The Fancy Dancer

photographs of the two forbidding gentlemen who had preceded Father Vance as rector. The brass chandelier had been converted from gas to electricity. In its mellow light, Father Vance sat reading the Cottonwood Post.
    His plate was covered with chicken bones clean enough for an anatomy lesson.
    “You’re late,” he said, in his gruffest voice.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just at nine, someone wanted to confess.”
    “I understand the famous Vidal Stump was there tonight. Mrs. Bircher saw him when she went to fetch me something from the sacristy.”
    “Yeah. In fact, that was him that came at nine.” “Amazing,” said Father Vance. “If God’s grace can reach him, it can reach anybody.”
    2
    After high mass the next day, I shucked the cassock, and put on black trousers, a black turtleneck sweater and a sport jacket. Then I jumped into my red Triumph and started for Helena fifty miles away.
    The Triumph had been an ordination present from my parents. Their motive was part generous, part selfish. They knew I’d need it for my parish work, but they also wanted to make sure I could visit them. The car was a dream, and I drove it too fast. With its thirty-two miles a gallon and its cockpit interior, it was perfect for a young guy who was counting pennies and had no temptations to start a family. But it made Father Vance grumble about pilgrim assistants who helled around in their own sports cars.
    I drove out of town past the fairgrounds. The grandstand had been freshly painted green for the Bicentennial celebration that fall, and the big letters along it were updated. COTTONWOOD RODEO AND COUNTY FAIR, SEPTEMBER 1, 2, & 3, 1976, it read. And in smaller letters, don’t miss the helena-COTTONWOOD ENDURANCE HORSE RACE, SEPT. 3.
    I was in a giddy mood. As I turned up the ramp 17
    onto the Interstate, it was hard to remember the curate blues that I’d had on Saturday.
    All around the Cottonwood basin, the mountains were shedding the last of their snow. The rolling foothills with their glacier moraines had that pale green of June that would soon be scorched away by the sun of July. The wildflowers would be in bloom everywhere out there—wild roses, bitterroot, phlox, prickly pear. It would be nice to walk over the hills and look at them but there wasn’t time. I turned the radio way up—station KGLM in Butte was playing my favorite mix of country music and soft rock.
    Up on the last foothills above the basin, I could look in my rearview mirror and catch glimpses of the world I was leaving behind. The great valley, seventy miles wide, ringed by mountains, was seen in the glass whitely, as the dust billowed up from the side of the road.
    My parish was that rarity in America today, an area whose economy was still based on agriculture. Cottonwood did have a sawmill, and a chemical refining plant. But the income these industries brought into the county was a drop in the bucket. Wheat, hay and cattle were still king here, though they were trapped kings fighting off inflation. Sheep had been king too, but imports had nearly killed off the local woolgrowers.
    Cottonwood’s ranchers and farmers were not glittering tycoons of agribusiness who flew around in planes. Theirs were mostly family operations, held together by bank loans, grit and old-fashioned love of the land. Even the town folks of Cottonwood, though they might not know one end of a horse from the other, had much the same mentality as the rural folks out in the hills, or in the little outlying communities like Ellis, Whalen, Garnet, Hernville, Skillet Creek. Out there, all the little old Catholic parishes were now boarded up, and the people had to drive clear in to Cottonwood, the county seat, if they wanted to go to mass.
    It was a world whose scenery had hardly changed since the first French trappers came through in the eighteen-forties, if you could ignore the main power line that marched down the valley, and the curving scar of the new Interstate 10, and the green patches that meant irrigated hay and dry-land wheat. Yet it was as painfully intimate with the pressures of modem life as if it had been a suburb of Chicago or Los Angeles. Unemployment was high, and the county welfare rolls were lengthening, though the traditional mentality looked down on welfare. Cottonwood even had a housing problem—many pre-1900 homes were not fit to live in anymore, and few new homes were being built. A little band of local blue-noses fought to keep pornography out of