The Fancy Dancer

terminals and the -maze of runways glittered in the rain. The fog lights were on along the runways. A chill in the air hinted at fall. Vidal was already on the highway north, and he must be chilled to the bone.
    Doric and I had a last cup of coffee together, and then we walked out to the smaller hangars where the little planes were parked. Flavey was waiting, talking to a couple other pilots.
    Of course Doric didn’t kiss me good-bye. He shook my hand, but he also smiled warmly.
    “I’m so glad that God brought us together again,” he said. “We’ll keep in touch.”
    “We sure will,” I said.
    He held my hand a fraction of a second longer. “Stay a priest, Tom,” he said.
    “I still have to think about it,” I said.
    “This is Able four-six-eight-three-nine requesting permission for take-off ...”
    In a few minutes, we were lifting off, out of the ground mist.
    Denver lay below us, immense, smoky, sparkling with lights. Cars poured along its avenues and highways. I could make out the Regis campus, and the Denver U. campus, and the Botanic Gardens.
    I couldn’t cry in front of Flavey, so I just gulped and took a Dramamine. He had warned me that it might be a rough flight.
    Rain spattered on the Cessna’s windshield as the plane banked away to the north.
    14
    Back in Cottonwood, in the week I was away, life had gone on its measured course.
    At St. Mary's Hospital, three babies had been bom. Two people had died. A fire had burned out a little family grocery store that had done business on Placer Street for nearly thirty years. On Main Street, the pennants and bunting had been strung up for the rodeo and Bicentennial activities. City crews were just finishing the planting of the young cottonwood trees. The saplings stood straight as soldiers in their wire stays. The singles bar had opened.
    Other than that, you would have thought that nothing had changed.
    Yet the town was eerily different. I was looking at it from a new fixed point in the map of my conscience. Driven by a new tenderness, and by a closing-in of loneliness now that the break with Vidal and my possible departure from the ministry were so near, I checked up on the local brothers and sisters.
    Jamie Ogilvie was getting ready to go to college. His family were disappointed that he wasn’t going to the seminary, and had given him no help with applying. But his own excitement had carried him through
    all the letter-writing and clothes-shopping. He had been accepted at Rutgers.
    “I really wanted to go to M.I.T.,” he said. “They’re supposed to be terrific in biochemistry. But Rutgers is okay.”
    I felt a little sad. Jamie would go away to a brilliant career in the East and probably not come back.
    “I’ll miss you, Father,” Jamie said. Then he grinned and added, “Don’t misunderstand that.”
    I laughed.
    “Father, I’m worried about you, though,” said Jamie.
    “Oh?” I said.
    “Father Vance said you went to Denver for some vacation, but you don’t look like you got much. You work too hard, Father.”
    One of my first house calls was to Clare Faux’s place.
    To my astonishment, I found a crew of strange young people bustling around the old dairy farm. A few of the boys were painting the house, sanding the weathered old clapboards and making them a warm yellow. A sign was up on the road that said cottonwood crafts. A couple of young women were unpacking suitcases and strange bundles of stuff out of a Volkswagen bus, and carrying it up on the front porch.
    But the busiest scene was around the old milking bam. The young men had ripped out the stanchions, mangers and other cow-barn fittings, and a truck was loading them for the trip to the town dump. The cobwebby windows had been washed clean, the vast concrete floor scoured down with hoses and brooms. A couple of electricians were busy installing bright lights and electric heating. Some of the girls were already carrying in some big looms and setting them up, arguing about where was the best place to put them.
    I met Clare marching slowly from the house to the bam.
    She was wearing a black and white checked summer dress. Her old-fashioned black stockings, which
    she must have kept going since 1930, bagged around her reedy ankles. She was holding the eternal black silk umbrella over her head.
    “What’s going on here?” I asked, grinning. “It looks like the Seven Dwarfs have moved in.”
    Her eyes twinkled. “You told me to make plans, Father.”
    “You didn’t fool