The ordinary sun and moon run leisurely like an iron hoop wooden ** car pulled by an ox. Famines, pestilences, and sudden upheavals are like ox carts whose wheels sink into a puddle of mud, or they die or break their axles and are forced to stand still; After a long or short toss, or a new axle, the ox cart creaked and rolled slowly on the rutted dirt road. Bai Jiaxuan sat on the lacquered wooden chair where his father and his father's father had sitted, holding the white copper hookah held by his father and his father's father, and snoring and snoring; He stood in the courtyard and looked at the majestic Nanshan Mountain shrouded in smoke, and thought the same; At night, when he had had enough of smoking, drank enough tea, and lay on the empty clay kang, he couldn't help but think like this. He has detached himself from the specific events of famine, plague, and agricultural cooperatives, and has entered into a kind of thinking about the regularity of life and people. The death of a person, no matter what kind of calamity it is, is like falling into a pothole and breaking an axle; The living cannot always lament the benefits of the broken axle, because no matter how good it is, it is useless, and it must be replaced with a new axle, and the ox cart must climb the pothole and continue on the road. He walked through the village alleys with a cane and a bent waist, and heard the sad voice of a woman crying for her son or her husband coming from a certain house, and not only did he not sympathize with them, but scolded them in his heart for being bastards! Because no father, mother, son, daughter, or husband can guarantee absolute perfection to anyone, and it is impossible for a family to be together forever; Because no matter how good a father and mother are, sons, daughters and husbands, once they are killed, they will not reunite, even if you don't eat or drink, you want to die and cry alive, and you don't have anything to do! A broken axle! No matter how good and strong the axle is, there will always be times when it will be worn and broken, so the dead should not show special sorrow. Bai Jiaxuan was also deeply saddened by the death of Xiancao, so that for a long time, he always felt that something was missing; What was missing was certainly not only the warm ** that she carefully slipped down his feet and legs every night, but also the rustling sound of her walking in the courtyard, the smell that emanated from the kang stove in the courtyard, or another indescribable feeling different from the sound of the image, all of which were definitely non-existent. His superman lies in the fact that he can come to the extraordinary conclusion that the fairy grass is also a broken axle. When Bai Jiaxuan was thinking about the mysteries of life, he always remembered a mantra that had been passed down since ancient times: the population of Bailu Village always did not exceed 1,000, and when it did, there would definitely be a disaster, and the population would suddenly shrink back to less than 1,000 people. For the first time in his lifetime, he experienced the process of this great population decline and was able to verify the mantra, and he went from doubt to certainty: In the dark sky above Bailu Village, there is a pair of eyes that are watching, and they control the reproduction and density of the population of various villages in Bailu Village and even the entire Bailu Plain......

Bai Jiaxuan's approval of his son Xiaowu's move to supplement the genealogy was just when the conclusion that his dead man was like a broken shaft was formed.

Bai Xiaowu single-handedly began the sacred mission of supplementing the genealogy, inviting monks from the Sanguan Temple to chant sutras for every deceased who was qualified to go to the genealogy. ** And the concise procedure is, according to the two surnames of Bailu from high to low, the same generation is then in the order of age, first by the son or grandson of the deceased on behalf of the whole family to light three purple incense into the incense burner, and then lead the deceased's male and female filial sons to knock three turns, kneel in front of the spiritual table and stand quietly waiting; Bai Xiaowu anointed the tip of the brush in the inkstone, hung his wrist to fill in the name of the deceased into the red square, and then put down the brush and bowed to the deceased three times; The filial sons repeatedly kowtowed and retreated out of the ancestral hall; The five small groups of musicians played melodious music when the filial son stilted into the threshold of the ancestral hall, and the music was played until the whole ceremony was completed, and the filial son withdrew from the ancestral hall before taking a break; After the filial son bowed three times, the monk began to ring the wooden fish and recite scriptures that no one could understand; When the monk closed his mouth and did not knock on the wooden fish, the musician continued to play. Bai Xiaowu solemnly and respectfully filled in a square for all the dead men over the age of sixteen and the women who married into Bailu Village, and the unmarried women in his clan were not eligible to occupy a red square even if they died at the age of twenty. This sacred activity, which involved every household, did not make any mistakes or mistakes, which naturally increased Bai Xiaowu's prestige among the clansmen.

Bai Jiaxuan only came to the ancestral hall when he unfolded the genealogy god axis at the beginning and re-rolled up the god axis at the end, and bowed down with all the clansmen. At the end of the ceremony, Bai Jiaxuan saw the relaxed expressions of the clansmen from the eyebrows of men and women, so he said to the clansmen excitedly: "You can't let the ox cart nest in the pit, you have to let the wheels roll on the road!"

Lu Zilin never entered the ancestral hall. There is no undead in his family, and it is not the reason that he does not need to go to the family tree. Bai Xiaowu did not forget this point when he fully described this vast ceremony to his father at home: "Before unfolding the scroll and scroll, I told him for a long time, but the man still did not show his face. Bai Jiaxuan said: "You treat him as a person, just run the round." It doesn't matter if he comes or not. I saw that the man was arrogant and arrogant all over the place. It's not good for people to be crazy, and dogs are crazy about! Frivolous ......"

Bai Jiaxuan began to work on marrying his third son Xiaoyi. He instructed Xiaowu to invite a matchmaker, and then instructed Xiaowu's daughter-in-law to fry four dishes, warm a pot of wine, and said, "You have to run on the way down." After the matchmaker ate and drank, he happily ran to the woman's house to say what she had to say and do what she had to do. Bai Jiaxuan explained the details that he should prepare to Xiaowu one by one. The first thing is to pan for grain and grind noodles, the stone mill grinds up to three buckets of wheat a day, you have to start early, and you must estimate that the sun often does not appear in the wax moon, and you can't pan and dry the grain to delay the possibility of grinding noodles. This simple way of work is handed over to Lu San, who is not very flexible in his brain, and the rabbit baby takes over Lu San in the management of livestock, and young people often can't bear the loneliness of the stone mill turning slowly. Bai Jiaxuan corrected Xiaowu's arrangement: "Let Xiaoyi grind noodles." His character had to be sharpened in the grinding eyes. ”

The third son, Xiaoyi, glared at his brother Xiaowu's assignment: "I send dung to pull soil and gin, which job is not heavier than grinding noodles?" Tell me to grind noodles and grind the road, I'm so confused!"

When the harmony of the chime chanting in the ancestral hall stopped, Xiaoyi and the rabbit sent all the manure accumulated in the enclosure into the wheat field, and then pulled back seven or eight carts of loess from the moat, dried it on the vacated soil field, and dried it in a small cart into the soil shed where the dry soil was stored.

Autumn rains and plagues delayed the reserves of dry soil. He and the rabbit rode the ox cart to the moat, often running over the first rut on the frosty road, and spreading the wet soil to the enclosure to dry. The two of them walked into the stove room hungry and toasted two steamed buns that were browned and soft, and then stepped into the ginning room and stepped on the ginning machine. Xiaowu's daughter-in-law, who cooks under the stove, bakes a bun of steamed buns in the stove, so that those who are hungry at work can be sharpened first, and they can also block the mouths of children who crawl out of the bed and want to eat steamed buns. She joked at the gobbling rabbit baby and said, "Rabbit baby, what are you doing so happily with other people's filial piety?" Xiaoyi wants to marry a daughter-in-law, what are you jumping on?" The rabbit baby understood that this was a joke and smiled absently. Xiaoyi only cares about munching and ignoring his sister-in-law's teasing. The two of them were very tacit and very harmonious, and happily stepped on the ginning machine.

Xiaoyi couldn't accept Xiaowu's division of labor separating him from the rabbit baby, so he went to his father to plead. Bai Jiaxuan said: "I asked you to turn the mill." Xiaoyi was stunned for a moment and glared. Bai Jiaxuan still said steadily: "You are about to get married." When you become a family, you are an adult, not a broken baby. Gotta grind your wild nature in the mill. ”

Xiaoyi was imprisoned in the mill day after day from morning to night, following the buttocks of the ox or the red horse, picking up the ground wheat flour on the grinding table, and then pouring it into the cabinet, and then shaking the crank, and the monotonous sound of the clattering made the ears wooden. Lu San walked in, grabbed the handle and said, "You go out to play." The stubborn filial piety pushed Lusan out of the mill door and said, "I'm going to grind me into you in the mill." ”

Bai Jiaxuan calmly grasped the progress of various preparations. In his view, marrying a wife is just a procedure, and betrothing is an important part of the effort; Whether or not a son can marry a suitable spouse is not in marrying but in engagement. Bai Jiaxuan has studied all the families of his peers and juniors in Bailu Village in his spare time, and concluded that the key to all men succeeding is women. There is a shrewd and capable man who meets a woman who does not know how to manage money and run a family, and he has lived a bad life all his life; A man with benevolence and morality is a slimy woman, and he can't hold up a tube in front of people all his life; Not to mention the kind of goods that are picked up like a black baby picking up rotten vegetables, if Heiwa has a rule, a woman will definitely not fall into the situation of bandits. When he gave Xiaoyi an engagement, he paid attention to his son's temperament, and he had to choose a woman who was both educated and a little more lively, which was intended to make up for Xiaoyi's stubborn nature. From the five or six objects introduced by the matchmaker, Bai Jiaxuan asked relatives and friends to inquire and inquire without the matchmaker, and finally settled on a woman in Xikang Village. When the woman pushed her mother to Mr. Leng's Chinese medicine hall with a small cart, Bai Jiaxuan observed her every move, word and deed in the inner room before she made a decision, filled the grain, and bundled the cotton into bundles and handed it to the matchmaker. Bai Jiaxuan was very satisfied, this was the most satisfactory and perfect of the three daughters-in-law. When Xiaowen was engaged, he mainly considered that the family was in urgent need of employment, so he set a strong woman who was two years older than Xiaowen, but the rest of the situation was very average; was engaged to Xiaowu, it was Mr. Leng who asked someone to propose a marriage family, and he had no choice, but this daughter-in-law was not too out of shape to take care of the scene, but she was not very elf; Only the daughter-in-law who was set for the third son Xiaoyi was an impeccable woman.

The wedding, which takes place on the third day of the first lunar month, inspires the enthusiasm of the whole village. This is the first sedan chair in the village alley after the end of the plague, the joyful music played by the suona washed away the bleakness of the lonely corner of the dead alley, and a stirring melody of life resounded in everyone's heart. Because it was the son of a respected patriarch who got married, almost every family with the surname Bailu had people to help, and Lu Zilin became the natural deacon head of this wedding. He was shrewd and carefree, directing the whole wedding in an orderly and orderly manner, and from time to time he teased and teased the men who served as deacons and the women who helped them, and the laughter showed enthusiasm and lightness. Bai Jiaxuan, as the master, should not assign anyone, and can only rely on the deacon leader Lu Zilin inside and out. He said to Lu Zilin at the beginning: "Brother will hand over the whole set to you." Lu Zilin said: "You can smoke hookah with confidence!" I had a great opportunity to drink it today!"

The most unusual thing about this wedding ceremony was the arrival of Mr. Zhu and his wife. Mr. Zhu was greeted by Bai Jiaxuan to his own bedroom in the West House, and the two people sat together without greetings, nor were they polite and overly humble, and they began to say the facts they wanted to say as soon as they took a sip of tea. Mr. Zhu doesn't smoke or drink, and took a sip of weak tea: "Xiaowen wants to go back to the original." Bai Jiaxuan did not respond.