One early morning at the end of August, when Bai Jiaxuan got up to wash his face and mouth, his wife Xiancao, who had risked her life to break the ban and showed signs of pregnancy, was sitting in front of the spinning wheel, humming and turning the handle. The spindle was already knotted.
The next white ear of thread the size of a wild rice plant appeared. His mother had already gotten up and was spinning her spinning wheel on the kang in the back room where she lived alone. He was sitting on the back chair where his father used to sit when he was alive, drinking strong tea and talking to his father.
He lived an early addiction to the white copper hookah left behind after his death. After his father died, he went to the back room to sit for a while every night before his mother stiffened her neck and after getting up early in the morning. The buzzing and squeaking sounds of the two spinning wheels connected and overlapped with each other.
, one sound intermittent, another sound sounded, filling every corner of the courtyard with a calm and harmonious atmosphere. Bai Jiaxuan was immersed in this ancient, distant, fresh and lively music, and his muscles and blood swelled.
Longgong Lu San packed up the plowshare ropes, took out the red horse from the horse stalls and tied it to the stone hitching post in the yard. He strode into the courtyard and asked loudly about the seeds. Jiaxuan walked out of the back room.
"You have a sip of tea first." Lu San stood in the courtyard and said he didn't want to drink it. He still asked about the proportion of wheat and peas, Erba or Panax notoginseng. Jiaxuan said: "Grow medicinal materials in this land. You don't want to use seeds."
Take it, I'll take it." He puffed out a puff of smoke, blew out the ashes in the hookah, put down the hookah, drank the last cup of tea, then walked out of the street and entered the horse horn. Lu San untied his red shirt
The horse was led and harnessed to the plow pole. Jiaxuan carried the heavy rake with iron teeth, and held a hoe and a bamboo broom under his arm. Lu San turned around and asked, "What are you doing with the broom?" Jiaxuan
He didn't explain: "It's useful if you take it." Lu San stopped asking. The master and servant walked through the streets, left the village, and walked down the river beach. The red horse dragged the empty plow and made bangs on the dirt road in the field.
sound.
The fields have changed into another look. The colorful autumn colors have faded away like feathers, and the rivers have taken on a kind of calmness after the noise. There are piles of garbage that have just been cleared from the fields along the edges of the irrigation ditches and on the well platforms.
The wheat stalks are coming out. Wheat sowing is almost over. The fields that have just been sown are exposed to wet soil. The fields that were planted earlier are already showing the tender green of the young leaves of wheat seedlings. The rainy season in autumn has come to an end, and it has long permeated the rivers and villages.
The haze and dullness in the sky have all been cleared away. The earth is simple and elegant, the sky is open and far-reaching. The air-conditioning in the morning makes people energetic.
The red horse dragged the plow stick into his own land, and Lu San inserted the plowshare into the land. He turned around and asked: "I have never planted any kind of medicine. How do you plant it?" Jiaxuan told him, it is better to plant it just like wheat.
In fine plowing, the seeds slide down one big plow or two small furrows, just like planting grains. In order to spread the seeds evenly, the seeds need to be mixed with fine soil or fine sand, because the seeds are too small. The deer calls three times.
The red horse started plowing, one plow next to the other, and the plowing was finer than the furrows of wheat. Jiaxuan looked at the plowed soil and changed his mind: "Plow it first, then rake it again, and remove the dead mud."
If the seed is broken, then dig a furrow for sowing. It is impossible to sow seeds like this." After heavy flooding in summer and autumn and trampling during harvest, the sticky yellow soil was seriously hardened, and large chunks of dead mud were turned up on the plowshares.
The hard lumps and tiny seeds couldn't break through the mud and were buried in the soil. Lu San couldn't help but ask: "What medicinal material is more delicate than wheat?" Bai Jiaxuan said: "Poppy." Bai Jiaxuan said poppy is like wheat wrapped in grain or peas.
Insipid. Lu San stopped asking. He didn’t know about opium poppy, which didn’t surprise him. Among the hundreds of Chinese medicinal materials, he couldn’t even remember ten names. Poppy was just a kind of traditional Chinese medicine, or it was precious.
Just a little bit lacking.
The sun has risen a pole higher than the top of Bailuyuan. The land of just over an acre has been plowed. The plow is unloaded and the iron-tine harrow is attached. Bai Jiaxuan pulls two ropes and directs the red horse to grind the rake again.
The ground became smooth and loose. Lu San took off the rake and put on the plow stick, and dug furrows on the land that had been plowed and sown seeds. Jiaxuan followed Lu San's butt every two small plows.
Mix the seeds with fine soil, and then use a long-handled broom to drag them along the furrow that slips through the seeds, covering the small and delicate poppy seeds with a thin layer of soil.
At this time, many men working in the fields stood at a distance and watched the strange behavior of the master and servant. Why did they sweep the furrows with the brooms used to sweep the fields and yards? The farmers were interested in these things.
They were so excited that they all rushed over to see what Bai Jiaxuan was up to. They squatted on the edge of the field, squeezed the soil, carefully picked up a few seeds that had just slipped into the furrow, twisted them in their hands, and rubbed them with their fingers.
The soil was cleaned by twisting and rubbing, and it was shiny and shiny, like a black-purple gem. They happily asked curiously: "Jiaxuan, what crops do you grow?" Jiaxuan said flatly: "Medicine." They also asked
: "What kind of medicinal materials?" Jiaxuan still said in the same tone as talking about wheat and millet: "Poppy."
After about ten days, a small green life sprouted out of the furrows that had been filled with brooms, appearing in the eyes of the owner with a shy and delicate appearance, which also made the farmers of Bailu Village
I saw the poppy. "Well, the poppy looks like this." "Yeah, it looks like mustard, but also like rapeseed." The farmer's metaphor is always appropriate. The poppy seedlings are almost the same as the mustard seedlings that choke people's nasal membranes. If Bai Jiaxuan said this
If it was "opium smoke", they would be so shocked that they would never compare it with that crappy mustard. In order to prevent them from freezing to death in the winter, Jiaxuan and Lu San used an ox cart to pull a cart of wheat straw.
into the furrow, covering the small seedlings.
In the spring of the next year, green and crystal-clear young leaves sprouted out from under the wheat straw that was soaked in mold and black by rain and snow; after the Qingming Festival, the stalks began to joint and branch out, more like a mustard or rapeseed plant shape; until
The essential difference from the latter is revealed only when they bloom. Rapeseed and mustard have common gold-like yellow flowers, but poppy blooms red, white, pink, yellow, purple, colorful flowers. After the flowers fade, they gradually
The fruit grows into a dark green oval.
After a while, people saw Bai Jiaxuan, his long-term worker Lu San, his mother who rarely went to the fields, and even his wife who was quite bulky coming to the fields together, using thick needles or triangular knives to pierce the dark green ovals.
They scrape off the thick, milk-like slurry that flows out from the cracked fruit. The family of four leaves the village at twilight every morning, and returns to the house together when the sun comes up. This seems to add to the
The mysterious color of this strange medicinal material. No one could figure out what diseases could be cured by collecting that milky white slurry. They just repeated to each other mysteriously: "That's poppy. Poppy is poppy. It's medicine."
At night, when Jiaxuan was simmering and processing the slurry in a small iron pot according to his father-in-law's instructions, a strange and faint aroma almost made him intoxicated. His mother, Bai Zhao, was also intoxicated on the Kang in the back room, sitting on the stove.
I was also intoxicated by the Wu's fairy grass that I used to pull the bellows. The faint fragrance spread from the courtyard, and spread to most of Bailu Village in the gentle night breeze in April. Both adults and children wrinkled their nostrils and greedily absorbed the beautiful fragrance.
Everyone is intoxicated by the air. It is a smell that once people smell it, they can't put it down. When they smell it, they immediately get rid of all their worries and become ecstatic. Get up early the next morning, in Ma Ma Liang
In the streets and alleys, the farmers seemed to suddenly realize it, repeating over and over again: "Poppy is opium."
Bai Jiaxuan put the successfully refined and processed opium into a porcelain jar. The porcelain jar was put in a sack, slung over his shoulder, and went into the city in a bullock cart.
Bai Jiaxuan married back his seventh woman, Wu Xiancao, from the mountains, and brought back poppy seeds at the same time. People were secretly discussing whether that very water-colored woman would become another dead ghost under Bai Jiaxuan's poisonous barb. No matter what, they never thought of it.
There was a packet of poppy seeds in the pocket under his blue robe. When his father-in-law, shopkeeper Wu, decided to marry his daughter to him, he also gave him the poppy seeds. His father-in-law said that he went to Shangzhou and went to Hankou at the beginning of the year.
At that time, he spent money to get this pack of poppy seeds. He said that the climate in the mountains was too cold and the poppy seedlings could not withstand the severe cold of snow and ice. The climate in Bailuyuan outside the mountains was just right. Poppies, like wheat, were sown in late autumn and would be harvested around the time of the next year's wheat harvest.
Harvest, any land and climate suitable for the growth of wheat are also suitable for growing poppy. He emphasized that he bought it specifically for his benefactor, the Bai family, and spent yellow goods as well as flowers. He taught him planting, management, harvesting, especially refining and processing.
As for the sales method, there is no problem at all. Whether it is in the countryside or in the town, rich or poor, ordinary people or dignitaries, they are all looking for this kind of thing. Some people smoke it, some resell it, and in drug stores
Not to mention how much you can harvest. As for the benefits and brilliant prospects of growing poppies, my father-in-law Wu Changgui didn't mention a word. Everyone knows the weight of this thing. The more expensive the gold, the more expensive the opium.
Bai Jiaxuan walked into the Kangfuyuan Traditional Chinese Medicine Shop with his clothes on his back. This was the delivery point established by his grandfather when he led his father to purchase Chinese medicinal materials in Panlong Town. The relationship of mutual trust has been established for many years. He first reported his grandfather's name, and then his father's name.
Finally, he gave the name of his father-in-law. Shopkeeper Kang of Guan Yuan met him specially, and appointed a clerk to buy the opium immediately. He also enthusiastically pointed out the technical shortcomings of his low refining quality and told him that he had a good grasp of the heat.
It's important. Bai Jiaxuan said that this was the first time to test the fire, and it would definitely be better next time. When he went out, his heart dropped. The silver coins in the bag were much heavier than the can of opium he brought.
For three consecutive years, Bai Jiaxuan planted more than ten acres of water land in the river with opium poppies, and only grew food on drylands and original slopes. The huge profits from poppy cultivation were more tempting than the aroma of opium. He planted one acre of water on one acre of water.
The silver dollars sold for the opium harvested and refined in the fields can buy back the wheat that can be produced on more than ten acres of water land. The value of the opium grown on more than ten acres of water land is enough to be worth more than a hundred acres of land.
Of course, Bai Jiaxuan would not be so stupid as to spend all those white silver dollars to buy wheat. He completely renovated the old ancestral house, removing the moss-stained old tiles and replacing them with new ones.
The village's kiln ordered new tiles, and the adobe front eaves were removed, and screen-style carved doors and windows were installed. The halls and wing rooms of the courtyard took off the adobe tires and gave them an elegant atmosphere.
In the spring, the renovation and renovation work of the hall and wing rooms was completed, and in late autumn and early winter, the renovation and renovation of the gatehouse and gatehouse were carried out. The gatehouse was the most thorough renovation. It was originally made of adobe covered with blue bricks, but now it is entirely made of blue bricks.
All the parts above the lintel were polished by hand. The craftsmen used their best efforts and skills to carve patterns. There is a white crane on one side and a white deer on the other side. Only one original thing of the entire gatehouse is retained, which is the carved pattern.
There is a jade plaque with the four words "Growing and Reading Heirloom". It was the handwriting that my father specially asked him to write when my brother-in-law won the imperial examination. After renovation, a complete courtyard house has become firmly entrenched with its attractive and majestic appearance.
In the alley of Bailu Village.
The horse barn was expanded in the spring of the next year. A row of spacious adobe tile houses for storing wheat straw and dry soil were built in the horse barn; a wall of wooden boards was also built around the drying field and the horse tethering field. The red horse was born again.
The next brown-red mule foal was having fun in the newly enclosed drying field.