A Rhinestone Button (9 page)

Job turned the corner, hid behind the barn, felt the sun-hot wall against his palms as he listened to Will’s footfalls on the steps to the house, the duck’s quack greeting him as he opened the door, the screen door snapping shut.

Job headed back home, slowly now, his feet in concrete, his skull a pot of churning porridge. The heads of timothy grass in the hayfields were a stunning green, lit from within. A thing he’d never seen before, or noticed. Then a startled squawk, a flurry above him, a
thwack
to the back of his head, the bounce and quick flicker of feathers, and his hands were in front of him, instinctively reaching out for the thing falling into his arms. A duck.

A beautiful thing. A bufflehead. A large white patch on the back of its head; shimmering forest-green and eggplant plumage on the front. Black and white body. He felt for a pulse and found it was dead. Checked for a bullet hole and blood, but there was none. He remembered a thing his father had said, that ducks sometimes die of heart attack in the air. The exertion of achieving flight.

Job’s head began to throb. He nestled the duck like a baby, in the crook of one arm. Checked his scalp. Found a tender spot at the cap of his skull but no wound. He saw a blaze of dust stretching up the road, turning into his driveway, and couldn’t think who it would be. He quickened his step before realizing with a start that the dust was the television crew. But he didn’t run. He felt a strange mix of drowsiness and clarity, and the landscape was different somehow. The colours of sounds were muted, faded. The crow’s caw was a transparent tongue of sky blue, not the usual wedge of navy. When he followed the fenceline towards the house, the shush of his legs passing through grass was hardly visible, though usually it offered up a pleasant sunflower-yellow haze. Now there was nothing but a shimmer.

Job carried the bufflehead to the steps of the house, where Ben waited, his eyes still puffy from crying. “They’re at the crop circle. Dad told me to wait and tell you. He went into town for some meeting. What’s that?”

“A duck.” Job carried the bufflehead out to the crop circle, prodded by his nephew’s questions. Had he shot it? Found it dead? Job didn’t answer. Words were too unwieldy, too heavy to bring up from inside himself. Even walking seemed difficult. All he was certain of were the silky feathers of the dead duck.

“They’ve got a couple of other men with them who they’re going to interview,” said Ben. “Crop-circle experts. They’re in a hurry. We should run.” He took Job’s arm and tried to get him to pick up his pace. At other times Job would have run to the crew so they wouldn’t have to wait, apologized for the inconvenience he had caused, blushed in the effort to make peace. But at that moment he couldn’t fashion in his mind the thing that was being asked of him.

A cameraman had set up just outside the crop circle. He wore a military-green vest with many pockets and didn’t bother to greet Job. Inside the circle, there was an interviewer Job recognized from an Edmonton news show, casually dressed, holding a mike. With him were two middle-aged men, both dressed in suits.

The interviewer held out a hand. “Mr. Sunstrum. Thought we were going to miss you. I’m Dave Nash of ITV. I’ll be interviewing you and Mr. Mayer and Dr. Fisher here. All right?” When Job didn’t answer or even nod, he asked, “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“What you got there?”

“Duck. A bufflehead.”

“A pet?”

“It’s dead.”

“All right then. Tell us what you thought when you first saw the crop circle, Mr. Sunstrum. What did you think caused it?”

“I thought it was God.” He realized this was a mistake. But felt committed now, caught in the truth.

“God?”

“A sign, from God.”

“A sign?”

“I was trying to make a decision. So I prayed. Asked God for a sign. Something in the air. I thought maybe a duck. Then Carlson was in the plane flying overhead and …”

“The crop circle.”

Job saw he was sinking, paddled harder. “But then Carlson was talking about aliens writing messages in the barley, or that maybe the circle was where a UFO landed. And my brother explained how all that talk about aliens is a demon conspiracy. So now I don’t know what to think.”

“A demon conspiracy?”

“The devil trying to get us to believe we’re not the only people in the universe, so that salvation doesn’t mean much. My brother’s a pastor.”

“I see. A unique theory, Mr. Sunstrum. Well, there you have it, folks. God—or maybe the devil—reaches out and touches folks in Godsfinger.” He turned to one of the other men. “Dr. Fisher, what do you think caused the crop circle?”

“There’s been all kinds of explanations for crop circles, anything from dust devils to plasma vortexes or ball lightning to landing marks left by alien craft. But most likely it’s pranksters.”

“Some argue that the crop circles are too complex to be built by pranksters,” said the interviewer.

“I’ve made them myself. I fixed up this piece of two-by-four with wire stuck through a hole on each end. I held onto the wire and pushed the board down into the grain with my boot. Nothing to it. Leaves that swirling pattern everyone gets so worked up about.”

“But that hardly explains the molecular change the wheat undergoes in these crop circles,” said Mr. Mayer.

“There is no molecular change.”

Job stepped back, out of view of the camera, and looked down at the duck. He couldn’t think for a moment why he was holding it. He listened to the other men talk and talk, couldn’t catch onto what they were saying. Aware of the ache at the back of his head.

Dave Nash lowered his mike, coiled its cord. “All right, Dr. Fisher, Mr. Mayer, Mr. Sunstrum, thank you very much. I think that’s all we need. Karl, make sure you get a shot of the silos and that barn roof. We can splice it into the interview with Sunstrum.
Jesus is Lord! Hallelujah! This is cattle country. Eat beef
. Christ. And the dead duck. This is too good.”

Job followed several yards behind the crop-circle experts, the cameraman and Dave Nash as they hauled their equipment back to the van. He watched Ben leap around them like a magpie on an ant hill, pecking bits of attention from them. Mr. Mayer and Dr. Fisher continued to wrangle. Mr. Mayer, red-faced and angry; the doctor, quiet and assured, pulling out a notepad as he got into the van next to Mayer, calmly sketching out his defence as they drove off.

Job watched the van drive away, pulling a cloud of dust behind it. Held up a hand as Ben waved to him from the stoop of the house before going inside. He wondered again why he was carrying a duck, realized with a sting of embarrassment that he’d held it throughout the interview, though now he couldn’t recall what he’d said. The television crew and the interview—they seemed unlikely. As unlikely as a crop circle forming in his field in answer to a prayer. As unlikely as a dead duck dropping from the sky onto his head. As unlikely as seeing Will kiss another man on the lips.

Job winced as the throbbing of the lump on the back of his head came sharply into focus. He picked up a shovel that was leaning against the barn wall, carried it with one hand up to the house and laid the duck on the bottom step before scooping out a hole in the flower bed. He laid the duck to rest, and quickly shovelled dirt to cover its one open eye.

For the first thirty years of the town’s life, Godsfinger was called Hay Lake, after the lake that disappeared in dry years, giving surrounding farmers a fertile field of hay to cut. But then the sky set about renaming the place. A tornado touched down one summer, blasting a swath through town, lifting the church whole into the sky like the body of the chosen on the day of resurrection, before slamming it down again. Everything was destroyed, except for the cement cold room, in which the ladies’ auxiliary kept fruit and preserves for church suppers and pie-making events. Not a single jar of preserves was lost.

Members of the congregation built a new church on the old foundation that same summer and conducted services until the second tornado hit, exactly a year to the day after the first, lifting the roof of the new church like a great winged bird, casting it a half mile to the corner of Steinke’s farm. Without the roof, the walls fell; what was left looked like a flattened cardboard box. Upon seeing that second tornado approach, the church secretary fled downstairs to the concrete cellar to hide among the preserves and rose from rubble into daylight carrying a jar of strawberry jam.

The following Sunday the pastor then, Fritz Hofmann, preached a fiery sermon in a crowded tent beside the church
foundation. He claimed God had roared through town to give them a taste of the end of the world, so believers would know their deliverance was close at hand, so sinners would have no excuse on the day of reckoning. From the manse, he had watched the tornado touch down in the field, he said, “like God’s finger writing the commandments in front of Moses!” And went on to suggest the town should be renamed Godsfinger, to commemorate the two catastrophes, to remind everyone of God’s everlasting power over them. In the end, the town council agreed, as public sympathy had been swayed by the disaster.

Disaster is said to come in threes, and even though the congregation rebuilt a second time on the old foundation, everyone stayed away from the church on the anniversary of the tornado and breathed a sigh of relief when the day came and went without catastrophe.

Godsfinger might have become a bedroom community to Edmonton, as nearby St. Albert had. But the stench of Hanke Bullick’s feedlot on one side of town, Stinky Steinke’s dairy on the other and Stubblefield’s poultry farther out kept potential buyers from the city from settling there. No one in Godsfinger liked the stink, but almost everyone understood, as they carried their own farm odours: the sweet smell of horse or cattle, the foul scent of pig, or the worst of odours in Job’s mind, poultry. Stubblefield’s poultry barns were situated a half mile west of Godsfinger on Correction Line Road, so when the wind blew east, it brought the foul stench of chicken manure into town with it. As it stood, the whole town was composed of one dead-end street with a strip of shabby buildings running down each side, crowned at the end by Godsfinger Baptist Church.

There was little to keep the town going. The old brick bank still stood, but its windows were boarded over. Residents had to go to Leduc or Millwoods to do their banking. The Godsfinger Bar and Grill kept chugging along, though the upper floor hadn’t been operated as a hotel for years. Hanke Bullick, who owned the bar as well as a feedlot, occasionally rented rooms by the month to young people just stepping out or to ancient bachelors down on their luck, but they never stayed long. The rooms were sun-baked in summer, freezing in winter.

Sheeler’s Auto Repair had been running for nearly twenty-five years, though rumour had it Sheeler was thinking of retiring, closing things down. The beauty salon closed and reopened every couple of years. It was currently owned and operated by Annie Carlson, who cut both men and women’s hair. A doctor from Leduc visited a worn office next to the salon two mornings a week. The three grain elevators had been taken down and Hosegood’s sausage factory had gone bankrupt almost a decade before, though the building still stood, empty and boarded up, at the opposite end of town from the church. Beside the factory, an Esso gas station did brisk business.

Children in grades one through twelve were bussed to Godsfinger from surrounding farms, and it was this school that kept the town alive. That and the Out-to-Lunch Café tucked in the front corner of the co-op. Fifteen years before, Crystal had covered the café walls in fake wood panelling, decorated them with laminated jigsaw puzzles of cats, horses, an empty farmhouse on the prairie, and hadn’t changed a thing since. Plastic plants dangled from macramé hangers over the windows. On the ceiling, a brown swell of
water damage. Stinky Steinke, Gerhard Schultz and Walter Solverson sat like elements of the decor at their table by the counter, in a daily, informal meeting of the church board.

Job came into the café wearing his Sunday best, dress corduroys and a white town shirt, wishing he’d gone into Edmonton to meet Debbie. Hadn’t thought of these prying eyes. He waved at Crystal, who blew him a kiss from the kitchen, nodded at Steinke, Schultz.

Solverson with a double chin, the sideburns he’d worn since the fifties, dyed with Grecian Formula, though he was otherwise bald. “Saw you on the news,” he said. “You believe all that stuff you said about that crop circle?”

Job pulled back a chair at his usual table by the window, said nothing. He didn’t remember much of what he’d said and was afraid Stinky Steinke would tell him all about it.

“What was with the duck?” said Steinke. He had a long, thin face, a neck that had lengthened and shoulders that had sagged with age, giving him the general appearance of a ketchup bottle. A sign placed on the side of the Steinke’s barn by the salesman who sold him the equipment had proclaimed his barn to be a Barn-o-matic, a self-cleaning model. Cows, locked into stanchions, shit into gutters. A chain propelled by an electric motor dragged the manure down the gutters and up a chute that dumped the manure outside into a shit-spreader. Steinke made a practice of spreading his manure right behind the hall during community events. It was his way of saying, “I’m working and you’re not,” and it was this routine that had earned him his nickname.