Text/Lu Fu'an
When I was a child, I was under the impression that my father was a gambler.
Listening to my grandmother, my father began to gamble money, from one dime and two cents to two dollars. Once his grandmother asked him to go to the market to sell piglets, and a litter of piglets sold for dozens of dollars. On the way back, my father saw someone pushing Pai Jiu around the circle, so he was itchy, and unconsciously fell into the trap of others, and lost the money from selling piglets. When I got home, my grandmother cried a lot, and my mother also divorced him and carried me back to my grandmother's house.
It is said that after this time, my father never gambled money again, but his temper of gambling could not be changed.
I had heard many legends of my father when I was a few years old. Once, the production team organized members to go up the mountain to kill thorn strips (a plant that can weave baskets and baskets), and at noon the production team managed rice and steamed buns with peppers. The captain joked that whoever wants to be able to eat 15 steamed buns will be rewarded with 5 work points today. Everyone did not dare to gamble, because such a large steamed bun could eat seven or eight, and 15 could not be eaten.
Unexpectedly, my father patted his chest and said, the captain speaks a lot, if I eat 15, you must reward me with 5 points (at that time, a male laborer only earned 10 points a day). The captain thought to himself that you would not be able to eat anyway and agreed with a full mouth. No one could have imagined that my father had eaten 15 steamed buns in one go and almost died.
I think my father is really stupid, for 5 points of work, even do not want to die.
What is even more legendary is that once my father made a bet with someone to sit alone in the middle of the night on a mass burial post.
The mass grave was five or six miles away from our village, and the place was overgrown with grass, eerie and terrifying, full of white bones, and lone rabbits. It is a place where the poor and the beggars from other places throw their bodies away. Only a one-foot-wide path can pass through it. At night, you can see the ghost fire on the mass burial post in the distance, as if someone is holding a candle and slowly fluttering, and you can still hear the cries of the little ghosts, which are miserable and desolate, creepy and creepy. Occasionally someone passes during the day, and they are also frightened that their hair is slightly straight, and the back of their spine is cold. No one ever dared to walk to the mass grave in the middle of the night.
Lu Xinyue of the brigade sales agency, with his own money, made a bet with his father that if he dared to sit in the mass burial post for half an hour in the middle of the night, he would lose five yuan to his father, otherwise his father would lose him a dollar.
Of course, my father would not miss this opportunity to gamble heavily, because these five dollars were equivalent to our family's annual dividends. He first drank a teapot of shochu, then found a red cloth wrapped around his waist, held a flashlight in his left hand, and a wooden stick in his right hand, and went to the mass burial post alone that night.
In the hazy moonlight, a group of villagers watching the bustle watched him enter the mass grave from a distance, all holding a handful of sweat for him. At this time, the black grunt on the mass burial post was in the middle of winter, and from time to time there were ghost fires flickering, and it felt like there was the cry of the little ghost, in fact, it was the cry of the fox, just like the child who was frightened and crying, very maddening.
After more than 20 minutes, the signal of the agreed flashlight to illuminate the sky never appeared, and everyone began to worry, afraid of making a scene. Suddenly, a bright pillar of light appeared above the mass grave, and everyone exclaimed, "Really bold!" His father became famous in world war one.
My father bought ten pounds of pork for five dollars he won with a big gamble, and gave us better food, and our family was as spacious as the New Year for those days! Even the cooking smoke in the kitchen is fragrant.
In the winter when I was eight years old, it was particularly cold, and my friends all had a beautiful leather hat. Platinum said the leather hat was precious, worth eight cents. I was so envious that I made a request when my father was happy. When my father heard me say the price, he was silent and went to roll up his horn. I know, there's no hope.
Three days later, at night, I was working on my homework under the kerosene lamp, when I suddenly heard someone shouting at me outside the door, and I hurried out the door, and it turned out that my father was drunk and playing a drunken madness in front of the sales store. My mother and I ran over quickly, and in the distance, I saw my father dancing his teeth and claws at the door of the agency store, blowing all over the sky, spitting stars all over the sky, and everyone around him clapping his hands and laughing. Suddenly, my father leaned over and fell into the snow.
It turned out that he and Lu Xinyue had made a bet that if his father could drink a bottle of four special wines (56 degrees, a bottle of 1.8 yuan) in one go, not only would the wine not cost money, but he would give his father another eight cents. Without saying a word, the father unscrewed the cap, craned his neck, and drank it in one gulp.
I think my father is really humiliating. My mother was also angry. When we lifted him up and staggered to his feet, I found my father clutching an eighty cent in his hand.
The next day my father handed me a brand new black leather hat. At that moment, my eyes were wet with tears. I also finally understood the heartache and responsibility of my father, an ordinary farmer.
My father's last big gamble was in 2006. That spring, the flowers were slow to bloom. My father was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer. He refused to be hospitalized. He smiled and said, I will gamble again, I bet that this time the disease will not be cured. But my father lost this gamble, and our hearts were broken. Two months later, he left us.
The father gambled heavily all his life, but in the hearts of his four children erected a monument with two words engraved on it: Father's love.
Lu Fu'an, a Chinese language teacher in Qishan County, Henan Province, and a member of the County Writers Association, has published more than 70 works in various media such as Writers, Zhumadian Daily, Tianzhong Evening News, and Literature Hundred Flowers Garden. In 2016, he won the second prize of zhumadian honest government poetry competition, in 2017 he won the excellence award of the first love poetry competition of Jiangnan Media, and in 2019, he won the second prize of the first national prose poetry competition of my father and mother.