The Fancy Dancer

winding flagstone path, toward the street. The lawn around the church needed mowing already. We were too cheap to hire a gardener now, so I would probably have to do it myself.
    Vidal’s hike was parked by the church. We stood for a moment looking down at the wonderful view of Cottonwood and the valley in the summer evening.
    The Catholic buildings dominated a little hill on the east side of town. If Cottonwood was Rome, then this was its one sacred hill. Across the street, surrounded by huge old cottonwood trees and cinder playgrounds, stood the shaky brick hulk of St. Mary’s Academy. The rain had washed away the children’s footprints on the playgrounds.
    Up the street was another, bigger, brick hulk—St Mary’s Hospital. This hulk looked alive—lights at nearly all the tall curtained windows. Father Vance said his low mass in the chapel there every morning. You could almost hear rosaries clacking as the nuns hurried down the corridors, and smell the pain and the cotton swabs soaked in alcohol.
    Behind us was the rectory; beside us was the church.
    Before us, Cottonwood spread out its several thou-45
    sand roofs in the evening glow. Dogs barked here and there. The streetlights and neon signs were already burning on Main Street, and so was the garish orange tower of the new McDonald’s. The Safeway supermarket was lit up like a Christmas tree—the ranch people came in the evening to shop. Beyond Main Street, the tower of the grain elevator was stately and glowing pink as a triumphal column in the sunset. The winding line of willows and cottonwoods told where the river cut through town.
    West of Cottonwood lay the hayfields, cut into squares by the fine lines of barbed-wire fence. The one grove of trees out there was the cemetery. Farther on, the runway lights winked on at the little airport.
    As we stood there looking at the scene, hoofs came clopping along the street. An old cowman, white-haired and frail-looking, came riding on a big rangy sweat-dried black horse. He didn’t give us a glance as he rode by. It was a contemporary of Father Vance’s Pinter Brodie, the oldest cowman in the valley. He, like Father Vance, was another of those living fossils of the old manly virtues. He had probably been up in the hills to look at his cattie.
    “There goes old Pint,” said Vidal, laughing. “When he goes home, you know it’s time to quit.”
    “Kind of spooky, isn’t it,” I said, “to think that he can remember all the stuff that you and I have to leam from books?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I used to get that feeling with some of the old folks up on the Blackfoot. I was never much of an Indian, though.”
    “How come?”
    Vidal shrugged. “Like you said, I had other things on my mind.”
    “Where do you live, Vidal?”
    He straddled his bike and clamped his hat firmly down on his head.
    “Cross the river and turn left on Willow Avenue. It’s the last house at the end of the street.”
    He tromped on the starter and the bike roared into life. He grinned at me.
    “Good night, Father. I’m gonna buzz old Brodie and tell him to get a horse.”
    He circled out onto the street, threw a little wave at me, and gunned the bike down the hill. By some miracle, his hat stayed on his head—his guardian angel must have been sitting on it.
» » «
» » »
» a a
a a a
» » «

» » «
    With that smile still on my face, I jumped into the Triumph and gunned off down the hill myself. Next on the evening schedule was the meeting of the parish council. It had gotten so I dreaded these meetings, because we always ended up squabbling.
    The parish council was one of the few real innovations that I’d been able to start at St. Mary's. Like others in the United States, it was composed of both clergy and laymen.
    It was supposed to help provide solutions to problems for both the parish and the community. With the pinch of inflation these days, most of the problems seemed to boil down to Caesar’s money or Christ’s money. Father Vance supposedly belonged to the council, too—but he was mistrustful of it, so he usually delegated the meetings to me.
    The council met once a week, on Monday evenings, at a different member’s home. Tonight it was being held at the home of Meg Shoup’s parents. I had really been sorry for Father Vance’s decision to let Mrs. Shoup join, as she had started her book-burning crusade shortly afterward. She had tried hard to make pornography one of our major problems, when it simply