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brandy glasses. The big color TV, which stood by the vitrine full of old bric-a-brac, stayed turned off. My mother sat with her coin books, finding the right place to slip Antinous in. My father and I talked about the economy—St. Mary’s troubles finding money and the bank’s troubles with ranchers going broke. On the mantel, the china clock ticked between the two French bisque figurines, shepherd and shepherdess, that had stood there as long as I could remember.
    I sat there sipping Drambuie and looking at my parents. They were both a breath of the virile past, two living fossils shut away from the dust, like the rare seashells in the vitrine. They were so much a match for each other that they might have been poured from the same batch of white clay at the same factory, like those two figurines. They wanted me to marry and have children for old reasons, not modem ones.
    Later, I left them for a little while to keep my monthly appointment with Father Matt.
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    I drove across town and parked the Triumph near the cathedral. Walking into the shadow of those great spires, and under the sculptured portal, I went in.
    Except for a nun in a short modem habit who was arranging flowers on a side altar, the cathedral was
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    empty. I kneeled down in front of the altar where the Blessed Sacrament was kept, and tried to collect my thoughts. I’d learned the hard way that I had to be very still inside for these talks with Father Matt.
    But I couldn’t. I kept having this heady feeling that I’d just won some sort of heavenly sweepstakes. Rushes of memory kept going over me. Playing against Missoula in the state football championship, and losing. Kissing Jean for the first time, very gently, and later breaking the engagement, also very gently. Hitchhiking to Butte to hear E. Power Biggs play the pipe organ in concert, and feeling very daring because hitchhiking is illegal in Montana.
    Moments of recollection were so rare now. Priests were supposed to have a spiritual life. I wanted to have one, but I didn’t, and it was my fault. What I had was a sort of hyperactive hysteria that passed for loving God, and possibly for loving people too. But hadn’t I always loved people?
    I left the cathedral and walked over to the Carroll College campus.
    Father Matt was just coming down the corridor toward his office. He stood six foot six, and walked with long springing strides that made his cassock flare out. He looked like a Jesuit Ichabod Crane. His salt-and-pepper hair was shaved close to a magnificent skull and high-bridged nose that would have done credit to one of Mother’s Roman coins. Ordinarily Jesuits scared me to death, but Father Matt was a Jesuit with some horse sense.
    “Hello, my boy,” he said. “You look happy today.”
    “Oh, it’s my mother’s birthday,” I said. “She’s fifty, and she likes it.”
    Right away I asked myself why I had lied. A little white lie, of course. Later I would look back at it, and know that it was the first and the whitest of a lot of lies.
    We sat in his office. He put his huge dusty feet up on his desk, displaying the frayed cuffs of his black trousers, and lighted his clunky briar pipe. Father Matt smoked a very sweet mixture that smelled like the prune whip Rosie sometimes baked.
    Just the sight of Father Matt made me feel more
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    comfortable about things. I put my feelings about Cottonwood in front of him. He smoked and smiled out the window.
    Finally he said, “Every young curate has that moment. He suddenly realizes that the Church is a sinking ship, and that he is the chosen rat who’s got to stay aboard and save it, instead of leaving it.”
    I had to laugh. Father Matt was famous for being a specialist in deflating first-year delusions of grandeur.
    “Seriously,” I said, “I like it in Cottonwood. I don’t believe I had any illusions about being in a small-town parish. If I stay there, Father Vance will kick the bucket one of these days, and I’ll take over. But