The Fancy Dancer

Father Vance saw the letter, he flew into a rage.
    “If that woman goes on defying my authority,” he roared, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
    “Do you think that’s what it’s about?” I asked.
    “I’ll bet my bottom dollar it is.”
    “Do I have your permission to go to Helena? The sooner this is straightened out, the better.”
    “Sure, sure.” Father Vance waved me out “Go to it, my boy.”
    By Friday morning, the insomnia had affected me so much that I felt as if I was losing my mind. My vision was blurred by rainbow showers of hallucination. Dizziness washed over me now and then. Sometimes I heard voices and ghostly telephones ringing in my head. Joan of Arc must have been an insomniac too.
    It was a hairy drive to Helena. Up on the pass, as I went by the Holiday Inn, I had a strong temptation to drive the car off the Magan Wall.
    A thousand feet below, the thick treetops of the timber waited for me. In the deep shade beneath them, I would find a shattered but total peace. The Rockies rolled out before me, and for the first time, their beauty was that of death, not life.
    But I argued with myself like a crazy man, keeping the car near the white line in the center of the road. I talked out loud, as if I were one of my own parishioners in counseling.
    “Don’t be a dope, Father Tom. There’s no peace 210
    down there. The devil is showing you all that, as he showed Our Lord the cities of the world from that other mountaintop. That’s the real unforgivable sin. It’s unforgivable because you make it that way. God can’t undo that one act of your will to destroy yourself.”
    Sermonizing to myself like that, I made it over the pass.
    As I drove past the Broadwater Hotel, it seemed like a thousand years ago and in another life that I had gone to a drag ball there, with a butterfly painted on my face.
    » » »
    At exactly eleven a.m., Father MacFee showed me into the presence of Bishop William Carney.
    The study was crafted in the same painfully correct Victorian Gothic style as the cathedral. The dark walnut walls were covered with their carved flamboyant tracery. Five or six curious tapestries hung from ceiling to floor. They were Art Nouveau ink washes on cloth, showing scenes of various Jesuits being martyred by Indians. Through the heavy green-draped windows, I could see the green lawns of Carroll College, and thought of Father Matt.
    The Bishop was sitting at the huge Gothic desk, flipping through some diocesan reports. By calling me to his study, I knew, he intended to have an informal-type meeting with me.
    “Ah, hello, Father Meeker,” he said, getting up and coming toward me. He wore the plain cassock of a working priest, and nothing gave away his rank except the pectoral cross. As I kneeled and kissed his ring, I thought sorrowfully of my fantasies about being a bishop.
    We sat down in two massive Gothic armchairs upholstered with cushions of old red velvet, and I looked at him. That burning sensation was at work over my shoulders and back again.
    Bishop Carney was known throughout the state for a mild manner that hid a granite forcefulness. In that grandiose study, he looked a little like the Wizard of
    Oz in his throne room—he had a round cherubic face, round spectacles and blue-gray eyes as mild as a kitten’s. The curls of iron-gray hair around his temples gave him the look of an altar boy aged overnight. He was a small man, five foot nine or thereabouts, and didn’t have any of the bearing traditionally associated with princes of the Church.
    But in the ten years he’d been bishop, Montanans had learned that he was not a man who retreated into sanctimonious abstractions. He was conservative, but openminded and realistic, in that tradition of grass-roots populism that seemed to characterize Montanans. He had made a singlehanded turnaround in the economic decay of the Church in the state, though lately inflation was putting the thumbscrews on his accomplishments.
    Usually Bishop Carney didn’t waste any time getting to the point. But today he took a different angle.
    “Two years ago,” he said musingly, “we gave you a tough assignment. One that might have broken some young priests.”
    I sat there listening with a sheen of hallucination in front of my eyes. The Bishop was really on a television screen, an apparition of yellow, green and purple dots.
    “We sent you to one of the most difficult parishes in the diocese, and one of our most admired but difficult pastors.