Chapter 25 Alien father and son.1

Old Master Dong's life is a mystery to us.His grave now stands alone on the left bank of the river, across the river from the ancestral grave of the Tong family.The water flows over the long river bed, and the flow is very desolate.It rained for a long time last spring, and the rain pulled up and widened the river of my hometown. Sometimes a delicate bamboo basket or basket suddenly floated on the water, and you knew it was the relic of Old Master Dong.It is said that all the bamboo wares he made before his death were thrown on the river beaches on both banks. Whenever the water rose, those bamboo wares dived into the water like beautiful fish and floated downstream.

Old Master Dong's life has always been a mystery in his hometown.He was the best bamboo craftsman in the village when he was alive.But everyone knew that he was not from the Tong family.My grandfather and Grandpa Dong have been friends for almost a lifetime.On the day of the Seventh Seventh Death Day for Old Master Dong, my grandfather was in a trance, seeing his late old friend hiding himself in every bamboo vessel in the main room, with his unique plain and distant smile on his face, his soul shrank. Telling something to my grandfather in the bamboo vessel.Grandpa said he was dizzy, so he climbed to a cold bamboo mat and sat quietly for a whole evening.My family has always been silent and never hated anyone.But we always feel that grandfather's affection for Old Master Dong is unusual.In our hometown, everything can be traced to the bottom. On that windy evening, we heard our grandfather tell a story about a foreigner.In the light blue sky, the family of unkempt foreigners gradually approached our village.The first time I saw him, he was curled up in an open-topped pine box.Dongzi's father carried him on his shoulders.The strange burden trembled non-stop, hesitatingly climbed the stone steps of the copper kang bridge.Dongzi's head was turned up with a small braid, which floated weakly in the morning wind, and looked exhausted.Probably one autumn morning, Dongzi and his father walked across the copper kang bridge with five bridge holes and the wooden lattice windows of my house. "A family is here." I stepped on the bamboo strips all over the floor in the main room, and knocked over a pile of bamboo baskets that my family had woven.The family members sitting around doing morning work all freed up a hand to drag me and prevent me from going out.

I tried to poke my head out of the door to see the boy sitting in the pine box.I heard him coughing loudly, his face flushed purple.His eyes are like lambs, a little dark green (maybe it was Dongzi's eyes that made me approach him again and again from the beginning). "Father, where do the bamboos grow?" Dongzi said. "The trees around here are bamboos." said the man carrying the burden.Except for me, no one in the family paid attention to this family who came from afar.Didn't hear their initial comments about their hometown either.On the morning they arrived, there was frost on the river beach outside the village. A bamboo chicken fled from the depths of the bamboo forest, flew around on the white frosty ground, croaking all the way, and then dropped an egg and sank on the river beach.He knocked on the doors of all the respectable people in the village.He leaned against the eaves of someone's house and spoke hoarsely into the house. "I am from this village. My grandfather's generation left, traveled many places, and then came to the northeast. Before they died, they told me that we are from this village... My surname is also Tong. Really, I The surname is Tong, this surname is rare, I am lonely everywhere, I only have to go back to my hometown, and when I go back to my hometown, it is all surnamed Tong..."

That is Dongzi's father.When he was talking to people, there was no expression on his bark-like face.I also saw his eyes clearly.He is an old sheep, the eyes of the old sheep are gray and yellow, looking down at his old cloth shoes covered with mud, occasionally when he lifts them up, a deep worry falls down.But everyone in the village said that the outsider is the descendant of Tong's surname?The boy sitting in the pine box always calls the bamboo that has grown for hundreds of years in our village a tree.They don't have big-headed stripped knives.They do not have the square face and peaceful, drawn brow of our blood.I saw a strange double-barreled shotgun standing on the dusty burden of the household, shiny and shiny, exuding an ominous atmosphere.

"What do you want to do here?" Many folks asked Dongzi's father this way.He muttered again and couldn't say anything, and occasionally forced a smile, his camel-like old face looked weary.Not reconciled, he still walked from house to house like a wandering soul.In the evening, outsiders came to stand under the eaves of my house.Under the eaves of my house hangs the oldest strip ring in the village, which resists wind and rain all year round.The tall and clumsy foreigner bumped into the strip ring, and was startled.He stared at the crazily swinging hoop, and his appearance made people laugh.The family stopped what they were doing and stared at Dongzi's father with hostility.The guy was panicked by the strips under the eaves, and he waited for a long time before he heard the dumb and powerless narrative.My grandfather, who is nearly eighty years old, still has bright eyes.He looked at Dongzi's father silently, and found that he had an unfathomable demeanor like a gray wolf, and he was not at all sensitive to the bamboo forests, bamboo strips, and bamboo utensils in and outside the village.The old grandfather opened half of his teeth, giggled, and shook his head at us:

"A stranger, he is not from our place." The guy's eyes dimmed and he suddenly became weak.But his hand was still tightly grasping the door frame of my house, stubbornly confronting us. "Do you have a big-headed bamboo knife?" The old grandfather grabbed the family's big-headed bamboo knife and shook it at him. "If you are a descendant of Tong, you should take it with you wherever you go." "I don't have this knife. I only have a shotgun, which is also inherited from my ancestors." Yes." Dongzi's father smiled strangely at this time, his tall figure, rarely seen in the south, looked very lonely in the dim yellow twilight.It seems that there is a wind outside, and the strip ring under the eaves of my house began to sway again, like a curse hoop testing the top of the stranger's head.

In the wind, I heard Dongzi coughing.He seemed to have been standing behind his father, listening to the conversation of the elders, and he probably held back for a long time not to cough.So I coughed badly all of a sudden.I saw a thin, red hand like a maple leaf groping from the wall to the door frame of my house, and then I saw the child in the pine box standing under his father's arms, looking timidly towards the main room of our house. "Bamboo--bamboo," Dongzi screamed after his eyes flooded into the empty bamboo baskets all over the floor, his frowning eyebrows flicked cheerfully like a sheep's tail, and the blush overflowed on his face . "This is my son." Dongzi's father hugged his son and pushed him forward again, "Last year in the Northeast, he dreamed of bamboo, and he even said that the bamboo had red flowers. I knew it was not a good omen, so I moved immediately." I came up with the idea of ​​going back to my hometown. No, we’re finally here.” Dongzi smiled at our family with a blushing face.Maybe he was smiling at the bamboo ware and bamboo strips piled up in the main room.One could tell at a glance that it was a sick child, and there seemed to be two sticks of bamboo covered with red flowers standing in the eyes.

In the days to come, they lived in the bridge hole of the Tongkang Bridge.At night, every household in the village can see a pile of firewood burning in the dark bridge hole.The figures of the father and son swayed by the fire, one big and one small.Sometimes the figure stands still, looking lonelier than the trees by the river.Autumn mist floated up from the river morning and evening, separating the copper kang bridge far away.Outsiders did not enter our village for three days in a row, but the villagers began to talk about them, wanting to know the strange story of that family.There was a rumor in the village about a name called Tong Zhen.This person fled from his house many years ago and has always been regarded as a yellow water disaster by the village.Only the old grandfather seemed to be unappreciative of the name.In his remaining memory, Tong Zhen is a wild child born in poverty but rough and unruly.He eats and does nothing all day long, roams around, his parents beat his back with a bamboo whip almost every day, and the back is covered with purple scars that have been years old, so he also wears dirty and smelly clothes even in hot weather vest, and never allow anyone to see his back.Tong Zhen was ugly and small. He had a strange disease. He felt unbearable pain all over his body when he touched bamboo. Even if he was beaten to death, he would not learn how to be a bamboo craftsman.It is said that Tong Zhen escaped when he was eighteen years old. Before he went, he piled up all the bamboo strips in the house on the roof and burned them all down. He danced and sang by the fire for a long time. .Grandfather could not forget the terrible firelight that night.He said the sound of bamboo crackling in the fire woke him up, and the flames, filled with a fresh, damp smell, flickered on Tong's roof like crazy will-o'-the-wisps.

Whether Dongzi's family is Tong Zhen's descendants, only the grandfather can tell.But the old grandfather said to us, "They don't look like each other, their eyes don't look like each other, they are too soft and weak." Those few days were good days for collecting bamboo wares.The big boat is moored by the river, waiting for each household to pick out the mountain-like high-quality bamboo wares.The people in the village are working like crazy.I remember that time I was picked out by the old people to be the bamboo delivery boy on the boat, and I followed the boat for a hundred miles to the city.I was dressed up like a puppet by my family and buried in a bamboo basket that exudes a fragrance.The boat passed the Copper Kang Bridge, and I suddenly found a gun protruding from the bridge hole.facing me.The gun barrel shone with a dark blue glaze and trembled slightly.Everything happened unexpectedly, but instead of being afraid of the gun, I had an urge to jump up and grab the ominous object.Just then, the gun was retracted, and I saw Dongzi and his father's face appear in the shadow of the bridge opening, looking down on our boat.The gun is in Dongzi's hand, but Dongzi's father is carrying a dying bamboo chicken.A cut was made in the neck of the chicken, and the blood was dripping continuously.This kind of scene is very strange to the people on board.At that time, no one knew that the father and son were wiping the double-barreled shotgun with chicken blood.The only shotgun I've ever seen in my childhood is the one from Dongzi's house.Later, when I became friends with the father and son, I touched the ebony gun handle many times.Dongzi said that his father was very good at marksmanship, and he would knock down people and animals with one shot. When he said this, he coughed and his face glowed red.

"Did you hear my dad fire a gun?" I often saw a tall figure breaking through the mist and wandering on the left bank of the river with a gun, but for a long time, I didn't hear the first shot of the stranger. "Fire me a shot." I shouted from one side of the river to the other.The stranger on the other side was still wandering, he ignored me, and saw the white and thick fog rushing around him. "What the hell are you going to fight?" After a long time, I heard him make a sighing voice: "There is nothing to shoot here. Nothing is dared to shoot here." I longed for the first shot that shattered the small village.Later I told a lie to the father and son.I said that there are many wild animals in the bamboo forest outside the village.I don’t know if they believed me, anyway, at dusk I led the strangers into a vast bamboo forest. The bamboo forest was dark and humid, and the air was mixed with the strange smells of plants.The footsteps of the three intruders seemed hasty, reckless, and each had their own scheming.But the bamboo forest flashed past in darkness, motionless, not a single bamboo leaf made a sound.I suddenly became frightened. I felt that the silent bamboo forest could not accommodate my childish lies, and many bamboo eyes were looking at me angrily.

But the three of them still walked deep into the bamboo forest. "Dongzi, have you seen the bamboo with red flowers?" "No, everything is so dark that I can't see clearly." "Child, go and hold my son's hand." Dongzi's father patted me on the shoulder gently, "Maybe I'll see you after walking through the woods." My hand and Dongzi's were stuck together.I found that palm licking me like a flame.His whole body was hot, and he looked around the bamboo forest of our ancestors with bright eyes, full of inexplicable panic and commotion.I wanted to let go of Dongzi's hand, but the palm seemed to grow together with me, and I couldn't break free. "Child, I know you're lying to us, but I won't beat you up. You can accompany us through the forest." When it was getting dark, we got out of the bamboo forest.Dongzi was already lying on his father's back when he was ill.His queer pigtails hung limply on the outlander's generous back.That day he was the first to see the flock of birds in the sky. He suddenly raised his head, beat his father with his fist and shouted, "Birds are coming, birds are coming." Over the blue dome above the village, a flock of nimble bird shadows flew by, and my ears were filled with the sound of mysterious flapping of bird wings.I don't know what kind of birds it is, they scattered into a huge and boundless queue, and fell in the bamboo forest in a dark way.Immediately afterwards, I saw Dongzi's father pointing the double-barreled shotgun into the air, there was a loud noise, and the flames shot up, and the faces of the father and son, a foreigner, were clearly reflected around the muzzle of the gun, a fierce image that only hunters have.When the bird's shadow began to fall like flower petals, Dongzi's father let go of his grip and threw the double-barreled shotgun to the ground.He folded his arms tightly, facing the bamboo forest, and suddenly laughed nervously, his whole body trembled and he couldn't breathe.Amidst his laughter, the unnamed birds that had been hit by the shot fell one by one, never ending.That's how I heard the first shot.