Part One: The Needle and the Chisel
Father Gstir is a minister in the 1800's. He is dispatched from Bavaria to the German-Catholic population in Canada. He ends up staying in a small town in a valley, Shoneval, Ontario where he decides to erect a stone cathedral with a church bell. Joseph Becker, a local carpenter, assists.
We flash forward to the 1930's. We meet Klara, a single spinster. Klara and her brother Tilman were the grandchildren of the carpenter who helped Father Gstir decades before. Grandpa Joseph Becker wants to teach Tilman to be a carpenter, but it's Klara who ends up learning it—Tilman runs away once and for all. Klara falls in love with Eamon O'Sullivan, but he goes off to WWI. He dies, and she never heals. Now in her old age, Klara mainly just sews and crafts, alone.
Part Two: The Road
Tilman has run away once and for all, to his mother's great distress. He lives as a drifter with a guy named Refuto who killed his own brother and lives as a hobo. Tilman lives with Refuto and his son for a long while, but in WWI, Tilman goes to war and is injured at the battle of Vimy Ridge.
Part Three: The Monument
Tilman is 40-something now, and he returns to his sister in Shoneval. Klara thought he was dead, but it turns out he is a war hero. When Klara learns that a monument is being erected in France to honor the battle where her brother was injured, she stops at nothing to work on it. She dresses as a man and puts her carpentry skills to use. She intentionally carves Eamon's face onto one of the statues, the soldier carrying a torch. Walter Allward, the monument contractor, agrees that it does improve the statue.
In the end, they open up to others, and they find spouses and get married. Tilman ends up with a man who works as a restaurant chef.
