A local pastor uncovers a rich vein of civic pride and indiscreet support within tattered linking of folks and is pressed into service as an undersheriff. If the people will not attend Sunday services, the sanctuary will come to them. Father Chad, as they have come to call him, makes house calls. Polly Mankiller, the sheriff, attempts to balance the spiritual keel of the town that is seeing young folks drop off the rolls forever, for a scourge of poison in the form of recreational boredom's first casualty is killing them. A biblical reign of weather draws the world's focus on a town that only wanted to be left alone. In a time when people are increasingly alienated, what first appears to have been parts of a cosmic mockery shows increasingly to be blessings of a merciful god. Slowly the people come to recognize their need for one another. Mr. Blackburn, known affectionately as Blackie, is the unofficial mayor of the town and somewhat of an old-style fixer. He is one of the few men in the town to have grown up without a father and whose life dramatizes the fact that not all poverty is rooted in the lack of material things. Fair Haven depends on Blackie's masterful but understated grip on the town, but to whom will he lean as spiritual decay gnaws at him from the inside? Is Bigfoot a descendant of Gigantopithecus blacki? A relict hominoid? A Heidelbergensis? Will Blackie help to hold together a town that seems primed to implode under the weight of meteorological oddities and strange creatures at the edge of the woods? Sometimes, it is enough to believe in those who believe.
