Nanci was sitting in a truck stop in Trinidad, Colorado, just off the Interstate, on a fine spring morning four months later. The prairie was green and spotted with flowers in the light of the sunrise, and it offered the promise of a good summer to come – a summer that wouldn’t be much like she’d known the last several years, true, but a promising summer anyway. The last day had gone very well indeed, and it offered promise for the future, too.

This was going to be a challenge; she knew that, but she felt she was ready to meet it. She was musing about the details of what she would have to do in the next few days when her cell phone rang. It might be Al or her mother, she thought as she opened the phone and punched the button to accept the call; they knew what had been planned for the previous evening. “Hi, it’s me,” she answered in her normal response. “May the Lord be with you.”

She was rather surprised to hear the voice on the other end of the call – it was one she hadn’t heard in over a year. “Reverend Chladek, this is Reverend Lackamp,” he said. “Is Sarah there with you by any chance? We’ve been trying to reach her, but all we get is that her service has been disconnected.”

Nanci thought fast. She wasn’t sure how much to say, but at least it sounded like Sarah’s parents hadn’t called her first. “No, she’s not here,” she replied in a friendly tone as she stalled for time a little to figure out what to say. “Are you still in Rwanda? How’s it going?”

“Yes, we’re still in Rwanda,” he replied. “I don’t want to say that it’s disheartening, but it could be going better. On the other hand, it could be going much worse. We’ve tried to get in touch with Sarah, but the telephone service where our new mission is located is totally nonexistent. But we’re here in Kigali, so we thought we’d better try to get in touch with her. Is she close by?”

“Oh, no,” Nanci said. “We’re not at Hickory Run any longer. The semester ended last week.”

“Oh, it did?” Reverend Lackamp sighed. “I guess I didn’t realize that. Do you have any idea where she is?”

“Yes, I do,” Nanci smiled, deciding to drag this out a little for the fun of it. After all, they deserved a little psychological torture if anyone did. “But you won’t be able to get hold of her before tomorrow night at the earliest.”

“Tomorrow night? Are you sure? We’re going to have to be out in the bush by then.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Nanci grinned. “I’ll be sure to let her know you called.”

“Are you sure you won’t be able to get to her sooner than that?”

“Oh, yes, I’m positive, but I’m pretty sure she’ll be home tomorrow night. She’ll probably be pretty tired, though.”

“Home?” she could hear Reverend Lackamp frown. “Where’s that?”

Nanci decided to throw caution to the wind; the curiosity was overwhelming her. But she also decided to drag this out as long as she could. “Flagstaff, Arizona,” she replied.

“Arizona? And you’re not with her?”

“No, I’m in Colorado right now,” Nanci said. “Last night I met with the combined pastor-parish committees of the two little Methodist churches I’ve been assigned to, and I’ve decided to accept the assignment.”

“Then what is Sarah doing? Is she all right?”

“Oh, yes. I talk with her every now and then. She’s working now. In fact, she has a couple of jobs, but one of them keeps her out of town a bit.” This seemed like a good time to drop a little more information into the conversation. “But to tell you the truth, I haven’t actually seen her since she left on her honeymoon.”

“Honeymoon?” Reverend Lackamp exclaimed. “She got married?”

“That usually happens before people go on a honeymoon,” Nanci snickered. “Although my sister tells a story about a couple she met once who took an eight-month honeymoon that ended with their getting married.”

“Let me get this straight. She got married?”

“Oh, yes. I was the one who married them, in fact. It was a nice wedding, if a little on the small side. You should have been there. She looked beautiful.”

Reverend Lackamp obviously had to struggle for words for a moment. “Reverend Chladek,” he finally managed, “I hope you’re not saying that she got married to Abe Bowman.”

“I thought that was what you wanted,” Nanci replied, trying to sound apologetic. “That was certainly what she thought you wanted.”

“Don’t tell me . . .” he sighed. “That wasn’t what we were hoping for at all.”

“Then what were you hoping for?” she asked, trying to not let a snide sound into her voice.

“We were hoping that she would show enough backbone to defy us a little,” Reverend Lackamp replied. “Look, we knew all along that Abe Bowman was a few bricks shy of a barbecue pit, and we knew she couldn’t stand the ground he walked on. But you know how tentative and sheltered she was. We couldn’t think of anything else that might get her to come to her senses and do something for herself.”

“Well, you certainly could have handled it better than that.”

“I guess you’re right. Look, when we saw how good a friend you were becoming with her, we hoped that you would be able to lend her a little guidance. I can’t believe you would let her get married to Abe Bowman, let alone be the one to marry them.”

Nanci tried to process the last few words she’d heard from Reverend Lackamp. Something wasn’t quite matching up with what she’d believed for over a year, what Sarah had believed, too. There were parts of it that made a little bit of sense, but parts that didn’t. But maybe it was time to let him off the hook a little. “Oh, I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that,” she said. “Not after he assaulted her and spent six months in the county jail, and then came right after her again as soon as he was released.”

“Abe did what?”

“He banged her around pretty badly the first time, before my sister got to him,” Nanci replied. “My sister had to hand her baby to someone else before she broke a couple of his bones. The second time, he managed to see the wisdom in the Bible when I hit him over the head with a large copy of it.”

“Why on earth would he have done something like that?”

“Because he didn’t know any better, maybe? Look, Reverend Lackamp, Reverend Bowman had this idea that he had more than your permission to court her. He had the idea that you had given her to him.”

“I . . . we never said anything like that. We wrote him a letter saying that we thought it would be good if he could look after her, but what you’re saying was nothing like what we meant.”

“Unfortunately, he took it that way. I saw that letter, but I didn’t get the chance to actually read it before Sarah tore it to pieces. She read the important sections out loud, but we could tell that he didn’t take it that way.”

“Oh, dear,” Reverend Lackamp said. “Reverend Chladek, we never intended for that to happen.”

“I couldn’t honestly believe you would,” she replied. “Although, to be honest, you may be a long time selling Sarah on that idea. I hate to say it, but you are not exactly her favorite people in the world right now, and you haven’t been for a year or more.”

“Well, that’s at least a little bit like what we hoped might happen. We wanted her to reduce her dependence on us, because we knew that we were going to be coming back here, and we were quite sure she wouldn’t want to come with us. Did she ever tell you what happened when we left here the last time?”

“Yes she did, and it sounded absolutely horrible. I can’t imagine how seeing a scene like that wouldn’t warp an individual. I can’t blame her in the slightest for her not wanting to go back to Africa, and I have to wonder if your decision to go back wasn’t exactly rational, either.”

“It’s our mission,” Reverend Lackamp sighed. “It’s all Martha and I have ever believed we should do. We feel the Lord needs us here, and while we’ve been a while getting started, I think we’re starting to make a little progress. But that’s beside the point right now. Are you sure Sarah is doing all right?”

“Well, not having actually seen her since she got married, she sounds like it on the phone.”

“This man she married. Is he a good, Christian man?”

“He is,” Nanci replied. “One of the finest men I know. He’s been my best friend for years. I won’t say I introduced them, but they got to know each other through me. I don’t want to say it was love at first sight, but they moved toward each other fairly quickly.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I thought I could trust your good judgment or we would never have tried such a hair-brained stunt to get Sarah to stand on her own two feet. I guess it worked, but it sure must not have worked the way we wanted it to. Do you have any idea what happened to Abe Bowman?”

“Only a little bit. The second time he came after Sarah was at Hickory Run, and I guess someone in the administration got in touch with someone from the missionary society under the table, and the last I heard he was in an institution.” Actually, she knew Warren and Norm had been involved somehow, but she didn’t know the details. “That was a couple of months ago, and I don’t know what’s happened since. I’d guess he’s still there.”

“Poor Abe. I was afraid that was going to happen sooner or later. Reverend Chladek, don’t get me wrong. Abe Bowman was a good and loyal friend for many years here in Rwanda, but he had an experience escaping the country that was even worse than ours was, and his wife died in the process. It must have warped his mind more than I thought. I know the society sent him to learn Chinese more to keep him out of trouble than they had any idea of sending him to China, which has been put off yearly for several years. But the society takes care of its own, Reverend Chladek. If a person is having trouble, we don’t turn our backs on them.”

“And yet you wanted to stick Sarah with him.”

“No. Never. We wanted her to think we were trying to stick her with him. There’s a difference, a huge difference.”

Nanci let out a sigh. “Sir, the wisdom of your reasoning is beyond my understanding. I know your actions have been very troubling to Sarah for over a year now, and it hasn’t been easy for her to deal with them. Fortunately, she managed to pull her way out of it, but I don’t think she’ll be very kind about wanting to talk to you.”

“I’ve been afraid you were going to say something like that,” he sighed. “What do you suggest we do to get back in her good graces?”

“That’s a little hard to say. Obviously, a huge apology is in order, but you’re going to have to get her to listen to you long enough to make it. About all I can say is that I should be seeing her this weekend, and I’ll try to reason with her a bit, but I can’t make any real promises under the circumstances.”

“No, I don’t suppose you can, but it might be a first step. Maybe, given time, she’d be willing to take a phone call from us where we can talk about it a little.”

“It might be, but I wouldn’t get too optimistic,” Nanci warned. “I can tell you that it’s going to take time, perhaps lots of time. It may be that you have to come back to the country and walk into her church unannounced to get to talk to her without her making a scene.”

“Her church? Is that the same as your church? Hillside Methodist, I seem to recall.”

“Well, yes and no,” Nanci said. “I’m still a member there and as far as I’m concerned it will stay my home church, although I will be resigning my post as Associate Pastor and my membership in the church. It goes with my being assigned to the two churches here in Colorado. But no, Sarah’s church is now the Flagstaff John Wesley Fellowship.”

“What brought that on? Is that where her husband goes?”

“No, it was one of those deals,” Nanci grinned. “It’s a little hard to explain.”

“I seem to recall you spoke there on occasion, and didn’t she speak there a year ago last Christmas?”

“Yes she did,” Nanci laughed. “She actually spoke there several times last summer, as well. She really is a very good speaker, and you ought to hear her sometime. The Fellowship, well, they’re on a very tight budget. I think I told you that. They haven’t been able to afford a pastor in some years.”

“I seem to recall you telling me that.”

“It seems that they have a parsonage, which I didn’t know about in all the years I spoke there. It had been rented out for the income, but it was sitting empty when Sarah and her husband were looking for a place to stay. I won’t go into the ins and outs involved, but the church board cut her and her husband a deal on the rent if she would speak there regularly, and, to make a long story short, they took the board up on it, so she’s now an independent minister. She actually beat me to it, the stinker.”

“Reverend Chladek, you have to be kidding me!”

“No, and it surprised me, too. She refused to be named as their pastor, but I’m told that if you look at the signboard in front of the church she’s listed as the ‘Interim Pastor.’ With them, ‘interim’ could mean decades.”

“That is something I never, and I mean never expected out of Sarah. She always seemed so, well, wishy-washy.”

“She’s changed, Reverend Lackamp. In fact, she’s changed a lot. I haven’t been there to see, of course, but it seems that that the church attendance is actually improving a little. The people at the Fellowship really seem to like her, at least according to an old friend who’s the lay leader of the church. They apparently aren’t going to mind her being gone so much this summer.”

“Gone? Where to? I thought you said she had a job.”

“Oh, she does. I won’t go into the details, but my stepfather needed some help in his office, working the phones. It gets busy in the winter, and some of the office staff takes that time for their vacations. Her husband was substitute teaching, officiating school sports, and working in a tax preparation place, but it’s all seasonal work. They’re out on the river now, together of course.”

“On the river? Reverend Chladek, do you mean on a raft, like you do?”

“Like I did,” Nanci sighed. “If there was any possibility of my doing it again this year, it got blown away last evening. I have churches I’m going to have to tend to.”

“Do you mean our daughter is actually rowing a raft down through the Grand Canyon?”

“Well, she’s doing it some, but I doubt if my step-father is going to promote her to boatman this summer. I wouldn’t put it past him for next summer, though.”

“Are we sure this is Martha’s and my Sarah we’ve been talking about?”

“It sure is,” Nanci smiled. “She’s quite a gal. She’s come a long ways, but she still has a long way to go, too. But then, we all do.”

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe any of it. I think you must have had quite an influence on our girl. It’s more than we could have ever done, that’s for sure.”

Nanci wanted to say that it would have gone a great deal easier if they had been part of the process, but she held her tongue. That might have been right, and it might not have been. After all, now that she thought about it a little, the Lackamps were right in that Sarah needed to get out of their influence a little, but they sure picked a bad way to accomplish it. That, though, was a problem that was going to have to sort its way out in the future.

They talked for a few more minutes, during which they exchanged a few more things, like how things were going in Rwanda, and what Sarah had been doing in Flagstaff. Nanci gave the Lackamps Sarah’s new phone number, but warned them that catching up with her any time in the next few months was going to be an iffy thing since she would be on the river so much.

Finally, there wasn’t much left to say, so they ended the call. Nanci sighed, put away her cell phone, and turned to the cup of coffee sitting in front of her, to discover it had gotten cold. That was all right; it wasn’t very good coffee anyway, nothing like she was used to, brewed down by the river in the desolate wilderness of the Grand Canyon.

She glanced at the clock on the wall. Right now, the White Team was probably loading up down at one of the campsites around Granite Springs. While she had been meeting with the people from Tyler and Conestoga Methodist Churches, the team would have had a steak fry as always on the last night of the trip. She could close her eyes and see Preach and Angie and Kevin and Sarah sitting around a campfire, telling stories of the river, looking forward with a bit of sadness at having to bid goodbye to some new friends at Diamond Creek Wash later this morning.

There was a part of her that would have liked to be there, and at least for the moment her spirit was there with them. She wished them well.

As she sat there trying to decide if she wanted another cup of coffee or just to get on the road, an interesting thought crossed her mind. She had been born again at Havasu Creek, and for the last six years the Grand Canyon had been her cradle as a Christian. But it was time to get out of the cradle and go on to other things. She had churches she had to pastor, and it was time to start thinking about them.

Note to Readers

The Reverend Nanci story is complicated and spread over several parts of the Dawnwalker and Reverend Nanci series. I consider Down By the Riverside to be Book One of the Reverend Nanci series, as well as a part of the Dawnwalker series, because it involves a lot of Canyon Tours characters in the Grand Canyon. There will be more of this new series to come in the future.

However, there are two books in the Dawnwalker series that tell a significant part of Nanci’s story, and probably could be referred to as “prequels.”

The first is Dawnwalker itself. In that book, Nanci is a self-centered teenage playgirl with no sense of responsibility and whose only objective is to have fun, not realizing that she’s on a serious slide downhill. While she’s only a small part of the book, the reaction of other characters to her actions play a big part of the whole story.

The second prequel is Canyon Fires. While Nanci’s recovery, redemption, and conversion is a part of the book, it is only one of several story lines, although in my opinion Nanci’s is the most powerful.

Nanci also has cameo appearances in several other Dawnwalker stories, most notably River Rat, but most of what happens in those cameos is recapitulated in Down By the Riverside.

For a character who was first cast as a semi-villain and was something of a throwaway, Nanci and I have come a long, long way. – WB

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