A Rhinestone Button

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Lilith came out in a yellow dress and shoes with heels that punched holes in the lawn. “What are you two doing out here?” she said. “You’ll get yourself hit by lightning, then what will I do? It’s time to head over to the church.”

  “Church?” said Jacob.

  “To help Ruth and Wade set up for the wedding, remember? We said we’d be there by now. Job, Ruth phoned. She wants you to come in whatever you’re going to wear tomorrow. She said she wants to make sure the best man doesn’t look prettier than the bride.”

  Job stepped from his truck to the gravel of the church parking lot wearing the new dress shoes and blue double-breasted suit Ed had helped him pick out. He stood a moment outside the church, hoping Liv might catch sight of him dressed up, though he sweated in his new suit and wished for shorts. The flying saucer, the hot-air balloon, was nowhere in sight; Job imagined that the pilot, seeing the storm, had landed it in one of the fields. Beyond the community hall, a single sunflower, head and shoulders above the surrounding crop, bloomed in the midst of Steinke’s field of flowering canola. Above, a storm blackened sky, so dark that the town lights flickered on. Ants, their blood hot, sped across the gravel under his feet. The air was thick with electricity: the smell of ozone, a metallic taste on Job’s tongue.

  Ruth called when she heard the church door open. “We’re downstairs!”

  Job rattled down the concrete steps to the basement, sounding to himself like a woman in heels; he wasn’t used to the clack of dress shoes. Wade was on a chair, and Ruth stood with her arms up, the two of them on either end of a streamer they were taping over the head table. Ruth turned when they were done. “Thank heavens,” she said. “I thought Wade and I were going to have to decorate this place by ourselves.”

  “So?” Job held out his arms.

  “You look fine. I had nightmares that you would turn up in that frilly shirt you wore to grad and upstage me.” It should have hurt. But it didn’t.

  From outside he heard tires on gravel, and car doors slamming. Jacob, Lilith and Ben shuffled down the stairs, Jacob carrying a box of small white vases of roses Lilith had hastily picked from the bushes in front of the house. “Sorry we’re late,” said Lilith.

  “Well, I’m just glad you’re here,” said Ruth, taping another streamer in place. “I’ve got to get these up before rehearsal. Pastor Henschell will be here in about an hour. You and Ben can put the roses out, centred on the tables. Jacob, blow up the balloons, will you? The helium canister is by the door and there’s a box of balloons on that last table. Job, you want to get going on those pompoms?”

  Jacob dragged the helium tank over to a table, put the lips of a balloon to the nozzle and tied a full balloon to a chair so it wouldn’t float to the ceiling. The balloon was pink with purple writing: Congratulations! May all your dreams come true!

  Job slipped off his suit jacket and sat on the concrete floor beside the box of plastic pompoms. They were packaged flat and had to be ruffled into shape. He looked up at Jacob now and again, assessing his anger, the damage done. Jacob locked gazes with him once as he fixed a string to a white balloon that read Life is sweet with you by my side. The balloon slipped from the chair he tied it to, bounced against the ceiling and was drawn into the overhead fan, where it popped.

  Job felt the rumble in the concrete floor against his behind before he heard it. The low vibrations of an approaching freight train carried through the concrete of the floor, though no train should have been running at that hour. Then he heard it, a distant, deep roar that created spots of molten orange just in front of his face, like fire in the sky as the sun dipped below the prairie horizon. “What is that?”

  “What?” said Jacob.

  Job brushed off his dress pants and trotted up the basement stairs to the front door. Wind licked up dust and bits of paper, pushed and pulled Steinke’s canola crop and bowed the sunflower. Lightning flashed and thunder banged hot on its heels. The first few pellets of hail initiated a deluge. Lights throughout town blinked out. Suddenly it was there, illuminated by the blue-white flashes of downed electrical transformers. A looming finger dropped from a fist of cloud, twirling towards them. Job cried down the stairs, “Tornado!”

  “What?” said Jacob, heaving himself up the stairs.

  Job pointed as Ben, Lilith, Wade and Ruth joined them on the front steps under the awning to stare at the thing. A roar like jet engines that produced, for Job, licks of harvest moon, streaks of shining yellow and puddles of orange like liquid metal. With the colours came the first blushes of certainty Job had felt in months, a light thrill of knowing.

  “It’s coming right for us,” said Jacob.

  Lilith headed back down the dark stairs, her hand clutching Ben’s shirt sleeve, dragging him down with her. “We’ve got to get into the cold room,” she yelled. “It’s solid concrete.”

  They all disappeared down the stairs, leaving Job alone on the front steps of the church. He leaned into the door frame in order to stand, as the force of the wind nearly knocked him over. It was exhilarating, and deafening: a roar the exact colour of a harvest moon, when thousands of prairie combines kicked dust into the atmosphere, colouring the moon a shining deep red-orange. He coughed dust, and his ears popped as the tornado careened into Steinke’s canola field. Canola blossoms spiralled upwards, clockwise, turning the tornado momentarily yellow. Job felt the air pull from his lungs and felt himself lifting, losing his footing, even as he clung to the door frame. Lightning banged overhead and reached out like the legs of a spider across the sky.

  Then a black spiral snaked its way up the tornado as Bullick’s house and yard were sucked upwards. Debris, like a swarm of bees, rolled together as if orchestrated by one mind. Shattered two-by-fours. The branches of trees. Sheets of siding. A truck. A hot-water tank. The roof of a barn flapped like the wing of a bird before disintegrating. A duck floundered through the whirling air; its flapping slowed, and it lost momentum, clicking through its movements like an image projected in slow motion. Around it, debris hung suspended in place, as if the tornado were about to reverse itself and send Bullick’s house snaking back down. But the tornado didn’t unwind. It simply stopped.

  Quiet. The colours of the tornado hang still in the air in front of Job. Puddles of molten orange, streaked with shining yellow. He touches the colour and his hand sinks into orange. Colour bleeds up his arm and runs into him. He becomes orange, becomes yellow, becomes light. He becomes air, and churning wind. He feels himself balloon outward in all directions until he doesn’t feel himself any more. He is all there is. It is all himself.

  Bliss.

  A shift. A disconnection. A lack, a loneliness. A movement from light to form. A hand, a foot. Stomach. Gender. Self. He laughs and finds voice. Remembers the taste of orange. All at once, everything falls into place.

  A hand on his shoulder. Jacob. “Job!” Job saw him shout, but didn’t hear. All around them the thud of falling objects: chunks of wood, slabs of concrete, sheets of siding. A canoe bounced off Job’s truck and landed whole on the parking lot that was now a lake of mud. Power poles along the road fell one after the other.

  Jacob grabbed Job’s arm, pulled him back into the church and down the basement stairs. They stumbled through the dark, pushing tables aside and tripping over the legs of chairs. Above them the crash and tinkle of glass, the snap of two-by-fours and all around a roaring. Job’s molten orange was brilliant in the dark. But even brighter inside him was a profound excitement, a presence he had only one word for: God. He fell. Jacob dragged him across the concrete floor and pushed the metal door of the cold room shut behind him. Job’s ears popped. A freight train chugged towards them. The snap and thunder of disintegrating boards. Then, nothing.

  A crack of light under the door. Behind him in the dark, Jacob, Lilith, Ben, Wade and Ruth murmured to one another that they were all right. Job yanked the door open and stepped into sky. He stumbled over layers of debris at his feet, the wreckage of the church. The organ sat on a pile o
f studs, insulation and plywood. The church roof sat almost whole out in the mud of Steinke’s field. Pews were on end in the graveyard. Children’s chairs from the nursery were flung into surrounding fields. The canoe that had fallen from the sky was now cradled in a poplar, but Job’s truck was gone. Everything was cast in a green-yellow light.

  Job picked his way through mud and debris, careful not to get his new shoes dirty, and headed down Main Street, the yellow blossoms of Steinke’s canola crop showering down on him like confetti. Shingles were torn from the roof of the community hall, and paint was lifted from the sides of Barbara’s house as if it had been sandblasted. Trees were knocked over, their roots clutching air like tortured hands. On the trees still standing, wads of pink insulation hung like Christmas-tree ornaments. The strings of Ruth’s wedding balloons were caught in a rosebush, wrapped around the mirror of a truck and snagged in a crabapple tree. Many of the balloons were still full of helium. Job found a torn garbage bag on the road and collected them, thinking Ruth would want them.

  Bullick stumbled through the alley between the community hall and the co-op coated in dirt, carrying a piece of siding in one hand, a chunk of two-by-four sticking out of his shoulder. The brilliant red of blood oozing over mud. Job waved a hand to get his attention. “Got something on your shoulder there, Hanke.”

  Bullick looked back at his shoulder, at the wood sticking out. “Oh, thanks.” But tucked the siding under his useless arm and bent to collect another piece.

  A few windows were knocked out of Liv’s place, and the bird feeders were gone. Job pulled a balloon from her caragana hedge and added it to his collection. Liv picked her way out of the basement door and joined Job on the lawn, in the shower of yellow petals. She held her hands out to them, as if to a welcome rain after a dry spell. Yellow in her hair. “You okay?” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “What you up to?”

  “Ruth’s balloons.” He tied a knot in the top of the garbage bag, put it down, and it took flight, sailing into the air above them. It struck Job as funny. He went to all that effort collecting the balloons, only to have them fly off. Wasn’t that just the way of things? He laughed.

  Liv laughed a little and said, “What?”

  But Job was off, stumbling past the co-op, where a small crowd had gathered outside. Steinke was among them, still drinking his coffee. Crystal came out, refilled his cup and went back inside. Job waved a hand at them and they all waved back, as though they were watching a parade. Liv caught up to Job and walked with him down Correction Line Road, the gravel strewn with yellow flowers. “You sure you’re all right?” she said. “Weren’t hit by something?”

  “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.

  Twenty-two

  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.