198 1 year, I am a normal student. When I first saw Luo Zhongli's masterpiece "Father" on the cover of Art magazine, my heart was immediately shocked: if the white headscarf was replaced with a bald head, the old farmer in the painting would be my father.
My father has been farming in his hometown all his life, and the scorching sun has already tanned his face and whole body, just like the bronze color of the Millennium temple clock. Especially in summer, the fireball-like sun scorched the land of Jianghuai, and my father wore an old yellow straw hat and grey shorts, waving a bullwhip endlessly and shouting to rake the pear orchard in the paddy field. At this time, looking from the ridge, my father's naked hunchback looks like a big black ball, and the sweat on his back actually reflects small bright spots.
During the busy farming season, my father farmed in the fields; During the slack season, my father herded cattle on the ridge of the field. Sun and frost, wind and rain, my father's thin face was covered with wrinkles prematurely. Those deep wrinkles, like ravines in the mountains, like ruts of cars, and like ridges between endless rice fields on the north bank of Chaohu Lake, crisscross. Every autumn, my father's hands and feet crack like old bark. In winter, my father's hands and feet seem to be cut by swords, and there are always cuts.
My parents have given birth to nine children in my life, and I am the youngest. In the early 1960 s, there was a famine in the whole country, and the Jianghuai area was full of sorrow, hunger and cold. Parents lost six children in a row in despair, leaving only their eldest sister and seventh brother. When I was a teenager, my living mother recalled this incident, always in tears and heartbroken. And my father, like the old cow he plowed, was silent and immediately turned away. But at this time, I also found my father's kind eyes filled with tears, revealing sad, sad and confused eyes.
When I was a child, I heard my mother say that my father was a posthumous child. When my grandfather was alive, he was a big shopkeeper in a pawnshop in the town, and his family was fairly well off. Unfortunately, my grandfather died of illness in his early years, and his family was gradually declining. A few years later, my grandmother was forced to remarry to a poor peasant family, and my young father became a duckweed in the pool, wandering in relatives' homes and growing up in the wind and rain. In the old days, there was a custom of referring to the belly for marriage. At the age of twenty, mom and dad got married and had their own home in two abandoned and shabby adobe houses. But when War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression broke out that year, people were in dire straits. Parents can't read and write, have no land, and have no specialty in making money. Only by working for the landlord's parents can they maintain a difficult life. After the liberation of the motherland, most poor families in the village were classified as poor farmers, while my family was listed as one of the few tenant farmers. Although farmers in New China have turned over as masters and the lives of most villagers have gradually improved, little lives have been born in my family. The responsibility of raising too many children is like a mountain, which weighs heavily on my father's thin shoulders and keeps him breathing and struggling on the hunger line.
Because of poverty, my father once gave a nine-year-old thin sister to a family in a neighboring village as a child bride in a cold winter. My mother told me in her later years that although my father never talked about it, it was always an incurable pain in my father's heart.
Because of poverty, my father became a hunchback. When my father was middle-aged, he did odd jobs and carried bags in the town grain station in the morning and evening. On one occasion, a mountain of grain bags suddenly collapsed, and my father carrying them could not escape. He was at a loss on the spot and vomited blood. The doctor said that my father's inner bone was damaged and needed immediate surgery. But the family is poor, and the cost of surgery is astronomical. After taking some medicine, my father flatly refused the operation. From then on, my father always carried an ugly Luo Guo on his back, and all the adults and children in the village called him Tuozi. Because of the deformity of my father's back and his indecent nickname, my father's favorite youngest son is studying in primary school. I don't even want my father to hold a parent-teacher conference at school and go shopping with him. I don't want to talk about my father in front of my classmates and partners.
Poverty became the label of father.
However, it was my poor father who did a little thing with his mother in the 1960s, always making the villagers talk with their thumbs up.
On an early spring morning in the 1960s, my mother went to the grain depot in the town to deliver breakfast to my father. On the way, she found a small cloth bag. After arriving at the grain depot, mother untied the rope and was surprised to find that there were forty ten-dollar bills in it. Mother said, "With so much money, the person who lost it must be crazy." Father put down the rice jar, touched the brand-new money and said, "Yes, whoever loses so much money will be in a hurry." We need to find the person who lost the money. "My mother said how to find it. Father thought for a moment and said, "Give the money to the stationmaster and let the stationmaster hand it over to the police station. The police will find the person who lost the money. "When my parents went to the stationmaster, they saw a group of people around an old man at the door of the finance room. The old man beat his chest, his forehead was dripping with sweat, and he kept sobbing: "I'm sorry for my son, I'm sorry for my son. I can't live with so much money." Parents came forward to ask why. It turns out that the old man's son is the secretary of the brigade. I paid 400 yuan from the bank yesterday, and today I sent him to the grain depot to buy spring ploughing seeds for the whole brigade. Because on the road, sweating like a pig, the old man naturally untied his belt on the road, but accidentally left his money in his arms. After the parents verified the amount of money and the bag, they immediately returned the money bag to the old man. The old man knelt down on the spot and said gratefully, "If I can't find the money, my son will be wrongly convicted of corruption and will go to jail. You two are great benefactors of my family! "
Four hundred yuan, today, is far from enough for a table in the hotel. However, in my father's time, that 400 yuan was enough to turn my mud-walled thatched house into three big red brick tile houses.
As far as I can remember, a poor father like me only knew three words of his name all his life, but together with his mother, he trained Ziggy as the first high school graduate of my production team in the early 1970s, and sent his youngest son to the normal school founded by General Zhang Zhizhong in the autumn of 1980. In order to enable me and Qi Ge to study in school smoothly, in the late 1960s, my father began to secretly start the peanut business in the evening. Every year after the Mid-Autumn Festival, before dawn in the East, my father quietly walked out of the village with a backpack. At night, after the moon rose, my father quietly picked up a load of peanuts, and his jacket was soaked with sweat. Mother peeled peanuts by hand under kerosene lamps in the middle of the night, then soaked them in boiling water, drained them, and marinated them with coarse salt all night. The next day, spread the peanuts in the sun all day, and stir-fry them in the iron pot with fine sand and dried peanuts at night until the crispness in the pot gradually stops. After sifting the fine sand, my father weighed the peanuts, and I or Qi Ge wrapped them in newspaper or book paper, and finally put them in a big iron bucket. In that era of extreme poverty, the peanuts made by my father were simple, but they tasted good. This is a good dish with wine, and it is also the favorite snack of men, women and children in the village.
No matter how many stars there are in the moon or how cold the wind blows, my father is always weak regardless of his age. At night, he carries a flashlight and carries a small iron bucket with peanuts under his arm. He walks around the streets alone, earning hard money and making little profit. But in that era of political movement, a farmer engaged in peanut business privately was regarded as speculation and was naturally the object of proletarian dictatorship. When I was in primary school, one cold winter, a young man behind my house, in order to actively pursue political progress, informed on my father and several armed militia took him to the brigade for interrogation. The next morning, it was snowing heavily, and my gray-haired father hung a sign on his chest that read "Speculators were arrested", and was escorted to the streets by militia and several other right-wingers. After that, my father was locked up and spent eleven days in the training class of the brigade, studying documents and cleaning the streets and toilets every day. Although my father was hit by this, one night when I came home, I saw that I was immersed in writing, and my father's sunken eyes showed relief and expectation.
My father's old age coincided with the implementation of the contract responsibility system in rural areas, and I stepped onto the podium again, and my family was getting better and better. He should have enjoyed his family for a few more years, but unfortunately/kloc-0 was diagnosed with gastric cancer in the hospital in the spring of 1987. In late autumn, my father left us forever.