World War II is on, and the present pushed by the future in Bentonville Holler, a place already fifty years behind. Sickly Brad Busby, nine-years-old is, brought to rural Missouri by his family to escape the unhealthy Kansas dustbowl. He is befriended by strapping fourteen-year-old Harry Goodnight, whose family holds to hill ways, but who yearns to see the world.

It is 1943, yet here automobiles are novel, electricity and telephone's a hope. The hill dialect, the comic interface between old fashioned and new-fangled, the community of the holler folk, the Busby's struggle to give Brad...