Chapter 2 Read Farming Heirloom

The villages on the Southern Plateau, whether they are large villages with 1,200 or 800 households, or small villages with 30 or 20 households, all the villages and alleys are neat and orderly, and the street gates of every household are opened along the streets and alleys. Facing south, the east gable of one family is closely attached to the west gable of that family, and the west gable of one's own is next to the east gable of another, crowded and crowded without leaving any gaps.As the saying goes, relatives should be easy to get along with distant lands, and neighbors should be good at hitting walls high.Every family built a loess wall in their own courtyard to prevent disputes and quarrels caused by chickens and dogs running around.There is a door in the middle of the courtyard wall facing the street, and a beautiful gatehouse is carefully built on the door.

The farmers there pay great attention to decorating the gatehouse.Wealthy families build brick and wood gatehouses, while most of them build civil gatehouses.Families who cannot afford to build a gatehouse have to cut a round hole in the soil wall and install a fence gate woven with thorns to prevent thieves and dogs. When strangers enter any village, walk along the streets and alleys, and slip past the two sides at a glance. The tall and short gatehouses of various shapes can roughly delineate the family composition of each family.However, this is an old saying in the early days of liberation.Now, the size and posture of the gatehouse have little to do with the elements determined during the land reform; if you guess according to the old habits, you will definitely make a joke.

In the middle of the gate tower, there is usually a door plaque, engraved with four big characters on the door plaque.The choice of these four characters is actually the family declaration of the crop owner in this gatehouse.After Liberation, the enthusiasm of the farmers was high, and the choice of the door plaque on the gate tower was inevitably affected by the influence of the times. During the land reform, many people liked to use "develop production" and "make a fortune"; during the cooperative period, "common prosperity" was fashionable , "Kangzhuang Road"; during the three-year difficult period, "self-reliance" and "diligent and thrifty housekeeping" became popular; , "Struggle as the key link", "True learning from Dazhai" and other political slogans were indeed all the rage.

The content of the inscribed plaque on the gate tower before liberation is much more monotonous.For those wealthy families who could afford to build a brick-wooden gatehouse or a somewhat decent earthen-wood gatehouse, the family declarations on the inscription plaques would most likely use the words "Farming, Studying, Heirloom", and the intention is obvious.Our Yangxu village is only a small-to-medium-sized village in the star-studded village on Nanyuan. Among the more than 200 peasant households, the one with the most luxurious gatehouse is the family of the rich man Yang Guinian.Water milled blue bricks, carved beams and painted buildings, cornices and corners, just like a magnificent four-corner pavilion.There are two bluestone lions squatting under the gate tower, and birds and beasts are carved on the wall.In the middle of the gate tower, in the image of a crane and a deer, which symbolizes auspiciousness and eternity, four inscriptions of "farming, reading, and family" are carved in seal script, which are in harmony with the auspicious clouds.Yang Guinian's eldest son is an official in the Xianning County government. His family has more than 100 acres of irrigated land with rivers and two full troughs of tall mules and horses.The rest of the well-to-do households, although they could afford to build a gatehouse with earth and wood, also imitated the door plaques with "Farming and Studying Heirlooms", but most of them were farming but not studying, and their names did not match their names.But as a declaration of family establishment, it is naturally mainly to illuminate future generations, and the shortcomings of the lack of scholars must be made up for by the younger generations.

Another family in Yangxu Village who can afford to build a brick and wood gatehouse and is worthy of the name "Farming and Studying Heirloom" should be my family. My grandfather, Xu Jingru, respected the spirit of "farming and reading" even more purely than Yang Guinian's family.Yang Guinian's eldest son worked in the county government, mainly because he was an official and did not go to school. The second son joined the army to play with guns and rarely write; Lift your feet.My grandfather Xu Jingru was a loyal believer and real practitioner of the spirit of "farming and reading".

My grandfather Xu Jingru, known as Mr. Xu, was the last scholar of the Qing emperor. Because of the abolition of the imperial examination system, he was unable to pass the imperial examinations. He taught in Yangxu village until his temples were frosted, and he still sat in the school. I don’t know what ideological influence, my grandfather dug out the inscription plaque of “Farming and Reading Heirloom” on the gate tower, and replaced it with an inscription plaque of “Reading Farming and Heirloom”, and put the words “farming” and “reading” together. The position was changed.The words were written by my grandfather himself. They are square and upright, the skeleton is rough, and the strokes are meticulous. The real willow font is carved by my father stroke by stroke.When my father first read it, he thought my grandfather had made a mistake in his writing. When he asked, my grandfather flicked his sleeves, glared at my father, and did not answer.My father didn't dare to ask again, but he understood that the exchange was intentional rather than a clerical error. He should appreciate it slowly, lowered his head and chiseled carefully.

There is one more strange thing.When my grandfather was old, he made a strict division of labor among my father and brother. One inherited him from the school, embodying "reading";The three brothers could barely accept such a division of labor, but when the grandfather died, he left behind strict family instructions, which can be summed up as the will of "three dos and three don'ts".His instructions said: "Teachers only do learning, and do not require officials to be eunuchs; farmers must do the farming themselves, and do not hire labor to do it for them; as long as they keep their existing family property, do not buy land and build houses to buy mules and horses."

The three brothers stared wide-eyed, you look at me, I stare at you, at a loss.The three of them are just adults, and they have long wanted to work together to show their ambitions and compete with Yang Guinian's family in Yangxu Village.In recent years, the Yang family has been strong and strong, has built fields and houses, and has prospered in all kinds of businesses. It has become a new wealthy family in eight villages with a radius of ten miles.Seeing the eruption of the Yang family's creek swelled, the three brothers had long been dissatisfied with their father's cautious family management policy, and they dared not speak out. They are tied tightly to this small family business.The old man seemed to have figured out what his three sons were thinking, fearing that his children and grandchildren would have nothing to worry about after he left, so he simply said to death: those who do not obey their father's instructions are evil!It is not allowed to burn paper on his grave.The three brothers had no choice but to endure their grievances, and to carry out those who didn't understand. They followed the old man's legacy, those who plowed the fields personally plowed the acres, and those who sat in the library devoted themselves to studying the poems and books of the sages.People in the village made up my grandfather's weird housekeeping precepts into a jingle: "The house should be small, the land should be small, raise a scalper and do it slowly." It was spread as a joke.

Ho!As soon as Yangxu village was liberated, Yang Guinian's second son who played with guns died at the gunpoint of the PLA; All the money was given to the poor and farm laborers in Yangxu Village.I still can't forget the scene of that night. My father and three brothers, holding my grandfather's magic box, kowtowed and cried and laughed. It was almost like going crazy.After the night was quiet, the three brothers ran to the ancestral grave behind the village, crawled on my grandfather's grave, and gnawed!Grill!I can't wait to dig up the grave, hug the bones of the foresighted ancestors who left the legacy of "Three Dos and Three Don'ts" in my arms and kiss a hundred times!How should we thank our ancestors—the ancestors who are even more godly than Zhuge Kongming!Fortunately, he has already seen through the world of mortals and left a strict legacy of family management, which saved his children and grandchildren from the catastrophe of the Yang family!Our family is classified as an upper-middle peasant. Although we are not the target of the working group, we are not in the circle of exploiting classes who are attacked and isolated. This is luck!

Five years before my grandfather died, he had selected my father as his successor to teach in a private school in Yangxu Village.It is said that during the long-term observation, the old man felt that my uncle was scheming, good at planning, and had the air of a businessman.The second uncle has a stubborn temper, so he should be a martial artist.My father was clever and intelligent since he was a child. He was neither as cunning as his uncle nor as stubborn as his second uncle. Big eyes, moist complexion), so just after he was over sixty years old, my father sat on the admirable black chair in the private school.

I vaguely remember that after my grandfather died, my father took off his blue robe and put on a navy blue cloth robe. Firstly, it was a sign of respect for the soul of my grandfather, and secondly, it marked the passing of his thirties. Time to take off the blue robes of youth.I was very impressed. After the death of my grandfather, my father seemed to have suddenly become another person. The brow bone became more raised, like a high cliff above the eyes, and the aura in the eyes also dissipated. He has a solemn and majestic look. In the school, he is unsmiling, sitting in front of the square drawer table, with a straight waist, and never gets tired from morning to night. A cough is enough to make those mischievous students jump. , On the way to and from the school, I walked through half of the village lanes, raised my head and chest, kept my eyes straight, and never took the initiative to greet anyone.When someone greeted him with a conversation, he just nodded and walked over without stopping.When I got home, apart from talking to my two uncles, I never talked to my two aunts and seven or eight nephews and nieces.Except for the two uncles, there is no one who is not afraid of him.When my father came back from school, he coughed as soon as he entered the street. There was a sudden silence in the house and courtyard. The nephews and nieces stopped joking, and the voices of aunts and mothers cooking pots and blowing bellows became low and even.If my cousins ​​and I were fighting and quarreling, if my father stood in front of us, he didn’t need to move.He never hit the child with his hands, but he never showed even a little intimacy to anyone. I seem to be more afraid of my father than my cousins. The only reason I can explain this change in my father's personality is the change in his status in this big family of fifteen or six people after the death of my grandfather.When the grandfather died, he accidentally broke the traditional rule that the eldest son was in charge and entrusted all family affairs to the father.It is said that the grandfather was afraid that his uncle would be too cunning and hurt his brothers in the neighborhood, and that his second uncle's violent temper would cause family troubles, so the father who ranked last was in charge of the family.He has to lead two older brothers and two sisters-in-law, to deal with various conflicts between the three brothers, three aunts, nine nephews and nieces, and his own son, to deal with the relationship between this family and dozens of relatives, old and new, near and far, and to deal with all kinds of conflicts. The relationship with more than 200 neighbors with the same surname and different surnames in Yangxu Village is really too complicated!At that time, I couldn't understand my father's various difficulties. I just felt that the smile on his face disappeared forever. Although my father was strict with himself in this family—mother, sister, brother, and I, he was lenient with others—uncles, aunts, and cousins, there was always friction in the family, but it didn’t openly quarrel to the point of separation.The uncle felt ashamed of his father's leadership of the family affairs, and the three wills tied his brothers tightly, holding his breath all day long.His eldest son has grown up and intends to send him to Xi'an to study business, but because his father insisted on the legacy, he couldn't make the trip, and he had nowhere to vent his anger, so he coaxed his second uncle to attack him.My father understood everything, but he just endured it and ignored the evil fire that he was afraid of, so the uncle couldn't help it. Going on like this is not a long-term solution. My father can't watch this family who enjoys the highest reputation in the village with etiquette end up falling apart in his own hands, making the people of Yangxu village laugh.He resolutely decided to resign from the school and go home to take charge of the family affairs.He himself teaches in the school, and he can't do two things with one mind. He can't take care of his family when he takes care of the school, and he is afraid of hindering the studies of other people's children when he takes care of the family.More importantly, when he was sitting in the school three hours a day, at home and in the field, he left the uncle with too much time and space environment to instigate troubles without any scruples.In this way, when I just turned 18, my father pushed me to the black master chair he had sat on.