Yesterday at noon, I had a small gathering with friends and ate the lamb of Suide Forty Mile Shop. Sheep face, sheep brain, haggis, lamb tripe, lamb... I asked the waiter if she had any sheep intestines, and she actually looked at me strangely twice and said: No.
So I remembered the sheep when I was a child.
When I was eight years old, in the spring, my father went to Yanwu Town to catch up with the market, and the Baishan brand bicycle carried two small lambs and sheep from the basket left and right. Just able to walk, the hair color snow as white, the eyes as black as coal, confused look up at the living people around, non-stop "babble" shouting, very cute.
My uncle's family also fed sheep, but they were straight-haired goats. It was also an early time that gave birth to lambs, and of course also goats. At this time, because the cousin wanted to eat milk, the little lamb was wearing a net cover on its mouth, and could only keep arching its mother's milk, but it could not eat a bite. Its "meal" is regularly quantified.
Watching the two cute little lambs cry out for hunger all the time, I grabbed a handful of hay to feed, but it only sniffed, and then looked up at me, a pitiful look, which caused the mother next to me to laugh. Say, take a pot and go to your uncle's house to milk the milk, it won't eat grass yet.
I took the pot and went to my uncle's house to beg my aunt and ask her to milk the milk. But she smiled and said, you want, just squeeze yourself. I thought there was no way to think about it, and I was anxious about the two lambs, so I had to walk hard to the side of the lying old goat. Who knows, as soon as I reached out and touched its milk, the old goat suddenly jumped up, kicked over the milk basin, and stepped on me, which hurt my eyes and burst into tears. The aunt saw it, smiled affectionately and said, Come and come, I will teach you how to squeeze. On the one hand, I gently hit the old sheep, gently stroked the goat's milk twice, and watched the sheep obediently standing, while demonstrating for me. I also followed her example, from top to bottom, gradually exerting force, and even successfully expressing milk.
Mother said, you should like these two lambs, and they will belong to you. Now feed it milk, wait for two days to grow grass, you cut the grass and feed it, okay? Why not, that's exactly what I can't ask for!
In the first grade of elementary school that year, I carried a small bag of "Bai Nabu" sewn by my mother every day, which contained two books of "Language" and "Arithmetic", and a stone slab for writing. When the willows in the wild turned green, they also began to learn the appearance of the eldest children, carried a small thorn cage, and went to the field to find grass. I also know a lot of grass that sheep love to eat, what sweet lettuce, the Three Realms, what bowl flowers, reed grass, cut back randomly, and then a small handful of pick up, feed the sheep. My parents saw me, and people praised me before and after me.
One afternoon after school, several classmates discussed playing the game of "hitting jujube kernels" (a traditional game of hitting a small wooden wedge cut into the shape of a jujube core with a wooden stick with a board), and they followed with a gust of wind. When I came home when it was dark, my mother saw that she had not cut the grass, and the two sheep were barking endlessly, knowing that I had been playing all afternoon, they severely punished me, which always meant that it was my business that the sheep were hungry. This made me wonder, so I was still crying before I went to sleep. But from that day on, I knew that my carefree childhood was over and that I had become a big child with family responsibilities.
Because of feeding the sheep, the farmland became my second class. From spring grass to wicker and poplar branches, green yarn tents in summer and grass valley incense in autumn, it became another world after I got out of school. This year, I got to know a lot of wild grasses and wild vegetables that sheep like to eat, almost all the crops in the village, and almost all the names of the land in the village. The water barnyards, red indigo, three-edged grasses next to the canals, the valleys, the red valleys, the grappling tigers in the fields... The frogs in the water and the cauliflower snakes in the fields seem to have the basic conditions for being a farmer. And the lambs have also changed from cute lambs to two mighty looking big sheep. When there is no green in the fields after autumn, my career of cutting grass and feeding sheep is over.
At that time, the production team still had a supportive attitude towards farmers raising sheep, after all, it was a very important source of livelihood for most families. Therefore, every year after autumn, the village will gather the sheep raised by various private families and arrange for people to carry out unified stocking. That flock is really interesting, because the sheep are big, and the sheep of each family are not easy to identify, so everyone will make a sign on their own sheep. For example, two of my sheep have red ink on their tails. And my task became to go to the production team every day after school to bring my family's sheep back. At night, the adults then feed them the rotten grain that some people can't eat, that is, the so-called "sticking autumn fat" is also. The next morning, I led them to the production team and asked them to go out with the flock to forage for food, and the cycle began.
By the time of winter break, the two sheep were fully grown. During the day it was tied under the roots of the wall, and at night it was driven into the sheepfold. Probably thanks to my labor, whenever they saw me, they eagerly licked my palm with their mouths, not knowing whether it was an expression of affection or hunger. But I know that their days on earth are running out. Sure enough, one day I came home and found that there was one less sheep. My father said that he had sold it and wanted to exchange money for new year goods. Another day when I came home, I saw another sheep lying on a high stool in front of the sheepfold, an enamel basin in front of its neck, bright red sheep blood flowing into the basin, and a familiar neighbor laughing and talking to his father. After all, I was raised by my own hands, and I really couldn't accept the fact of killing sheep, so I quietly stepped into the house, intending to avoid this bloody scene. Unexpectedly, soon, my father called out the window to me and asked me to send out the long cigarette pole in the house. Smoke rods? What to do with the cigarette poles, I sent them out with suspicion. The neighbor took the long white copper cigarette pole, and then cut a hole in the sheep's hind legs with a knife, and in one fell swoop, he inserted the cigarette pole under the sheep's skin. Only to see him also bend down, puff up his cheeks, and blow up hard. Soon the sheep became round and tumbling, a big fat man. He sharply drew out the cigarette pole, tightened the entrance to the leg with the hemp rope, and then tied a dead knot to the sheep's hind legs with the rope, and with one force, the sheep hung its head down on a wooden frame that had been set up in advance. The rest of the action was even more dazzling to me, three times five divided by two, the sheep skin was peeled, the sheep was smeared with a layer of salt, the chest was opened, and the five organs were pulled out... The courtyard was full of unconcealed sheep's breath.
The butcher finished eating and left, leaving the rest of the aftermath to his father. The five viscera are grouped into one category, and the head and hooves are classified into one category. Sheep lung sheep heart sheep heart sheep heart sheep kidney soaked with cold water, lamb tripe turned over, washed. There was still a pile of sheep intestines left, and the father did not throw it away, but tied a knot at one end, and then used a bamboo chopstick to top it, and also turned over, rolling down a field of sheep dung eggs. It's just that those intestines become only a handful after washing. In retrospect, I echoed the phrase "lice are also meat." The head hooves were even more troublesome, and the father first burned the hairs on the skin with a red-hot fire, and then used pumice stones to wipe the burn marks clean, and it took a long time to complete the work.
The next day, according to my mother's instructions, I sent two pounds of lamb to his neighbors (later, I learned that it was actually a way of selling), my family, only two pounds, or the worst blood neck. The sheepskin was hanging in the courtyard, saying that he was going to make a sheepskin jacket for his father next year. The sheep's trotters were too small to boil the "paste wax", so they stewed with the sheep's head and sheep's bones, saying that it was to be made into sheep's head meat for the first month of hospitality. After the bones of these sheep's heads are stewed, the meat is stripped off and incorporated into the pot of sheep's head meat. Father put the lamb bones into the pot again and boiled them again. It was so thoroughly separated that I called all the children in the courtyard to gnaw on the sheep bones.
I have long smelled the aroma of lamb, but I can't eat a bite, and it is also a beautiful thing to chew on the bones of the lamb. A few of us children gathered around a large basin, desperately looking for the slightest thread of lamb in the horns of the sheep bone, although we could not eat anything, but I felt that the taste was really the best taste in the world. Especially if you are lucky enough to touch the bone marrow in the bone of the sheep's stick, you will feel like you have won the jackpot. Turn the intestines of the sheep and nibble on the bones of the sheep until there is no water left of the sheep's juice. It can be seen that the idiom of "knocking on the bone and sucking the marrow" must come from an experience of life. In fact, it is not just about knocking out the bone and sucking the marrow, these gnawed sheep bones were sold to the supply and marketing cooperative (there is a bone fat society in the city, which specializes in collecting livestock bones) in exchange for money.
On the 30th of the 30th month, my father boiled the sheep into a pot and made a large pot of "haggis cutting", and the lamb carrot stuffing that the locals paid attention to eating "turned over and burned", which was the prelude to the Spring Festival of this year. And I, with the food in my mouth, even forgot the cuteness of the two lambs, and forgot the hard work of feeding the sheep for a year. I just made dumplings by chopping up all the lamb and not eating a piece of molded lamb.
That was in 1972. By the spring of 1973, although I had eaten the "turning fire" years ago, I had not turned over. In the spring, when Yanwu Town was assembled, my father bought back two sheep.