David Early discovers that his father has died when a hopeful letter sent after a 20-year estrangement is returned marked, "Deceased: Return to Sender." Going home to the town from which he escaped under threats of death two decades before involves him in uncovering a brutal secret his father had kept since David's childhood, a time when the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement began to expose the hatreds and ancient bigotries that were still seething beneath the bucolic crust of Blossom, like some malevolent force focused on David Early, who as a young student was the first white person in the town to march with blacks in protest. Blossom was just another of those junk-cluttered, ramshackle, un-consciously ugly, roadside hamlets lost deep within the evergreen forests of southern Arkansas like atolls in a great green sea, islands in the pines, one of those curious, mysterious southern towns that appear and disappear around curves in washboard roads like dead skunks in ditches. But it is only there that David can find redemption for mistakes he never knew he made.