A Rhinestone Button Read Online Free PDF

better yet to take the silos down. He agreed with the sentiment all right, but the enthusiasm of the four-foot lettering embarrassed him. In any case, the silos weren’t of use any more. They had long ago been replaced with thecement silage pit that Job had converted into a feeder. The silos were becoming dangerous; the soil beneath them was giving way to their weight and each year both silos leaned farther south. The summer before, Job had been forced to climb them in order to wrap cables around them both, to tether them to steel rods forced into the ground to secure the silos from collapsing.
    “My dad won’t let me have any,” said Ben.
    “What?”
    “Matches.”
    “You a firebug?”
    “No.”
    “I was a firebug,” said Job. “Got me in a lot of trouble with my old man.”
    “
You
were a firebug?”
    Job had started setting fires following his mother’s death, after his father had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. He lit brush piles and the garbage in the burn can at first, made it his job to fire up the tank heater in the stock tank. Fires his father couldn’t fault him for. But he later carried boxes of Redbird matches in his pocket so that when the compulsion hit, he could simply light a match and drop it in the dry grass around the farm.
    It was the sound of fire that drew him first. The pops and crackles of a flame filled his vision with tiny explosions, a private display of fireworks, silvery white and tinged with green, like the back of a poplar leaf blowing in the wind. With the fireworks came brief, intense bursts of excitement, oddly mixed with a peaceful feeling. It was the
eureka!
he’d found nowhere else for a time following his mother’s death.
    “I nearly set the cabin on fire once,” he said. “Got it out though.” A grass fire Job had lit had licked up the wall of the hired hand’s cabin, sending panicked mice scurrying from under the building, darting between Job’s feet as he beat the fire with a wet burlap bag. He managed to get the fire out by himself, but the west wall of the cabin was scorched black. He was strapped for that fire as he was strapped for almost every fire he set.
    “I lit this fire in the garbage can,” said Ben. “Sparks from it set our lawn on fire and burned the lawn furniture and Mom’s plants. Dad beat the crap out of me because he said I’d nearly burned the house down and it wasn’t even our house. It was the church’s, and how was he going to explain it to the church board? He lied. He told them he’d been cooking on the Hibachi when a fire started. He said he didn’t want them to think he didn’t have his son under control.”
    “Look, you like fire, you can have the job of keeping the fire going in the stock tank heater. But don’t light any other fires. Okay?”
    “Cool!” Ben picked up a fist of snow, patted it into a ball. “Dad didn’t want to come back to the farm, you know.”
    “Oh?”
    “He said he didn’t have any choice. We didn’t have any money, no place else to go. Mom wants to stay. She doesn’t want Dad to go back into preaching ’cause she’s tired of moving from church to church. She says she’s tired period. She says she’s tired of Dad.”
    “I’m sure she didn’t mean that.”
    “She said it was Dad’s fault she duct-taped that kid’s head to a desk.”
    “She duct-taped a kid’s head to a desk?”
    “He was hyperactive. Always running all over junior church. So she got real mad and duct-taped him to his desk. She had to cut the duct tape out of his hair and his parents asked how come his hair was cut funny and they found out and they yelled at Mom, and Dad got fired because he couldn’t control his wife and we had to come here.”
    “She thought that was your Dad’s fault?”
    “Because he’s a preacher and she’s his wife and she has to be nice all the time because everybody’s always watching everything she does. She says sometimes she wants to explode. She says sometimes she feels like