The swampy still green of the placid grassy water blended seamlessly with the moss covered cypress trunks that stretched upward to reach the setting sun. There was a damp swelter to the air that hung heavy and wet on their skin. The small canoe glided almost effortlessly, avoiding the tangles and rotted stumps still stuck deep in the muck of an ancient muddy bottom. Deeper and deeper they slid into what seemed to Samuel to be another world, conjured up from the primeval past. Somehow he sensed that it was the place where he would die. Amanda Hamrick gladly left her family and their troubles behind when she married her husband, Thomas, and moved to Boston to live many years ago. Now in her seventies, Amanda receives a letter from her long-lost brother, Samuel, who is on his deathbed at his plantation in Grassy Water, Mississippi. He is asking for her help in a most serious matter, and even though they have long been estranged, she carries tremendous guilt for abandoning him. By the time she shares the letter with her beloved husband, she has already decided that she must help her brother. But as they take on the task of fulfilling his final request, she realizes that it will not be easily accomplished.