Chicago-1889. Forced to witness his mother's agonizing death while quarantined in a one room tenement during a cholera epidemic, Gunnar Nilsson's world is turned upside-down. The experience begins his odyssey from a hardscrabble life in Chicago's notorious Swede Town slum to one of near isolation on a rundown farm in the bucolic hills of Black Earth, Wisconsin where he is indentured to a reclusive, emotionally scarred, civil war veteran, Tobias Wren, and his nearly blind wife, Emily. As their lives interweave, Gunn learns the secret that shrouds Emily in sadness - the same secret that goads Tobias to rage against God. In an emotional confrontation, they come together, return to the community and begin to thrive as a family when Gunn falls in love with Hattie Brown, the beautiful daughter of an abusive, mean-spirited horse breeder who threatens to kill him to keep his own secret.