Polly of the Storm Country

Moonlit Appalachia fractures into two hostile hemispheres: the valley-bottom Hopkins clan, who till soil they don’t own, and the chandeliered ‘hilltoppers’ whose deeds are ironclad. When patriarch Jerry is dragged to a squalid cell on trumped-up trespass, the shock ricochets through his bloodline—his wife exhales her last above a starving cradle, leaving reed-slender Polly to cradle both grief and gospel. The girl’s pulse syncs with the mountain’s old hymns while she negotiates a terrain bristling with barbed privilege, until Robert Robertson—scion of the very ridge that casts the longest shadow—descends, half-curious, half-smitten. Their magnetism arcs across class fault lines, but Robert’s sister Evelyn carries a clandestine marriage certificate that Oscar Bennett, a human piranha in white spats, wields like a scalpel. Polly, trying to cauterize Evelyn’s shame, becomes the accused: her father shackled, her brother indentured to a Methodist orphanage, her grandmother’s heart snapped like drought-stricken kindling. Vengeance germinates; Evelyn is dragged to a pine-board cabin where candle smoke coils like a jury. Yet the grandmother’s spectral whisper stays Polly’s hand, transmuting fury into a fierce, luminous mercy. Evelyn, gutted by such grace, publicly unwrites the lie that branded Polly, toppling Bennett and MacKenzie’s cartel of rusted morality. Two shotgun blasts of restitution later, dawn ignites the ridge—Robert and Polly stride toward a horizon no deed can survey.