A century of poverty

Chapter 72 Mischievous

In spring, the winter-stored vegetables are all gone, leaving only pickled vegetables and soybean paste, which the locals call the "bitter spring staples."

We brought a small millstone from our hometown, along with some dried cabbage stalks and radish leaves from last winter. We soaked them, added a pound of soybeans, and ground them with the millstone to make delicious tofu.

Qu Hui's mother also soaked some beans and came to use the millstone. She said politely, "I've also learned to eat tofu from you, and I've become addicted to it. I'll just use your millstone here, which saves me the trouble of carrying the heavy millstone."

Mom: "Please don't be shy. It's fate that we, who are thousands of miles apart, can come here and stay in the front and back yards."

At noon, we had just finished eating. Mom picked up the dishes and washed them when Wu Ku came in carrying an old cotton-padded coat under his arm. "Auntie, I'm begging you. The sleeve of my cotton-padded coat was torn off by a cow's horn, and I can't sew it back on myself. Please help me sew it back on."

Mom: "Sure!"

Wu Ku saw a small bowl of tofu on the stove and asked, "What's this?"

Mom: "Little Tofu, you've never seen it before?"

Wu Ku: "No."

Mom: "Let me serve you a bowl to try, it's delicious!"

She ladled out a bowl, handed it to Wu Ku with chopsticks, and Wu took it. His mother found a needle and thread to sew a cotton-padded jacket for him. Wu Ku sat on the edge of the kang (a heated brick bed) eating small pieces of tofu: "So delicious." After finishing, he put the bowl on the stove in the outer room.

His mother handed him the sewn cotton-padded jacket, saying, "It's done."

Wu Ku took the cotton-padded coat: "Thank you, ma'am, I'm off."

Watching Wu Ku leave, Mom squatted down by the cabinet, intending to take out the slippers she'd worn last year to air them out, when she heard a clear, childish voice from the outer room: "Auntie—here's your winnowing basket." It was Old Mou's younger sister-in-law. After Mou married a girl from his hometown, his mother-in-law brought her along. Mou originally lived alone and didn't have many household items, so his mother-in-law often sent this young girl to run errands, borrowing and returning things.

The mother took the winnowing basket and hung it on the wall, and the little girl turned and ran home.

Mom came back again, lifted the cupboard curtain to take out the shoes, and found that the soles and uppers had separated. It was because of the dampness that the shoes had rotted. Mom said to Grandma with heartache, "What a pity. Several pairs of shoes were fine, but now they're ruined. It's all for nothing. It seems this place isn't suitable for wearing cloth-soled shoes."

Grandma: "It's all because you guys love coming here! The wind is so strong here, I can't even stand up when I go outside."

Liu Shiya's niece, Liu Shuyun, came to my house: "Uncle Zhang, Aunt Zhang, the land to the east of your house has been approved for us. We'll be moving earth to build up the foundation tomorrow. I came to let you know." Sure enough, the next day she and her husband, Kou Xueli, came to move earth. They left a large area to the east side unused and started moving earth right next to our house. My grandmother went to the landlord's temporary outhouse to relieve herself and tripped over a clod of earth that rolled over. She went back inside and complained, "That old Kou family is really disgusting. They didn't move earth over there, which was spacious enough, but they moved earth right next to our side. I almost tripped and fell."

Mother: "Tomorrow we'll have to move the outhouse to the west side, and we'll have to move the haystack too. Look where it's coming from, it's heading this way."

Father: "She squeezed in for us; we didn't bring any land from inside the Great Wall."

Grandma: "Here comes this barrier! I heard this second girl isn't a good person!"

As the weather warmed up, Wang Fa, who came on the same train as my older brother and mother, started building a house. Since our house was only next to Xiao Tie's, Wang Fa treated my house as his support base.

His wife, Wang Huaying, had always had a bad relationship with him. They had no children yet and often fought. Whenever Wang Huaying got angry, she would run away. She would constantly curse him: "You liar, you poor wretch! You said you were a worker with everything you needed, but you tricked me into coming to Hebei from Shandong, and then ran away from Hebei to Liaoning!" At home, she did nothing and had no interest in living with her husband.

Today was his first day of work, and neighbors and several fellow Shandong natives came to help him. Mom cooked for him, and as lunchtime approached, Wang Huaying and Wang Fa started fighting again. Mom couldn't stop them, and Wang Huaying ran away. Mom quickly ran home to call her third sister: "Xia Lian, go help Wang Fa's family prepare the food, make sure the workers have eaten, I'll go after Wang Huaying, but he's run away again!"

My third sister left home, leaving my fourth sister and me to take care of the meals. Grandma was unhappy: "Your mother is too kind-hearted, too kind. Helping his family cook isn't enough? She even interferes in his pursuit of a wife? She goes to that damned Liu Zhen family every day to keep them company."

In a small patch of green grass below the irrigation ditch south of the horse stable, there was a shallow layer of water. I was walking along the east side of the horse stable on West Street. I saw a boy wading through the water with his trousers rolled up, wearing an old yellowish-green shirt. He looked very familiar. How could it be him? I wondered. Yes, it was him, one of the bad boys from Liuzhuangtuo. Once, he suddenly fell ill and came home, and all the students in the class turned to look at him. He still looked the same, with a protruding forehead and an ugly face, only taller now. He was Liu Hexiang from Liuzhuangtuo, and I remembered him very well.

I turned onto West Street and went to Liu Shunian's house to visit her third sister, Xiao Shuling. At the back door of her house, Jiang Hong led a little girl who was about our age and introduced her, saying, "This is Liu Fengming, who just arrived. She's a relative of Liu Linsi (Liu Zhenyi's eldest son)." The girl spoke to us without any shyness in her Northeastern accent.

A little while later, Li Xiumei arrived. She was a year younger than us, about the same height, and her second brother was in the same class as us. We had known each other for a while, after Kong Zhi's second sister's family moved away. Her family moved into that building; her father's name was Li Kongge.

After Li Kongzhu moved away, his cousin Guo Linghua moved into his dark little house. The Li family girl to the west also moved away; her younger brother, Li Kongsuo, now lives in that house. The three houses behind the stable all changed owners.

After Huanjie moved out of the lower room of Liu Zhen's family's house, Wang Fa moved in. After Wang Fa moved out, Zhang Ailing's mother-in-law's family moved in. Liu Hexiang was the third son of this family, and Liu Fengming was the fourth daughter. Her eldest son, eldest daughter, and second daughter were married and did not come. The second son Liu Haixiang, third son Liu Hexiang, fourth son Liu Boxiang, third daughter Liu Fengyun, and fourth daughter Liu Fengming came.

After dinner, Li Kong often came to stand in front of the house and chat with my elder brother and us. A woman around fifty years old, with gray hair tied back, wearing a plain blue cloth outfit stained with dirt, entered the house and said in a clear voice, "Sister, have you eaten?"

Mom came forward and said, "Eat up!" Then she introduced us, "This is your aunt from Liuzhuangtuo. She also moved here from inside the city."

Upon hearing that she was from inside the pass, we felt a sense of closeness and called her "Auntie." Liu Fengming was a very adaptable girl, and having met her before, we quickly became friends.

This aunt also had no sisters, and since she came to the Northeast, she and my mother became very close, treating each other like sisters. Her second brother, Guo Kaiguang, also came to Jinhai and settled in Xiao Liu's family, living in the same production brigade as Liu Huaxin and Wang Daikui, a mother and son from Wangzhuangtuo.

Every year, the slogan "Work hard in May, don't plant rice in June" resounds throughout the fields, and red flags wave in the fields. However, it won't be until mid-June to complete all the rice planting. There is vast arable land, but a shortage of labor, and many barren plots remain uncultivated. The various production brigades and teams are still recruiting households.

The reeds in the barren fields were already taller than a person, and the cattails were sprouting tender stamens; it was time to harvest the yellow cattail stalks again. My younger brother and Xiaoqian ate some while picking the yellow cattail stalks and putting them in their pockets to dry and sell as medicinal herbs when they got home.

As the weather gets hot, countless nests of the reed warbler, commonly known as "ga ga ji," appear in the reeds.

The calls of "quack-cheep, quack-cheep" rose and fell, high-pitched and enthusiastic. It seemed as if they were competing to see who could call the loudest, making the air even hotter with their noise.

Dad, wearing a straw hat, was hoeing beans with the bean-hoeing team on the small road near Old Liu's house. With each stroke of the hoe, white things appeared in the straw nest. Dad squatted down to look and saw it was a nest of duck eggs. He took off his hat and picked the eggs one by one into the hat pocket, setting it aside. When they finished work, Xiao Tingshun looked at Dad holding the hat pocket full of duck eggs and said, "Old Zhang came home for lunch today. This hat full of duck eggs is enough for us to eat!"

Dad: "I can have vegetables to eat even without these duck eggs. I guess whose ducks these are. I'll deliver them to their house later when they pass by."

Xiao Tingshun: "Tch! Why bother with that? Whatever you pick up is yours!"

Dad: "What I want is peace of mind!"

Father carried the duck eggs toward Liu Shiheng's house. Hei Taisui was pulling scallions in the garden in the street. He heard Father say that the duck eggs she found might have been laid by her ducks. She nodded and picked up the duck eggs one by one with her clothes, then turned and went home.

Time flies, and summer vacation is here again. It's another peak season for making straw bags. Every household's straw stacks are falling down. When Mom sweeps the floor, she picks out every single straw, unwilling to burn it.

This year's floods are severe, and there is a large demand for straw bags as flood control supplies. Therefore, the supply and marketing cooperatives are going all out to collect them, with every household working hard. The small teams are providing strong support; they don't even need to go to the supply and marketing cooperatives, as they collect the bags in the streets using their horse-drawn carts. Team leader Liu even offered verbal encouragement. With continuous rainfall, the water level has reached the national dam's critical point, and a dangerous situation could occur at any moment. Male laborers have been working around the clock on the dam for several days. The rain continues, and the sky shows no sign of clearing. The farm command headquarters ordered: "Female laborers, go to the dam."

At a single command, the women's team leader immediately led all the girls on the dam to fight the flood.

They filled bags with soil and transported them to the dam area, where they patrolled and inspected day and night. Wherever bubbles appeared, they immediately filled them with bags.

The dikes have been saved. This year is a good year; the rice is ripe and ready for harvest, so it's not advisable to work in the fields. Agricultural planes are here to spray pesticides; the planes are flying very low, and the pilots, wearing helmets, can be seen from the ground.

This situation seems to have triggered some kind of jealousy in Liu Junzhan, who picked up a pebble and threw it at the plane. The pebble hit the fuselage and left a noticeable mark.

When officials from higher up came to the brigade to investigate, they said, "How can we tolerate such malicious behavior? The perpetrator must be taken away."

Seeing that things were going badly, his fourth uncle, Liu Shishou, quickly stepped forward to explain, "It's just a child, just a child. There was no malicious intent. It was just a naughty child who caused the trouble."

Two police officers said, "How could a child have such strength to throw stones so high? The pilot is furious. What if this causes significant damage to the country? We must take him away. Please cooperate!"

Liu Shishou: "To be honest, this child is my nephew, my elder brother's son, who has a mental illness. My sister-in-law wasn't watching him properly that day, and he ran away and caused trouble. We will definitely warn his family to keep a close eye on him. I guarantee that this kind of thing will never happen again. If it does, you can hold me accountable. Our brigade guarantees it."

After saying that, he looked at the head of the security department, who said, "Please rest assured, we will definitely handle this matter. Our brigade will vouch for you, so you don't need to take this child with you."

Seeing that the brigade had gone this far, the two police officers decided not to force the issue and left empty-handed.