A Rhinestone Button

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  “No. I’m a beef farmer. Cow-calf operation. Who is this?”

  “Uh-oh. Sounds like you pulled a fast one on us, Job. We don’t take farmers. Most of you live too far away for our callers to hook up with.”

  “Take farmers for what?”

  “This is ‘Loveline.’ Edmonton’s dating show. And you’re on the air.”

  He watched Ed pick up the duck. “I’m sorry. Somebody’s played a joke on me.”

  “We’ve got you on the air now, Job. Why not tell us about yourself? What do you like to do, besides farming? What do you do to entertain yourself when you don’t have a date on a Saturday night?”

  Job thought of himself in the kitchen, listening to the vacuum cleaner, stroking the invisible glass egg in his hands. His cat sucking her tail at his feet. “Not much,” he said.

  “Come on, there must be something you like doing.”

  “I cook.”

  “Great! Gals love a man who cooks. Don’t you girls?” Canned giggles, a womanly whoopee. “So what kind of cooking? Taiwanese? Tex-Mex?”

  “Just cooking. Home cooking. I like to bake.”

  “Great! Cookies, cakes, that sort of thing?”

  “Almond squares. Matrimonial cake.”

  “Matrimonial cake. The way to a woman’s heart. So what are you looking for in the way of a girl, Job?”

  “I don’t know. A Christian.”

  “Okay, a Christian. What else?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “All right, girls. We’ve got a guy who bakes squares and ain’t picky. If you think he’s the one for you, give us a call later in the show. Now we’re on to our next caller, Rick from Castle Downs. Hello, Rick. You’re live on ‘Loveline.’ ”

  Job hung up the phone. Turned to find Ed and Will, Jerry and Wade, Ruth and Penny all watching from the living-room doorway.

  “So?” said Ed.

  “You didn’t give them my home number?”

  “No. I gave them this number. You should hear back within the hour. Come on, let’s listen to the show. Hear who calls in for you.”

  There was Cindy, who water-skied in the Shuswap during her vacations and thought she’d be perfect for Rick from Castle Downs, who was into dirt biking. Sandy from Beverly, who was hoping for someone to talk to and liked the voice of Andy from McKernan. Shelly from Londonderry, who wanted the number of Phil because she was looking for a man with a steady job. Call after call, but none for Job from Godsfinger, who cooked and baked and would take any Christian girl who might accept him.

  Then a call from Debbie. “I feel God is leading me to have coffee with Job from Godsfinger.”

  “Can you tell us why?”

  “Well, as I said, God is leading me.”

  “No particular reason, eh?”

  “I think God telling me to is reason enough.”

  “You got a point there, Debbie. All right, Job, if you’re listening, you’re going to get a call from Debbie from Millwoods. Let’s move on to the next caller.”

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang. Job picked it up. “Hello. Job Sunstrum speaking.” He was caught by the formality of his voice. Like a bank manager.

  “This is Debbie Biggs. I heard you on ‘Loveline.’ ” Her voice nasal, a cluster of little balls, like frog’s eggs, the colour of a John Deere tractor. “I wouldn’t normally phone into a show like that,” she said. “But God led me to.”

  “Well.” He cleared his throat, glanced back at Ruth, Wade, Penny, Will and Jerry standing at the living-room entranceway, watching. The duck waddled across the floor towards him.

  “Besides, I liked the sound of your voice. The way you described yourself, with such vulnerability. You did say you were Christian, didn’t you?”

  “I was looking for a Christian, yes.”

  “So what do you look like? No, don’t tell me. I want to walk into the restaurant where we meet and pick you out intuitively.”

  “Intuitively?” The duck pulled at the laces of his boots. He brushed it away with his foot.

  “I feel that we should know our soulmates immediately, when we first meet them. We just feel something click inside. Something inside us says, ‘That’s the one for me.’ You know what I’m saying? I always know when someone’s my soulmate. Oh, listen to me, babbling on. I’ll let you talk now. Go ahead.”

  “I, um—”

  “I’ve put you on the spot. We can talk when we get together.”

  “Yes, we could meet.”

  “How about next week? I’m busy this weekend. Say, Friday? That’s my day off. You can get away from the farm on a weekday, right?”

  “Sure, Friday.”

  “How about noon at Maxwell Taylor’s. You know, the restaurant on Calgary Trail?”

  “I was wondering if you could come here, to Godsfinger. I’m not much for the city, and I wanted you to see me in my element.” So she’d know what she was getting into right away. So he wouldn’t be hurt later.

  “All right, I guess. Okay. Sure.”

  “At the Godsfinger co-op. The Out-to-Lunch Café. You can’t miss it. It’s the only restaurant in town.”

  “The only restaurant?”

  “Well, they serve coffee at the gas station. And there’s a bar, but—”

  “The co-op will be fine.”

  Will tapped him on the shoulder, mouthed, “Photo, get a photo.”

  “I was wondering if you’d send me a photo. It’s Job, Job Sunstrum at general delivery, Godsfinger.”

  “Sure. I could do that. Sunstrum. General delivery. Godsfinger. All right. See you next Friday. Ciao!”

  Job put the receiver in its rest, stared at it. This was the girl God had in mind for him?

  “So you got a date!” said Will.

  “I guess.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I guess’?” said Ed.

  “I was thinking, what if she isn’t who God has in mind for me?” What if he went out with this woman just because she was the only one who phoned, and they got married even though she wasn’t the one destined for him by God, and then she ran off with the local MLA who came knocking from farm to farm during election time as Mrs. Ireland had, or took up living in sin with the rendering man as Jean Milner had, after he came around to pick up a cow who’d died from bloat. That would prove to everyone that Job hadn’t been listening to God whispering in his ear when he made his choice of wife but that he had been listening instead to the devil.

  Ed threw up his hands. “I don’t believe you people.”

  “So you put out a fleece,” said Will. “Ask for a sign.”

  “What do you expect?” asked Ed. “A bloody burning bush?”

  Five

  After he’d done chores, before he had breakfast, Job began his day with a Bible reading. He read through his Bible twice a year, starting with Genesis, finishing with Revelations. He was in Acts now, Saul on the road to Damascus. Saul before his name change, still persecuting Christians. A flash of light and God was speaking to him. As straightforward as that. No room for doubts.

  Job tucked his bookmark into his Bible. Penny had given him the bookmark on his birthday. A purple laminated card with gold lettering that read, “A day hemmed in prayer seldom unravels.”

  He closed his Bible, looked around at the hired hand’s cabin. The bare plywood walls, the pile of junk in the corner: socket sets, drill bits and Vise-Grips; stomach tubes and pill pushers. A box of equipment for inseminating the cows: French guns, sheaths, gloves and lubricants. Dehorning wire and handles; castrating rings and tools; hoof trimmers and hoof knives; halters and calf pullers. He couldn’t bring Debbie Biggs home to this.

  He reached across the table for Debbie’s letter. The day before, he’d walked out across the road to the mailbox that had been knocked crooked from a game of drive-by mailbox baseball. He’d found her letter inside, along with a pile of flyers and an electricity bill, and opened it there at the mailbox. Her photograph had slid out and fallen to the gravel below.

  Job looked
down at the snapshot now. She was pretty, pretty enough to intimidate Job. She appeared to be in her early twenties, and somewhat heavily made up. Job worried that a woman concerned about her appearance might not like getting her hands dirty around the farm. But there was no telling from a photo.

  He put the photo back in the envelope, tucked the letter in his breast pocket and opened the cabin door to step outside. Maybe Will was right. He should put the matter in God’s hands, put out a fleece.

  Job looked over the farmyard, the silos that read: Jesus is Lord! Hallelujah! His cows in the pasture and the far bank of the coulee beyond. He prayed silently for a sign from God, that something might fly overhead if God expressed approval. Maybe a duck? He stopped praying, and waited for a reply.

  All around him the farm was sketched in the simple lines of a child’s drawing, painted in the primary colours of a kindergarten paint set. The house, a child’s rendition of a house: a white box topped by a red peaked roof. A power line stretched out to thin, elderly power poles that trailed away in descending order into the horizon in both directions. Beyond, rolling fields of brilliant primary yellow, canola in flower. One line defined the prairie horizon. Perfect white and fluffy clouds receded one after the other into blue.

  At first Job heard nothing except the northeastern wind that whistled through the windrow of blue spruce behind the house, a sound that rolled tiny bluish balls, the shape of woollen pompoms or tumbleweed, across Job’s field of vision. Then the whine of a yellow Ag Cat, a biplane, popping purple-pink fireworks in the air in front of Job, like the burst of a chive flower. The plane flew so low he could see the jubilant, ecstatic expression on the pilot’s face. Arnie Carlson. His wife, Annie, washed dishes alongside Job at church functions, but after nearly twenty years of marriage, she had given up trying to talk her husband into going to church. Arnie had stopped farming his father’s land years before, rented out the fields surrounding the yard and got himself a pilot’s licence. For a moment Job locked gazes with him. Was this the answer to his prayer? Please God, Job prayed, if you want me to go out with Debbie, make Carlson circle around the house.

  The plane banked, circled the house. Job’s heart leapt, fell. Carlson would have circled anyway, to say hi, as he always did when he flew over. This was no sign from God. Just Carlson showing off.

  Job walked across the road to watch the plane as the door to the house slapped shut. Jacob stepped out onto the stoop and hung onto the top stair rail with both hands. He looked down at Job as if he’d never left the pulpit. Even now, resting at home, he wore a town shirt and striped tie. Perspiration circles ringed each underarm. A tense smile etched into his huge face. He could have been the old man himself.

  “You get Carlson in to do crop-dusting?” he asked Job.

  “No.” He watched the plane fly over the silos. “I got a letter from the girl I told you about. From the radio show.”

  Jacob watched the plane fly over the north quarter as if he hadn’t heard. “So what’s he doing?”

  “Just giving us a show, I guess.”

  “He’s flying like he sees something. Keeps going over that same spot. Could be a cow down. Or a grass fire.”

  “No smoke.”

  Job’s tortoiseshell cat, Grace, was at the screen door, meowing to be let out. Job had removed the screen at Lilith’s request, as she didn’t like the ratty look of it, but he hadn’t got around to putting the new screen in. The cat could have hopped through the hole to go outside but from habit sat there waiting for someone to open the door.

  “You going to find out what Carlson’s after, or what?” said Jacob.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Job followed the cow trail towards the field Carlson seemed to be interested in. He passed a patch of scorched grass, fire-blackened fence posts. A discarded box of Redbird matches. Ben’s handiwork. He looked back to see Ben and Jacob, following at a distance. Carlson’s plane buzzed low overhead.

  Job trotted up a small rise, found himself staring down at a swirling depression in the barley field, as if God had pressed the barley flat with his finger, leaving his seal of approval for Job’s date with Debbie Biggs.

  Ben caught up to Job just as he stepped into the centre of God’s fingerprint. “Cool! A crop circle!” Job’s shoulders fell. Of course.

  The plane landed with a bump and a hop in the hay-field just as Jacob walked up to meet Job and Ben. He had a limp and the rocking gate of the obese, his joints giving out after years of holding up his weight. “Why’s this barley lodged?” he asked. “You tramp it down?”

  “No.” But Job at once felt guilty, as if he had made the circle himself.

  “You put too much fertilizer here?”

  Carlson climbed the fence and walked through the grain towards them in cowboy boots, sunglasses, a short-sleeved western shirt and jeans with grass-stained knees. A bad case of helmet head. “You got a crop circle!” He squatted down, placed the palm of his hand over flattened barley. Nicotine stains on his fingers, dirt under the nails. A couple of skinned knuckles. “It’s hot. Can you feel the heat?”

  “It’s sunny,” said Jacob. “The plants are absorbing the heat.”

  “Probably radiation,” said Carlson. “Shouldn’t let the kid too close.” Although Arnie wasn’t known for his concern over safety. Annie Carlson complained that each spring, when her husband came home from a day of crop-dusting, stinking of weed spray, she had to get him to undress outside the house or all her houseplants would wilt.

  Ben hunched down beside him, put a hand to the barley. “It is hot!”

  “It’s hot ’cause it’s sunny,” said Job.

  Ben shook his head. “Aliens.”

  “The kid’s right,” said Carlson. “They leave this tell-tale mark when they land. Their ships flatten the grain. Or sometimes they’re trying to communicate with us, by drawing pictures in the fields. They’ve been landing for years, see, but only started communicating with us about five years ago, when they started drawing pictures in fields in England. Now they’re talking to us! I hope you don’t mind. I radioed this in. Pete said he’d call ITV news.”

  “There’s no such thing as aliens,” said Jacob.

  “Sure there are,” said Carlson.

  “They’re not aliens,” said Jacob, his voice easing into pastoral authority. “They’re demons trying to make everyone think they’re aliens.”

  “Why the hell would a demon want to go and do that?” said Carlson.

  Jacob limped forward, into the crop circle. “It feeds into the whole evolution conspiracy, doesn’t it? Demons want us to believe in evolution because it undermines the Bible, undermines man’s place at the pinnacle of creation. If everyone comes to believe there are other worlds, other intelligent creatures, that makes us just another creature. Jesus dying on the cross to save us doesn’t make a whole lot of sense then, does it?”

  Carlson ran a hand over his scalp to flatten his hair. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Pastor Sunstrum. That whole God’s-son-dying-to-save-us thing never made much sense to me. Evolution makes a hell of a lot more sense.”

  “Sure evolution makes sense,” said Jacob. “God came up with the idea. He planted the evidence of evolution. He made the world have the appearance of great age, and he put the fossils in place so it would look like there was evolution.”

  There was no denying there were fossils. With each pass of the fields Job churned up more fossilized wood. The farm was strewn with it. He took it home and used it as book ends.

  “God is outside time,” said Jacob. “He knew there were going to be evolutionists, so he put the fossils under the earth at the time of creation to see who would be faithful to his word. Do we listen to the humanists? Do we trust what we see with our own foolish eyes, what we hear with our own puny ears? Or do we have faith and believe what God told us happened, in the Bible. That’s the test.”

  Carlson scratched his neck. “But if God knew there would be evolutionists, then he’d also know who would be faithfu
l and who wouldn’t, wouldn’t he? So why go to all the trouble of planting the fossils in the first place? It seems kind of, I don’t know, deceitful.” When Jacob opened his mouth to reply, Carlson held his hand up. “No offense, but I just want to take a look at this crop circle; I didn’t come for a sermon.”

  Jacob’s face the colour of pickled beets. But he smiled. “None taken. We’ve all got a right to our beliefs, no matter how misguided. I’m heading back to the house.” He took a few steps, turned. “Come on, Ben.”

  “I want to watch the plane take off.”

  “Now!”

  “All right.” But Ben didn’t move.

  “I said now!”

  “I could use Ben’s help moving the bull to the other herd,” said Job. Though he’d already done it.

  Jacob let his shoulders drop. “All right. But don’t take long. Lilith will have coffee ready. You know how she gets when we’re late.”

  Ben nodded his thanks to his uncle as Jacob limped away.

  The faint, sweet smell of insecticide clung to Carlson. Over this the smell of petroleum, the lines of his hands sketched in oil. “I seen lots of things in fields that look like crop circles, you know,” he said. “Fairy rings, crops that grow quick and collapse over old manure piles or fertilizer spills. But never an authentic crop circle.”

  “It could be somebody playing a joke,” said Job.

  Carlson shook his head. “Too well done. Though I pulled one over Stinky Steinke years ago. You know how I drop those automatic flagmen after each pass, to see where I’ve sprayed?”

  Job nodded. The flagmen: six-foot lengths of folded, filmy paper, like toilet paper, fastened to six-inch squares of cardboard.

  “I ran out of them while I was dusting Steinke’s canola. So instead of going back to base for some more, I flew real low, dropped my wheels into the canola, lifted off again, to mark the line where I’d sprayed. When I stopped in on Stinky he said, ‘Somebody’s been driving in my field but I can’t figure out how he got in there.’ There were no tire tracks coming or going, see? Just the touchdown in the field. I never did tell him. Still hear him worrying over it now and again.” He took off his sunglasses, wiped them. “I should be going too,” he said, walking off. “Crop circle. Wild.”