The Fancy Dancer

dairy farm was on the north edge of town. It had been thirty years since the place sent any milk to the creamery in town. In the empty pens, the manure-rich soil grew every species of weed native to Montana. Tumbleweeds rolled across the trackless barnyard. The pastures were thick with quack grass, fox tail and tall Russian thistles. The huge bam had caved in, and its shingle roof was silvered by a half-century of weather. Along the creek, the big old cottonwood trees were half-dead, their branches tom out by winter storms.
    But around the big white frame house with its green shutters, the two old ladies defended a square of life and order. A boy came to mow the lawn. In the back, Clare still tended a big vegetable and flower garden. She did the work alone now.
    Inside, the house had that fragrance of old wood that always reminded me of my parents’ home in Helena. The broadloom carpets with their fake Oriental patterns were worn, but always swept clean by Clare. The smell of fresh coffee always floated out from the big kitchen. There, the old curtained glass cupboards rose clear to the ceiling, and the yellow-oak wall clock made its soft deep chime. The two old ladies’ hats hung on pegs by the door. Missy’s was a black straw boater with a bunch of daisies on the brim. Clare’s was a black straw boater with a bunch of red cherries.
    The house was crammed with examples of the two ladies’ artistry. The living room curtains were hand-crocheted, and as delicate as spiderwebs. There were antimacassars on the chairs, afghans draping the sofa, rag mgs on the floor.
    One day Clare showed me an amazing patchwork “friendship quilt” that the two of them had made. They kept it on the bed in the guest room. It was patchworked in tiny squares of silk instead of the usual cotton, and it had a rosette pattern as rich and colorful as a stained-glass window in a Gothic cathedral. In one comer, the two of them had stitched their names and the date 1934.
    I asked her the why of that year.
    “Oh, it was the year that we moved in together,” Clare said shyly. “We’d both been widows for exactly one year, and we decided that two could live cheaper than one.”
    Clare and Missy were very different, though you might have thought they were twins when you saw them walking to church with their identical black umbrellas. Clare was taller, bigger-boned, with a round apple face and a bulldog jaw, and a quiet blunt way of speaking that went with her features. Missy was more frail and more fey, with a cameo profile and faded green eyes that still hinted at the beauty of her young days. But forty years in the same house had so entwined their habits of thought that you couldn’t pick out any individual philosophy, any more than you could pick out which stitches one of them had put in the friendship quilt.
    On my visits, I always sat with them in Missy’s bedroom.
    Missy lay propped on several pillows, her thin hair carefully combed by Clare into a tiny chignon. She always wore a blue wool bed jacket that Clare had knitted for her. Clare would sit by the window in a creaky yellow-oak rocking chair, and I would sit on a straight chair by the bed and read to them from the New Testament. That was what they wanted. They especially loved the Beatitudes. Clare would rock creakily and knit, and Missy would listen, her watery eyes looking blindly, dreamily out the window.
    “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” I would read. “Blessed are the ..
    “When are we going to have a picnic on the lawn?” Missy would suddenly interrupt. “Clare, are there enough eggs in the house to make some egg sandwiches?”
    "We used to picnic on the lawn a lot,” Clare would say to me apologetically.
    One afternoon, Missy interrupted by reaching out tremblingly for my hand. She held it in her own thin veined hands, which were warm and helpless as the paws of a newborn kitten, and she patted it.
    She said in her high quavering voice, “I’m so fortunate to have Clare, you know, Father.”
    I put down the Bible and patted her hand back. “You are very lucky,” I said.
    “If it weren’t for Clare they would have come and put me in the county home,” said Missy.
    “Pretty soon St. Mary’s is going to have its own nice home,” I said.
    She kept patting my hand. “But, Father, what will happen to Clare? When I go, who is going to look after her? They’ll come and take her away to that county home, Father.”
    “Now, Missy, you