The Fancy Dancer

disrespect to his mother and called her a bitch?
    I broke off the fugue. I was not in the mood for Bach.
    Furiously I pulled out some different stops, and crashed into a Gabriel Faure piece that I’d always loved. The bedridden old organ was just about going to have a coronary. Its aged wind-chests and its thirty-foot bourdons were rattling with the thunder in them. The bizarre chords made the stained-glass windows buzz. In the mirror, I could see the parishioners all turn around to look at me again. This time they looked startled and pissed off.
    The young man turned around too, and grinned. That was when I remembered who he was. He was no stranger in Cottonwood at all. Now and then I had passed him on the street, but we’d never talked. He was one of the more colorful, mysterious and disreputable people in town. His name was Vidal Stump.
    I played the Faure all the way through, whaling away at the four keyboards and the foot pedals like a maniac. I must have looked like the Phantom of the Opera bending over his underground organ, except that I wasn’t a masked monster—just a blond young priest in a dusty cassock.
    When I finished, a sweat had broken out all over me. Silence flooded the church again, and I could hear a few discreet coughs from the parishioners. It had been as relaxing as jogging for a mile, and I felt a little better.
    I looked at my watch—it was 8:05. I was five minutes late. Shutting off the organ, I rushed down the stairs. In the sacristy, I grabbed my stole off its peg in the incense-scented closet, kissed it hurriedly and slipped it over my head. It, like all the rest of the vestments, had been made by two old parish ladies, Missy Oldenberg and Clare Faux, and it was embroidered with crosses and some less liturgical bitter-root flowers.
    Moments after I’d sat down in my side of the confessional, the musty red velvet curtain on the other side made its muffled noise, and someone kneeled down noisily on the other side of the lattice. I slid it open. A kitchen smell came through to me—dishwater and cooking grease. This was a housewife who had hurried away after dinner.
    A woman’s halting contralto voice began, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned ...”
    The baling of souls began, for the week of June 12
    7
    through 19, 1976, in Cottonwood, Montana, Zip Code 59701.
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    The sins of a small Western town today are pretty predictable—or at least I thought so when I started that night.
    There were two old ladies suffering from the scruples that old ladies have always had (did I or did I not repent such and such a sin?). There were three teen-agers with spiritual acne. There was a rancher who was heartily sorry he’d wanted to shoot so-and-so for stealing two inches of his water out of the main irrigation ditch. And a young wife who’d driven over to the State university town, Missoula, to see Deep Throat because, she said, that kind of movie never came to Cottonwood.
    I was well into my second year in my first parish. I was finally learning how to get along with Father Vance, who resented the Bishop’s sending him a no-good greenhorn assistant. Father Vance was bom on a ranch near Livingston, he was sixty-seven now, and he really couldn’t manage alone anymore, but he called me a “pilgrim”—the old ranchers’ word for a useless outsider. Father Vance took out his resentments on me by making me do most of the hard legwork in the parish.
    Father’s biggest resentment came from the fact that he’d unthinkingly ran the parish deep into debt. The reason was his rigidity about old ways and his conviction that St. Mary’s should be run with as much pomp as St. Peter’s. But Bishop Camey had decided that it was humiliating to have one of Montana’s most historic parishes about to be snapped up by the bank. So he bluntly ordered both of us to get St. Mary’s back in the black, or else.
    Father Vance had no choice but to sit down with me and do some drastic cost-slashing. First to go was the decrepit academy, which the earthquake had made unsafe anyway. The children were hustled off to the Cottonwood public schools, and the $53,000 that Father Vance had cached in the Union Bank in Helena toward building a shiny new parochial school went to pay off part of the mortgage.
    Next was the utility bill—the church was now a little chillier on winter days and lit less lavishly. We stopped buying flowers from Fulton’s Greenhouse and made do with potted plants—they lasted longer.