"After more than twenty years in the priesthood, Father Frank Healy is going home. Emulating the hero of his youth, a nineteenth-century missionary named Father Zell, Frank is bringing Catholicism to the Ojibway Indians living on the Basswood reservation in the north woods. But what he finds at the battered Church of Our Lady are very few believers and a woman from his past--the woman from his past--whom he thought he'd never see again. Libby Girard has been chasing after the happy family life she never had in her violent chldhood home, and her search for love has borne bitter fruit: a crumbling marriage to a doctor named Tom Pearsall, and her daughter Verna, a wild young women with a long history of crippling mental illness. It is clear to Frank that Libby's life is unraveling. And as she slowly becomes dependent on him, the lives around them erupt in a tangle of drugs and despair, alcoholism and death--Adapted from book jacket flap.