In 1937, Ollie and Roy, after striving to keep their farm during the Great Depression, leave to pursue a better life in California. Finding it is not the Promised Land they anticipated, they return to Arkansas.
On a small Arkansas farm, they labor with mortgage payments, drought, and sickness. Roy goes away almost every year to work and supplement farm income, while Ollie and the children work the land. Roy wants to hire a man to help, but Ollie's intuition causes her to plead against it. Later, they learn that the man requesting work is a serial killer and has murdered twenty-two people.
They buy the farm of their dreams in 1946. It has a big barn, a house large enough for their six children-and a mortgage. In 1950, Ollie, expecting their seventh child, gets strep throat and loses her hearing. Uterine tumors dictate induced labor in her eighth month. At delivery, Ollie learns she has twins. It is four years before she can afford a hearing aid, allowing her to hear her babies laugh or cry.
The family raises melons and vegetables to peddle in town, and attempt to raise pigs, cotton, and corn-drought and bad luck follow. They try borrowing money to start a dairy, but cannot get a loan, fire destroys the pasture, corn and cotton crops, and a tornado hits the farm. After four children are grown, Roy and Ollie begin operation of a Grade 'A' dairy farm.
