In the eighteenth year of Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty, Chen Zhimei, the sixty-year-old governor of Guangxi, grew old and gave his son a name "Gongbo".

Chen Zhimei was an ordinary military attache in the Qing Dynasty, because of his participation in the suppression of the peasant revolution in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the official to the governor of Guangxi, after the dismissal of Guangxu in 23 years, he stayed at home and continued to enjoy the Qing Dynasty.

Because Chen Gongbo is Chen Zhimei's only son, Chen Gongbo has been loved and indulged since he was a child, he is different from other eunuchs, in addition to the four books and five classics that must be read, he only loves old and historical classics, whether it is "Water Margin" or "Strange Tales from Liao Zhai", "Dream of Red Mansions" or "Golden Vase Plum", Chen Gongbo will not care about him when he reads Chen Zhimei in front of Chen Zhimei.

Chen Gongbo has a wide range of knowledge, talented, and unique ideas, he is used to seeing the power of emperors and generals in history, and he is also used to seeing the deceit on the rivers and lakes, it is precisely because of this that Chen Gongbo is also a suspicious and entangled person.

Chen Gongbo participated in the underground national army in his early years, and was a representative of the underground national army, and later broke away from the party and joined the ranks of the national army, and then he broke away from the national army to follow Wang Jingwei.

In the call of the national army to denounce the traitors, the devils, as a defeated country, had to extradite Gongbo back to China for trial.

Chen Gongbo's talent has to be admitted, but he has lived in bitterness and contradictions all his life, and it is precisely because he is too smart that he is a person without faith, let alone trusting anyone.

Jiang Sheng often felt Chen Gongbo's contradictions when he was in Shanghai, and later he went to the island country in the open sea with Uncle Li, he was by Chen Gongbo's side, looking at his father's increasingly haggard face, depressed all day long, unable to sleep and eat, and his heart was extremely contradictory.

After Jiang Sheng learned of Chen Gongbo's death, he ran to the north slope behind Sanlitun alone, and sat on the grass in a daze when he was tired of crying.

It was from that day on, that Jiang Sheng became more and more silent, at least in my opinion.

Chen Gongbo is a big man, but his death has only become someone else's after-dinner conversation, which seems insignificant.

That night, when the villagers of Sanlitun slept peacefully, Jiang Sheng lay on the bed and kept sobbing quietly, and at night, his mother quietly opened the door and called Jiang Sheng out.

Jiang Sheng followed his mother to the back of the tunzi, and his mother asked him to kowtow three times to the south, and then she took out a pile of letter paper from her pocket and burned it in front of Jiang Sheng.

Mother said: "Jiang Sheng, your father is gone, and you can't go back to Shanghai, so you can stay in Beiping with peace of mind in the future." ”

Jiang Sheng wiped his tears, looking at the letters that Chen Gongbo had written to his mother over the years, all of which were burned at this moment, and his mother was only red-eyed, and she didn't shed a single tear after all. At that time, they were indeed talented and beautiful, but they were not in the right household, Chen Gongbo lost his mother, and his mother was resentful at first, and then she didn't hate it with the passage of time.

Mother just felt a little pity for Jiang Sheng, and Chen Gongbo didn't let him see him for the last time before he died.

And Jiang Sheng will cut off contact with all the people he knows in Shanghai from now on, including his previous lifestyle and habits, he is no longer a young master of a rich family, without a strong backing, he can't even say that his father is Chen Gongbo, and if he says that, he will be called a big traitor's son for the rest of his life.

At that time, it was already June, and the weather in Beiping was getting hotter and hotter, and Jiang Sheng was taken by Lao Jiang all day long because he didn't have to go to school, and he went to see a doctor with Lao Jiang carrying a medicine box every day.

Poor and restless Beiping will die a lot of people every day, every day people are so sick that they can't afford to bed, and even a few people die on the side of the road because of heat stroke.

In the final exam before the summer vacation that year, I won the first place in the class for the first time.

Mr. Zhang was very happy and rewarded me with a wolf pen, which I carefully held in my hand and took home to show my father and mother.

My mother looked at me with a happy and proud look and said, "Your brother didn't take the exam and you got the first place, don't be proud." ”

I muttered a little displeased, and my father immediately said, "Your mother said that you are right, and you can't be proud, but this time you did impress me, saying what reward do you want?" ”

I said, "I want a floral dress." ”

"There are no textile factories these days, and no one has a patch on their clothes, where will the cloth come from to make flower skirts for you." The mother retorted.

When my father saw that I was not happy, he said, "It's not that I don't want to make a flower skirt for you, the clothes store and cloth store on the street have closed down, you can change to something else." ”

I said, "I want chicken, I haven't eaten meat in a long time." ”

"Didn't you eat meat dumplings just last month?" Mother asked.

The father said, "Okay, then let's kill an old hen, the child hasn't eaten chicken for a long time." ”

The mother said, "There are three old hens, and they can still lay eggs, what a pity to kill." ”

The father said: "It's good to keep two as companions, just to save some food, save so many eggs and sell them is worthless, let you get the rich family to exchange for rice, you are embarrassed to go." ”

The mother thought for a moment and said, "Okay, there happens to be a thin hen that is about to lose all her hair, so let's kill that one and let it lay eggs for a few more days." ”

"Jiang Rong, kill it in three or five days, and let the hen lay eggs for a few more days, right?" My father asked, looking at me.

"Okay." I muttered.

My father smiled and touched my head to comfort me.

A few days later, in the evening, Jiang Sheng went out with Lao Jiang to see a doctor and did not come back, while his mother went to the cornfield to pull weeds, and I and the children of Sanlitun and Xiaowu played in the wheat field.

At that time, the weather was dry, and Beiping had been dry for half a year, the crops in the field were wilted, the ground was peeled, and the crystals in the yards of every household were dry.

There is an old well in the west of the back of Tunzi, which was dug in the village more than ten years ago, and the well water is sweet, so many villagers do not eat their own well water, and come to the old well to carry water.

The well in my yard was also dry, my father had to kill chickens for me to eat at night, and the water in the tank was all used up, and seeing that it was getting late and my mother and Jiang Sheng had not yet returned, he limped to the old well with a bucket by himself.

The sound of June covered every corner of Sanlitun, and I was having fun with my friends in the wheat field, when the scream of Niu Aihua pierced the sweltering sky and reached the bottom of my heart.

Xiao Wu heard Niu Aihua's voice and hurriedly ran in the direction of the old well, and many villagers also went out to check when they heard the movement. When a group of our children rushed over, they saw Zhao Shugen and others pulling their father out of the old well, and then kept pressing on his chest.

I watched as the crowd surrounded my father, who was motionless and cried in fright.

Fortunately, my father was finally rescued, and my mother and Lao Jiang also happened to come back at that time, and they carried my dying father home, Lao Jiang said that his father's lungs were water, and he could get an infection, and he got some antibiotics from the town's Western medicine center.

When Lao Jiang came back, his father was half asleep and his head was hot, so Lao Jiang boiled some fever-reducing decoction for his father to drink, and then boiled some dampness tonic soup for his father to feed.

After my mother took care of my father to sleep, she went to the yard and saw the old hen who was tied up by my father to kill, and knew that my father was in a hurry to fetch water and kill the chicken, she slapped me in the face in anger and yelled: "Eat, eat, if it weren't for you, how could your father fall into the well?!" ”

My mother slapped me in the face, Jiang Sheng was distressed, ran over to comfort me, and I shook off Jiang Sheng and ran out of the yard.

The first witness of his father falling into the well was Niu Aihua, and in those days, Niu Aihua would say that his father had died by himself when he met people all day long, and he had to go to the well even though he was a lame man.

"You don't know, Jiang Zhengyang carried a bucket and went directly into the well without hesitation, but it scared the old lady."

"You said that if he died in the well, we Sanlitun would still drink water and not drink water, who would dare to drink the water of the dead after soaking in the dead, you said you weren't?"

"What nonsense are you talking about, how can it be that I pushed it, no matter how much conflict I have with that slut Zhang Xiumei, I won't kill his man, but I can't swim, he has been splashing in the well for a long time, and I have no choice but to call people if I can't save it."

A few days later, when Niu Aihua told people about what happened that day, someone said:

"Sister Niu, I heard that Jiang Rong's father lost his soul and had a fever and cough all day long, could it be that he was frightened by your loud voice?"

"Now some people in Tunzi say that you pushed Jiang Zhengyang down, and Jiang Rong's mother is asking around."

When Niu Aihua heard these words, she was naturally angry, she shouted: "Zhang Xiumei, that slut just wants to rely on my money, I call others to save her man, she doesn't thank me, I still want to rely on my head, kind as a donkey's liver and lungs, when I am a bully?" ”

My father was too frightened because of the incident in the well, and he was sick in bed because of the water in his lungs, he couldn't eat, and he would vomit out when he drank medicine.

And Niu Aihua's words of fanning the flames in Sanlitun finally reached her mother's ears, so her mother quarreled with Niu Aihua one morning, and both sides scolded so hard that they almost fought.

After the quarrel between my mother and Niu Aihua, Xiao Wuyi didn't come to my house to look for Jiang Sheng for a few days, for fear that I would encounter the situation where Jiang Sheng and I drove him away again.

His father was sick for a long time and needed to be taken care of by his mother, so Lao Jiang had to go out to see a doctor, and Lao Jiang became the only person in the family with income.

During the summer vacation, Jiang Sheng and I were able to help my mother with some work, but after school, whether it was taking care of my father, doing housework, or the crops in the field, all the work fell to my mother.

And his father finally became irritable, and wave after wave of unfortunate disasters made him extremely resentful, and he began to think of the incident that caused him to fall from the stairs absent-mindedly because of his mother's contact with his uncle and grandmother, without that incident, there would be no subsequent disasters.

My father coughed when he opened his mouth to speak, so he became a man of few words, throwing all the dishes and chopsticks at the bedside on the floor when he got angry, and sometimes splashing the decoction on his mother's body.