The Fancy Dancer

We slashed our own salaries. We lived leanly at the rectory, with several meatless days a week by necessity, not devotion. Our best parishioners contributed many good ideas for saving money. Housewives with too many tomatoes in their gardens would drop a basket of them by our kitchen door. Or a rancher who’d shot an elk would give us a quarter to throw in our freezer.
    We scrounged, haggled over pennies, bought on sale. Now we were living more or less within St. Mary’s low income, and we were making regular payments on the rest of the mortgage. But it was all veiy hard on Father Vance’s ego.
    Father Vance had no use for what he called “pilgrim morals.” While college students over in Missoula lived in co-ed dormitories, and even the Bishop was liberal about young priests’ life-styles, he still insisted I had to be in the rectory by ten every night. I had to have his permission to stay away overnight, and I had to tell him whom I stayed with, even if it was my parents. He even made me wear a cassock around the church, though I usually managed to shuck the thing when off the premises. To keep the peace, I gave in on these things, to have freedom in other areas.
    Curiously, he could be a kind man when he took a notion to. He was a real old whang-leather pioneer priest, upright as a man on horseback. He had the undying admiration of his older parishioners. He was as faithful to his traditionalist view of the Church as the hayfield that comes up green every spring.
    I didn’t like him much, but I respected him. It had to be hoped that I could be as true to my view of the Faith as he was to his.
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    The hour of confessions wore on, and I began to wonder when the colorful, mysterious and disreputable Vidal Stump would show up. So far I had known all the voices that had come through the lattice, and none had been his. There had been the manure smell and boozy breath of a ranch hand who had a drinking problem. There had been the musky perfume of one of the town’s teen-age queens, and a recital of her misbehavior at a pot party in her parents’ home while the parents were in Butte for a K of C convention. There had been Clare Faux, who lived with Missy Oldenberg on the other side of town. Usually the two old ladies walked to church, each carrying a big old-fashioned black umbrella, rain or shine. But Missy hadn’t come today, for the first time since I’d been assigned to St. Mary’s, and I wondered if she was sick.
    I peered at my watch. It was just about nine o’clock. My stomach was rumbling, and I started to think worldly thoughts of the supper that the housekeeper would be getting ready. On Saturday night she always made a dish that we now regarded as a luxury: fried chicken.
    The watch hand said nine sharp, then five after. Vidal Stump must have chickened out. I felt pretty sad. Maybe he would come next week.
    I was just about to push out through my own musty red velvet curtain when I heard a man’s footsteps approaching the confessional. They were stumbling, shaky footsteps. I had already learned to read footsteps. These were a drunk’s.
    The other curtain swished, and the man kneeled heavily. His head pressed against the wooden lattice that separated us—I could see the dark wavy hair pushing through the openings. His breath nearly knocked me out—booze, garlic and pot. Pot has a funny hayfield smell—I know, because I had worked on a little drug program in Helena High School, and I had also toked on a few joints myself, long long ago. He must have had supper at Trina’s Cafe, a little Chicano place on the bar side of Main Street, and gotten himself high enough to face me.
    He had one hand against the grille, and the fingers curled tensely through the openings—dark young fingers with broken nails and smudges of black motor grease.
    “Father,” he said in a thick voice. Then he stopped.
    This had to be Vidal Stump.
    Vidal must be a Catholic, or he wouldn’t have called me Father. But he couldn’t have been to church for ages, or he would have rattled off the “Bless me Father” right away. If I had been Father Vance, I would have made him go back and say the formula.
    Instead, I said, “Yes, I’m still here.”
    My mind was picking through the little I knew about him. He was in his late twenties. He was bom and raised up in Browning. Although he looked Irish or a little Spanish, he was one quarter Blackfeet Indian. He had spent two years in the state penitentiary for petty theft