The Fancy Dancer

modernist stuff.”
    Father Vance knew that playing the organ before confessions was a venial weakness of mine. I had been a priest for two years now, but Father Vance assumed that I still got butterflies in my stomach when Saturday evening rolled around. He was kind enough to tell me that I’d get over it, and that not many priests really liked hearing confessions anyway. The fact was, I liked confessions. Dealing directly with people was the chief joy of the priesthood, and the music always calmed me for the hard work of the next hour.
    Jamie Ogilvie, one of the altar boys, stood by the vestment racks listening to this conversation. Jamie was seventeen, and he was one of the few really devout high school boys in town. In fact, he was so devout that he was a pest—always underfoot. “Father Tom, would you like me to take the dirty altar linens to Mrs. Bircher?” “Father Tom, should I sweep out the sacristy?”
    I was irritated that he’d overheard Father Vance scolding me, even though it wasn’t the first time.
    As I turned away from the sacristy door, my eyes and Jamie’s met.
    “Father, I put the vestment racks back in order,” he said.
    “That’s good, Jamie. Thanks. You run along now.”
    “Father?” said Jamie. It was me he hung around the most. Any day now he probably was going to tell me he had a vocation.
    “What?” I said, every cell in my body yearning to get up to the organ.
    “I shouldn’t say anything, but Father Vance is awful mean to you.”
    “When we’re old, Jamie, we’ll have to hope that people will put up with us,” I said, a little shortly, and headed out of the sacristy into the church.
    I stomped up to the organ loft, trying to start working off my lousy mood. The old oak stairs creaked ominously under my 170 pounds. Switching on the light, I flicked a glance through the nave below.
    The usual regulars were kneeling or sitting in the pews, examining their consciences and waiting for me. There were about fifteen of them, mostly women over forty. One of them was Mrs. Shaw, who was among my favorite parish ladies. A few more would straggle in before the hour was out. Father Vance was always saying he could remember when the church had been half-packed on Saturday nights. Now it was mostly the young people who were missing, partly because there were so few jobs to keep educated kids in Cottonwood, partly because the Church had lost so much credibility with them.
    That was why I noticed the dark-haired young man right away. He was kneeling alone in a pew far away from the others. I didn’t recognize him from that far away—his head was bent. I wondered who he was.
    The Gothic brick church was as stately and as creaky as its old pastor. It had been built in 1889, the year that Montana became a state. Many of the bricklayers had been devout half-blood Metis who built the little settlement on the river that became Cottonwood. Later on, some of them left Cottonwood to rejoin that lost tribe with neither American nor Canadian citizenship. They left behind the church, a monument to their confused identity, their faith and their loving workmanship.
    In the last years of the nineteenth century, white man’s livestock money and gold-mining wealth had put in the church’s magnificent stained-glass windows, and its altar of imported Italian marble, and its carved pews of good Victorian yellow oak. A little-known Montana painter, Frederick Sommer, had painted murals on the nave walls. The murals picked up on the Indian half of the building’s schizophrenic identity, and depicted scenes from the lives of Father de Smet and his Jesuits as they converted the Flathead Indians.
    Now the Metis, the mine owners and the livestock men lay in the little cemetery on the west side of town, and the murals were faded and draped with cobwebs. The church had been damaged in the earthquake seven years ago, though not as badly as the old parochial school building. Now several big cracks ran up through the white walls on the north side of the nave. One crack cut in half the scene where Father Point was boating down the Missouri and making his famous drawings of Indian life on the banks. In fact, the crack went right between Father Point’s eyes, shifting one eye upward and giving him a kind of crazy look.
    The church was half-dark—we were trying to hold down our electricity bill. In front of the side altar of Mary, the few votive candles that flickered in their red glass vials were throwing