Just about that time Nanci and Larry were in Reed’s Jeep Cherokee, heading down the lane to the road. “So how do you think it went?” Nanci asked the older man. He was over six feet, and on the heavy side. She hadn’t asked him his age, but she thought he had to be in his seventies.

“Not bad, considering,” Reed replied. “They’re happy enough to have someone besides Darius Anders as a pastor. He twisted some tails that he shouldn’t have, and they’re going to be a while getting over it. Of course, that’s true in Tyler too. It was hard enough to get him off his dead butt to do something in Tyler, and he really resented having to come out here to not do much either.”

“Bishop Ennis sort of hinted that he hadn’t exactly set the world on fire out here,” Nanci submitted cautiously.

“She was either being nice or you’re a master of understatement,” Reed laughed as he turned onto the county road. It was paved, but not recently and showed its age. “In my opinion, and it’s only my opinion, though you can likely find people who will agree with me, Anders was just putting in his time here until he could get sent to some church in what he considered civilization. He was lazy and didn’t do anything he didn’t absolutely have to, so it’s no surprise that the combined pastor-parish committee asked the bishop to get him out of here. On top of that, he was a nitpicker, and nothing was good enough for him. His wife didn’t help matters any, either. She absolutely hated it here and was counting the minutes until she could leave. She was pretty snobbish and just couldn’t adapt to the fact that this isn’t some nice suburban neighborhood.”

“Now, who’s the master of understatement here?” she laughed. “I may be a city girl in some ways, but I’ve spent enough time in a place that makes this look downright urban and can appreciate its size.”

“I sure hope you’re right. On the other hand, if you make any effort at all you’re going to look pretty good in comparison to him.”

“I’m here, and that means I intend to do my best,” she replied. “I didn’t become a pastor with the idea of doing half of a job.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand that, but I hate to say that it’s going to take a while for people to get used to you and maybe believe it themselves. I mean, a woman, a young woman at that, and a stranger from the city? And then, to follow Darius Anders? I think people will be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for a while, but you to have to prove yourself, too. People resist change, Reverend Chladek, especially people around here, when the world is changing around them. We had Craig Howell pastoring here for what was it? Thirteen years? He was a local minister from down in Carondelet, and he moved up to Tyler and made himself a part of the community. He didn’t even become a pastor until after he retired, and he had to give it up when he was past eighty and had had two heart attacks. I always thought of him as a loveable old fuddy-duddy, but he was a darn good pastor, very personable, and people liked him.”

“I’ve met a few like that.”

“I think,” Reed reached for words, “that the fact he was hanging on represented to the rest of us that we had to hang on, too,” he said finally. “But then he couldn’t carry on any longer, and the bishop wound up sending us Anders, who promptly showed us how little we meant to the real world. Now, it’s going to be your job to bring things back into balance. I don’t know how long you plan on being here, but I’ll bet it’s not going to be a real long time.”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “And there’s a part of me that doesn’t care. I’m here because I was sent here, and I made up my mind a long time ago that I would be satisfied with wherever I was sent. How long I’m here, well, that’s not my choice. The Methodist Church likes to move its pastors around, at least partly so they don’t develop personality cults. It’s not as easy to move local ministers like Reverend Howell, but they like to keep us moving when we’re elders or a probationary elder like I will be after I’m ordained in about a year. Let’s just say that I would not be surprised to be somewhere else five years from now, but if I’m here five years from now it will be all right with me. This is where God and the bishop want me, so here is where I’m happy to be.”

“After Darius Anders, you have no idea how refreshing that attitude is,” Reed shook his head. “He got a lot of people in both churches rather upset with him, and I think it’s safe to say that the people in Conestoga were more upset than in Tyler. Reverend Chladek, speaking from experience, it’s going to be easier for you to give more attention to Tyler, and you probably should since it’s the larger church. But you should give all the attention you can to Conestoga, because I think more hard feelings need fixing there.”

“I can see how the people there could feel left out.”

“It’s been a sensitive issue over the years,” Reed went on. “Along with sharing pastors with Conestoga, we share a lot of other things, but both churches are pretty independent, too. With services starting at Conestoga at eight, that will usually leave you plenty of time to drive the twenty-one miles between the churches and refresh yourself before the services start at eleven in Tyler.”

“What happens if I run late?”

“Hopefully it won’t happen very often, which is why we allow a lot of time. Occasionally we’ll have a blizzard in the winter, and when that happens it’s usually best to not go to Conestoga at all. That usually only happens once or twice a winter, though. If it looks iffy, call Art Gamble and work it out with him. They’ll understand, especially if what you’re doing out there seems positive to them. If you have something delay you, I’ll start the service at Tyler, though you should call us and let us know if you’re held up.”

“I can do that,” she nodded. “I have a cell phone.”

Reed shook his head. “It won’t work out here,” he told her. “No towers. Cell phones aren’t common around here since there’s only the one tower in town. It would be a real good idea for you to get a CB radio. Normally they won’t reach that far either, but some people in town have antennas mounted up high, and you can usually get through to them.”

“All right, I can do that,” she said. “I’m used to being in places where cell phones don’t work.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much it twisted Anders’ tail that he couldn’t use his cell phone out here,” Reed sighed as they came up on a small collection of houses. “But that’s neither here nor there.” He changed subjects and went on. “All right, this is Lexington, where you turn onto the state highway. There’s not much left here anymore either. I remember when I was a kid there was a little country store here, but it’s gone, too.”

Nanci looked around. There were, at the most, eight or ten houses, but at a closer look several of them appeared to be abandoned. “Not much here,” she commented.

“Really, there never was. Oh, there was a time before my time when there were, oh, maybe fifty or sixty people living here. It can’t be more than a dozen now. There used to be a one-room schoolhouse, but that’s gone, too.” He slowed to a stop at a stop sign, then turned onto the wider state highway.

Up ahead was a small church; there were half a dozen vehicles in the parking lot, almost all pickup trucks. As they got closer, another pickup pulled into the church parking lot. “Lexington Community Church,” Reed explained. “Used to be Baptist, way back when. They cut their ties with the denomination back when I was a kid and I’m not sure why, not that it matters now.”

“I can’t believe they’re any bigger than Conestoga,” Nanci commented. “Can a church that small support a pastor?”

“They share pastors, like we do with Conestoga,” Reed explained. “They share him with a church down the other side of Carondelet, maybe seventy miles from here. He trades off Sundays. I’ve never met the man, but I hear he’s a real Bible-thumper. Some people like that kind of thing, I guess.”

“I’ve run across a few,” she agreed noncommittally as Reed accelerated up the highway, which ran straight as an arrow across the nearly level prairie. To one side of the road there was evidence of where a rail line had formerly run, but it looked like the tracks had been torn up a long time ago. Once in a while a dirt road intersected and headed off somewhere in the distance; occasionally little groups of trees indicated that a farm or ranch house might be off that way. “Not much here,” she commented after a while.

“No, there isn’t,” Reed agreed. “What’s more, there really never was, and what we have is steadily dying. I’ll be honest, Reverend Chladek. The people still here are mostly too stubborn or stupid to leave, and you can include me in that list. This end of Walke County is all ranching, and it’s not real good for even that. Oh, there are some places where people try to raise a little hay, and sometimes it’s almost worth the effort if we have a wet year, but mostly it’s running cattle. It’s not very good land for that, either. It takes about ten acres to support a cow if there’s not much supplemental feeding over the winter, and that can be a pretty iffy business.”

“I have a friend who has a ranch in Nevada,” she replied. “It’s even worse for him. It’s more like twenty or thirty acres per cow for him, and he says that some of his land a cow couldn’t live on a hundred acres.”

“I believe it. It must really be desert, though.”

“It is,” she agreed. “I’ve only been there once, but a lot of it is pretty barren. You said there’s some farming around here?”

“Yes, a few of us are still willing to battle it out. Over toward Tyler there are spots where dryland crops, usually wheat, millet, and sorghum are fairly reasonable if we have an average rainfall. But if we get a dry year we can really be in a bind, so it’s tough all around.”

“I hate to say it, but somehow it doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort.”

“Remember what I said about people having to be either stubborn or stupid to stay here?” he smiled. “Reverend Chladek, a hundred years ago people thought this area was going to be another grain belt, like, oh, eastern Kansas. Land could be homesteaded free, and a lot of people tried to take advantage of it, but in the long run the land took advantage of them. Back a hundred years ago, it was possible to raise a family on oh, a hundred and sixty acres, or maybe twice that. That was about all a family could handle in the horse-drawn days. They had some pretty good years back then, with rainfall better than we get now. But then hard times came, the Depression and the Dust Bowl along with it, and this was deep in the Dust Bowl country. Add to that, a man with a tractor could get more done than a man with a horse, and those hundred and sixty acre farms weren’t so reasonable anymore, so people left and never came back. I don’t blame them in the slightest, either.”

“It seems like a shame.”

“Oh, it broke a lot of people, that’s for sure. Things were bad back in those days, but it’s still going on, too. Back in 1930, there were about thirty-five hundred people in Walke County. When they take the census in three years, I would be surprised if we have over fifteen hundred, and close to half of those will probably be in Tyler. Reverend Chladek, have you ever heard of Frederick Jackson Turner?”

“The name rings a bell, but that’s all.”

“Back in the eighteen-nineties, he came up with a theory that when the land in a region reached a population of six people per square mile it was no longer part of the frontier, and that the frontier this country had grown on for hundreds of years was closed, meaning it was essentially gone.”

“I remember hearing something about that somewhere along the line.”

“Turner may have gotten part of his theory right,” Reed shrugged. “But the simple fact of the matter is that even back at its peak, this county and the counties surrounding it never made it up to anywhere near six people per square mile. This is still a frontier, Reverend Chladek, and it’s becoming more of one with every year that passes. I’ve come to pretty much agree with the people who say that man was never supposed to settle these lands, but I’m too old, too stupid, and too stubborn to give up now. I think you’ll find that most of the people at both Conestoga and Tyler Methodist Churches are pretty much in the same boat with me.”

“You make it sound pretty bleak.”

“It is very bleak,” he sighed. “But it’s not all bad. The people who have stayed are mostly staying because it’s home to them, and they don’t want to live any other way. It’s not an easy place to live, Reverend, and it’ll break people who aren’t willing to live with the facts. But in my opinion, the people left behind are up to the demands the land puts on us.”

Amber Wallace was still in bed. Staying in bed late on the weekends is a pretty normal thing for teenagers to do, but in her case it was because it was warm in bed. Granted, the musty old covers she was sleeping under were heavy but they kept her warm, just like they had through the coldest days of the winter.

The beat-up old shack that she referred to as her house was quiet as Amber lay awake, taking stock of things. There was no telling if her mother Linda had made it home or not; she hadn’t come in before Amber went to bed the night before. She’d told Amber that she was going to go out for a while and didn’t know when she was going to be back. Amber knew very well that she meant that she was going to go over to the Stationhouse and have a drink or two – or however many she could manage to talk someone out of. She did that more often than not, and often wound up spending the night away, presumably with the man who had been buying her drinks. She might not be back for days, and if that happened it wouldn’t be the first time.

Her mom was more or less all right when she hadn’t been drinking – or had drunk enough that she was pretty close to out of it. In between, she could be hard to live with, and there had been more and more of those in-between times the last few months. From an early age Amber had been aware that things were very hard for the two of them, and that things were slowly getting worse, not better.

Things had gotten a lot worse last fall when her mom had lost her last job, not that it was much of a job in the first place, so both of them were mostly living from day to day. At that, her mom probably had it better than her, since it was warm in the Stationhouse, and it probably was warm when she wound up sleeping over with a guy, whoever he might be. But not much of that got back to Amber. Oh, every now and then her mom might bring home something to eat, possibly scrounged from the dumpster behind the grocery store or the Prairie Dawn, the restaurant in town, and Amber was usually hungry enough that she didn’t care very much where it had come from. Keith Westbrook giving his school lunches to her had made many days not quite so hungry; Keith was really sweet to do that for her.

Keith was probably as close to being a real friend as she had in Tyler. It wasn’t easy to be friends with someone when they knew that Amber’s mother was the town drunk, and essentially the town whore; no one seemed to give a shit for her and seemed to think that she was going to turn out the same.

Amber had already made up her mind that she was not going to wind up like her mother, at least not if there was anything she could do about it. But she realized that at the moment there really wasn’t much she could do. If she were a little older, she could just pack up a bag and hit the highway, hitchhike for Denver or something, but she knew that she couldn’t do it just yet. She suspected that at her age she’d just wind up living on the streets in what would most likely be an even worse situation than she was in now.

If she could hold out until she was eighteen, her chances of being able to do something for herself somewhere else would be much better. She was a pretty good student – nothing spectacular, but she got Bs and Cs, and had never failed a course even though she didn’t get much slack from the teachers. If she could actually graduate from Tyler High School, maybe she could join the army or something, which would give her regular meals and a warm place to sleep. But even the army meant getting through two more years, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to do that. If she could, then it was going to be the happiest day of her life when she put Tyler behind her.

Tempting though it was to lie in bed all day, Amber knew she shouldn’t do that. The bed would be warm, something she didn’t get much of outside of school, but it wouldn’t do anything for her. She had to take advantage of it being daylight as there was no electricity in the place. But there was a fallen-down old barn behind the shack she lived in. Back when they’d moved in here from having no place else to go, she’d discovered an old wood stove in the barn; it was rusty and hadn’t been used for years. With the help of her mom they’d dragged it into the house and managed to find the right pieces of rusty stovepipe to hook it up to the chimney. Ever since then she’d been cutting up pieces of the barn to feed to the stove, and that got them through the winter.

The problem was that there were only a couple of rusty saws and an old axe to cut the old barn wood up with, and it took quite a bit of work to cut enough wood to get through a day. Still, it was getting warmer now, and they didn’t need quite as much wood. Looking forward to next winter, Amber was trying to cut extra wood so she’d be ahead of it; it might mean that it wouldn’t be as cold as this one had been.

Finally there was no choice but to get up – her bladder demanded it as much as anything. There was a bucket over in the corner of the kitchen she could use if the weather was too bad to use the outhouse behind the shack or if she didn’t want to take the time to get dressed. If the weather today was no worse than it had been yesterday she figured she would be better off to get dressed and use the outhouse.

It was still chilly enough in the shack that she didn’t waste any time getting dressed. She had enough clothes, even though some of them didn’t fit very well. For months she’d made a point of taking her old coaster wagon around town on the nights before garbage pick-up day and coming back with what she could find that might be useful. Sometimes she made several trips, usually bringing back wood that could feed the stove, but occasionally she found other useful things, like clothes she could wear.

The only light in the house in the winter evenings had come from the stove, or from an old kerosene lantern that someone had thrown out. She knew that over at the grain elevator there was a diesel fuel pump that sometimes didn’t get locked. She only stole a gallon every now and then, but a little bit of it went a long way, even though she knew that the diesel fuel didn’t burn in the lamp as well as kerosene. Sometimes there was some spilled grain over at the elevator that could be scraped up. It couldn’t be eaten directly without being ground, but she’d found an old kitchen grinder that would at least make lousy flour if the grain, whatever it was, was run through the grinder enough times and sifted between grindings. It took a lot of work to even make a bit of hardtack or porridge, but it was something to eat, better than nothing. Once in a while she’d find some spilled cattle feed; since that had already been ground it was easier to eat, though it didn’t taste very good.

Once she was dressed, a quick look around the house revealed that there was no sign that her mother had come home, not that it was a surprise. She might straggle in sometime today, or might not. Amber grabbed the water bucket and headed for the outhouse. In a few minutes she felt better, so went to the pitcher pump around the side of the house and pumped the bucket mostly full of water. It at least gave her something to drink; something to eat would have been welcome but she knew there was nothing available that didn’t need at least some cooking.

The logical thing to do would be to spend her time cutting more wood from the collapsed barn. She didn’t feel she had the energy to do it, but didn’t know what else to do, either. Once she had brought in a couple armloads of wood, she could fire up the stove and make herself some cracked-corn porridge to eat. She could also heat some water to take a bath and try to wash some of her clothes so she would look a little less disreputable at school tomorrow.

School was a welcome thought. It would be warm, and she could have a big meal of both her and Keith’s hot lunches; that would carry her through another day, which was about as far ahead as she dared make plans. Two years and a little more before she could leave Tyler seemed too far in the future to plan, but that was about all she had hopes for. She didn’t like living like this and could hardly wait to leave, but she at least realized that she was better off than she would be if she were actually homeless.

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