The Widow's Cloth Bundle on the Wedding Night

In the spring of 2002, I walked into the childless village with a woven sack on my back.

Behind me, the matchmaker said:

Go on in. You should count yourself lucky to get a wife at all.

I was twenty-six that year. No land, no money, no future.

Just a chill running down my spine.

What I didn't know that year was that I wasn't only walking into a woman's home.

I was walking into a game a dead man had left behind.

My family lived in a small village on the eastern Kansas plains.

There were four brothers, and I was the second.

We had only a few acres of land. My father was sickly, and my mother had worried her whole life.

Four sons, and the land couldn't feed four families.

My eldest brother married a girl from the neighboring town early on, the bride price borrowed.

The third and fourth were still young.

By the time it came to me, the family was already scraped bare.

The matchmaker had been at it for three years.

She'd worn through three pairs of cloth shoes and talked up six or seven girls.

Some thought my family too poor, some thought I wasn't tall enough, some took one look and walked off without even drinking a sip of water.

At the end of 2001, the matchmaker, Leona Chavez, came and sat in our house, set her teacup down hard on the table, and said:

"I'll be honest about your second boy no proper girl is willing to marry into this family."

My mother went white in the face on the spot.

Leona went on:

"There's one way left. You want to hear it or not?"

My father knocked out his pipe and said:

"Go ahead."

Leona said there was a village thirty miles to the east, one people called the childless village.

Not its real name, just a nickname outsiders had gotten used to.

For a few generations, the men in that village had died young. By this generation, only a handful of households were left, and every one of them was run by women.

There was a widow, surname Gray, called Carla Gray.

Her husband had died the year before last, of lung disease.

She was thirty-one, no children, alone tending three and a half acres and two rooms of a mud-brick house.

Leona pushed the teacup over in front of me and said:

"Either you go marry in as a live-in husband, or you stay a bachelor your whole life."

The room went quiet enough to hear the pipe tobacco burning.

I didn't say anything.

But I knew this wasn't me choosing.

It was life choosing for me.

The first time I went to that village with Leona was in the dead of winter.

The weather was cold, the ground hard as an iron plate.

At the entrance to the village stood an old locust tree, its bark cracked, its branches pointing at a gray sky.

We'd just come in past the village entrance when a few old men squatting by the road started staring at me.

Leona greeted them. They said nothing, only stared at me.

Halfway through the village, a woman recognized Leona and hollered toward the back:

"Here comes another one marrying in!"

Her voice was sharp and clear, like cloth being torn.

My step faltered.

Leona said under her breath:

"Ignore her. Keep walking."

A few more steps, and two old women by the road exchanged a look. One of them shook her head and sighed, and there was something in that sigh I couldn't put a name to, but it wasn't pity.

Right then I felt a wind cutting across my spine.

Not the wind that blew in from the cold.

The kind of wind that goes in through your back and straight into your heart.

Leona said:

"Once you're inside it'll be fine. Don't mind these village people. You live your own life."

I didn't answer.

What I was thinking was:

I hadn't even gone through the door yet, and I'd already shrunk three notches.

Carla Gray's yard was at the very end of the village.

Mud-brick walls, a wooden gate, the red paint on it worn down to a few flakes along the edges.

Leona Chavez pushed the gate open and called out. Something stirred inside.

I followed her in, and the first thing I saw was her back.

She was chopping firewood.

The axe swung up and came down, clean and sure.

Hearing us, she turned, rested the axe on the split log, and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.

Then she looked at me.

Just one look.

"You're here. Come inside."

That was all. Six words.

No fidgeting, no fuss, none of the wariness I'd imagined a widow marrying again would have. None of that shrewd, calculating edge either.

None of it.

Just calm.

Like a pool of water. The wind blows over it, and even the ripples stay small.

I followed her inside. Behind me, Leona kept up her steady stream of the usual polite talk.

I didn't take much of it in.

I was busy looking the place over.

The bed was spread with indigo cloth, folded square and neat.

Farm tools hung on the wall. A hoe, a sickle, a spade, each one on its own nail, and the nails looked measured out on purpose, evenly spaced, all in line.

Beside the stove sat a row of jars, every one with a paper label brushed on in fine, close ink.

"Pickled radish." "Bean paste." "Peppered salt."

Standing there in that room, something rose up in me I couldn't put into words.

It didn't feel like a place one person lived.

It felt like a place a man had poured all his care into, and then the man was gone, and the care stayed behind.

It was a strange feeling.

Like I'd walked into someone else's territory.

And that was how the marriage was settled.

Simple, no proper banquet. The two families just sat down to a meal together, Leona stood as witness, I moved my registration over, and from that day on I belonged to the Gray household.

Our wedding night, we lay at opposite ends of the bed, a folded quilt between us.

The room was dark.

I couldn't sleep.

I didn't hear her drop off quickly either.

A long time passed before I heard her turn over, and then silence again.

I stared into the dark at the ceiling and thought:

He had slept on this bed.

The thought came out of nowhere, and it set my whole body on edge.

But it had worked its way in, and there was no driving it out.

The first few days after I moved in, I went around helping to tidy up, though really I was taking stock.

The woodpile in the yard was stacked with a system to it, not just thrown together. One layer standing, one layer lying flat, crossed over each other. That way it wouldn't slide apart, and when it rained only the surface got wet.

That wasn't how we stacked wood back home.

I asked her,

"Did you stack this yourself?"

Her hands didn't stop. She said,

"He used to stack it. I do it the way he did."

I didn't ask anything more.

In the northeast corner of the yard there was a wooden rack, the kind you'd use to dry things on, and the feet of it were set on stones to keep the legs from rotting.

That was the sort of detail a plain farmhand like me would never have thought of.

The more I looked, the more I felt it. This house, this yard, everywhere I turned there was the mind of a man who had lived here.

He was gone, but his mind was still working in this place.

I had moved into a place he'd arranged, was using the tools he'd hung up, was sleeping on the bed he'd slept on.

That strange, pressing feeling started in those days.

I couldn't put a name to it.

Maybe it was this. A dead man, in some sense, seemed more the master of this house than I did, and I was the one still alive.

On the fifth day I lived there, the village came calling.

Three women, and the one leading them was named Lawrence, the village women's affairs director, with two chatterers trailing behind her.

They said they'd come to visit, carrying a bit of homemade tofu.

The moment they were through the door they started sizing me up.

Athena Lawrence sat down, a teacup pinched in her hand, her eyes running over me once before she opened her mouth.

"Where's your hometown?"

"How many people in your family?"

"You got much land?"

She asked it all with a smile, but the smile was hollow. Her eyes were carrying something else.

I answered every question.

When I finished she nodded, then turned to Carla Gray and said,

"Carla, when your husband was alive he was such an honest man. Never said half a word too many."

She paused, then went on,

"This new one, you can tell at a glance he's no easy lamp to keep lit."

I was holding a bowl just then. My hand didn't move, and neither did the bowl.

But there was a ringing in my ears.

Carla sat beside me, nothing changing in her face.

She waited for Athena to finish, then stood and topped off everyone's water, and said,

"Athena, it's cold out and the road's slick. Best get home early."

It wasn't an invitation. It was showing them out.

The three women looked at one another, but she was already standing at the door.

They left.

The yard gate shut.

She came back, filled a bowl of rice from the pot, and set it down in front of me.

She didn't say anything.

I stared at that bowl of rice for a while.

I'd meant to say "thanks."

But by the time it reached my lips it came out as something else.

"They'll come again."

She sat down, picked up her chopsticks, and said,

"Let them. We live our own life."

Around that time, word came from back home too.

My mother had a man from the neighboring town who was going in for market day carry a message over. She said my third and fourth brothers were gossiping behind my back, saying the second son had married into the childless farm village as a live-in husband and brought shame on the family.

My father was so angry he smashed his rice bowl.

Only my sister, Lena Abbott, quietly asked around to find out where I was and walked over ten miles to come see me.

When I saw her come through the gate into the yard, my eyes went red.

I didn't cry, but my throat closed up tight.

Lena came in, looked around the yard, then looked at me, her eyes rimmed red, and opened her mouth.

"Second brother, are you all right?"

Just that one line, and I almost couldn't hold it together.

I said,

"I'm fine, doing fine. Go back and tell Mom and Dad not to worry about me."

After she left, I sat in the yard smoking my pipe, one bowl after another.

The sky went full dark, the moon climbed up, and I still didn't move.

Then I heard something behind me. She had come out.

She didn't ask what was wrong, and she didn't say anything to comfort me.

She just carried over a small stool and sat down next to me.

The two of us sat there, neither of us saying a word.

The moon slid slowly to the west, until at last it went down.

Only then did she stand and go inside.

I sat a while longer, tapped out the ash, and went in too.

That night I slept deeper than any night before it.