The Fancy Dancer

midnight, one night during the first week in August, Clare called me at the rectory.
    ‘The doctor was just here,” she said. “He thinks you ought to come. And she wants to receive the sacraments.”
    “She should be in the hospital,” I said.
    “She doesn’t want to go to the hospital,” Clare said. “She wants to die at home, in her own bed, like decent people should.”
    Feeling the usual twinge of guilt, I dressed, got the bitterroot stole and the case of holy oils, and drove over there. Once again the poisoned priest was going to administer his stained sacraments to his unsuspecting flock.
    In the bedroom, I put on the stole and took Missy’s hand. “Mrs. Oldenberg,” I said.
    After a moment her half-open eyes opened a little more, and she rolled her head feebly toward me. She didn’t have the strength to pat my hand anymore. Her lips looked dried, and her face was a putty color. Her flat chest moved up and down under the embroidered sheet with a jerky uneven rhythm.
    “Father?” she whispered.
    “I’m right here,” I said. “Do you want to confess, Mrs. Oldenberg?”
    “Oh yes, Father, I’ve sinned some bad sins . ..”
    I held my breath, patting her hand. Was she a6out 150
    to avow the sexual sin that I suspected? It was my duty to “be firm,” as Father Matt had said. Dig it out, get her to repent, threaten her with loss of her immortal soul. But, guilty as I felt about myself, I couldn’t bring myself to do it to this gentle, dying old lady.
    “Father, I confess to being snappish with Clare sometimes,” Missy was saying. A sudden last rush of energy brought a little color into her washed-out face and eyes. “I haven’t been well, of course, but I shouldn’t be so snappish ...”
    She was silent for a while, moving her broken teeth weakly together, gazing at me blankly.
    “Is there more, Mrs. Oldenberg?” I prompted.
    After a few minutes, she said, “I’ve worried so much about what will happen to Clare, that I haven’t trusted in God enough ...”
    Another silence. I felt as if my heart was going to break.
    “Is that all?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she whispered, her voice fading now, like a radio signal. “So heartily sorry, Father ...”
    That lump in my throat was gagging me again. I had already learned the scent of a clear conscience, the way it only takes the young hound dog one lesson to know the scent of a mountain lion.
    “Mrs. Oldenberg, if you cant say the act of contrition,” I said, “just try to think it while I absolve you.”
    The lump in my throat made it hard to talk, but I choked my way through the words. Marking her forehead, hands and feet with little crosses of holy oil, I gave her the Sacrament of the Sick. Taking the single consecrated wafer from the pyx, I slipped it into her mouth, with those doomed fingers of mine that had touched Vidal’s flesh. She closed her eyes, and her broken ivory teeth moved on the wafer a little.
    Then she gave a little sigh and went to sleep, her chest still moving gently.
    When I left the house, I sat in the car for a few minutes and tried to cry. But the lump just stayed there, strangling me.
    The next morning around 8, Clare called me again. Missy Oldenberg had died quietly in her sleep around 4:30 a.m.
    S $ S
    Three days later, the doomed priest had to say Missy’s funeral mass.
    For the first time in my life, it struck me what an awful thing the Mass for the Dead is—awful in the old-time sense, with its root in the word “awe.” In an age where Americans seem to have lost touch with death (though the headlines put it next door every day), the Mass with the Body Present doesn’t fool around with soft lighting, cosmetics and plastic green grass. It rattles the bones right in your face. Even the modernization of this Mass, which had taken place in recent years, didn’t soften it for me. The hair-raising Dies Irae isn’t sung anymore, and the Church has tried hard to blow the stench of brimstone and burning flesh off this last rite—but my own guilty conscience put that stench right back.
    All morning, I kept wondering obsessively what Missy’s last judgment had been, and what I should have or could have done to change it. And what would my judgment be, if I died with that same sin on my conscience, plus my betrayal of my ministry? Even if I managed a last-minute repentance, would that be enough?
    The Mass started at 10:00 a.m.
    It was a furnace day, like a gust from the deep gulch of hell itself. Out in the