Free A Rhinestone Button by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

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 appearwell 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