Arkansas, 1914: A 13 year old girl is raped in the backwoods of the Ozarks. On her testimony, Nail Chism, from Stay More, is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair - until his innocence is championed by the staff artist of the state's leading newspaper, a woman whose past amongst the artists in Paris is even stranger and more solitary than Nail's. Will she succeed in saving Nail? Or will the singing - "Choiring" - of the trees that Nail hears while strapped into the chair be the last earthly (or unearthly) sound he will ever hear?