Summary
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.
Synopsis
The Hopkinses are a family of squatters struggling against the wealthy landowners or "hilltoppers." When Jerry Hopkins is unjustly imprisoned, his young wife and baby die as a result of the shock, but his sister Polly maintains the faith that has been instilled in her by her grandmother. Later, Polly meets hilltopper Robert Robertson and the two fall in love. Their courtship is disrupted when Robert's sister Evelyn is blackmailed by Oscar Bennett, the man to whom she is secretly wed. In her efforts to help Evelyn, Polly falls under unjust suspicion. Meanwhile, MacKenzie, one of the vindictive landowners, arrests Polly's father and sends her brother to an orphanage. Devastated by these events, Polly's grandmother dies of grief and Polly swears revenge. She has Evelyn kidnapped and brought to her cabin, but the memory of her grandmother prevents Polly from harming her tormentor. Polly's nobility inspires Evelyn, who exonerates Polly, thus clearing the path for her marriage to Robert.
