Antonio Márez is six years old when Ultima, an elderly curandera and a healer with the power of the ancestors, comes to live with his family. Her arrival marks the beginning of his coming of age. His parents disagree about the proper life and education for Antonio. His mother, the daughter of farmers, wants him to follow the Luna family tradition and become a farmer or a priest. His father, the son of vaqueros (cowboys), wants him to follow the Márez tradition and become a wanderer of the llano, the grassy plains of Spanish America. Before Ultima arrives, Antonio dreams of her role in his birth. The two sides of his family argue over the right to dispose of the afterbirth according to their respective family traditions. Ultima declares that she shall bury it herself, so she alone will know Antonio's destiny. .
The clash between his paternal and maternal heritages is only one of the many conflicts that Antonio confronts in the novel. Antonio struggles with the competing moral systems of an indigenous religion he encounters through his friends Cico and Samuel and the devout Catholicism of his mother. His atheist friend, Florence, increases Antonio's intense confusion in his endeavor to understand his world. He attempts to understand the nature of good and evil through contradictory cultural paradigms only to find that there are no easy answers. More conflict abounds when Ultima's decision to cure Lucas Luna of the Trementina sisters' curse embroils Antonio's family in a deadly, prolonged confrontation with the sisters' father, Tenorio. Antonio suffers a loss of confidence in all of the cultural paradigms available to him when he struggles to understand why good people often suffer while evil people like Tenorio do not. Moreover, Antonio faces the clash between Anglo and Hispanic cultures when he begins attending school. In addition to these larger conflicts, Antonio faces the challenges of peer pressure.
