Chapter 1

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.