According to the village people, my grandmother’s family is considered to have broken off the roots, extinct.
Twenty years have passed, no one has talked about them, only the old decaying house and three inconspicuous graves in the cypress forest prove that they existed.
But in this world, how many of them have really left a trace?
1
The courtyard surrounded by a low wall at my grandmother’s house was once my refuge.
Whenever the test scores were announced, the pencils I had just bought were lost, or I did something else wrong, it was time for me to stay at my grandmother’s house again.
In the summer dusk, dinner started late, and when the smoke rose, the trees were already blurred into a blur. The cicadas, which had been manic for half a day, rested their voices among the branches of the old toon tree, and the ground in the courtyard gave off a warm scent. I stood barefoot in the courtyard with my shoes in my hands, tracking the low-flying bats on my back, and when I saw the right moment to throw my shoes up, they would come crashing headlong in a hurry – those quick and stupid guys!
A kerosene lamp was lit in the west room, the body of which was made of a glass bottle with a twist of cotton. The firewood, baked by the sun during the day, crackled in the stove. When the fire was booming, the tongue of fire leaped out of the mouth of the stove and almost licked my grandmother’s face. I don’t know who’s children stuffed something in the chimney of the roof, the smoke could not be extracted, and the stove room was filled with smoke.
I approached the door and saw her tears from the smoke and sweat dripping from the corners of her forehead falling on the firewood in front of the stove. The grandmother looked down and wiped her eyes with her sleeve, turned to me and said, “The rice is not yet cooked, go outside and cool off – it’s choking inside – I’ll call you later.”
Above the stove hall, there is a rudimentary shrine made of thin wooden boards with three incense sticks burning in a three-legged incense burner, and the portrait of the couple is dedicated to the Zaowang master, and underneath the portrait is written, “Nine days East Kitchen Secretary Zaowang Fujun. Both of them have fat square faces, wide and cumbersome clothes, and smiling faces that look down on all beings – with the same gentle majesty as the enlarged statue of the leader posted in the hall.
My grandmother believed in the gods. She gave me a guess: wrapped in paper, wrapped in paper, even if the emperor is big, the emperor also has to kneel to me. The bottom of the puzzle is “incense”. She straightened up from the stove, served a bowl of vegetables, added a corn cake, held her hands high, and muttered: “Master Zao Wang, Grandmother Zao Wang, come and eat, come and eat, eat well to bring the blessing to my family – to give my son a daughter-in-law.”
The hand-rolled noodles in the big pot were also cooked. The grandmother lifted the iron spoon, leaned over the steaming steam, and searched the bottom of the pot for half a day before she picked up a lotus egg and put it in the bowl – this bowl of noodles was for me to eat.
2
My uncle was a fool, in his twenties, still fighting with me, always looking at me with displeasure. One time I used a small clay stove made for me by my grandfather to make a fire, and he yelled “Light the fire in the daytime and piss the bed at night” and kicked the small stove to pieces.
A few fashionable young people in the village bought second-hand bicycles and went to the tailor’s store to make a knee-length blue cloth coat, floating with long hair, sweeping through the streets like the wind, but suddenly pinched the gate and stopped in front of you with a “squeak”, making people froze. When my uncle saw it, he also wanted to buy a bicycle, “Father, only those who have foreign cars can get a daughter-in-law, I also have to have one.”
Grandpa was born with a crooked neck and a deviated head, and his right cheek was almost pressed against his shoulder. He maintained that painful posture and said, “Look at the people who buy foreign cars, what kind of people are they?”
“I don’t care what kind of people, no car, no daughter-in-law!”
The two of them choked and fought in the courtyard. My uncle held my grandfather down on the ground, covering his head, face and upper body, and all I could see was his legs and feet kicking and stomping hard.
The grandfather had suffered a loss in the uncle, sometimes looking for a fight with the maternal grandmother again, fighting. When my mother returned to her mother’s house once in a while, she saw the bruises on her face and scolded her grandfather: “Serving you food, serving you clothes, and still beating? See who cares about you in the future!”
Burn a handful of paper money, go get a daughter-in-law
Grandmother was born in a family of scholars, and her family had fields and a house, so she did not have to worry about food and clothing. Her brothers attended private schools and new-style schools, and they could all read and write. During festivals and holidays, my grandmother used to take me back to her mother’s house, and my uncle pulled the ground carriage to be our footman. As soon as we entered the village, she pulled out an old towel from her lapel shirt, folded it into a square, and covered her mouth with a muffled cry in a singing voice, calling out to her long-dead parents one after another.
Later, when things changed, the grandmother was unprepared for another life. Most of the family’s land, livestock and farming equipment were divided up; the former long-time workers, short-time workers and idle men seemed to have no need to work in the fields, but only met with snow-white towels wrapped around their heads to speak and assign work; the matchmakers who rushed to the door to propose marriage scattered in a flash. The grandmother eventually became an old girl. Her mother repeatedly recited her age, interspersed with sighs of despair, as to who she married no longer mattered.
Talking about the events of that year, the grandmother said: “Your old granddad (grandmother’s father) is not a bad person, the family land is a little bit saved. He also went to help anyone who was having a hard time. When the time came, most of the landlords in the township were fighting, but no one pulled their heads to fight him, and many village people even sent back their share of the things secretly at night.”
3
Despite the constant incense in the stove, there was still no marriage for my uncle – being poor was already too much to avoid, and it was also stupid.
The village people of understanding said that perhaps the feng shui of the house was bad, or perhaps the gods had been offended and had taken away the family’s fortune and connections. Lou Niang into the heart, when the feng shui gentleman invited to the home to seek “solution”.
This time, the gentleman was himself guided by the village people to find the door. He looked like a short, thin young man, wearing old cotton clothes, long, narrow face, a pair of thin eyes always squinting to look high and far away. The old lady hurriedly steamed white steamed buns, made four bowls of dishes, and asked me to go to the supply agency to buy a bottle of Lanling Daqu and gold leaf cigarettes for three dollars to entertain the gentleman.
During the meal, the grandmother carefully told Mr.: “My son …… was quite smart when he was a child, more understanding than other children. When he was five years old, one day, the sky was clear, but the wind suddenly rose, black clouds covered the sky – it was about to rain, but the freshly harvested grain was still drying on the roof na! I panicked to collect the grain, he climbed up the ladder to help me, the upper half of his body just sticking out of the roof, suddenly came a gust of wind …… he fell on his back and broke his head …… from then on became naive – -I only blame the time I did not hire a gentleman to call a soul.”
The grandfather sighed next to him and said, “How many times have I harped on the idea of giving birth to a fool, always saying it was a fall.”
The gentleman laughed softly, took a big puff of paper cigarette and said, “It doesn’t matter, I’ve seen a lot. I can cure anyone who is more stupid than him.” Hearing this, the family served him more respectfully, and carefully followed his accent and added words.
The gentleman was a good drinker and drank the bottle of Lanling Daqu alone. His face was flushed, his eyes shone brightly, he ordered his grandfather to borrow ink and paper, lifted his pen, and wrote in a single breath with a serious expression. The grandmother’s family is gathered around and craned their necks to watch.
The words are very messy, can not read clearly, although I have been in elementary school, but do not recognize a word. After writing several sheets of paper, he ordered someone to fetch an iron basin and a large bowl of cold water, threw the text into the basin and ignited it, burning it until only ash remained. He carefully picked up the bottom of the pot of paper ashes, scattered into the bowl of cold water, stirring with his fingers evenly. After doing this, he turned to his uncle and said, “Drink it!” Uncle refused, and was immediately reprimanded by his grandmother: “Do you not want to get a wife?” Uncle picked up the bowl, closed his eyes in pain, and drank the cold gray soup in one go.
That night, uncle did not eat, and as usual, urinated on the bed. But my grandmother said that my uncle’s eyes seemed more lively than usual and he didn’t stare so hard at things. She kept running to the matchmaker’s house, telling her that “my son is going to get better.
The gentleman stayed at the grandmother’s house and cast a spell every few days. In order to change the feng shui, the family’s toilet and pigpen were moved to a different location, and a screen wall was built in the yard to block bad luck. But it was useless, until the bacon treasured in the rough porcelain altar was eaten up by Mr. Uncle still looked foolish.
When it was time for spring plowing, people began to be busy tending to the land, and Grandmother steamed a pot of dry food and asked Mr. to take it away with him.
4
“The Desheng family’s second coward has bought a daughter-in-law!” This unheard of news startled the ears of the village.
At lunchtime, people looking at the new daughter-in-law filled the broken courtyard of Desheng’s house, and the “second coward”, who was always vicious to people, kept pouring tea and handing cigarettes to people with a happy face. The pig pits in the courtyard emitted the smell of warm pig manure and composted firewood.
The door of the house was wide open, and people at the back were pivoting their feet and stretching their necks to look inside. I got through the adults’ legs to the front of the door. The new daughter-in-law was sitting on a chair, but she was still tall, a little fat, with short hair, and occasionally raised her head and swept her dark, big eyes at the crowd in alarm.
Since then, a steady stream of foreign women have been sold to the village. They were mostly from Yunnan, Sichuan, but also Guizhou, all young girls. My grandmother began to save money desperately, planning to buy a daughter-in-law for my uncle as well.
Except for me, no one in the family could afford to eat eggs. Every morning, she lifted the stone slab blocking the door of the hen’s nest, and as soon as the hen probed, she grabbed it and stuck her two fingers into the chicken’s buttocks to check if there were any eggs to be laid there. If there were, she would gently put the chicken on the ground; if not, she would send it forward carelessly and let it flap its wings and fall back to the ground. In town, there was a market every five days, and at the market, my grandmother would walk several kilometers with a bamboo basket to sell eggs.
It cost several thousand dollars to buy a daughter-in-law – in contrast, she could only save two dozen eggs in five days and sell them for more than two dollars, so people couldn’t see their heads. She repaired the old loom, set up a spinning wheel and began to weave and sell cloth.
“The grandmother repaired the old loom, set up the spinning wheel, and began to weave and sell cloth.” (Network picture) “The grandmother repaired the old loom, set up the spinning wheel, and began to weave and sell cloth.” (Web Image)
The cotton was collected, ginned into cotton wool in the gin, spun into thin threads, wound onto the abduction, and then taken off and bundled into bundles. Next to color, pigments are sold at the entrance of the village, there are sky blue, date red, vermilion, lilac purple, bought and thrown into the dye bath, stirred well and dipped into the threads. Two days later, the threads of various colors were pulled out of the vat and hung on the horizontal bar to dry, dripping wetly in the sunlight, like a rainbow.
At night, I woke up from sleep and heard the spinning wheel still humming softly and the spindle spinning fast. The woman sat hunched over in front of the spinning wheel, cranking the handle with one hand, pinching the cotton wool with the other, raising and dropping it high, raising and dropping it again …… thread by thread in her hands, and winding it up to the spindle. The light of the kerosene lamp shone her shadow on the wall, and she did the same action, but the figure was very tall, like a giant.
Her black and yellow face looked wooden, her eyes half-open and half-closed, as if she had fallen asleep, but the spinning wheel was still singing, like an old tune whispering.
The smoke from the kerosene lamp was so strong that by daylight her two nostrils were filled with black ash, and her eyes were constantly watering, and from time to time she lifted her lapel to rub them. She sat on the wooden bench of the loom, her body almost bent over the threads in front of her. The two rows of warp threads on the loom were pulled straight, through the thin bindings, and intertwined with the baffle to form a triangular channel, the shuttle was cast through the right hand, the left hand picked it up, pulled a baffle, and the weft threads carried by the shuttle were incorporated into the cloth. When the thread on the bobbin in the shuttle ran out, my grandmother would call me: “Son, come and give me a bobbin. My eyes are no longer useful.”
5
The sound of the loom “bang bang bang” continued for years in the small courtyard. The handle of the spinning wheel had worn out its thin waist, a sunken palm mark appeared on the loom’s fender, and I had gone to junior high school in the city.
In 1992, I went home to see my grandmother after my vacation on “November”.
When I hurried into the village, I was shocked by the scene in front of me and stopped in my tracks: the street was a mess of dust and dirt, and several families were demolishing their houses on the street; two houses looked like they had been knocked down by machinery, and many bricks were broken, and several village people were buried in the rubble picking out useful things. The walls that were still standing were painted with bright red slogans: To get rich, first build a road.
The courtyard of my grandmother’s house was gone, and so were the old toon trees, leaving only two western houses standing abruptly among the rubble, with a few dismantled doors and windows leaning against the wall, and the loom lost to who knows where. Grandfather, uncle and several clansmen were busy using a tile knife to knock down the lime stuck on the old bricks so that they could be used when building a new house.
Grandmother was carrying a jug of water out of the west room to give to the workers. Her body was bent even more, as if she had broken her back; one of the hands carrying the jug was bony, half-blue and half-purple colored by paint. She struggled to lift her face, her face covered with a layer of dust, squinting at me for a moment, not recognizing who I was. I dumbly called out “grandma”, she opened her toothless mouth and smiled happily: “Alas, alas, my son …… looks at my blind eyes.”
A few days ago, the town’s people drew two white lines on the street, all the houses that crossed the line will have to be demolished. They refused to demolish, the town sent people with bulldozers bulldozed. A man named Zhu, relying on his brother’s work in the county office, stood in front of the house with a shovel to stop the bulldozer, and was beaten into a bloody gourd and admitted to the hospital.
The grandmother’s house does not face the street, but is in a broken alley, which also needs to be opened up and widened, so as to form a vertical and horizontal trend with the street, so her house is also in the way.
The new house cost her all the money she had saved from selling eggs and weaving, and she also ran to several relatives and borrowed several hundred dollars in debt. After that, she never mentioned the matter of marrying her uncle.
The street was repaired, but it was still a dirt road, and the town was too far away, so it did not connect with the highway. After two years, the street was rotted by plowshares, harrow teeth and “Dongfang Hong” bulldozer tracks, and on rainy days, the street was covered with mud and various livestock and poultry manure, so people could not get off.
My uncle died within a few years of living on that street, stabbed to death by a madman, and then my grandmother and grandfather both left, not long apart. Uncle died in a summer, that season the land is soft, easy to dig, so buried deeper; maternal grandmother was in a winter morning, the ground is too hard to shovel, so buried shallow, coffin down, the front of the coffin lid up only barely lower than the flat ground.
6
This year, the Qingming Festival, I carried a bundle of paper money to pay tribute to the grandmother’s family.
It was nearly noon, the sun was warmly embracing the cypress forest, the forest is their ancestral graves. The graves took up seven or eight acres of land – as large as I can remember – and now the new graves, next to the old ones, have expanded to the edge of the forest, making it very crowded. Some of the graves had new stone tombstones, and the brick stoves in front of them held freshly burned paper ashes.
The graves of the grandmothers were at the edge of the forest, and the untethered animals of the nearby families often came here to find food and nibble on the grass, and sometimes they would jump on the graves to stomp and play. Therefore, twenty years, the grave is still bare and no grass, and not as round as other families’ graves.
The original ancestor’s paper money, to use a heavy iron mold on the yellow paper smashed on the copper-like marks to bring the sacrifice, now do not care about these, bought by the store in bundles, scattered on the burn.
The paper money is very light and thin, burning fast, I put the remaining pile in my hand on the fire in front of my grandmother’s grave lit, intended to be placed in front of my uncle’s grave, the wind blew, the fire burned up along my hand, the outside of the thumb to start a blister. My heart ached, I couldn’t help but say, “Uncle, I’m sending you money, get a good daughter-in-law over there and live a good life.”
The ashes of the burnt paper slowly dispersed with the wind, the black-headed and long-tailed magpies chirped in the forest, and the sun passed through the dense needles of the cypress trees leaving dappled light and shadow on the ground. I stood in front of the grave for a long time and began to feel numbness in my legs and feet, and my eyes were shivering, so I turned around and went home.
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