1927 finds Lucas Schmidt tilling rows behind a beige plow horse in western Kansas. A violent, drunken father is Lucas' daily bread. Finding the love of his life neath a Cottonwood tree is his salvation. Marriage, prosterity, pain, death, the dirty 30s, World War II and a life of modernizing technology lead Lucas on a path to painful, beautiful destiny. Dust of the earth is one's only measure of time and time is the only measure of a farmer's earth.