The Fancy Dancer

had closed the circle begun by the building of the church a hundred years ago. The white man started by trying to exterminate the Indian, then to Christianize him, and wound up in bed with him. We had healed the last wound of the West.
    Father Vance turned around to me, and I quickly let go Vidal’s hand.
    “The float looks pretty good, Father,” he said. “Considering it only cost sixty-eight dollars.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “the kids’ construction costs ran a little over the estimate.”
    Now a long line of horses and riders was clopping past. The street began to be Uttered with road apples. The Cottonwood County Posse, a real civilian posse who assisted the local police, swept by on their matched Morgans. Some riders were local—ranch families riding their working horses, wearing their Sunday best. Others were the professionals who’d hit town to compete in the rodeo—the barrel racers in their flared pants and brocades, the bronc riders in their fancy chaps.
    My eyes had already fixed on another float coming up. I jogged Father Vance’s elbow.
    “Hey, Father, look at that. Clare Faux and her crew have got a float.”
    “Bless her heart,” said Mrs. Shaw, “she’s the bravest lady I know. To do what she did at her age really takes guts.”
    Clare’s kids had set up their biggest loom on another borrowed flatbed truck, and were actually weaving something. The truck was draped with beautiful new patchwork quilts, and a sign on the side said COTTONWOOD CRAFTS. Amid all the kids in jeans, Clare Faux was sitting beside the loom like a queen, on an old kitchen chair, with her umbrella over her head to keep off the sun. Like the kids, she was smiling and waving at the crowd. She was too nearsighted to see me there, or she might have thrown me a special wave. The crowd gave her loud cheers as she went along.
    Suddenly a curious feeling came over me. Everywhere in that crowd, that parade, I saw faces whose inner secrets I knew. Those people had reached out to me some time that summer, in confession or in counseling, or just in five minute’s talk on the street. They had reached out to Christ in me, and I had tried to make myself His instrument of their healing. Wounded and confused as I was, I still served. The proof was there in front of me.
    The parade ended, leaving the street littered with confetti and horse manure. The crowd started to break
    up.
    “The endurance race started at eleven, didn’t it?” I asked Vidal.
    “Yeah,” he said. “I wonder how Will and the stud are doing.”
    “What’s this?” said Father Vance.
    “The endurance race,” I said. “We know one of the outfits in it.”
    “Larry borrowed my bike,” said Vidal, “so he can wait for the horse at all the places where the trail comes up near the highway. He wanted to see how they’re doing.”
    “Well,” said Father Vance, “I’m a wee bit tired. You two run along to the rodeo, and I’m going back to the rectory.”
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    At the fairgrounds, we lost ourselves in the sights and sounds of the rodeo and the fair. But that spooky feeling stayed with me of knowing the secrets of people we ran into.
    For the farm and ranch people who supported the town, it was getting to be the end of the year. The hay was up, the grain was coming in, the feeder cattle would go to market in another month or two. Their paranoia about the weather was over. Their main worry now was money—what they’d get per ton for their hay, per pound for their steers. They flooded into the fairgrounds to be town folks for a day. They wanted to have a good time and forget economics.
    For the town folks, it was a chance to put on Levi’s and a straw hat, and catch the smell of horses and cattle that they didn’t get all the rest of the year in their stores and offices.
    Vidal and I wandered around the fairground, drunk on the tenderness, keeping our distance from each other. The announcer knew I was there—all he had to do was yell my name into the mike if I was needed.
    We looked in on the fat cattle show, where the local breeders led their prize exotics, Herefords, Angus and Simmenthals around the straw-covered ring. I was pleased to see a red ribbon on the halter of a
    Simmenthal bull from the Clem Malley Ranch. The young widow and her kids told me that, so far, they were keeping things together pretty well.
    We wandered through the carnival and spent a quarter each at a rifle booth, shooting tin ducks. The sound of rock ’n’ roll floated