Two unforgettable characters, Jack Ernest Stokes, known as Blinking Jack, and his wife, Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes, tell the story of their years together.

Drawing upon the same "honesty of thought and eye and feeling" that Eudora Welty praised in Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons has written a tale of a woman who shocks her well-to-do family by running off with a migrant worker who abuses her; after he is killed in a brawl, she meets Jack, a quiet, uneducated, but highly capable tenant farmer.