The year is 1925. Poverty runs deep. Revenge runs deeper.
Men turn to moonshine to make enough to feed their children.
A baby, the product of an adulterous liaison, is born and struggling to live as her mother promises God never to love her as atonement for her sin. In 1941 that baby, Randy Heydon, and her brother Josh help the sheriff set a trap for the powerful moonshiner who robbed Josh and killed his wife and children for running shine in his territory. Randy plans to elope to Tennessee with Toby Rose the next day, but instead, her brother is murdered, her mother retreats from reality in shock, Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, and Randy begins her campaign to avenge her brother. The plot twists and turns over several years until the war is over as Randy works to support her mother and to keep on going when those with whom she had planned her future are taken from her. She exists to even the score of her past and hope for the future, but fails to see the value of those in her life in the present.