I don't remember exactly what year it was, but the town of Shujigou began digging three wells: one under the primary school road, in front of the small railway station, one near the timber mill, the old bathhouse, and one in the square next to the avenue in the 104-family neighborhood. These three large wells are all industrial water sources, specifically the tap water system for the town government, primary schools, health clinics and mine offices, rather than residents' domestic water.
At that time, we always passed by the first and second wells that were being dug when we went to and from school, and people were scrambling to get busy, and the excavated loess was piled up on the side of the road, old and tall, so that we children rushed up to visit the little people in the deep pit. It is said that many workers were drawn from various units, and even recruited some family members of workers as temporary workers, including mothers and aunts from neighboring families. A few years later, my mother said that one of the most regrettable things in her life was that this temporary worker did not last to the end, because at that time, our brothers were still young, and the housework was heavy, and they could only give up halfway. And the aunts who persisted eventually became collective workers, and they were paid until they retired. For this reason, the mother is very inferior.
In addition to the three large wells above, the townspeople rely on the general well for water, no need to repeat, you will also know that the well is erected high along the side of a column (usually a thick iron pipe that can hold each other with two hands), with pulleys on it, a thinner iron pipe or wooden pole, a rope tied at one end, and a stone fell - to borrow the words of Gu Shouhong, a classmate who prefers science in my class: to draw water according to the principle of physical lever. Of course, there are also reels, but they are rare. I don't know how many such wells there are in the whole town, at least twenty or thirty, at least every residential area, point will have it, and the larger one must have more than one.
There are two wells under the grain station where my family lives, which are located on the side of the Liang Gong Wu family under the small train road and the road in front of the grain station, and the construction year is similar. What about distance? The former is a hundred meters away from my home, not far away. The latter came out of my family's house, along the alley at the head of Yang Baidong's house, passed the old Li family, the old Jin family, the old Guo family, and the old Wei family in the lower yard, and then crossed the road in front of the grain station, although it was not far, but it was uphill.
We usually prefer to go to the latter, which is what the idiom book says about giving up near and far.
Although the well next to Liang Gong's martial family is close and the road is flat, but to walk in front of seven or eight homes, it is inevitable to meet some neighbors, which not only has to say hello, but also dodges, afraid that the water in the bucket will splash on people and the yard. Especially in the summer, people are willing to eat in front of the door, there is a table on the ground, there is a bench around, it is not very convenient to carry water through, and it is not a trip - whose water tank can not hold three picks and two picks! Moreover, in these two rooms, each trip has a female classmate, who walks through it on a toddler, which is very faceless. But Sun Peng was the exception, because his family had a large garden next to Liang Gongwu's house, planted a lot of vegetables, and went there to fetch water, and by the way, he also saw if his own vegetables had been stolen, or let the pigs and cattle arch the fence.
If the husband is close, then there are many tourists, and if the danger is far away, there are few. Is this what Mr. Wang Anshi said? In contrast, carrying water along the well in front of the grain station is equivalent to walking around the scenery. After all, there is the only grain station in the town, the only middle school, the only road, even if you can't see any big scenery, there will occasionally be rags, sugar blowers, monkeys, curium pots and bowls, and even the People's Liberation Army stationed in the nearby Mozh Red Mountain, driving green convertible cars from the road, they either come to the town to show movies, or play basketball games with the factories and mines here. In this way, the pace under your feet naturally picks up so as not to miss a movie or a ball game. In addition, wang Huajun's family next to the well is a commercial household (his father is the accountant of the shop in the town, known as the shop Xiao Wang), although his family is not large, but it is separated by a small room to open a commissary (business acumen can be seen), retail tobacco, alcohol, sugar, tea oil, salt, sauce and vinegar, which is the only one in our next piece, we went here to fetch water, and by the way, we also bought some urgently needed supplies for the family.
Wang Huajun is one or two years older than me, and he is a classmate of Yang Baidong. Sometimes, when I play with Yang Baidong, I will run into him, although I can't say how good it is, but it is also familiar. But then we stopped coming, because that winter, we played with bone ice along the edge of the well (Manchu custom: on the night of the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, children are accompanied by a group on a frozen river or rolling ice along the edge of the well to eliminate a year's disease. Proverb: Bones and bones, the more you live, the younger you are. In order to compete in wrestling, I actually threw him taller than me down on the edge of the well, which made the shopkeeper Xiao Wang very angry and led his son to my house to complain. Since then, I have not gone to his house to buy anything.
Now I think it is indeed a little afraid. You know, at that time, the so-called well was only blocked by four wooden planks, and it was only higher than the neck...
Later, I don't know when, the town is popular again to dig a well, because going to the well to carry water is after all a manual work, there is no lack of danger, and many children with age, also go to school and work in other places, there are only the elderly at home, and draft water has become a problem. The town's water supply project did not introduce residents, only their own way, fortunately, there is no shortage of iron pipes in the mine, there is no shortage of skilled craftsmen, everyone will make their own wellheads: more advanced like gourds, ordinary points of the crisp large pipe sleeve small pipes, pressurized water levers are also iron pipe welding, and then brushed with gold powder and silver powder. When digging a well, it is also the neighbors who help each other, three or five days, or even a week to dig a well. For convenience, the well is often hit in their own kitchens. And because of the compulsion, there was only one person in the well, the pickaxe was planed, the shovel shoveled the soil, and then a basket was pulled out by the person above with a rope. Sometimes, even if the water is out, it depends on the amount of water and decides whether to dig again. In many cases, it is felt okay to bury the water pipe and seal the ground, but after a few days, the amount of water drops significantly, so that the water cannot be pressurized. There are also some that the water is always unclear, and the yellow soup is also undrinkable. The most embarrassing and the most embarrassing thing was to dig a dry well, and in vain, I had to change the land and fight hard.
Every house in our family has drilled a well, but it didn't take a few years, and it was all abandoned. Later, everyone cleared the old well in the former garden of Sun Peng's family and reopened it (not to say old!). But before Sun Peng's family moved in, there was a family surnamed Li, at that time, but we were still too young to know who had drilled the well, anyway, it was sealed with an iron plate for a long time, and only a rusty well head was exposed on it). In memory, the amount of water in this well is not very large, so except for the four houses we use this trip, other families rarely come to fetch water, but because of the proximity to the railway, one autumn, the firewood stack in the south of the railway was on fire, and this well played an irreplaceable role.
Just as I was about to finish writing this, Gu Shouhong called and said that there was a well next to his house that used to draw water, which was not very deep. Although Gu Shouhong's family is not far from my home, because there are several vegetable fields and several peasant households in the middle, his family is counted as the upper piece. Although I often go to the film to play, I have no impression of the well where the reels are used. Gu Shouhong said that the well, someone had jumped down, was a girl he knew, studying in high school. It was one evening, before Gu Shouhong entered the house to eat, he saw this girl and a male classmate talking at the well, and not long after, he suddenly heard someone shouting: Help! Someone jumped into the well! Gu Shouhong rushed out of the house at the first time, came to the well, shook the rudder violently, and finally rescued the girl.
I said, did you save that male classmate?
Gu Shouhong said that the male classmate did not jump.
I said, as if you knew something was going to happen. Girls look good.
Alas, it's been many years. Gu Shouhong hung up the phone.
Loop
There is only one river in the town, flowing down the ditch from the mountain, thin, along the rolling foothills of the north mountain, to the town, to be exact, to the small railway station opposite the health clinic room began to relax, but it is only four or five meters, step on a few stones can pass. Further down, after the last trip of the 104 houses, when they reached the wall of the middle school, they expanded a little more, and then the shore people built a wooden board bridge: on both sides were abandoned rails, and the planks were sandwiched in the middle. At this point, the river has some appearance, and can be paved straight through the town, until it turns more than thirty degrees under a gray-brown stone stone at the mouth of the bear's stomach ditch, and it runs side by side with the road leading to the outside of the town. Not far enough, merging into another river.
The river flows down the Red Mountain of Mozhi, passes through more than a dozen villages, and joins the Hun River in a place called Black Stone Wood.
We don't know what the name of that river is. Maybe there's no name. What the name of the river that flows through the town is, we don't know. We collectively refer to them as the Great River, the Loop.
Let's go! Go catch fish in the big river.
What about my mom? Went to Hetao to wash clothes.
We always say this.
As you know, my family lived in the white ash house in front of the grain station, there were four in all, and my family had the west end. In addition to the vegetable garden, the west end is a drainage ditch, so in and out of the east end, through Liu Bo's grandson Yang Baidong's three front doors, to the alley of the lower courtyard. Further down, there is the road. On the upper side of the road is the grain station, below is the middle school, if you go to Hetao, follow the sheep gut trail along the wall of the middle school, through the well and a piece of land, you will arrive.
Like The Railway Avenue, Hetao is a frequent place for us half-grown children.
Swimming, catching fish, herding ducks and geese, washing clothes, scouring the house, picking wild fruits in the mountains behind the school, picking wild vegetables, picking mushrooms, and even beating birds with a slingshot, will come here. The above, I am not very good at, such as catching fish, playing birds, there is very little participation, that is, the swimming that my partners like, I basically do not, even if I put my dog on it. And the ducks and geese, the raccoons wash the clothes, wash the family's shi, these daily tasks can not be less, because there are no girls in my family, my mother is frail and sick, my father goes to work, my brother goes to school, these things that boys despise naturally fall on me.
But I still often go to Hetao with my friends, dig the riverbed with them, move stones, build dams, make the water grow taller, and then watch them throw off their pants and plunge into the water, envious. Of course, at this time, I must have been sitting bare-ass on the rocks in the river, burying my head in the water from time to time and practicing holding my breath. Finally, one day after school at noon, My grandson Liu Bo and I did not go home, nor did we go to the loop behind the middle school, but went straight to the deep water at the mouth of the bear's stomach ditch, stripped naked, climbed on the head of the hammer, and jumped for life - as a result, my right knee was scratched by a glass ballast at the bottom of the water, and blood flowed out. Sun Peng bandaged my wound with a red scarf, and Liu Bo helped me carry my school bag and limped home...
There is a cave on the stone pot at the gate of the bear's stomach ditch, and it is said that there are monsters living there, because every day before sunrise, there is often white gas wafting out of the cave, accompanied by an inexplicable sound, like a fairyland. We always want to see it. One afternoon, Sun Peng's brother Sun He and Yang Baidong's third brother Yang Bailiang decided to take us with them. Without a flashlight, we lit a few sheets of linoleum paper as torches, and with sticks and stones in hand, we shouted and cautiously probed in. Naturally, there were no demons and ghosts inside, only dozens of bats rampaged, but this really frightened us.
It was later learned that the cave was not naturally formed, but a cave that the exploration team exploded with gunpowder to find the veins of the Mine.
After that, I never came here to swim (to be precise, a bath), let alone enter the cave. If you go to the bear's belly ditch to play, or go to the field to dig vegetables and fight pig grass, you will only look at the opening of the hole hidden by weeds and grass from a distance. Occasionally there were pheasants rising and falling, but I couldn't catch them. As I said earlier, this is not my strong point. Unlike Sun Peng, he once hit a fat pheasant here, using his old cannon.
Sun Peng not only has accurate marksmanship, but also hits sharply with a slingshot, unlike Me and Liu Bo dragging mud and water. Although Liu Bo and I also had slingshots, not only did we rarely hit birds, but we were often broken by leather bands and even scratched by stones that bounced back. Sun Peng also often makes slingshots, using hardwood forks and rubber tubes on discarded stethoscopes by medical staff at the health center, or belts in bicycles, and the bullet pocket is also an oval shape of leather gloves, in short, very exquisite. However, such a good east, he is not willing to give us, but carry the pants pocket to Hebei along the old single family. The north bank of the river is along the north bank of the Loop. The old Single Family Xiaofuzi was a few years older than us, and I had one term with my third brother, My Third Brother Sun Peng Brother Liu Bo, but I dropped out of school because I did not finish junior high school due to polio. Xiao Fuzi is very smart, and can also make slingshots and fishing net harpoons, so Sun Peng is willing to play with him, which can be described as technical exchange.
In the impression, I have also been to the old single home many times, but not necessarily to learn any experience - can not learn ah! Go, often because of borrowing something, such as washing the black work clothes that my father wore under the well in the river, and suddenly the mallet was washed away by the water, and I couldn't chase it back, so I had to step on the boardwalk bridge to his house to borrow it. Sometimes there was no one at home, the courtyard door was open, and I just took it for myself. Because the old Shan family is a worker household like us, it feels closer, unlike several other peasant households.
In fact, although Sun Peng and Xiao Fuzi are skillful and can make slingshots and others, they will certainly not make dagger gunpowder guns. It is the bigger children who can do this, or they are no longer children, but the youth of society. They used steel plates from cars to polish daggers, stainless steel tubes and bicycle chains to make streak guns capable of turning, and of course only gunpowder, no bullets. And with the repeated crackdowns, they eventually disappeared.
In the town of Shujigou, where I have lived for sixteen or seventeen years, there have not been many serious natural disasters. The 1976 Haicheng earthquake hit the area and had no consequences except for panic. What about floods? It happened. At that time, I always felt that the summer was rainy, for ten days, or even dozens of days. There is no doubt that this will have a serious impact on the peasants' harvest, and even we working households will be bored. The rain did not stop, and when she could not get out, my mother took a kitchen knife from the kitchen and threw it hard under the fence in front of the door, which was said to be the way God would blink his eyelids and drive away the clouds and stop the rain. If, by chance, the rain stopped, or we gradually became smaller, we would rush out of the room, holding plastic buckets and fences in our hands, and run to the loop. Yes, let's go catch fish!
By this time, the flood had overflowed the riverbed, flooding the fields on both sides. Fish, there must be. I don't know how to do it, but I think it's funny, or I can't help but do it — fish are white! The old Shan family and a few families living on the north shore could not take care of this, they were using basins and scoops of water from the house to the outside, and the wooden bridge in front of the door had long disappeared. Of course, the bridge will be rebuilt in the future. Rails and planks, ore will also be given again.
It's summer and everything seems to be okay.
If it is winter, the ice surface has not yet frozen, and there is no way to do without a bridge. On three or nine days that year, a farmer on the north bank went to a friend's house in Xiongzhugou to drink, and on the way back he fell into the glacier, slept all night, and never woke up.
(Originally published in Prairie Magazine, No. 4, 2020, No. 669)
About the Author:
Cheng Yuan, editor, writer, cultural tourism planner, ink lover. Literary works have appeared in dozens of newspapers and periodicals across the country, such as Shanxi Literature, Fujian Literature, Northern Literature, Yalu River, Novel Forest, West Lake, Mangzhong, Contemporary Chinese Ecological Literature Reader, Southern People Weekly, Chinese Culture Daily, Liberation Daily, etc., and some works have been serialized in newspapers, columns, and annual selections or awards. Main works: "Towards the Disaster Area - Diary of the 5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake", "Pearls at the Bottom", "Life with a Glass of Wine". The collection of essays and essays he edited, "Alive, Walking and Thinking", won the first Most Beautiful Book Award of Liaoning Publishing Group. He currently lives in Shenyang.