When Vanessa is six years old, her cousin Chris, 15, comes to live in Manawaka in their Grandmother and Grandfather Connor’s “Brick House,” which is near where Vanessa lives with her mother, Beth, and her father, Ewen. Chris is moving to Manawaka because he wants to attend high school and there isn’t one in his hometown of Shallow Creek, where his impoverished family lives on their struggling hay farm. Grandfather Connor is openly angry and resentful that he must support Chris for the next three years, and blames Chris’s late father, Uncle Wilf, for making a bad investment on the land in Shallow Creek.
Initially, Vanessa is nervous that Chris will be uninterested in her because she is so much younger than he is, but he turns out to be incredibly kind to her, and she quickly grows very fond of him. She is enchanted by the tales he tells of his home back in Shallow Creek and his lofty dreams of becoming a civil engineer. He gives her a miniature leather saddle for her birthday, branded with what he says is the name of his ranch, the Criss Cross, where he has two beautiful horses, Duchess and Firefly. As much as she loves to listen to Chris, Vanessa never knows how to reply and yearns to be older so that she can impress him with witty and insightful ideas of her own.
When Vanessa is nine, Chris finishes high school and leaves Manawaka. His dream of going to college to study civil engineering is crushed, financially impossible because Grandfather Connor is unwilling to fund his studies. On the eve of his departure, Chris tells Vanessa he is going to become a “traveller.” A month goes by without a word from Chris, until his mother, Aunt Tess, calls to let the family know that he never returned to Shallow Creek as planned. They have no idea where he ended up. Chris quickly fades from Vanessa’s mind amid a whirlwind of major life changes: her Aunt Edna loses her job and comes to live with them, her brother Roderick is born, and Grandmother Connor dies.
Two years after Chris disappeared, Vanessa is 11 and Chris shows up unannounced. He’s become a “traveller” just as he said he would, but, far from the romantic image he painted of someone who travels the world, Chris has become a travelling salesman. He visits the family three separate times, each time toting a new item—vacuums, magazines, knitting machines—convinced that each is going to be his ticket to college. Vanessa is old enough now to recognize that Chris’s dream is unrealistic, given the realities of the Great Depression. No one has money for such superfluous purchases.
Chris is living in Shallow Creek again when Vanessa’s father dies, an event that shatters what’s left of her childhood innocence and completely alters her understanding of God and the world around her. Beth suggests that she go visit Chris to get her mind off of her father. When Vanessa arrives, she quickly realizes that the magical version of Shallow Creek Chris painted for her years before doesn’t exist. In reality, his family lives at a level of poverty that Vanessa has never witnessed before and that profoundly shocks her.
It's haying season, and one night she and Chris camp out near the hayfields. As the two lay underneath the stars, Chris, now 21, begins to talk about his fascination with the universe and his conviction that God can’t exist because a god wouldn’t have created such a brutal world. Vanessa, now 13, has had doubts about God since her father’s death, but still struggles to formulate a response and is again frustrated by her youth.
Months later, Chris, desperate to leave Shallow Creek, joins the army at the outset of World War II. He’s stationed in England, and no one hears for him for a year, until a letter shows up for Vanessa. Vanessa is evidently disturbed by the letter but won’t tell Beth what it says. Six months later Aunt Tess calls and says Chris has been discharged from the military because he suffered a mental breakdown and is now committed to a psychiatric hospital. Vanessa can’t bear to imagine how anguished and alone he must be.
Years later, Vanessa is home from college. She and Beth are cleaning out the attic, and Vanessa comes across the miniature leather saddle Chris gave her all those years ago. Vanessa realizes that Chris’s stories and dreams were his defense against a deep depression. Lost in her sadness for Chris, Vanessa recalls a line from an old poem: “Slowly, slowly, horses of the night—” She imagines that the days and nights must move slowly for Chris, and wonders if the world he inhabits now is the reality full of terrors he'd spent his life trying to escape, or if he’s found a way to permanently exist in his dream world.
