Stone mill and brick mold
Author | Yang Yagui
Stone mill
Some time ago, I went to work in Gaoshan Miao Village in Chang'an, and on the side of the road outside a family's house, I saw a stone mill used in the fields in the old days. This stone mill is really regular, about 25 centimeters thick in diameter and about 180 centimeters in length, and it must have been abandoned by the owner for more than forty years.
I like it.
Ask the owner, this object, someone must have bought it, right? Yes, there are several people. How much to bid? Two hundred, the price is low, not sold.
At the end of the day's work, I contacted the master: 200 yuan, can sell me and take away. No, it's too much, let's add more. Can't add, the mill is really good, but there are only stone mortars at both ends, and there is a lack of iron hoof fossa, if not lacking, you can add some price.
Arrived, two hundred dollars, got to the top of the loading car body, the rope was tied, and the car was tuk-tuked home. I thought to myself, the transaction was lower than the expected price, and the silver was saved 60 yuan. Flat against the courtyard wall, it is a section of stone, and the fart is not used.
And I thought, pay five thousand yuan, hire a stonemason to make a piece, do the stonemasons have this skill regardless of it, five thousand yuan, can you beat it? Sneered again, isn't this his own lift? How to ask a blacksmith to play a seedling embroidery needle with a thousand yuan is a kind of quiz question!
This is off-topic crooked remarks. The main idea and the final result is that he has a very fine stone utensil of the agricultural era, and he can look at it at his leisure, or sit on it, and use his brain that is no longer sensitive to reminisce, to think...
A pair of neck flail shafts are struck with the back of an axe, and the shaft head of the iron wood is clamped into the "cow's hoof nest" at both ends of the stone mill, and the small wooden wedge clamps the shaft head. Then the bull hangs the rope, and a whip is raised in the air, and the whip is crunched, and the man's mouth shouts: "Deer." The big rhinoceros slowly combed the spring breeze that had not been blowing for a long time, and then lined up one by one... The wheat is still dormant, and the large and small clods of soil between the wheat, rolled by stone mills, are all fine and flat. After a while, the shock arrived, the empty wheat root all ate the solid soil, the spring rain moisturized and sprouted, and the wheat jumped high every day...
I walked behind the mill, whip in one hand and rope in the other, controlling the direction of the ox's pull, the sun was sunburned on the black cotton, and my back was warm. This coarse black cotton jacket was exactly the one my grandfather wore, and I wore it to fit just the right size. The throat suddenly had some itching, so he coughed up an old phlegm, called a board, Qin people were heroic, Qin cavity was open, that slow board, it shook the wisps of spring breeze on the Bali Plain, wave by wave.
Brick mold
This location is halfway up the slope of the Yangyu Ladder Gully.
In previous years, the government helped scattered households to move to the bottom of the mountain, and the old houses with civil structures were empty and had no demolition value, and they were all abandoned one after another, and they were allowed to erode by wind and rain.
When I found it, it was reclining on the eaves of the owner's gallery, surrounded by debris such as worn-out clay urns, old porcelain bowls, and rotten waste boxes, covered with thick dust, with traces of rain drifting on it. The owner abandoned them along with the old house. The door was open, the room was full of wolves, and after the tall and low weeds in the yard had dried up last year, they were standing in the wilderness, and some new grass had just popped out a little faintly green in the dead grass.
This is a mold for making bricks in the old days.
I walked up and picked it up in both hands. The workmanship is extremely regular, the mouth edge of the mold, very carefully nailed a layer of iron strips, the intention is to fill the brick mud when making bricks, and scrape off the excess brick mud with wood scraping, so as not to wear the mouth edge of the mold. One body of two bricks, shaped like a thin brick used in Chinese-style architecture.
Thin bricks are generally used for two purposes, one is to wrap the appearance of the Huji wall to protect the soil wall from rain. The second is to spread on the rafters of the roof, and the use is different, so the name is different, called the lookout brick.
That afternoon, he moved with me to my house. I asked my late father's junior brother, the eighty-year-old five-step chapter father, to judge, the old man forced the saliva to collect, leaned against the wall with his crutches, stretched out his rough big hand, trembled and touched it a few times, his mouth was unclear, and the words could still be distinguished: good workmanship, good wood, catalpa wood. The catalpa tree, which I recognized, stood tall, and on a summer day, among the dense leaves, bunches of cowpea-like pods were formed. The leaf juice does not smell good, but it can be used to dye cloth. The material of the catalpa wood board is moderately soft and hard, and the coefficient of thermal expansion and contraction in cloudy, rainy and snowy is small, and the box is not easy to crack and walk. I found the meter ruler and carefully measured the total length of the mold to 71.5 cm, and the length, width and thickness of the single brick were 25× 14.5x4.8 cm.
That night, I slept rather drowsy. It was a summer evening, and apparently our production team had started making bricks again and preparing to burn the kiln. The brick and mud were stepped on by people and animals, and they were pounded softly and softly. Shōji was a mechanic, wearing a white shirt of coarse cloth, his back was wet with sweat, and his waist was tied with an apron made of coarse cloth, which was covered with mud and splashed with mud on his chest and collar. Mud Xingzi's face is soaked with sweat, that face, like a five-flowered cat, only the eyes are closed, this big man bends his waist low, his hands dig down a piece of mud on the side of the mud basin, his arms are raised at the same height as his eyes, he falls into the mold mortar on the crime, and then bends down to dig mud and drop mud, next to take the wooden mud scraper, hold it in both hands, only scrape from front to back, the excess mud beyond the mold surface is scraped off together, and falls to the mud basin with his hands.
Flat-headed Lili lean barefoot, trotting all the way over, pinching some grass and wood ash next to the case evenly sprinkled into the surface of the mold left and right, the empty mold was placed on the crime next to the raw stick, picked up the mold filled with bricks and mud, turned around and ran. Thirty or forty meters away, he bent down to touch the side of the mold to the ground, snapped it backhanded, and slowly lifted the spoon, and the newly made brick blank, fluted neatly, and the brick blank that was previously buckled on the big scene, lined up with a regular square array. And the beads of sweat on Lili's dark and swarthy back arm sucked the sunlight crystal shining.
Also carrying the brick fight was a sixteen or seventeen-year-old boy named Chongxin, who was their apprentice. This batch of bricks was abandoned, and Shengzhi and Lili were all off work. The sun-dried bricks were still fired by Henan master Song Changming. The letter that hired the old Song may have just come out of Tongguan, but Chongxin came to the brick yard alone every day at noon on the big red sun, did not eat or drink, and used brick bricks to fire the mold of the brick kiln, today persuaded to return, tomorrow again, the captain said, this baby wants the daughter-in-law's head to be stimulated, so it will obviously be stupid. When people get up in the morning, in a large field, two large brick kiln models stand, which are made of tens of thousands of bricks stacked on top of each other. People are so tired that they snore in the kiln model. The storm suddenly came, the kiln mold collapsed instantly, and I shouted: Save people first, save people first! Just woke up. Chongxin didn't build a model, and I was still lying in bed, my mind a little drowsy.
It's all old things, and now Chongxin is nearly seventy, full of sparse hair. Shengzhi and Lili have been in the past for many years, and their grandsons and bones are all half a big man. That year, handmade bricks and tiles became their swan song, and the craft was lost in their son's generation.
—END—
【Author】Yang Yagui, who has published a variety of prose works in newspapers and magazines and the Internet, currently lives in Lantian County, Shaanxi.
Source: Reading Village, copyright belongs to the author.