One hundred and sixty-seven snow night people do not return
In the streets and alleys of Bingyuan City, only the watchmen who kept vigil every night and the sergeants patrolling the city holding tung oil torches would leave a series of deep and shallow footprints on the snow-paved road. After a while, they were covered again.
Covered in fresh snow. In this cold night when you can't even breathe out half a foot away, if there is nothing you really have to do, no one is willing to get up from the warm quilt and the hot bed to go out and endure the cold.
This has not yet reached the coldest days in Jinzhou. At that time, the vegetable cellars of every household in Jinzhou were neatly stocked with non-perishable vegetables. The men had prepared charcoal fires to chop firewood for the winter, and hugged their mothers-in-law.
In the same bed, people are either sleeping in darkness all day long, or doing obscene things like giving birth to babies. Therefore, some Jinzhou people make fun of themselves, saying that it is no wonder that the number of people in the family is increasing year by year.
3939, barking the dog at the door, it means that in the cold weather of 39th, some children at home could not hold back their pee and urine on the kang, and the mother-in-law was too lazy to clean up, so she called the watchdog in to cause trouble. Regardless of the lack of diligence in people's hands and feet, Jin
On the coldest days in the state, it is really difficult to cut ice to get water to wash your clothes.
"It's cold and the snow is falling, be careful of the candle!" The watchman with a scratchy voice yelled this every time he struck the gong. Although it is snowing, every household is still burning the kang and making fires at night. If the fire breaks out, the house will be burned down.
Incidents happen every now and then. A few years ago, a house caught fire and burned down half of the city. When one house burned, the wind was strong at night, and dozens of houses were burned in less than half an hour. After that, there were more watchmen.
A duty to keep an eye out for fires in every home.
When the patrol lasted half a street, the watchman pulled up the raincoat on his shoulders and coughed twice. Just as he was about to shout again, he saw three people passing by in a hurry, and one of them had a hand on his neck.
There was also a wooden box hanging on it. His clothes were all solid black, and he walked quickly past him in silence.
It is probably not very auspicious for a person dressed like this to walk like this on a day like this.
On a snowy night, the lights turned on and the windows became brighter. The three or five groups of people were just like this. They did not hold lanterns in their hands, and they made crooked lines on the white street, which was unexpected.
"Go a few steps further and you'll find the one with the repaired door." The person standing on the far left stopped and stretched out a hand from his raincoat to point to the small courtyard ahead, "Do you really want to go in alone?"
"nature."
The people on the left and right stopped. Among the three, the one with the ebony box hanging in front of him breathed slowly. The coldness in his body calmed him down. After a while, he took one step forward, two steps towards the small courtyard.
"We are all outside. If you really can't do it, just say it!" The person on his left seemed a little worried, so he raised his voice slightly and said to his back.
The person walking towards the small courtyard paused for a moment, without looking back, and then continued walking forward after a while.
"This guy."
Gu Sheng, whose face was mostly covered by a bamboo hat, felt helpless. He took off his bamboo hat and stood with the person beside him under the eaves facing the street. He was careful to break off all the icebergs on his head first, otherwise they would fall down due to the heat.
If you come, you will inevitably hit people with bloody heads.
"Uncle Qi, if something goes wrong soon, what do you have to do?" Gu Sheng pulled the sleeves of the old man beside him, "Zou Yongan, his mother is not young anymore. If something happens and someone gets involved, no matter it is
Neither the escort nor my father can explain it."
"The guys who are eating are all here. Your seventh uncle has never seen any big storms.
, why do you, a little brat like you, just eat carrots and worry about it?” The old man sneered, waving his hand and flicking a layer of snow beads on his raincoat, “Scenes like this were not seen dozens of times a year in the early years.
, things have gotten better in recent years. In the escort business, who dares to pat their chests and guarantee that no one will die?"
The man with the ebony box hanging on his chest was already standing in front of the gate of the dilapidated courtyard. Through the hole in the crumbling gate, you could see the scene in the courtyard. There was no debris, and there were few holes along the stone.
There is a large well, and there is a swaying light as big as a bean in the house in the courtyard. The chopped firewood is about the same thickness and is piled up into a small mountain beside the courtyard wall. There are also adobe bricks in several places on the courtyard wall.
It collapsed, and the fallen bricks were piled in a corner of the courtyard. This was not an easy job, waiting for a man to come back and put them back on the wall.
The man in this small courtyard will never come back.
Only one of the two copper door knockers that should have been on the crumbling courtyard door is left. It has been rubbed by generations of people until it shines. It is there alone, waiting for someone to knock it. The corner of the fir door panel is crookedly carved.
The words are just obscured by age-old dirt, making it difficult for people to see them clearly.
The hand that originally raised the brass door knocker was gently put down, and he knelt down to look at the carvings on the corner of the door panel, which read the four characters "Yong'an" and "Rou Zhi" in immature handwriting.
Zou Yongan...Zou Rouzhi...that's probably the name of the brother and sister.
The copper door knocker was finally clicked, making a muffled sound on the fir door panel, but it was pitifully soft, far beyond what anyone in the house could hear. But then there was the second sound, the third sound, and a cup of tea.
Before the scene came, a young woman's clear voice came out of the house, followed by the sound of people getting up in a hurry, and the urgent voice of an old woman.
The two people under the eaves watched the courtyard door open, and the people in front of the courtyard stated their intentions.
"Uncle Qi, the medicine box is ready." Gu Sheng lowered his voice and disappeared into the shadows under the eaves, but his eyes did not leave the rather dilapidated courtyard door. "Brother Wei is not someone who knows how to cause trouble..."
"Then why did you agree to let him go?" The seventh uncle opened the medicine box again to check, "This kind of thing has always been done by the head guard and the old man in the escort agency. You young people, when it comes to matters between life and death, you have a very different perspective.
It’s still a bit shallow.”
Looking at the people in front of the courtyard gate and the people in the courtyard, they didn't say anything for a long time, and they didn't move their bodies for a long time. It wasn't until an unknown amount of time that his hands and feet were a little sore from the cold. Only then did the people standing outside the courtyard door enter the small courtyard.
The door to the backyard is closed, and you can no longer see anything inside the courtyard.
"Brother Wei said that his life was exchanged with Brother Yong'an, so he has to do this." Gu Sheng lowered his head and thought, "Besides, I believe in Brother Wei."
"This trip from Suzhou to Jinzhou has only taken less than half a year. I have never been together. How can you, a little brat like you who refuses to accept anyone, convince me?" The old doctor took out something from his body.
A long and slender hollow copper rod, one end of the copper rod looks like a small pot, and the other end is made into a round mouth, like the mouthpiece of a sheng.
Pour finely chopped yellow-brown dry grass leaves from the delicate leather bag into a small pot at one end of the copper pole, compact them carefully, and then ignite it with a tinder stick. The finely chopped yellow-brown grass leaves will burn slowly, a little.
He took a sip of the red spark from the other side of his round mouth, and the spark became brighter, white, faint, and misty, and the smoke slowly rose.
He also exhaled a puff of white smoke from his mouth. The old man showed an intoxicated look, leaning on the street wall, half-raising the copper pole with one hand, and uttered a low voice:
Qingsi only hopes to leave home and travel around the world on horseback with a sword in his back.
Right and wrong, success or failure is half-way away, and the old people return home.
Gu Sheng knew that Wu He, the old doctor of the Escort Bureau, whom he called Seventh Uncle, was originally a scholar. He gave up his studies and became a doctor after trying many times. He saved thousands of people's lives. Each doctor saved one person, just like the ritual of repairing the pulse. For those poor people who couldn't afford it, they asked the family to plant three or five apricot trees outside Bingyuan City. After practicing medicine for more than 20 or 30 years, the apricot trees have grown into a forest.
"Uncle Qi, is this?" Gu Sheng also heard the wisps of white smoke, and felt that his tense heartstrings slowly relaxed, and then his throat became itchy as if someone was scratching it with a chicken feather. He asked with a wry smile while still coughing.
"Tobacco from the south is a medicine that helps the nine orifices." The old man, who was called Uncle Qi, leaned against the wall of the courtyard and puffed away. The white smoke lingered nearby, making it difficult for people to see his face. It’s something that makes people relax and calm down, but don’t inhale too much. After all, many of the herbs that can heal people and save lives are poisonous that can kill people if taken too much.”
The old man squinted his eyes, took a final deep breath from the nozzle of the copper rod, and then gently tapped the copper rod on the wall, and the embers and ashes were sucked out together.
After refilling the front end of the copper pot and lighting it, the old man took out a piece of white gauze from the medicine box and wiped the nozzle, then handed the copper rod to Gu Sheng beside him.
The young man curiously took the copper rod, but accidentally held it too far forward and got burned. He quickly and carefully stretched out four fingers of both hands to pinch the farthest place from the copper pot, and put his mouth to the other side of the copper rod. At one end, he took a deep breath, and the spicy smoke irritated his throat, as if someone had burned extremely spicy pepper noodles in a charcoal fire.
"Try taking two more puffs." The old man smiled and looked at Gu Sheng's wrinkled features and gave this suggestion.
I tentatively took a shallow breath, and the spicy feeling was no longer so strong. It was replaced by a tingling warmth that spread from my scalp to the soles of my feet. It was like a person who had been frozen for a long time and suddenly found himself in a hot spring, feeling graceful again. It's like being in the cloud.
He greedily sucked the mouthpiece, and when he was about to take another deep breath, the old man beside him snatched the copper rod from his mouth.
"It's best to take a shallow breath when trying this thing for the first time. If you get addicted right from the beginning, it will be harmful to people." He put away the copper rods and tied the knots on the leather bags holding the tobacco. ,"listen."
Not as Gu Sheng had worried before, there was no crying woman wailing in the courtyard, only the very low sobs of the young girl, and the gentle voice of the old woman, but not much of Wei Changpan's sound.
Not far from the small courtyard, the two silent people were ready to rush into the small courtyard at any time to use medicine and stone medicine to save an old woman who was frail and had just lost her son.
The smoke is lingering, the snow is falling, and the snow falling on Jinzhou and Yuancheng has no tendency to get smaller or larger. Just like the voices in the small courtyard, it is calm, but also reveals the sobs and tears that cannot be concealed. Sad.