Chapter 34 Chapter Twelve

Every spring when the river opens, chunks of icicles from the upper reaches surge down, rubbing, bumping, rolling, and stacking in the river, as if they were gnashing their teeth hard, making a terrible cracking sound.In some areas, the river water under the ice layer dropped, the ice blocks gradually melted and cracked, and then collapsed with a bang, causing rows of turbid waves with foam flying horizontally.The cold waves beat against the frozen gray-yellow sandy beach, and the river overflowed its original waterline.When the weather suddenly turned warmer, the gray-yellow sandy beach was soaked by the upwelling river water, and a straight tan lace bordered on the bank.Then, the river began to rush.The piles of firewood and grass fragments deposited last year on the river channel lazily leave the shallow bottom where they have been lying all winter, then flow faster and faster, and finally race desperately on the water.However, as long as there is a little obstruction in front, or a higher sandbar, they will stop panting and gather together.And more and more gathered, forming a stubborn barrier in the middle of the river.

As a result, the river forked in front of them—some pierced through their sides, and some seemed to give in, turning around in a very beautiful arc and turning around to the direction they came from. On shore, he was often drawn to the ripples that marked changes in the river's flow.Although he knew with certainty that the water was flowing downwards, rushing to the sea, to the place where he had seen the water and the sky meet, but in the face of these obstacles, the water flow was endless: some coy, some Waiting for the opportunity to move, some are fleeting, some are unyielding, some are swaying... use various methods to deal with the obstacles in front of it.In the end, the alliance formed by firewood, grass and broken trees finally collapsed and fled.The river course was unimpeded again.

How difficult it is for the river to flow to the sea! Human life is also very difficult.The life of any ordinary person is extraordinary, and life is not like a river.The river will return to normal after breaking through barriers one after another, rushing for thousands of miles-water is still water.After overcoming complicated difficulties and sinister encounters, people themselves have changed.People are no longer the same people... After the first long sound of dawn, there were a few hesitant cock crows. It was the voice of a young rooster who had just learned to crow. Halfway through the crowing, it stopped abruptly, as if it had not woken up from sleep.But soon, the roosters suddenly cheered up again, and echoed each other in several nearby villages, forming a cheerful chorus for a while, rippling in the cool morning breeze.

Dawn is gradually brightening, and the air has already infiltrated the unique humidity of the early morning.The wooden railings were covered with moisture and felt as smooth as jade.The donkey smelled the refreshing fragrance of green grass, happily shook its long head, and slammed its big ears. Ahead, a small bridge of concrete prefabricated boards appeared, erected over the gurgling canal.Clumps of green horsetail and fresh wild mint on the slope of the canal look like balls of fluffy hair in the faint morning light.It has entered the boundary of Luoqu Commune, and the Weijiaqiao Brigade is ahead.

Home, home... he thought sadly, what is left of the family?Who else in the family is waiting for him to go back?Some people need to take the trouble to count because they have too much, but some people need to bother to think because they have nothing... Lao He left.He didn't even eat lunch, so he got on a Beijing jeep and ran along the embankment. Everything that was so full and full of vitality in his eyes seemed to have shrunk and shriveled all of a sudden.Achievements, honors, food production, machine repair shop... are all built on the quicksand of the river beach. Once he collapses, all these things will collapse!He was ashamed at first, and felt that his self-importance was ridiculous.Then there is depression, feeling that achievements and honors are vain.Then he was angry again, "What the hell is 'fighting back against the rightist', and you want to punish people like You Xiaozhou!" In the end, there was nothing but melancholy.At this time, because of boredom and nothing to do, and because of the approaching and disturbing movement, the shadow that had been in his mind for many years appeared again, "It seems that she is the real one!" The next day, he went to Luoqu Commune to find Han Yumei's daughter who was left with her sister.

Han Yumei's sister was not hard to find, she lived next to Luo Qu not far from their brigade.It made him wonder why he hadn't thought of her for so many years.Before liberation, she was a child bride for Luo Qu's family. This family is her father's brothers. She didn't suffer much, and now there are still beautiful marks on her face, "If Han Yumei lived to this day, she would look like this. "This thought dispelled the barrier between him and this unknown woman, and he told her why he came. "Oh, Guiqi, you want to take her back." Han Yumei's sister understood what he meant, but immediately thought of other things. "When you were young, you just wanted to be happy, and raised your daughters to me..."

This sentence wiped away his goodwill towards her at once.Who can understand his relationship with Han Yumei?Moreover, her face was now ugly due to the nervous calculations in her heart, and she didn't look like Han Yumei at all.He sat on the kang calmly and looked at her, noncommittal about her guess, and asked straight to the point: "Don't talk nonsense, how much do you want?" "Hey, you, Secretary Wei, are such a cheerful person!" Han Yumei's sister held the sole of her shoe and peeked at his expression. "You do the math, these seven or eight years, you have to eat and wear clothes, not to mention laborious... To tell you the truth, Secretary Wei, the life of the farmers has become more and more difficult in the past two years..."

In the end, he spent two hundred yuan to bring Xiulian back. When Xiulian first came to his house, she was as tall as a twelve or thirteen-year-old doll, with yellow skin and thin skin, just like her mother was so emaciated when she was escorted back by the cotton spinning factory with a big belly.Afterwards, as if a god had blown her breath, she soon gained weight and looked juicy, with exactly the same eyebrows and eyes as her mother.She works in the fields like a young man, and she is also good at sewing pots and stoves at home, but the fly in the ointment is that she can't read a word.When she was eight years old, she went to her aunt's house to bring dolls, wash diapers, cook, thaw grass and feed sheep for her aunt. When she was a little older, she joined the team to work as a part of the labor force to earn work points.At first, he sent her to the brigade private elementary school. Xiulian said she would not do it, saying that she was already fifteen or sixteen, and she was sitting on the same bench with a runny-nosed baby, her face dull.So he asked a private teacher to come home to teach her alone—he actually knew how to hire a tutor, but Xiulian said that his eyes hurt when he read a word, so he had no choice but to let her go.

"What's the matter with you bringing this girl back?" Although Xiulian was very diligent, his wife still didn't like her and often nagged in front of him. "What's the matter? I'm going to promise her to Sansan!" Once he simply said that. "Hey, what a big secretary, what time is it, and you still have a child bride!" Don't look at his wife's listless, and her words are quite sharp. "Don't worry about it, it's none of your business here!" "Why don't I care? Catch the son of a dog and watch the mother. Who is her mother? Can she get better?"

"Who is it? Who is stronger than you!" "Of course, of course he's better than me..." His wife gave him a vicious look, and walked away resentfully. He has two boys and one girl.The eldest son and daughter were catching up with the era of escorting workers, peasants and soldiers to college, and they were "recommended" by him to go to college as soon as they graduated from high school.Now my son works as a reporter for a newspaper in the provincial capital, and my daughter works as a doctor in a county hospital.The second son was born in 1957. After graduating from middle school, Zhuangzi had more students in high school, and some educated youths who went to the countryside, and then "recommended" the party secretary's son to go to college. Second, he also wanted to keep a son by his side and marry Xiulian in the future, so even though the second son said he was dying, he didn't send the second son to the city.

The second son looks the most like him: high nose bridge, narrow eyes, although he does not have his bold and unrestrained aura, but he is thin-skinned and white-fleshed, more beautiful and smart than him.On the day he led him to primary school, he gave his second son the scientific name "Wei San" in memory of Hao San.This name cannot be said to be neither fish nor fowl, if the daughter is counted, the second son is exactly three, so no one has explored the true meaning of this name.When Wei San graduated from elementary school and gained some knowledge, I felt that the name was "too rustic". When applying for the middle school, Xiao Gazi secretly changed it to "Wei Shan", which means solemn and far-reaching, and he changed it without revealing it. trace.When he was an educated young man returning to his hometown, the social atmosphere gradually opened up, and Gawa and Gameizi, who had gone to school in Zhuangzi, also wanted to date him. Wei Shan quietly fell in love with a female educated youth from the brigade forest farm. The object, Wu Shangrong's machine repair shop, he didn't want to go, so he stayed in Zhuangzi for three days fishing and two days for underground farming.This brigade forest farm is next to Zhuangzi, and it is specially set up to deal with Xiaojin Zhuang.His father wanted to let the commune members free up their hands to engage in production, so he used the money earned from the machine repair shop to raise a dozen or twenty educated youths who could dance and sing in the forest farm.Wei Shan's target is one of the best, average-looking, but a high school student, who can recite Li Tiemei's libretto fluently.Standing on the stage, with a single stroke of the red light, a flick of the braid, and a grit of the teeth, he earned many awards and "Mao's Choice" for the Weijiaqiao Brigade.Although the pair of Gawaga girls have not performed the "dog chasing the wolf" that is common in movies now - in the words of the villagers, they have exchanged letters and glanced secretly, and they have already agreed with each other. When the "Gang of Four" was defeated, Wei Shan was twenty, and Xiulian was seventeen. One day, Wei Shan found out from his mother that Xiulian was the wife his father had found for him.Even though Xiulian looks juicy, she can only read comic books, and her reading of comic books has not broken through the level of "Little Kitty" and "Old Wolf Treats".At home, when Wei Shan said ten sentences, she could at most respond with one sentence: "No!" She usually said "the sheep should be fed", "the bitter vegetables on the Dongtou Canal are really fat", " This thin salt noodle is not as salty as the big green salt".On a windy day, Wei Shan came back from the county on a bicycle, and finally got dizzy and ran home. Xiulian greeted him but smiled and said, "It's good to ride a bicycle on a windy day, but you can't climb it!" "No? No! No!" Look what the wind is!" Wei Shan was so angry that he gave her the nickname "Budeng" from then on. "Not going up" is always cheerful, but Wei Shan always looks down on her. "Nine Nine Sunny Days" can only sing one line: "The eighteen-year-old brother is sitting by the small river", and the rest is up to her. Humming.No matter what good clothes I bought in the city, she didn't have that indescribable style on her; she walked with her chest high, and her hands were like rowing boats, and she sat on the sofa—with a car. The earthen sofa with a stretched inner tube looks like sitting on the ridge of the field, with the legs spread apart, and it doesn't have the attitude of an educated youth who is recruiting a lady... Wei Shan ran to his elder brother to hide in a fit of anger. As soon as the second son ran away, his wife fell ill at the same time.The county hospital where his daughter was located could not be cured, so she was transferred to a large hospital in the provincial capital.After a checkup, it was cervical cancer, and he would not live long. "She didn't get this disease in a day or two." An old doctor with a gray beard and glasses told him as he pulled him into the corridor. "According to our Chinese medicine practitioners, she has long-term yin deficiency and spleen dampness, causing dampness and heat to bet, leucorrhea continues, and she doesn't pay attention to hygiene. She is lazy and looks sick, but she can still eat, eat, and eat well? And she is irritable and loses her temper?...Yes, yes," the old doctor did not comfort him, but blamed him, saying, "Oh, you rural people, you often ignore this. If you are sick, you don't see it early." It turned out that her laziness, gluttony, indifference, and "irritability" were all due to her illness! His wife was already skinny, she seemed to have no body under Bai Shengsheng's quilt, her head the size of a walnut rested on the pillow, complaining pantingly to him: "You...have never been nice to me in your life!" "Yes, yes..." He sat on the square stool hunched over, knocking his head against the edge of the wire bed as if kowtowing, "Get well soon, get well soon, I'll give you whatever you like to eat when you're done." What are you doing?" The ward was completely white, with walls, curtains, cabinets, beds, quilts, stools... It became a frosty world, which was both desolate and ominous, and the air seemed to be filled with a pungent musty smell. , This kind of smell is unbearable to the living. He has never been in the hospital. When he came here, he watched the person who had slept with him for half his life slowly leave the world step by step. Pulling it out one by one, he felt dizzy.In any case, my wife has been with him for almost thirty years, and in this half of his life, he hasn't felt her warmth. Has my wife ever felt his warmth?Thinking of this, a strong, uncontrollable pity and sorrow welled up in his heart. "You, you are always thinking of someone." Although his wife was dying, his eyes were extremely sharp. "I know, you're always thinking about Han Yumei in your heart!" He paused in astonishment, but continued to knock his head on the edge of the bed. Facing the dying patient, he confessed deeply: "Yes, yes... I have never been nice to you. You are all right, go home, I am nice to you. " "It's late, I know..." My wife's eyes suddenly softened.It even became kind and loving like never before. "Forget it, let's forget about the past. Well, this is a lifetime... Now, it's Sansan. You can go to the city for Sansan. In the past, the farmers had land. Wherever they went, they were always thinking about the land and thinking about it." Zhuangzi...now, the peasants don't even have a piece of land, how can you tell him to love the countryside, how can you tell the young people to take care of the land...you let Sansan go to the city." "Yes, yes... I will do it for him, I will do it for him... How are you, let's go back and live." "What about Xiulian, don't let her be with Sansan anymore, Sansan has someone else in her heart. We two...isn't that the same? They two are really going to be successful, and it's hard for me, Sansan, and that girl. You ... Treat Xiulian as a girl." "Yes, yes... I listen to you, I listen to you, I will bring the Sansan Office into the city... How are you, okay, the old couple will lead Xiulian to live..." However, his wife did not recover in the end.With a feeling of redemption, he asked He Lide—he still couldn’t do without He Lide—to bring his second son into the city. Now he works as a worker in a construction company, and he takes Xiulian to live with him.He told Liu Yuqing that he wanted to buy things for the "girl", and this "girl" was not the daughter who was a doctor in the county hospital, but Xiulian. "Ah, life and death, which one have I not experienced?"