The Fancy Dancer

the county, and recently they’d had the Cottonwood bookseller arrested for selling “obscene” authors like }. D. Salinger and James Baldwin (the judge had thrown the case out of court, saying the Supreme Court didn’t have The Catcher in the Rye in mind when they ruled on dirty books). The town had its share of teen-age drunks, young divorcees, old people who ate cat food on their pensions, liberated women, bitter Vietnam vets, shoplifters.
    The ranchers’ year was just now starting to roll. Though they’d been calving since February, and asking for bank loans and fertilizing fields since April, the ninety-five-day growing season was just starting now—June 5 to September 15. The stores in town would live or die depending on how the cattle market would be, come fall, and what the price of baled hay would be.
    I knew all this as filtered through the lattice of my confessional every Saturday night, and in the regular counseling sessions in my office, and in my sacerdotal cruisings around the valley.
    But right now, I was glad to see it fade off into the dust behind me—for a while, anyway.
    A good feeling of being on the road and going somewhere important came over me. I had spent my teen-age years crisscrossing the Northwest, to retreats, Catholic or youth conventions, organ concerts, or just to go backpacking.
    And I was haunted by the thought of Vidal. I hadn’t run into a genuine down-and-out type in my year-plus of counseling. Besides, after a year-plus of talking to old ladies and children and Father Vance, it had been real nice to talk to a guy my own age.
    Stepping harder on the gas pedal, I happily watched the needle creep up to eighty. The wind whipped me through the open window.
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    The capital of Montana nestles on the eastern slope of the Continental Divide.
    The dome of the Capitol building, the great pines and spruces of its city park, and the twin spires of its nineteenth-century Gothic cathedral all rise against the steep slopes of Mt. Helena. The downtown area has a bombed-out look because of a big urban renewal project. But many magnificent old homes still line the hilly streets of the elegant West Side.
    As I turned off on Hauser Avenue, the main drive through the West Side, I noted—as always—how beautifully many of the homes are kept up, though they’re not owned by the pioneer families anymore.
    It saddened me, however, to see that a few of the West Side houses were run down, or turned into apartment buildings.
    In its day, Helena was the haut monde of the Northwest. It had Lily Langtry and Edwin Booth on its gaslit stages, and French on its hotel menus, and fresh oysters shipped on ice from “hack East.” Outside town, the mile on mile of lonely placer-mine dumps bear witness to the mineral wealth and the fever that built this city. Whenever I came back to my home city, I felt—even more than in Cottonwood—the weight of a history that was young, but heavy as precious metal. It was the weight of a society that was built on macho enterprise and daring.
    My family, and my religion, had been intimate in that building. My great-grandfather, Jacob Meeker, had been the first president of the First Metals Bank in Helena. Catholicism had spread from De Smet’s tiny mission up on Flathead Lake to be the major faith in the state. Mary, who allegedly appeared to a little Indian girl, was the reason that St. Mary’s Lakes and St. Mary’s parishes were now sprinkled over Montana’s eight-hundred-mile sweep.
    But as I drove into Helena that day, I felt a kind of depression. There was no denying that the state, and the Church, were in a crisis. Agriculture was still the biggest industry in the state/but the ranchers and farmers were being crushed to death between a depressed market and rising costs. The great copper mines are playing out or too costly to operate. The railroads are going broke, and fewer airlines fly into the state. The school system is tightening its belt— they’d just closed the state vocational college in Bozeman. People with college degrees leave the state to find work. Even the wilderness scenery that is such a joy to the tourists is suddenly threatened by rampant vacation development. And the Church’s crisis needs no itemizing.
    So Helena seemed to me, that day, like a lovely fossil—though it was still alive and well. Its population was actually growing, its old Montana Club was still open for businessmen’s lunch (my father ate there every day), and