The Fancy Dancer

arrangements were to be as simple as possible. I had offered to be present at her discussion with the Undertaker, to make sure he didn’t con her into anything, but she handled it very well by herself. She had also asked for no flowers, only donations to the still-unopened St. Mary’s Home for the Aged.
    Father Vance, Jamie, Clare and I got into Father’s car, and fell in behind the hearse. Everybody else piled into their own cars and followed us slowly through Cottonwood with headlights on. As we crossed the bridge, I could see the roof of Vidal’s house through the willows.
    I wondered how well Clare would be able to hide her grief during the burial service.
    At the cemetery, we parked the cars just inside the gate. The heat struck down on us with savage force.
    Clare had asked me to have a processional to the grave—the only touch of pomp in the whole funeral. So we formed up, Jamie with the cross, me, Clare leaning on Father Vance’s arm, the six pallbearers with the coffin, and the little crowd of mourners. Then Father Vance’s gravelly voice led everybody off with the hymn that Clare had wanted.
    We started down the gravel road through the oldest part of the cemetery—you could tell it by the style of the tombstones and by the age of the trees. In the deep shade of the ripest old cottonwoods stood the earliest crumbling brick graves of the French and Metis builders of St. Mary’s, and the weathered marble tablets of the mid-1800s, with good New England names on them.
    But we headed on out into the new section. Here, the trees were just saplings, and the sun beat down on the broad lawn with its neat rows of new granite stones. Our voices, singing “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” sounded even tinnier than in the church.
    Halfway through it, we came to Missy’s brand-new grave. It was a deep chalky rectangle. The bone-dry gravelly earth was piled to one side, on the grass. In that hole, we were going to bury a lifetime of devotion that the Church said was an abomination.
    We all stood around the grave with our clothes and vestments hanging limply in the still air. A fine white dust seemed to cling to us. On the nearby hills, clouds of wild baby’s breath were in bloom. From the little airstrip nearby, a small plane took off, climbing over us into the bald blue sky. On the hayfield across the road, a baling machine moved slowly along a windrow, and some men were stacking bales on the wagon hitched behind it. The farthest foothills shimmered in the heat like a mirage.
    I glanced anxiously at Clare as I blessed the grave. She stared dry-eyed down into the hole. There must be no loneliness on this earth, I thought, like that of an elderly gay person who has lost a lifelong mate. My own eyes were dry and burning as I read the rites.
    “Give her eternal rest, Oh Lord,” I said.
    “And may your light shine upon her for ever,” the people answered.
    The pallbearers lowered the coffin into the grave.
    Clare stood leaning on Father Vance’s arm, holding her big umbrella shakily over her head to keep off the sun. I had a sudden irrational desire for a cold beer, and thought of Larry and Will. Someday death would part them too. A ghostly roan stud and a ghostly gay rider paced slowly through my mind. I shook them away.
    As the cemetery crew shoveled the dry dirt back down onto the coffin lid, a tremor seemed to go over Clare’s body, like the barest breeze stirring the leaves of a quaking aspen.
    When the hole was filled, she motioned one of the young people forward with a long box. From it, she took the only flowers of the funeral. They were from the garden that she and Missy had tended so lovingly. She must have moved slowly around the yard that morning, cutting the flowers slowly with a little pair of sharp scissors. It was a real old-fashioned bouquet —spikes of blue and purple delphinium, pinks, bachelor’s buttons, sweet peas, roses, yellow snapdragons —all tied up with a black velvet ribbon.
    She bent forward to put them on the mound of
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    rubble, and nearly fell. Father Vance caught her arm just in time.
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    That afternoon, I dropped by her house to see if she was all right.
    Moving like one possessed by habit, she came out of the kitchen with the usual two steaming china cups on the tray. We sat with the coffee while the hot sunshine streamed through the spiderweb curtains on us.
    “Now, Mrs. Faux,” I said, “if you need anything, you let me know. Even if you have to call me up in