Pig farms do not raise pigs. In the more than a year we lived there, we had only seen an old black sow that was 'humming' around our hut all day, trying to misbehave (you know what I mean). There are more than a dozen cows. Except for a black old cow and a pale yellow breeding cow that had been imported from outside the mountain, the other cattle were all faded fur, short in stature, and native Tonkawa cattle. In fact, these cattle also belong to the same large family due to inbreeding. For this group of cattle that look the same and have a complicated bloodline, I have never been able to distinguish their family trees, but the long time of herding cattle can call out the name of each cow and tell the vein system of each cow. After the autumn harvest, the farm work in the field on the slope is stopped, and the people in the field will circle around the cattle all day long, either in circles, gaskets, dung, backs, or grass, into the grass (referring to the rhythmic delivery of hay under the knife), feeding cattle, and herding cattle.
To start a circle is to clean up the dung in the cattle pen. A gasket is a mat of dry soil in a circle filled with manure. One day, after the cattle went uphill, the old man who herded the cattle for a long time circled with me. 'Old Sun, do you know what it means to be clean?' He asked suddenly, with a cunning gimmick hanging from the corner of his mouth. I thought he was going to talk about nunnery again, and was thinking about Buddhist zen, but he said, 'Clean and clean, clean and clean!' The circle is clean and clean! I was stunned. Whenever the circle is padded to the point of no return, or when it rains on a cloudy day and cannot get off the ground, it is time to start the circle. Among the ginkgo biloba, the circle has never dried, and Yinchuan has never been clean, making it difficult to stand. Fortunately, there were Jiu Chang and Lao Shao, one digging, one shovel, and a few of us boys used flat burdens to mix cages and pick up the dung to the outside field. Over time, the field outside the cattle pen was piled up like a hill of dung over the years.
The back is the 'fool moving the mountain'. In addition to the summer harvest and autumn harvest, the broom on the back of the mountain, and the public grain in the mountain, the back of the rice is to do the homework of worship every morning. Every day at dawn, the captain Lao Su shouted in front of the window: 'Student, the sky is bright, get up and put it.' Oh, the workman! Of the three hundred and sixty days of spring ploughing and autumn harvest work a year, none of them hones one's physical strength and patience more than the back of the straw. The back was tired, a basket of strong laborers who earned ten labor points, filled with manure, at least one hundred and twenty or thirty pounds. The back is tired on the slope, the shoulders are sore, in order to maintain balance, one by one bowed and stretched the neck, when the slope is steep, it can really be described as five bodies. The north downhill floor is actually more tired, stumbling, bumping, involuntarily, unable to stop. Slipping and falling, no one can stand up without a squeeze (support). After struggling in vain for a few times, he simply lay down and shouted in the sky with a sentence from the old student of the Peking Opera Tan Sect: 'Bitter-ah...' The sad voice still lingers in my ears. The back basket is not only tired, but also dirty. Not to mention the visual and olfactory disgust, the worst thing is that when bending over and hunching over the empty back basket, the dung is often poured into the neck! Only after having such a 'skin kiss' with the dung can people truly appreciate what it tastes like to be a back mound. Fortunately, the old men in the pig farm still know how to pity xiangxiang and cherish jade, only ask the girls to beat the dung, and do not let them carry the rice, where they are really 'planting flowers on the cow dung'.
Grazing in the pig farm, there is no "Military Reclamation Battle Song" kind of desert lonely smoke letter horse reins outside the style, nor the ink Danqingli small bridge flowing water shepherd boy piccolo Jiangnan interest. Like other farm jobs, herding cattle is the basic work of survival day after day. A small fire before winter burned down the wheat stacks that served as winter feed, so early in the morning the cattle had to be placed on the slope or in the harvested wheat fields, leaving them to look for the dead leaves of the straw on their own until twilight was faint. Whenever the cattle scattered in the liangshangping, the old men would light a cigarette pot and stomp on the ditch, gossiping. Jiu Chang is the most capable of the three old men. From his canonical book, we stop at the legend of Wang Mang and learn the allusions to the 'Dianjiangtai' and 'Xiantouling'; some people say that from his laughter and anger, we arouse the "sex" interest in the cliché stories of "pretty daughter-in-law" and "melon son-in-law"; and from his name, we learn that in the remote Chaoyu Mountain Village, landlords and poor peasants are often relatives who do not serve five clothes. Lao Shao is an example. Before liberation, as a lower middle peasant, he worked for his uncle as a landlord. On the first floor, the 'production team held a meeting', and at the urging of the 'Four Qing' working group, Lao Shao plucked up the courage to accuse the landlord of not paying wages at the end of the year, but unexpectedly attracted not the slogan of the crusade, but a round of playful laughter, and it turned out that the villagers had long rumored that he and the landlord's mother-in-law and aunt were not in harmony. As a result, in the rolling red dust, 'class hatred' and 'wind debt' have become a mixed account. When it comes to his own life, the long-standing language is particularly simple. In his speech, he knew that he was the son of the Royal Family of the Chaoyu Wang Clan (of course, it was a landlord component), and when he was young, he also went to the provincial city of Xi'an for two years of middle school, saw the world and became a family, sighed only that his daughter-in-law was difficult to give birth, and even his son was 'Mo (no)'. His tone in the statement was flat as if he were telling someone else's story. Looking at this Ren who once had a 'classmate education' with me, he was now 'inseparable' with the illiterate old Shao, so indifferent to his past, √ the destination of his life, I was speechless, but my heart palpitated. Every day cattle herding, following a long time, high and low feet through those inexplicable bumps, each step makes me can't help but think of asking myself, can I go back to this step in his footsteps? In order to get rid of this suffocating overly strong symbolism, I would go around the long way, through the cattle, and climb straight to the top of the slope first. This kind of 'detachment' in a condescending manner broadened my horizons, but it was also this kind of childish 'unwillingness' that caused me to run into a catastrophe!