Xinhua and I are small, and in our local proverb, we grew up with bare butts.
Yes, Xinhua, who is one year older than me, has always been a head smaller than me, and Wenwen quietly looks like a girl.
But as long as I call him, no matter what is in the water in the tree, he will never move forward.
Because I usually cover him all the time, in his heart, I am equivalent to his patron saint, and I will never harm him.
We grew up and began to study, and Xinhua, who had been covered by me for five or six years, raised his eyebrows. Because of my academic grades, I am simply different from him, and he is still the kind of me who is on earth and he is in heaven.
In the eyes of the teachers, Xinhua is a good student, and I Xiaoguan is a bad child.
At school, Xinhua never caused trouble, but there was also a premise that I was not dragged into the water.
Once I said a few words, he still rushed forward with his head down as he did when he was a child, no matter whether there was a mountain of knives or a sea of fire in front of him.
Because of this, a good student like Xinhua has also been reprimanded by the teacher several times.
Every time, the teacher would point at me and say to him: You keep a little distance from him, at least you have to have a long brain to distinguish between good and bad.
When I was in the fifth grade of elementary school, I was going to junior high school in the second half of the year, and my grades were there anyway, and I just wanted to go outside to see and see.
I discussed with Xinhua to make some money and go outside to have some knowledge. The so-called making money is, of course, stealing the parents' family funds.
It just so happened that my mother sold a fat pig, which was originally prepared for me, and I was going to junior high school in the second half of the year, and the tuition fee seemed to be fifty or sixty yuan.
So, the money from the sale of the fat pig was unknowingly "scooped" by me.
I was going to leave in the second half of the night, and when it was time to make the appointment, Xinhua came, but empty-handed.
He still didn't dare to steal the family's money, and even persuaded me for the first time: Otherwise, let's not go.
Xinhua was ridiculed by me for a while, and even did not hesitate to shout the nickname "Hua Girl".
Even if I was alone, I still left, walked more than 20 miles overnight, climbed on the shuttle bus to the city, and then climbed on the train again without even knowing what was going on, and I really arrived in Guizhou.
The next day, I found that I was gone, and the family's money was gone, and my mother first found Xinhua.
So, under the coercion and temptation of my parents and his parents, Xinhua, whose face was drawn with several blood marks by bamboo branches, finally told my whereabouts: he went to see Huangguoshu Waterfall.
My parents set off on the same day, found someone to borrow the travel fee, and rushed directly to Guizhou. Xinhua's parents saw that something was wrong, and they also followed with the tuition fees prepared by the family for Xinhua.
I walked around Huangguoshu Waterfall for two days, and at night I found a random bush to get into and sleep. On the third day, my parents and a family of three from Xinhua found me.
The first time I scolded the traitor, of course, there was also a meal "under the yellow eel" - my dad slapped his ass with a bamboo stick.
On the way home, Xinhua carefully apologized to me, but I could say without care:
You and I are brothers and sisters, after all, we still came to Huangguoshu Waterfall together, although we were all beaten, but we also realized our ideals, and we can be regarded as the same end.
I don't know if it's a grudge or not, but my friendship with Xinhua has become more and more unbreakable since then.
It was also because we had such a feat at the age of twelve, and the names of Xinhua and I were resounded all over the township.
After the high school entrance examination, Xinhua was admitted to the most famous secondary school in the province.
I didn't even go to high school, so I dropped out of school and went home to farm, while Xinhua jumped out of the farm and became a national food eater.
In the eyes of many people, our friendship should end up here.
But every year during the winter and summer vacations, the first thing Xinhua does when he comes home is to come to my house to play with me.
We still have endless things to say, he talks about interesting things in school, and I talk about the shortcomings of parents, whose little daughter-in-law is very beautiful, and whose boy never forgets her.
Although we are already people of two worlds, our friendship has not changed in the slightest. Sometimes when I am tired, I want to go to the village orchard to pick a few pears, as long as I "give an order", Xinhua will not hesitate to turn around and go.
Of course, although he was still a student at that time, he already had a lot of face in the eyes of the villagers, and he didn't need to steal it, so he took the initiative to take it off and give it to him.
Later, after graduating from Xinhua Secondary School, I returned to our city to become a teacher, and I have been in the society for several years. Not to mention wearing colorful shirts all year round, he also likes to run around the county in several towns, and he says to others that he is looking for business, but in fact, he is just fooling.
Xinhua will go back to his hometown every time he pays his salary, and he will definitely go to my house for a trip, and his parents and my parents will hand over 100 yuan each.
Sometimes my parents ask him not to give like this, after all, you have your own home, and you are so big, so generous to give it away, where will you have the money to marry a wife in the future?
Xinhua's parents didn't say anything, because my relationship with Xinhua had already formed a kind of muscle memory in their thinking.
And in addition to the fact that I don't have any money, I take the initiative to do any heavy work in Xinhua's family as long as I know it. Although it is unreliable most of the time, the time of double robbery every year does save his parents a lot of worry.
In a blink of an eye, Xinhua and I have reached the age when it is time to start a family, he has been a teacher in a high school in the city for several years, and he has also found a colleague to be his girlfriend.
And I'm still hanging out of tune, there are a lot of girls around me, and people who will change girlfriends at two ends in three days.
On the first day of the Lunar New Year in '95, Xinhua told me that he was going to get married in the second half of the year. After drinking a few glasses of wine, he actually said hard things to me: If we don't find a reliable girlfriend, our brotherhood will be broken.
Not surprisingly, I really took care of it, and my last girlfriend became my wife.
Xinhua's wedding was also held in my hometown, and our wedding was three days apart. To put it simply, after the happy event of his family was completed, the whole set of people turned around and came to my house to continue the banquet.
We have the custom of haunting the cave house in our local area, Xinhua is thin-skinned and doesn't dare to speak, and during the whole process, almost all of them are doing it for me, helping their husband and wife block a lot of pot bottom ash.
I seem to have opened my mind overnight, and after I got married, I even had a bit of a taste of reform, in the eyes of my parents and fellow villagers, it was really "late maturity".
I was busy looking for a way without touching the ground, this time it was not a mess, but a sincere effort to earn money to support my family.
As luck would have it, I quickly got a pickup truck and started transporting it. In the late 90s and early new century, the freight industry was indeed quite profitable.
And Xinhua and his wife are both in schools in the city, and the teacher's income is not too high.
Perhaps it is the fate of our predecessors that our identities are becoming more and more disparity, but our friendship has never faded. Even if everyone is married, from wives to children, they are no different from other people's brothers.
I am from the countryside, and although family planning is strict, I have also given birth to three children, fined a lot of money, and enjoyed it.
Xinhua only gave birth to a daughter, and with the policy at the time, if he dared to have a second child, the couple would have to go home to farm immediately.
Our child was born, and although we only have the opportunity to get together during the winter and summer vacations every year, there is also a picture that makes people laugh:
My three children will call Xinhua husband and wife Daddy, and we will be called Daddy. His daughter did the opposite, calling us fathers. Not to mention outsiders, sometimes even we ourselves can get confused.
In 2007, Xinhua had an accident.
As a veteran senior teacher, Xinhua applied for a prestigious school in the provincial capital as a teacher, although the salary has increased several times, but the workload and pressure have also increased exponentially.
When people go to high places, Xinhua couples will of course think of settling down in the provincial capital, buy a house in the second year, and be busy decorating by themselves, and they are so busy that their feet don't touch the ground every day.
In order to subsidize the family, Xinhua and his wife also opened a training class, and they can earn other people's money for a few years in one summer.
Although the money was earned, Xinhua's body also collapsed.
In September of '07, he collapsed on the podium, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and left before he could be taken to the hospital, that year, he was only 40 years old, and his daughter was only 9 years old.
I received the news in the afternoon, when I was out of the car in Guangdong, left the truck in Guangzhou overnight, and rushed to Changsha by plane.
I helped deal with his aftermath single-handedly, just as we used each other as shields when we were in the cave room more than ten years ago.
But I know that in this world, my best friend is gone.
At that moment, I, who used to be a mess in reading, suddenly remembered a few sentences from Han Yu's article:
My daughter and your daughter, wait for her to marry, that's all......
In 2019, Xinhua's daughter graduated from graduate school, and I went to Guizhou to attend his graduation ceremony, and specially took her to Huangguoshu Waterfall.
I didn't go into the scenic spot, but just pointed to the pile of grass opposite the door and said to her: Back then, I hid there, and your father took my grandparents to find it and screw it home.
After graduating from graduate school, her daughter worked in Guizhou, and in 2023, she got married.
I dressed up to attend, took Xinhua's daughter by the hand and walked on the red carpet, handing her over to my husband.