Summary
Juanita Holland—heiress, flapper, and self-anointed apostle of literacy—abandons the marble mansions of her Northern enclave, spurred by a gospel of alphabets and a hunger for friction. She descends into the Cumberland Mountains, where the air is thick with gunpowder and ancestral grievances. Between the blood-oathed McBriars and the hawk-eyed Haveys, she brandishes primers like talismans, preaching jurisprudence over bullets. Yet the feud’s gravitational pull is stronger than any chalk-dust sermon: Jeb Havey’s father lies murdered, suspicion ricochets, and the hush of pines crackles with retribution. At the eye of the storm stands “Bad Anse” Havey—buckskin, beard, and a gaze that could ignite wet timber—who trades his birthright of vengeance for the stranger’s promise of courts and gavels. Their electric courtship—half baptism, half combustion—forces the hollows to witness a spectacle: a mountain chieftain surrendering to statute books and to a woman whose silk stockings still smell of city rain. A McBriar is hanged, Old Milt swears by the noose’s ghost, and lead sings again. When Bad Anse crumples, chest blooming red, Juanita—gown shredded, hair unspooled—grabs his Winchester and becomes the avenging angel she once preached against. In a candle-lit cabin smelling of pine-knots and iodine, she weds the dying man, sealing the mountains’ most improbable covenant; dawn finds her both widow and wife, ink still wet on a marriage license smeared with blood and wax.
Synopsis
Wealthy, beautiful Juanita Holland leaves the comfortable surroundings of her home in the North and journeys to the Cumberland Mountains to educate the illiterate mountaineers. Finding herself in the middle of a fierce feud between the McBriars and the Haveys, Juanita urges the clan members to end the violence and settle their differences in the courtroom. She and clan leader "Bad Anse" Havey fall in love, and under her influence, he convinces his followers to let the law punish the murderer of Jeb Havey's father. After one of the McBriars is found guilty and hanged, "Old Milt" McBriar swears that his family will obtain revenge and organizes a party to go after Bad Anse. When they shoot the young man, seriously injuring him, Juanita seizes a rifle and opens fire. Fearing that Anse will not recover, she marries him that night, but he eventually regains his health.
