Blacki Belief Is Never Gray

A dispirited small town in Georgia believes it lives under a curse that was conjured by the town’s founding father during the Civil War. The people of Fair Haven do not share one another’s joys. They do not comfort one another’s pains. They barely relate to one another, but for clandestine, they huddle at the back of the night’s quiet. They have never learned to rally around their own. Or have they? They agree on one thing: there are monsters in the woods. An agent of US Fish and Wildlife, Causey Bentz, has set up camp in the neck of the woods before and seems to be as interested in the bigfoot on the mountain as the citizens are prepared to pretend it does not exist, for the last thing they intend to be is having backwoods fodder as a punch line for the world’s unbelief in mysterious things. The 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.