While Nanci had to spend time getting to know people around Tyler and Conestoga, she had other things to do, and dealing with the parsonage was one of them. Apparently, Anders’ wife, whatever her name was, hadn’t been much of a housekeeper, and there was cleaning needed throughout the whole house. Nanci decided to work at it a little at a time, starting in the kitchen. While not a large house, it was close to twice what she would need, so some of the cleaning could be put off for a long time, at least until she had the time for a thorough job.

She was just getting started on the older electric stove when she heard the doorbell. Wondering who it could be, she put down her rags and bucket, and went to the door. When she opened it, she was surprised to see Bernice and Edith standing there. “I just saw you,” she said. “What’s up?”

“After you left the restaurant,” Bernice said, “We got talking about how you didn’t have any furniture or housewares, and we thought that you had other things you’d rather be doing than dealing with those issues.”

“I don’t mind working on them,” Nanci told them, “I planned on doing it a little at a time. But yes, there are other things I need to do as well. Everything will come in good time, like getting this place cleaned up, and it needs a good job done.”

“I have to apologize to you for that,” Bernice said. “Again, we didn’t expect you to get here so quickly. We’d planned to have a work bee a little later to go through and get it back up to standards, but we thought we’d have a couple weeks or more to do it. You were too quick on your feet for us, Reverend.”

“No big deal,” Nanci shrugged. “I don’t mind doing it.”

“Yes, but it’s our responsibility, not yours, or at least something that we should do,” Bernice protested. “Look, we were wondering if you’d object if we found a few people from the church to come over and pitch in on getting this place back to what it’s supposed to be.”

“Bernice, you don’t have to do that, I can take care of it. Like I said, I can do it a little at a time.”

“Yes, but I know I’d feel better if it were done the way we were supposed to do it. Besides, it would let you get to know a few of the women in the church a little better.”

“Now, that’s an argument that’s hard to counter,” Nanci smiled. “In fact, I was wondering what the first step on that would be. Would tomorrow be too soon?”

“How about today? Edith and I didn’t have anything to do but sit around the Prairie Dawn and drink coffee, and I’m sure I can get some more people here pretty quickly.”

“All right,” Nanci conceded. “But it might be a good idea if you could call in someone you know from the Conestoga church who might have time to help, too. I need to get to know some of them too, and this might be a good way.”

“I can do that,” Bernice smiled. “We might as well get this place cleaned out before you start bringing furniture in here. It’ll be easier that way.”

“Furniture is probably going to be a while, but I can get along with my sleeping bag as long as I need to.”

“Reverend, it’s probably good if you can think that way, but while you may be here to take care of us, we’re also here to take care of you.”

In only a couple of minutes Bernice had left, leaving Edith behind to help getting started. “Well, that’s something I didn’t expect,” Nanci told her as the two of them went out to the kitchen. “But really, I appreciate the offer to help. Edith, I had a lot of names and faces thrown at me yesterday, but I’m afraid I don’t remember you from there.”

“It’s probably because I wasn’t at the dinner,” the older woman replied. “Mostly because I was at the Lutheran Church.”

“Oh, you’re Lutheran? I didn’t know there was a church here.”

“It’s the only other church left in town,” Edith replied. “Back when the Baptist Church went under a few years ago we had the choice of the Lutherans or the Methodists, and somehow my family wound up with the Lutherans. I guess it doesn’t matter much.”

“Probably not, but it probably would be best if the bishop didn’t hear that I said that,” Nanci laughed. “I take it the Lutheran Church is about the same size as the Methodists.”

“It’s a little smaller. We don’t have a fulltime pastor of our own these days. We have a part-time minister who spends his days working down at the mill. When I was a kid we had five churches in this town, and now it’s one and a half, so to speak. A lot of people don’t bother to go to church these days.”

“That’s probably true about everywhere,” Nanci sighed. “You grew up here, I take it.”

“Oh, yes. Jasper and I are Tyler kids. We both graduated from high school back in 1960 and got married right after. We lived out at his folk’s farm for years, until he got a job at the grain elevator here in town. He’s probably going to be retiring sooner or later and we’ve talked about moving away when it happens, but I’m not sure I want to have to go someplace and have to live with a lot of strangers. This is probably about as good a place for us to retire as anywhere could be.”

“I think leaving would be hard, too,” Nanci said as she started working on the stove again. “At least here you’d probably know most everyone.”

“That’s what I think. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for you to walk in here and not know anyone.”

“It’s what’s expected of me, so I deal with it,” Nanci shrugged. “I mean, I know the conference will move me on somewhere else sooner or later. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to get to know new people pretty easily. I had a lot of practice in the last few years.”

“That can’t hurt. I never got to know the old Methodist pastor, but from what I hear around town I don’t think anyone really did.”

“I keep hearing things like that. I hope I’ll be able to do better.”

“Speaking as a Lutheran, I think you’re off to a good start.”

Nanci and Edith managed to cover a lot of ground in the next half-hour or so. Edith apparently knew virtually everyone in town, churchgoer or not, and was easy to talk to. Nanci, of course, had to talk a bit about being a boatman on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, which even she agreed was a slightly odd background for a minister, but she didn’t want to dwell on it. She had important things to learn, like about the people in Tyler and Walke County, and Edith was really the first person she’d talked to in any detail who wasn’t a member of the church, which made her independent viewpoint even more interesting to the new pastor.

Before too long people began to arrive – mostly women, although Maxine Brantly from the Tyler church brought her husband Harold along. He was soon involved with fixing a few little things around the place that needed attention. After about an hour an older pickup truck parked in front of the parsonage, and Nanci noticed Cathy Westbrook and Shirley Gamble getting out. “Wow,” Nanci said to them. “I sure didn’t expect you to drive in for this.”

“Might as well,” Shirley smiled. “It’s something different to do, and besides, Cathy and I thought that Conestoga ought to be represented.”

“Well, you’re certainly welcome. The more, the merrier.”

Bernice was a while getting back, but when she came she brought a grocery bag with cold cuts, bread, and chips for something of an informal lunch. Things came to a halt so people could make sandwiches. They were right in the middle of their break when Margie Griffin walked in, one of the people Nanci had held an extended discussion with at the church dinner the day before. “Reverend Chladek,” Margie said, “Bernice was telling me that you don’t have any furniture or housewares or anything like that.”

“I’m afraid not,” she admitted. “I’ve just never needed things like that. I figured I’d pick up things when I knew what I needed.”

“Speaking for myself, I’d rather our pastor wasn’t camping out in a sleeping bag in the parsonage,” Margie replied. “Especially since there’s a real opportunity to do something about it. Could you come with me for a few minutes, please?”

“Sure,” she replied, a little surprised at this, but pleased that people were willing to do so much for her, “if we can stop at the grocery store and pick up some cold drinks for everyone.”

In a couple minutes the two were riding across town in Margie’s pickup truck. “I’m amazed that people are doing so much for me,” she commented.

“Reverend Chladek, I know you’ve only been here a day and a half, but you’ve already proved to a lot of people that you’re not cut from the same cloth as Darius Anders.” Margie pulled into the driveway of a small house on the north edge of town and went on, “So this is really not that big a deal. We’re glad you’re here, and we want you to realize it. I think you want to focus your attention on the church and the people, and not on yourself, and Bernice agrees with me. So do some others I’ve talked to. So we want to do what we can to smooth the way. Now, let’s go inside and I’ll explain what we’ve got in mind.”

Nanci was more than a little curious about what was happening as she followed Margie up onto the porch of the house, which looked as if it had seen better days, and waited while she unlocked the door. “This used to be LeAnn Johnson’s house,” she explained. “She died, oh, over a year ago. Her son didn’t want anything from the house and tried to sell it, but never got a nibble, so a few months ago he just gave a quitclaim and the keys to the bank. I don’t know what you need for furniture or house wares, but under the circumstances, you can take what you need while you’re here.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, I’m not,” Margie sighed. “Look, sooner or later the bank will have an auction to dispose of the house and contents. If we get a dime a dollar on what anything is worth we’ll be doing very well, and at that we may not be able to sell the house for anything like what’s owed on it. I don’t really know what all is here or how good any of it is, but it’s probably not worth much even before it goes to auction. I talked to Harry, my boss at the bank, and he agrees that it’ll be worth more as a tax write-off as a donation to the church than it would be to auction it. If you don’t want anything when you leave, well, there’ll probably be another auction along sooner or later. But this ought to get you going.”

“You people are being much too good to me.”

“I don’t think we are,” Margie shrugged. “None of this stuff is of any earthly value to anyone just sitting here like it is. Like I said, I don’t know how good any of it is, but the bed ought to be better than a sleeping bag on the floor, and any chair beats sitting on the floor.”

“I have to admit that I’ve spent enough time sitting on rocks in the Grand Canyon to appreciate something a little more comfortable,” Nanci shrugged. “So when you put it that way I can’t turn you down. I don’t think I want everything from here, but a few pieces would make life a little easier.”

It would have been possible to take a great deal more from Mrs. Johnson’s house than Nanci wound up with, but there was no point in it. She really didn’t want much in the way of possessions, since she felt they were just things that complicated her life, but it was possible to go too far in the pursuit of simplicity, too. But Margie and some of the others kept pressing things on her, so by the end of the day she had a comfortable living room chair and sofa, a small desk for her computer, a kitchen table and chairs, and other such furniture. She would have been willing to get along with one bed and dresser, but Margie pointed out that she might have guests at some point, and there was room for another bed and things, so why not make use of them?

There were a lot of housewares, too – she now had more kitchen stuff than she thought she could ever use, dishes and the like, even sheets and towels and things. Much needed washing, and some was not exactly of store-new quality, but it would serve.

By the end of the afternoon the cleaning and hauling were more or less complete, though there were many little items that Nanci figured would take her weeks to deal with as she settled into the parsonage. In a way it was something of a milestone for her, and she knew it – it was the first time she’d ever really had a home of her own. She’d had rooms in the houses of her parents and others, had roommates and boyfriends, and had her room in Mrs. Keller’s Place at Hickory Run, but this was somehow different in some way she couldn’t quite put in words.

She may not have owned the house, and the furniture really wasn’t hers, but somehow she felt that she had to put a mark of her own on the place to indicate that it was her territory.

It was easily done, but she waited until the people from the two churches had left. She hadn’t brought everything in from her car, but now she made a special trip to bring in a cardboard mailing tube. She pulled out the poster inside the tube, unrolled it, and used thumbtacks to pin it on the wall.

The poster had been on the wall of her room in Mrs. Keller’s Place, the boardinghouse where she had lived when she attended Hickory Run Seminary. It was not only familiar, but uniquely hers, a poster advertising Canyon Tours, the rafting company owned by her stepfather, and where she’d worked for six summers. In the photo, a raft was rearing high into the air in a backroller in Hance, one of the biggest rapids in the Grand Canyon, and Nanci was the one at the oars. It was a poignant reminder of the Canyon, the life she led there, and the life that her family and most of her friends were still leading. Those days were in the past for her now, but they were a good past, one that had built her and shaped her into the woman she was today.

It wasn’t that the dark days before the Grand Canyon hadn’t shaped her too, for they had, in profound ways she still hadn’t fully explored and probably never would. They weren’t things that she cared to think about; it was almost as if it had been another life, one much poorer and a real disaster that only a few people besides her knew very much about. It wasn’t often a topic for discussion with her, and she had never told anyone the whole story in all the detail. She was well away from that life, so much that it sometimes seemed as if it was a bad dream; the only good thing that could be said about those memories was that they reminded her of what she had turned away from when she became a Christian. The difference was night and day.

Her days in the Canyon were pleasant to remember, although she doubted she would ever recapture them now that she had churches to pastor. Her life there had been a challenge, but a good challenge that she had met – but the time had come for her to face new challenges, and the two churches she would be leading was the first of them. She’d spent years getting ready for this, and now she hoped she would be up to meeting the challenge.

“Amber, I need to close up now,” Mrs. Parkinson, the school librarian said.

“All right,” the girl replied. “I think I got what I needed to finish up this report.”

The library was a safe place to be after school. Amber was bullied a lot, just because she was small and an easy target, and everyone knew it. The easy way to avoid being bullied was to avoid most other kids around her age when there weren’t adults around to keep the situation under control, and she suspected that Mrs. Parkinson was aware of the reason she always spent a few minutes in the library after school. In only a little while longer the buses would be loaded, the kids driving home would be gone, and the walkers would be well away from school. That made getting home a lot safer.

But she had a special reason to hang around after school today. She knew that the boys’ baseball team and the girls’ softball team were loading up for away games with Fort Francis, fifty miles away, and that meant the locker rooms would be empty after school for what probably would be the only time this week. It meant she could sneak in and get a good shower, rather than a bucket bath like she’d had yesterday in the kitchen after she’d spent much of the day cutting wood. It was slow and frustrating with the poor tools she had, but at least there would be enough wood to stay warm this evening, and most of the evenings this week if it stayed as warm as it was. On top of that, there would be the leftovers from the meal that Keith had given her the day before, and that added up to a good day. There were a few things that could be expected to last another day before they went too bad to eat, so she should have something to eat tomorrow besides the school lunch.

So, rather than heading for the door of the old brick school, she went down to the girls’ locker room. She stripped off her clothes and headed for the shower, soon feeling the warm rush of water beating on her body. It felt good, even though she knew she didn’t dare take too long. She got out of the shower and dried herself off, and caught sight of her naked body in a mirror that most girls used to primp. She knew that she was thin, terribly thin, but the sight of her body just underlined it. Something was going to have to change or she wasn’t going to make it through the rest of her school career, but she didn’t know what she could change to do her any good.

It was half an hour before she left the school, carrying her damp towel in a plastic bag along with her school books and things in a backpack she’d rescued from trash put out on the curb. It wasn’t a long walk – nowhere in Tyler was a very long walk – so it didn’t take her long to get home, even though she took her time to enjoy the nice day. There would be days to come when the weather wasn’t so nice, so she knew she’d better enjoy it while she could.

When she got home she went in the back door – the front was permanently closed – and set down her book bag. It wasn’t real warm in the place, but it wasn’t so cold that she felt like she needed to waste any of her precious stove-length wood. There was no sign of her mother, and it looked like she hadn’t been there at all, surprising. She had mixed emotions about that; life was more peaceful without her around, but still she was quite concerned about her, too.

Maybe she ought to go out and cut some more wood, she thought, but that would waste the shower she’d just taken. The next best thing she could do would be to work on her homework – that was important too, and if she did it now she wouldn’t have to light the lantern to see it later.

“So,” Cathy Westbrook said as they rode out of Tyler in Shirley Gamble’s pickup. “What do you think of her?”

“She seems personable and friendly,” Shirley said. “She certainly doesn’t put on airs. What’s more, she seems willing to learn. A lot of the life around here has to seem pretty strange to her, but she sounds genuinely interested in learning to fit into the community.”

“It probably won’t be easy for her,” Cathy agreed. “Yes, she’s spent a lot of time in the Grand Canyon, but at heart I think she’s still a city girl. It’s going to take a while for her to learn country ways, but when she does, I think she’s going to do a good job.”

“I think we could have done a great deal worse for a new pastor who has never had a church before. I mean, we did with the last one. Now, whether she can grow into the job is another question, but time will tell. I can see right now that she’s trying to do the right thing but still isn’t sure yet what the right thing is.”

“It would be nice if we could get to know her socially a little better than we did in Tyler yesterday. I mean, something easy and casual, just with our Conestoga people.”

“That strikes me as a good idea. It’s going to be much too easy for her to get focused on Tyler, like Reverend Anders did. We combine with them far too much for many church functions, but it is mainly because we don’t have a fellowship hall and they do. Look, the weather is getting to be pretty nice. What would you say if we had a barbecue potluck at one of our houses?”

“That would work,” Cathy agreed. “I think Trent and I could do it at our place, and it wouldn’t be any trick to get into the freezer and do pulled buffalo. We could invite all the regular church members, of course, and even the ones who only show up now and then to see who else would show up.”

“That would be good. I know we lost some people after some of the things Reverend Anders said, and our own potluck would show that he’s gone. You know Anders would never come to one out here. We might be able to bring some people back.”

“Not a bad idea. We could even invite a few neighbors who aren’t involved with the church at all, just to be friendly.”

In the several miles it took to get them to Lexington, the two women worked out most of the framework of the idea, although the details would still take time to be arranged. The following Saturday afternoon seemed like it would be a good time.

At Lexington, Shirley turned off the highway onto the narrow county road that led in the general direction of both of their places, still working on who would call who, and who to call at all. After a couple of miles they drove past the West Walke Cemetery. They were past the place before Cathy spoke up. “That’s strange,” she said to Shirley.

“What?”

“That’s Elmer Pepper’s truck.”

“He goes to visit his wife’s grave pretty often, so it’s not surprising.”

“Yes, but the truck was there this morning when we went into Tyler.”

“You’re right,” Shirley replied, as she stepped on the pickup’s brake. “The last I heard he wasn’t doing very well. Art was saying that he really ought to be in the hospital, but he doesn’t want to go.”

In half a minute the two were turned and heading back to the cemetery. Shirley pulled the truck up behind Pepper’s, and the two got out. “Elmer, are you all right?” she called as she got out of the truck. She didn’t get an answer, so walked closer, with a feeling in her gut that things weren’t right. She took a couple steps closer to the driver’s side of the truck, stopped, and let out a small gasp.

“What’s the matter?” Cathy asked.

“He’s dead,” Shirley shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

“Cathy, it’d be hard to be any more sure. We’d better call the sheriff.”

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