The Fancy Dancer

pastor. The snorty old mossback priest liked parades as much as a little boy.
    Father Vance, Vidal, Mrs. Shaw and I were standing on the curb by Mitchell’s Drugstore, crushed in the mob. People had driven in from all over the county, and some of the smaller communities out there had even entered floats in the parade.
    Main Street was brave with flags and bunting, and bright with the results of the beautification program. The restored buildings in the Landry block gleamed with new paint and new windows. The antique shop had just hung out its sign, and the owner had rushed around chasing garage sales and estates, trying to get together a minimum stock, so as to have something to sell over the holiday weekend. The tearoom had been open a week, and reported a land-office business.
    A few young people lounged by the door of the singles bar, which had reported moderate business, though not a land rush. The garden center was looking ahead to the long Montana winter, and had filled its windows with exotic house plants.
    Mrs. Shaw had a proprietary gleam in her eye as she surveyed what she and the town had wrought.
    “I think we’ve done it,” she said to me. “Thank God.”
    But the spirit of Cottonwood was more humanly expressed in the boisterous parade now coming down the street. When I saw the grit and pride and humor in it, it came over me all over again why I’d wanted to be a priest in a small town. The sadness that one way or the other I’d be leaving it was there in my throat.
    Vidal was standing right beside me. In the crush, he dared to fumble for my hand, and hold it. I squeezed his hand back. No one could possibly see this, especially Father Vance, who was in front of us, trying to see past the yellowing leaves of one of the cottonwood saplings.
    The parade was rounding the comer by City Hall and coming down the street toward us now.
    A dozen horsemen were all carrying the Stars and Stripes. Their horses pranced along and foamed at their bits. When they got closer, we could see that all the flags were different, from the thirteen stars of the Colonies to the fifty-star flag of today. Vem Stuart, the big local quarter horse breeder, was riding his famous Bobcat and carrying the blue flag of Montana with its motto, Oro y plata.
    After the flags came the Knights of Columbus band, mostly older businessmen, blasting away and looking very smart in their blue uniforms. Then they were passing, and we were drowned in the sounds and sights of the parade—the hot smell of horseflesh, exhaust fumes from the floats, flowers, popcorn, cotton candy. Vidal was playing sexily with my fingers, and with the emotion in me, I kept trying to hold his fingers hard. It was the only time we touched each other in public in Cottonwood.
    “Don’t you think the K. of C. band is a little weak on 233
    clarinets?” Father Vance asked. He was craning his neck. I was tempted to buy him a little flag to wave.
    The floats were rumbling past now.
    The town’s official float was a mountain peak of red and blue with silver snow, crowded by young men and women wearing what Vidal would have called cowboy drag. They were grinning and throwing confetti and paper streamers at the crowd. On top of the mountain sat the rodeo queen, Beth Stuart, smiling shyly and waving.
    The Cottonwood County Historical Society’s float dramatized the Skillet Creek Fight between the U. S. Army and the Nez Perce Indians. Several of the older businesses in town had floats. The big sheep ranch up the valley at Whalen had a float with live sheep in a pen and a sign that read LET US PULL THE WOOL OVER YOUR EYES.
    Finally the float came along that our little group had been waiting for. The St. Mary’s band preceded it. The kids looked very brave, though some were cheerfully out of step and they were missing a piccolo and a couple of trumpets. If you looked closely, you could see a moth hole here and there. In the last file of musicians, Jamie Ogilvie had his cap set at a rakish angle and he was whanging away at the glockenspiel.
    Our float was mounted on a big flatbed truck loaned to us by Fulton’s Nursery. The cardboard brick church had nearly come to grief when the boys hoisted it up there that morning. But now it looked fine. The stained-glass windows were very recognizable, and the lilacs. The white and Metis hod carriers were at work around it with a few real trowels and real bricks.
    I watched it pass, thinking that in a curious way, Vidal’s and my love