Set after the war in Tennessee, the narrative moves across a haunted battlefield and a dismantled plantation house where a proud, impecunious veteran presides. A visiting relative encounters household members and the region’s scarred landscape, and conversations and memories expose debts, social pretensions, and lingering violence. Intertwined subplots follow other outsiders and local figures whose ambitions, misreadings, and reckonings reveal tensions between past honor and present decline. Themes include memory, the persistence of place, the collision of idealism with economic hardship, and the moral residues of conflict as characters reckon with loss and shifting social orders.