A first person recall of the past -- which carries through to the present digs into the life of Andrew Jackson Hunter whose uncle Robert had made him responsible for his cousin, Bobby, whose talents were all for flying and not farming. Andy, after an absence of fifteen years, comes back to The Hall and its one family Arkansas town; comes back too to the memories that tainted and tortured his growing up, to the poisons that flowed from white to black -- and white to white, to the sweet-sorrowful respite of his marriage to Cora, whose death almost meant ruin for him, and to the unreal postures of Bobby. As a superintendent he refuses to be treated like a squire, as a Hunter, from his uncle's training, he can make his demands stick when it comes to new ways of handling current problems, and as a man he can make his bid for widow Helen Ramsey. But he is unable to control wild, adopted Monty Hunter and he is not able to prevent Bobby's death at the hands of the man Monty had flouted -- so that the new gives way to the old when he truns to his uncle's sword cane and whip as constant companions. The life of princelings, days of worldly innocence that end in violence, this faulknerizes a solid cordon of tradition for what could be a prurient audience. More hot blood than this skins here.