Twin Rivers was once a prosperous town, but things changed when the paper mill closed. Many people moved to other towns, those that stayed behind were not there by choice but by circumstance. Stores and movie theaters on the Main Street were boarded up, windows were white washed and the old Victorian mansions began to crumble. Houses were set on fire, vagrants and gangs took over the streets and people who had spent their entire life in Twin Rivers began to feel like outsiders.
Tess and Curtis grew up in this small town and had rarely gone beyond its borders. Although Tess’s mother speaks harshly of Curtis, she is unable to prevent her daughter from marrying him one week after High School graduation. While Tess raises three children, Curtis works as a butcher. Curtis soon becomes dissatisfied with his weekly pittance and begins cruising the streets of the affluent town of Riverton. He watches the businessmen and women leaving for work and notes the various times of departure. When he is fired from his job, he starts breaking into wealthy homes and holding up stores.
Although Curtis works odd hours, Tess never becomes suspicious of her husband’s newfound wealth. She is stunned when he is arrested and later convicted for holding up a bank. With each visit to the penitentiary, Tess watches her husband become more distant and withdrawn. Though she tries to hold on to him, it soon becomes clear that prison is devouring him and he loses the will to fight back.
The days go by slowly for Tess as she searches for work in the dying town. She finally manages to find a job in a beauty parlor, which her best friend runs and she begins to put her life in order. Her visits to the penitentiary become fewer. She spends her spare time with Candy, a Vietnam veteran, who was born in Twin Rivers and works as the village mailman. Though he speaks bitterly about the horror of fighting in Vietnam, it cannot compare to the grief he feels over the loss of his wife and child, who died in a car crash outside of Twin Rivers.
Tess and Candy spend a long afternoon together in a pine forest outside of town. Candy tells her about the home he was building for his family in Montana and speaks of the wonder and splendor of the mountains. He tells her that he hoped that he would experience a blinding revelation in the mountains that would make all the pieces of his life fall into place. He said that did not happen, ‘but there were sacred moments, when he thought he would love all humanity. In those moments he found happiness and a glimpse of his finest self.’ Candy asks her to go to Montana and live there with him. She wants to say yes, but she is unable to escape the grip Curtis still has on her.
After five years in prison, Curtis comes home and finds that he is a stranger in Twin Rivers and an intruder in his own home. Overcome with the shame of having failed as a father and grief stricken about all the dreams that went sour, he spends his days and nights drinking himself into oblivion. In his paranoid fantasies, he thinks the entire world is against him and nothing Tess says can make him feel otherwise. Curtis sinks into a depression and when Tess sees that there is very little left in him that resembles the man she married, she takes her children and moves in with Candy.
When Curtis discovers that Tess is living with Candy, he gets out his gun and threatens to take Candy’s life. Curtis’ threats do not stop and Candy gets his rifle and begins to stalk Curtis through the streets of Twin Rivers on a day when the town is celebrating the anniversary of a victory Washington had over the British on a battlefield outside of town. Candy chases after Curtis while derelicts and drunks play their fife and drums and march out of step in a parade. When Curtis is cornered in a gutted Victorian mansion, they take aim at each other, ready to fire. But just as the parade marches by on the street outside, Tess followed by Violet rush into the decaying mansion. Tess stands between them and lets out a heart-wrenching scream, demanding that they stop their insanity.
In Twin Rivers, the dreams of the past are a mockery and there are no dreams for the future. Candy, Tess and her three children drive across the country in search of the freedom and promise of Montana that Candy had so often told them about. Candy and Tess establish themselves in a new home and Candy is able to continue working as a postman.
After months of solitude and reflection in Twin Rivers, Curtis arrives in the small Montana town where Candy and Tess live. Tess is seized with fear that violence will erupt again, but Curtis tries to convince her that he has come there to be a father to his children. The passage of time and the beauty of the land has a calming effect on Curtis, and Candy cautiously recommends his old job as a Forest Ranger to Curtis. The time that Curtis spends with Violet strengthens their relationship and Curtis opens up to the possibility of developing a friendship with Candy. Candy and Tess invite him to an afternoon barbecue and Curtis discusses a book of philosophy that he is reading, with Candy’s friend, who is also a postal worker. As he accepts the changes in his relationship to Tess and opens up to new relationships, he begins to find peace for the first time in his life and Violet and Tess are able to let go of their fears of a recurrence of violence. In the mountains old wounds begin to heal.
***