The Fancy Dancer

hayfields around Cottonwood, any careless hayhand who didn’t wear a hat would have a sunstroke by mid-afternoon. Even the church, which was usually cool, had a scorched dusty smell in it. The candles around Missy’s bier burned straight up, with a sound like soup simmering.
    In the sacristy, I put on the green vestments that Missy and Clare had embroidered. Black vestments weren’t worn much anymore. Surely the two old ladies must have had the random thought that these things would be worn at their own funerals. They had chosen a design of wild-roses and crab-apple blossoms.
    When Jamie and I came in through the front door of the church for the processional, I was surprised to see so many people. Usually the death of an old lady in a small town goes unnoticed by everyone except her peers. But here were several young people that I didn’t recognize. They must be from out of town, maybe some of the handicraft freaks that Missy and Clare had corresponded with in other parts of the state.
    The one important person who wasn’t there was Vidal. He didn’t know what this Mass meant to me, so he was down at the garage.
    As I came in, the people rose with a rustling of hymn books and a clunking of feet against the wooden knee rests. Even Clare got shakily to her feet in the front pew.
    She was alone. She had taken the bunch of cherries off her black straw hat and substituted a black net veil. Her huge old black silk umbrella with the yellowed ivory handle fell over, out into the aisle, and the clatter echoed through the church. One of the young people picked it up for her. She stood with her face tight and vacant, fanning her iridescent sweaty cheek with an old lace fan.
    I spoke the first words of the rite. They were gentle modernized words, and they sounded funny coming out of that mind of mine, that echoed with the shrieks and the cries of the Last Judgment of gays:
    “The grace and peace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you,” I said.
    “And also with you,” said the people in the church.
    The pallbearers had Missy’s coffin there. The peculiar feeling came over me that it was my own defiled corpse that lay inside. I sprinkled the body with holy water. The pallbearers put a white pall over the coffin.
    Then we proceeded down the aisle to the sanctuary. Jamie carried the lighted paschal candle. The gospel book rode along on the coffin, over Missy’s head. The congregation stood singing a hymn as we walked along slowly through them. Since I was not playing the organ, their voices had the usual naked, lonely, off-key sound.
    I plowed my way through the Mass, my voice breaking. Everybody knew I had tended Missy in her last days, so they would put this down to grief. Yet every word of that Mass seemed to be a public announcement of my guilt, and Vidal’s. I wondered if I would get desperate enough to think of killing myself.
    When I came to the Scripture readings, I chose one from the book of Wisdom that suited my state of mind. It was almost like giving myself away:
    “He who pleased God was loved;
    he who lived among sinners was transported,
    Snatched away, lest wickedness pervert his mind or deceit beguile his soul;
    For the witchery of paltry things obscures what is right and the whirl of desire transforms the innocent mind...”
    Now and then, as I turned to face the congregation, I saw that Clare had her handkerchief in front of her eyes. I would have given anything to know what she was thinking about.
    Odds and ends of thoughts fluttered through my head, like magpies that come flying to pick out the eyes of a dead cow. I thought of super-sensitive saints like Rose of Lima, who shook when the word “sin” was even mentioned. I thought of Roman martyrs of both sexes—some of them just children—who let themselves be tom by wild animals, beheaded, flayed, stabbed, roasted alive, rather than let their minds and bodies be defiled by the pagans. In my hotter religious moments, I had toyed with the idea of becoming a saint. It was just another of the long train of human fantasies, and it was a lot funnier than Vidal’s fantasy about the sexy priest.
    a a a
    After the Mass, the six parish men carried the plain black coffin out into the hot sunlight. Their foreheads were already beaded with sweat as they slid it into the waiting hearse.
    Grief had not seduced Clare Faux into spending 154
    her savings to quiet her conscience. She had made it plain to Bender’s Funeral Home that the