It is a warm and balmy July evening. At sunset two sisters arrive at a village dance. One is plain, the other as lovely as an angel in a holy picture - auburn - haired Marie. It is love at first sight for the curt farmer, who usually arrived at the pub through the back door via the barmaid Rosa's chamber. Marie is bewitched by the man's ardour, they make love and a child is conceived that magic night.

Nearly four years have passed and Marie, Loyzik and his father are a truly happy family. Although he had at first hesitated to marry Marie, now he wouldn't exchange his wife for whole worlds.

It was as if an eternal spring had settled at the farm. Every smile of Marie's breathes of sunshine and
the joy of living. Another kind spirit around the farm is Joseph the old groom, to whom Loyzik's father feels as close as if he were his son. But their happy home is rent asunder by a single stroke of lightning which brings down a mighty branch that crushes Marie beneath its weight. She dies.

From that moment on, a curse seems to have fallen upon the farm. For Loyzik, who is as gentle and dreamy as his mother was, her funeral is like a scene from a fairy-tale. He is terrified of his plain spinster aunt, who means to take her sister's place at his father's side. The boy identifies ever more with the chick that hatched in his hands when Marie was still alive, and whose mother-he was clawed to death by a sparrow hawk on the day of his mother's funeral.

Marie's death hits his father hard as well. He tries to regain his equinamity and look after his little boy, but is unable to do without a woman in the house. At first it seems that this could be Marie's sister, but she tries too hard to make him love her and he is put off. He drives her away in a very harsh manner, spends all his time at the pub and finally returns to Rosa the barmaid, who, it seems, has forgiven him long ago...