Luo Fu came to Luojiawa in Linshan Town with his remarried mother when he was eight years old.

Since his mother became pregnant and gave birth to a younger brother, Luo Fu has been treated by his elders for a long time, and although his small body is not tall, he also has a shoulder that can be picked and carried. In order to be able to eat at home, I would pick up bundles of firewood and carry them home on the way back and forth to school every day.

Gradually, the height did not grow, but the waist and back became wider. When the children in the same village saw that he was strong, no one dared to bully him anymore, but they just hid behind his back and called him "Big Embryo". As a result, there were many shouts, and the old and young in the village also called him a big embryo, and it sounded more like praising him for his size, and he gladly accepted it.

Perhaps because he has suffered too much, Luo Fu knows how to cherish the opportunity to read more than other children.

Maybe children who are sensible early will be faster to learn knowledge. Luo Fu helped the family work, and he could only go to school every once in a while, but he didn't fall behind in his studies, and he was among the best in the return exams.

Children with good grades are loved by teachers, and seeing Luo Fu pouring cold water all day long, he knows that he is hungry, and the teacher who teaches will always stuff him with half a sweet potato or half a tortilla or something in private.

Since he was appreciated by his teacher, Luo Fu, who was not treated by his elders at home, was like a spring breeze, even if it was just that bite of tortillas, it also made him more attentive to reading.

I stumbled and couldn't stick to the college entrance examination, and my grades have been excellent. But because his stepfather's grandfather was a landlord and also served as the principal of the party school who betrayed the party, Luo Fu was directly disqualified from the exam because of this family composition problem.

When the head teacher pleaded with the principal, Luo Fu carried a few books on his back and walked out of the school lonely.

When I got home, I didn't talk to anyone, but I went up the mountain with a sickle to cut the cow's grass.

The cow dung was weighed and counted, and the cattle farmers in each team cut all the cattle grass around the village. Luo Fu came to the eaves mountain at the east end of the village alone, leaned over and cut the cattle grass on the bank, although he did not speak, his heart was like ashes.

remembered that because of the low family composition, he was not qualified to wear the portrait badge of a great man since he was a child, and he was just coldly regarded at home, but he didn't expect that because there was no portrait of a great man in the school, he had to be inferior every day.

I was depressed in my heart, but I was careless, and I rolled down. Fortunately, the career is not high, and most of them are yellow mud, but their lives are unhindered. However, the edge of this cow grass was like a jagged tooth, but it cut off the eyelid of Luo Fu's left eye.

He sat up from the mud and tried to open his eyes, but his drooping left eyelid had lost its flesh and could no longer open it. Blood was hot all over his cheeks and slid down his neck.

"Sir, what's wrong with you?" asked a woman's voice.

Luo Fu turned his head and saw a girl from his open right eye, climbing and jumping to him from the top of the road, with an anxious face?

This woman's Luo Fu naturally knew her, the girl had attended two night classes he taught before, and Luo Fu had gone up the mountain with the villagers to find her not long ago.

I saw her squatting down to look at his bloody eyes, holding his face and fiddling with her fingers, looking at it carefully and saying, "It's okay, it didn't hurt my eyes, but my eyelids were broken." With that, she stood up again and searched around, and finally pulled a handful of blades of grass from the cliff wall and put it in her mouth.

She chewed her mouth and walked back to him, spit out the chewed blade of grass in the palm of her left hand, leaned over to him and said, "This is what I taught me, I don't know if it's good or not, but it can stop the bleeding." I use this compress when I'm hurting. ”

At this time, where would Luo Fu care about this, even if he was not blind, he would just make a living in the future.

She wiped her right hand on the clothes on her side, told Luo Fu not to move, raised her right hand and carefully bulldozed Luo Fu's eyelids to make the wound fit neatly, and then applied the blade of grass in the palm of her left hand to Luo Fu's eyes.

She pressed Luo Fu's eyes with her left hand, turned her head left and right to look for it, but there was no "bandage" in her hand, she gritted her teeth, picked up the corner of her clothes, put it in her mouth and tore open a strip of cloth that was not neat.

Luo Fu only felt that the hand pressing his left eye was very warm, warm enough that the temperature could penetrate the blades of grass and enter his eyes, a little numb and a little itchy.

When she was bandaged properly, looking at Luo Fu at this time, she burst out laughing.

Luo Fu asked her what was wrong, she shook her head and said it was fine, but she hadn't bandaged her head, and the bag didn't look good.

She stood up, took the sickle and found a way down, helped Luo Fu up the smooth mountain road with a deep foot and a shallow foot, and helped him tie up the cow grass before turning and leaving.

Luo Fu looked at her back and shouted, "Xiu, how many feet of cloth can I find to return to you?"

She was in the distance, the torn corners of her coat fluttering in the wind, and she looked back and smiled, "Sir, you better watch out for your flesh and skin." With that, he continued to walk away.

Watch out for your own flesh. Does she let herself be careful of the wound, or does she imply that I will suffer from the flesh and skin when I take the cloth at home? Maybe it's both, Luo Fu thought like this, and what came to his mind the most was the smile that came to her back as she was blown by the mountain breeze. Squatting down and carrying the cow grass on his shoulder, Luo Fu went home with one eye half-open.

When he got home, his stepfather didn't ask Luo Fu's eyes and ignored them.

Maybe it was Xiu's herbs that worked, and it didn't take a few days for Luo Fu's eyelids to really grow again, and what was even stranger was that there was not even a trace left.

……

Later, the package production was delivered to the household, Luojiawa was located in a hilly and mountainous area, and the family's fields were not enough to plant, so Luo Fu went to learn carpenter.

As the old saying goes, if you want to learn a craft, you must first eat three catties of soil ash. But Luo Fu is not afraid of hardship, but he is afraid of hunger. Although the master is fierce, he can manage the food to his heart's content. He worked hard for two years and took care of farm work for the master. It wasn't until the following year that he began to do the actual apprenticeship.

After Luo Fu left school, he also took his apprentices and went to Jiangnan to work for two years and save some money.

When he returned to Luojiawa, he still remembered his original words and sent a few pieces of cloth to Xiu.

At this time, Xiu was already slim, because the eldest of the family had married to other places, and the two younger siblings were still studying, so Xiu had become the labor of the family, and it had delayed getting married.

When Luo Fu returned home, he discussed with his family that he would build a house and marry a daughter-in-law.

The stepfather didn't refute, but just dropped a sentence: "The family has no money, if you borrow money to repair the house and get married, you have to pay the debt yourself." ”

Now Luo Fu is in the prime of life, as long as the family is willing to nod, he is not afraid of borrowing.

At that time, the best houses in the countryside only needed some cement bricks for the load-bearing walls, and the other upstairs and downstairs houses were still mainly carpentry.

He took his apprentices and worked as carpenters during the day and dug up the sand in the river at night.

Within half a year, a set of two-storey, single-door compound houses were built beautifully, with eight wings and two lobby houses, enough for parents and two brothers to become a family.

Luo Fu saw that the house was solved, but his wife was still lacking, so he started to run to Xiu's house when he was free to help with farm work. Xiu's parents also understand that their daughter is going to marry when she grows up, and marrying someone in this village may be able to help the family do some work, and it can also prevent old age in the future. So he agreed to the marriage.

It's a pity that the good times didn't last long, since Xiu married into the family, Luo Fu looked for carpentry work everywhere in order to pay off the debt of building a house. The in-laws locked the cabinet, locked the granary, and locked the wing. The new daughter-in-law has no firewood and no rice, and she can't get by. begged for a dowry, but was beaten.

It wasn't until Luo Fu came home to find out what was going on, and he contradicted his stepfather for the first time.

The stepfather wanted to bombard the two of them to go out, but Luo Fu argued on the basis of reason, so he asked why he couldn't live in the house because he built it himself? The stepfather sneered, pointed at Luo Fu's nose and scolded: "You have no tiles on the Luo family's recess, and there is no inch of land under it. ”

On this sentence, Luo Fu is already indiscerning, no matter how much he does in this family, he is still an outsider after all.

Later, the old people in the clan couldn't stand it and went to their stepfather's house to ask for an explanation for Luo Fu with the village cadres, so they finally got a homestead for the little couple.

The two of them committed themselves to the ancestral hall, relying on the food received by their father-in-law and mother-in-law, and built a mud-tiled house in debt.

On the night when the two moved into their new house, water was still seeping through the mud walls.

The husband and wife are hard-working and willing to work, leaving early and returning late every day, and they have no worries about food and clothing in less than two years. Later, Xiu was pregnant with a child twice, perhaps because of the hard work, but she couldn't keep it.

It wasn't until Luo Bin was born that the red and yellow mud tile house was more interesting, and the love of the two for their children was needless to say.

As the days passed, the villagers began to go out to work to earn money one after another, Luo Fu also went to the city to decorate, and Luo Bin's mother became unable to walk an inch because she was illiterate.

But her mother's heart was very high, and even if she couldn't enter the city, she didn't want to be compared. She took care of the farm work in the field, so she went up the mountain day and night to dig herbs, pick tea, dig bamboo shoots, and burn charcoal, trying her best to exchange money for coolies.

So in Luo Bin's impression, every inch of land on Luojiawo Mountain has traces left by his mother, and every time it gets dark, Luo Bin sits on the threshold, hugging the neck of the big dog and waiting for his mother to come home. When his mother staggered back, Luo Bin would pounce on her and hug her, smelling her vigorously, even the smell of sweat in other people's eyes was sweet in his nose.

In a blink of an eye, Luo Bin was twelve years old. The orange trees planted by my mother in the self-kept mountain have become a forest, in order to facilitate the care, after the beginning of spring, my father did not go out to work again, and picked tea with my mother during the day and fried green at night. As a result, my mother fainted on the stir-fry stove due to carbon dioxide poisoning.

Luckily, there was nothing wrong with him, but he burned his hand. Seeing that she would not be able to work for a while, her mother followed Luo Bin to learn to read and write, and after a few days, the injuries on her hands were all healed, and her mother also learned Arabic numerals, and forced her to memorize more than 100 common Chinese characters.

After harvesting the spring tea, she felt that there was no shortage of food and rice at home, but there was a lack of money, and there were more places to spend money to see the children growing up. After consulting with her father, she left him to take care of the orange grove, and she went to the lake market with the women of the same village to work as a weaver.

As a result, he took his life on the line.

When my mother returned from Lake City, she did not inform the family. The moment Luo Bin saw her, she was already standing outside the house with a smile. She had been bedridden since she entered the house, and she asked the doctor in the town to come to the house, but she couldn't tell the cause, so she prescribed some conditioning medicine indiscriminately, and left.

Her father insisted on taking her to Ningshi for a check-up, to see the best doctor, and to sell iron to treat her. But she didn't agree, she just refused to leave the house.

On the day her mother left, Luo Bin remembered very well that she got out of bed by herself to wash and take care of herself, and she always smiled when she looked at Luo Bin. The family sat in front of the hall and asked the brother who came back from a part-time job next door to take a family photo with a film camera.

It was raining on the day of the funeral, and the coffin was buried in the soil amid the cries of her sisters and aunts.

The rain was so heavy that even the firecrackers could not be lit, and the thunderous lightning in the clouds was densely packed, and everyone had to worship one by one and go down the mountain.

When everyone went down the mountain, there was thunder and lightning in the heavens and the earth......