Jacob had put a down payment on Hosegood’s sausage factory, and was in the process of renovating the second floor into a large apartment and the first floor into a church, all with the weekend volunteer labour of the church’s membership. He’d been holding Sunday services in the midst of sawdust and construction for months, ever since Pastor Henschell, too close to retirement to start over, had handed his resignation to the board. A few members of the old Godsfinger Baptist congregation attended Jacob’s church, as the closest Baptist church was in Leduc. But most of Jacob’s flock were newcomers, acreage people, or families moving into new subdivisions.
Ben and Jason sat on the ground at Liv and Job’s feet. Ben scratched the belly of Jerry’s dog with his foot as Liv unwound her long hennaed hair from the bun she kept it in during her day serving at the tea house. Her orange broomstick skirt was fanned out over her legs, her orange silk tank top shining in the sun. Goosebumps on her arms. The vulnerability of her stubby, exposed toes in her leather sandals made Job want to pull her close and never let go.
From across the road, on the Sunstrum farm, came the roar of machines: Caterpillars and scrapers, buggies and a track hoe digging out a slough. The clack of tracks and grind of metal scraping on rock. Dump trucks and gravel trucks came and went, cleaning up the rubble, smoothing out ground, now that the earth had thawed. A couple of Johnny-on-the-spots. A survey team of two men. And a foreman watching it all, with his hands on his hips, from the rubble that had once been the house.
“So how’s it feel?” Liv asked Job. She pointed at the machines with her beer bottle. “Seeing the farm turned into a golf course.”
Job shrugged, felt his eyes sting. It made him weepy to think of it, the land his grandfather had homesteaded sold to strangers. But there it was, progress. And the sale had let him do what he wanted. He’d sunk a little of his part of the insurance settlement and the sale of the land into a half share of Liv’s tea house and set up the kitchen the way he wanted. He had a tidy sum in the bank, even after taxes. He felt like a rich man. All that money, tied up in land.
The Sunstrums’ had been the first of the Godsfinger farms hit by the Black Friday tornado to sell. It was the coulee that wrapped up the deal, the view of the lake. They’d sold to an Edmonton developer named Schlitt, who was turning the property into a golf course with a subdivision all around, for those hungry for a game of golf after a hard day’s work in Edmonton. A sign where the mailbox had been said so: Future Home of Schlitt Estates. Golf Lover’s Paradise! A man swinging a golf club. Rolling greens beyond. The future clubhouse at the top of the coulee, where Job had watched deer run for the joy of it, to feel blood thumping through their veins. Locals had already taken to calling the place “Shit Estates.”
Bullick’s feedlot was the second to go, sold to a developer who risked October snows to bang up a tidy street of roofed boxes and was at it again now. Rumour had it he’d already sold all the houses planned for the development. Dithy Spitzer had bought one. Families living in ten others already. Liv and Job’s tea house was booming, filled with visitors from Edmonton who came to check out real estate and stopped for lunch. A few Out-to-Lunch Café old-timers came to the tea house too, mostly the younger married couples, out on dates. Liv and Job had hired Ben to bus on weekends along with Jason, and to wash dishes after school.
A red Mustang roared down the road but slowed when it came upon the toaster. They all sat forward in their lawn chairs and watched. When the car sped on, they booed and hooted. Jerry’s dog, excited by the shouts, leapt up and barked, put its front paws on Jerry’s lap and licked his face.
Liv leaned forward to get a look at Jerry. “Where’s Debbie?” she asked him. “Figured she’d want to see the silos coming down. Or is she too good for us?”
Jerry clapped his hands, yelled, “Git!” and wiped muddy paws from his jeans. “She left me last weekend,” he said. He pulled a beer from the cooler and avoided looking anyone in the eye. “She said I couldn’t bring her all God had in mind for her and that she’d found her true soulmate in a welder from Stony Plain.”
Liv caught Job’s eye, grinned, and raised her beer in a toast.
From across the road the buzz of an angle grinder droned as a workman cut the last of the anchor bolts of the first silo. Then a minivan drove down Correction Line Road, with a kid in a car seat in the back. The van slowed and stopped. A woman in a wide-shouldered business suit and blue pumps got out, looked around, picked up the toaster and trotted back to the driver’s side, holding it like a football. She sped off.
Will jumped and raised his arms. “Touchdown!” he said, and did a little dance. They all hollered. Will clinked Job’s beer with his plastic Thermos cup and took a swig before choosing his next item from the back of his pickup: a transistor radio that hadn’t produced a tune for a decade. He ran it down the hill and left it by the side of the road.
A catskinner on a D4 Cat ran the loader into the first silo. Jesus is Lord! Job pulled a Coke and a Bud from the cooler. He handed the Coke to Jason and popped the beer open, then took Liv’s hand in his. A flock of ducks flew low overhead, their wings whistling. Northern shovellers with bills like spatulas, shiny olive heads and splotches of reddish brown on their bellies. Job paid close attention now and noted details. Since the Black Friday tornado, he’d been searching out and collecting moments like this one as if they were photos, mementos, knick-knacks found in the tornado debris. Junk to anyone else. Precious to him. He replayed these moments daily, while lying in the bath or just before sleep, to keep the images fresh in his mind.
There was the moment the month before when he soaked in the claw-foot bath, up to his chin in the orange-scented bubbles Liv had filled the tub with. Liv was in the bathroom with him, dancing to the Mozart that played on the boom box she had carried into the room, her bracelets and earrings jangling. She grabbed handfuls of bubbles from the bath and blew them into the air. The clouds of bubbles hung suspended, as if time had stopped, as if they were held aloft by nothing.
There was the moment last November when Job and Liv and Jason took a walk down what had been Bullick’s long driveway, to take a gander at the unfinished houses of the new subdivision. A day sparkling in hoarfrost. Every tree and bush was frosted white and glittering like coloured Christmas-tree lights under a clear blue sky. Job turned to look behind him, at their footprints on the snowy road, at the line of frost-coated poplar the Black Friday tornado had miraculously left standing. The hoarfrost, just starting to melt in the morning sun, drifted across the road and floated down on them. Grace and her four teenaged tabbies followed in a row behind them. The snow was so dry their tiny feet squeaked when they walked in it, a sound that had once produced for Job a cloud of transparent blue.
There was that moment just the day before when he was in the kitchen, near closing time, wiping down his prep table. The smells of the day were still in the air: hot cheese from the tuna melts, the lunch special; sauerkraut from the grilled Reubens; the tang of homemade tomato soup; the sticky sweetness of cinnamon buns. From the tea room the clatter of Ben collecting dishes in a tub and Liv moving chairs and wiping down tables. The snap of fresh tablecloths. Sounds that had once produced, for Job, splashes the corrugated beige of fossilized wood that was churned up in the fields; a rain the metallic blue found on a tree swallows back; honeycombs the red-bronze of a salt lick. But he heard no colours now. No invisible glass egg from the hum of the vacuum cleaner as Liv cleaned up under the tea-house tables. No tumble of sparkling blue spheres from the gravel that hit the undercarriage of the truck. He no longer lost himself to the voices in a church choir, and never would again.
But he would have these moments. Job had tugged his apron off, and tossed it into the basket of whites by the washer, then pulled his blue T-shirt over his head and wiped his face with it before tossing it into the basket of colours. He spooned a cinnamon bun from the pan, cut it in half and bit into it. The kitchen window reflected his image, caught in the afternoon light. His mass of
damp curls. The smooth, nearly hairless skin of his arms. And in his face an ease, a happiness, had crept in. If he saw that man on the street, he’d want to know him. Count him as a friend. A tingle of recognition ran through him. This was where he wanted to be, in this moment.
Job collected moments like these, noting the colours in the ducks’ wings, the smell of thawing earth, the cool of the beer in one hand and the warmth of Liv’s hand in the other. Because if Liv could love him, just as he was, knowing all his foibles and fears, if he could catch his reflection in a kitchen window and like the man he saw, then who knew what else this world might offer him if he was attentive to its details. He might find eternity in the spin of a tractor’s wheel. He might lose himself, expand into an arching prairie sky as he drove the paved roads. He might feel the blood thumping through his veins as he watched northern lights pulse across a night’s sky. And it might be that God was found, not in a church or some hazy hereafter, but in the tart taste of a beer, in the warm hand of a lover, on the whistling wings of ducks flying low overhead.
The catskinner brought the loader up and lifted the base of the silo. There was a great woomph as the silo toppled like falling blocks, heaving up a great cloud of dust and a flurry of escaping pigeons. Jerry’s dog barked and leapt into the air. The junk party hollered and clapped, and Job clapped with them. The ease with which the structure fell, as if it had been made of cardboard. As if it hadn’t stood for thirty years. Then the Cat ate into the second silo. Another woomph. A cloud of dust. More startled pigeons. And Liv shouted, “Hallelujah!”
Acknowledgments
As they say, it takes a village to raise a child, and it certainly took one to bring this baby into the world. While I don’t have the space here to acknowledge the great many people who contributed to the creation of this novel, I would like to thank my husband and research assistant, Floyd Anderson-Dargatz; my Canadian editor, Diane Martin, and my British editor, Lennie Goodings; my agent, Denise Bukowski; and my mentor, Jack Hodgins.
A number of books inspired me as I wrote this novel. The most influential were Leaving the Fold by Marlene Winell; Bright Colours Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge by Kevin T. Dann; The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowic; and Synaesthesia, Classic and Contemporary Readings by Simon Baron-Cohen and John E. Harrison. The quote from the Book of Job that opens this novel was taken from a translation by Stephen Mitchell. Other Bible quotes were taken from the Thompson Chain-Reference Bible.
GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ is an award-winning Canadian author whose bestselling novels have been published worldwide. She currently teaches fiction at University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing program and lives in the Shuswap Valley, the landscape found in so much of her writing.
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