There’s only one God.”

“But if there
were
aliens, would God look like
them
, with a big grey head and stuff?”

“Your dad wouldn’t like you talking about this.”

“Dad doesn’t like me talking about anything.”

A tree had fallen over the path, but the cows simply stepped over it rather than deviate from the route. Ben and Job stepped over it too. Here and there the cows’ hooves had gouged deep, muddy holes in the trail. When a track grew too deep to traverse, the cows just walked a few steps over, matching the curves and undulations of the first. Creatures of habit.

Job followed his nephew up the stairs and into the house, took off his boots and sat at the same seat he occupied as a child, with his back to the window. Jacob at the head in Abe’s old seat, Ben in Jacob’s.

Lilith, hair flying like a banshee’s, shrieked into the kitchen brandishing a broom, chasing Job’s cat. Grace skidded across the linoleum, scrambled to safety under Job’s chair, behind his feet, and sat on the register. “What she do now?” asked Job.

“Just found it sleeping on my bed. I’m allergic, you know.”

Job leaned down to give the cat a scratch, but she jumped from his hand, jittery from the chase. Grace was the only cat on the farm Job had allowed in the house. She lived there still, as she had claimed it and refused to sleep in the cabin. When he had slept in the house, Job often woke in the night to find her lying on his chest, staring down at him, her eyes shining. A comfort, that something in this world found him fascinating. But frightening too, eyes glittering in dark. He had petted her, sparks showering
from her coat in the dry night air, until she fell asleep purring, sucking her tail.

Lilith set cups and spoons, a bag of Dad’s Oatmeal Cookies on the table and fell into her seat opposite Job. Two years before, she’d been overcome by a bout of palsy and hadn’t regained full function of the right side of her face. It gave her a sour look, as if she had just smelled something foul. The expression never left her face, even when she smiled, giving whatever she said a cynical edge. “So, we’ve got a crop circle out there, do we?” she said.

“You should’ve heard Carlson go on about it,” said Jacob. “He thinks we’ve got UFOs landing in the field. Or aliens trying to communicate. I tried to tell him it was Satan’s work, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“But God made the aliens too, didn’t he?” said Ben. “I mean, if there were aliens? Job said they’d be God’s creation too.”

Jacob slapped the table, making Lilith and Grace jump. “What have I told you about talking like that?”

He finished off his cup and set it down. Lilith jumped up to grab the pot and poured him another. “Ben, you got anything to tell me?” said Jacob.

It was what Abe had always asked before he gave his boys the strap. A fly landed on Job’s plate and tasted the cookie crumbs with its feet. Job overturned his empty water glass on it and watched it buzz in panic.

“About what?” said Ben.

“Anything at all.”

Ben reached for another almond square. Job admired the boy’s ability to look nonchalant. “No,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Go to your room and get ready for a strapping.”

“What for?”

“You know what for. If you’d told me about that fire you set in the field, I wouldn’t have to strap you.”

“Yeah, right.” He didn’t try to deny he’d set the fire, or give his father any more lip. He slid from the table and went to his room, slammed the door behind him.

Grace sat on Job’s feet, hoping for a handout. “I got a letter from that girl who phoned into the radio show,” said Job. “Debbie? She sent her photo.” Job slid the photograph across the table to Jacob.

“That’s no way to meet a girl,” said Lilith. “It’s embarrassing. What are you going to tell people when they ask how you met? ‘I was so desperate I bought an ad to find a wife’?”

“It wasn’t an ad.”

“Why don’t you go to Bible school?” said Lilith. “Find yourself a girl there.”

“
Bridal
school,” said Job. “I don’t see how that’s any better than meeting a girl through ‘Loveline.’ The only reason girls go is to find a husband.”

“Worked for me,” said Jacob. He winked at Lilith, but she turned and stood to clear away the cups and plates.

“Anyway, I’m too old for Bible school,” said Job.

“Now what’s the matter with that cat?” said Lilith, pointing at Job’s feet. “She been into some catnip?”

Job looked down at Grace rubbing her chops over his feet. He had in fact sprinkled a little dry catnip into his socks earlier in the day, afraid of losing the cat’s affections to Ben or his brother or, worse yet, to Lilith. He scratched Grace’s neck. “She just misses me,” he said, and blushed at the lie.
How small and sad his life was. Living in a shack, arranging dates over the radio, buying the affections of his cat. He felt at once overwhelmingly sorry for himself.

Jacob picked up the photo of Debbie Biggs. “Huh.” He slid the photo back across the table to Job. “I got a call this afternoon from Pastor Jack Divine. He’s agreed to come down for the revival Saturday.”

“
The
Pastor Divine?” Jack Divine hosted an hour-long Sunday program on a local Edmonton radio station. “How’d you pull that off?” he asked Jacob.

“You know we were at Bible college together,” said Jacob. “I gave him a call, to let him know I was back in the area. We had lunch and I asked him to swing by our revival, as a personal favour. You should have seen Stinky Steinke. He was thrilled.” Jacob rubbed his fingers together in the sign for money. Then he slapped his knees. “Well, I better get to it.” He limped to Ben’s bedroom, pulling off his belt.

Job listened for the first slap of leather on skin, and Ben’s cry. A brief burst of radiating red lines, followed by a flash of white light. He stared up at the plaque that his mother had hung above the stove many years before, words from Proverbs surrounded by wild rose blossoms:
A gentle answer turns away wrath
. Job stood to rifle through the kitchen cupboards, anything to keep his hands busy. He was sorry Jacob was strapping the boy. But there it was, a father’s prerogative. Abe had given Job the strap for each and every one of the fires he set, using a piece of leather horse harness hung by the fridge. Abe had waited a few minutes after telling Job he was giving him the strap, so he wouldn’t strap while angry. “Hitting in anger’s a beating,” he told Job. “I don’t give beatings. I’m not a violent man. My dad was a violent man.”

Job’s grandfather had been a little man, though he refused to believe it. He had married a woman nearly a foot taller than him, and wore clothes meant for a much larger man. As Abe told the story, his father went into the general store to order shirts, instructing the clerk to bring in size forty-two. The clerk sized him up and without saying anything, ordered the size Grandpa Sunstrum really needed—thirty-six. The shirts arrived, and Grandpa Sunstrum tried them on in the store, triumphantly declaring them the best fitting shirts he’d ever had. Then, on changing back into the clothes he’d arrived in, he noticed his new shirt was not in fact a forty-two. He made the clerk send back the shirts that fit and eventually got his size forty-twos in. Whether the story was true or not, Job remembered his grandfather in shirts that hung loose as a child’s play clothes.

Each time Abe warned Job that he was about to give him the strap, Job sat in his room, waiting for his sentence to be carried out with the same mix of fear and numbness, he imagined at the time, as a man on death row. Some time later Abe would walk into Job’s room, carrying the strap in both hands like an offering. He asked Job to take down his pants and lay from the waist over the bed, and he hit Job’s bare behind with the strap, just once. The sound of leather hitting skin made a good solid smack, very much like the crack a wet towel would make when Jacob flicked it at Job’s behind after the baths they shared. The strapping stung, and Job’s behind felt hot for an hour or two afterwards, but the real punishment came from the shame of exposing his behind, from the embarrassment of being caught yet again, the confusion he felt over his compulsion to set fires.

Abe administered the strap until Job was sixteen and had become “too big to handle,” as Job heard his father tell Pastor Heinrich over coffee in the Sunstrum kitchen. Pastor Heinrich himself had recommended from the pulpit that parents stop strapping their boys when they turned fourteen, and that, for girls, strapping should certainly be stopped before the onset of menstruation, well before age eleven, “to avoid any suggestion of impropriety.”

Lilith rolled the portable dishwasher over to the sink and glanced at Job as she loaded the supper dishes. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

“My jujubes.”

“I threw them out.”

“You threw out my food?

“I hardly call that food. I didn’t want Ben eating any sweets. We think he might be hyperactive or something.”

“Those jujubes were mine.”

“Well, I am sorry. I’ll buy you more jujubes. You can keep them in the cabin.”

“You rearranged the cupboards.”

“Just so they make sense.”

“They made sense.” Now alert for changes, he scanned the kitchen and living room. His books were gone, the shelves bare, except for a copy of
Nervous Christians
, which said anxiety and nervous tension were caused by Christians relying on themselves, rather than the Holy Spirit. He’d filled three shelves with books, collected over several trips to the Salvation Army thrift shop in Wetaskiwin, because if he happened to meet a woman in town and invited her back to the farm for a home-cooked meal, he wanted to appear
well read. But he’d only read a handful. Over several lonely nights the previous winter, he’d read
The Story of Margarine, Manures for the War-Time Garden
and
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
the latter of which he’d only got halfway through; it dealt with the many and varied ways in which humans were fooled by their own desires into believing the ridiculous, and for reasons he could not define, he found these stories unsettling.

After Pastor Henschell’s sermon on avoiding the polluting effects of media, he’d intended to throw all the books out and restock from the
Christian Book and Record Store
in Edmonton, worried that if he met a woman at church and invited her home, she’d see all those unsavory books on the shelves and would think him a backslider. Nevertheless, he picked up
Nervous Christians
, waved it in front of Lilith and demanded, “What did you do with my books?”

“They’re in a box in the car. I thought I’d take them to the thrift shop. Jacob needed the room for his books.”

“But they were
my
books.”

Lilith hooked the dishwasher nozzle to the faucet and started up the machine. The sloshing water and the whirr of the motor put invisible spiny cones in Job’s hands that pricked his palms. He flicked his hands as if to drop them, but the sensation persisted. “Can’t the dishes wait?” he said. “The machine’s not even half full.”

“If I don’t, I’ll run out of cups and cutlery.”

Jacob strode out of his son’s bedroom, red-faced. “Can’t you two shut up?” he said. “Squabbling like children. I could hear you through the door.”

The phone rang and Jacob answered it. Lilith switched off the dishwasher. She and Job listened to Ben’s sobs, to
Jacob’s side of the conversation. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Well, I don’t know.” Finally he said, “All right then,” and hung up the phone. He sat at the kitchen table. “There’s a camera crew on the way here. They want to interview you.”

“A what?” said Job.

“That was a guy from ITV. They’re coming out this way for another story and want to talk to you for a spot for the evening news, to end off the show. About that crop circle. They’ll be here in about twenty minutes.”

Job jumped up, ran for the door. “There’s no time. I don’t have any clean shirts.” He scrambled to the cabin, got himself dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Ran back to the house to see if he could borrow a clean shirt from Jacob.

Job slid off his runners and walked into the kitchen, just as a cat screech set off an explosion of green jagged lightning. Grace, wet through, shot out of the dishwasher as Lilith opened the machine. The cat slid across the floor into the kitchen hallway and scrambled out the hole in the screen door.

“What the
hell?
”

“Your cat shit in my shoes!”

Job looked behind him into the hallway, directed by Lilith’s bony finger, and saw a two-sectioned turd in Lilith’s yellow Sunday pumps. “So you put her in the dishwasher?”

“Just for a minute. It’s not like I was going to let her drown.”

Job saw in Lilith’s eyes the wild look he’d seen in gadding cattle, cows crazed by the larvae of warble flies burrowing into their skin, and decided against pressing the matter further.

“I need a clean shirt,” he said.

“Jacob’s shirts would be way too big.”

“Does Ben have anything that would fit? Some oversized shirt.”

“Not big enough for you.”

“How about you?”

“You want to borrow one of my blouses?”

“I’ve got to find a shirt. I can’t go on TV like this. What would people think?”

“Borrow one from Will, then.”

Job slipped on his runners, ran to his truck, praying that it would start. When it didn’t, he headed down the road for Will’s house at full run. As he reached the poultry barn, Will was just getting out of his truck in the yard. Ed came out of the barn to meet him. Job was about to raise a hand to catch their attention when Will kissed Ed on the lips. It was brief and tender, the kiss a husband gives a wife on returning home. He brushed something off Ed’s cheek and grinned before heading towards the house.