(b)

The big mountain by the Qingshui River where Wendou Village is located is majestic and imposing, and it is reckless in its stretching. I heard that before liberation, there were tigers, bears and other giant beasts.

My father was honest and romantic, and he once said a "very funny" joke. He had just returned home from joining the army in Yunnan, and after five years as a soldier, he and my second uncle and his second brother went to Wubang River at the foot of the mountain for the first time to collect firewood. The father actually asked his second brother a very "ridiculous" question: "Are there snakes in this mountain?" ”

Will there be no snakes in this mountain? Big joke. There are dozens of snakes in the bitter cauliflower bushes in this mountain, large, small, long, short, and named.

My father's words at that time became a joke in the village for a long time. I think that perhaps my father, who was young and vigorous and in his prime, must have had many "weird" thoughts in his mind, and those thoughts were interpretations of the unknown mountain, which seemed normal to me, but to the villagers who were familiar with the mountains, rivers, grass and trees in that mountain, they were "absurd".

Because the soldier who had the opportunity to study for a few years and had the opportunity to go out as a soldier for a few years and came back, he could have jumped out of the "farm gate" and sought a bowl of "happy rice" to eat, but his father was an outsider. He was originally assigned to the county armed forces department as an officer after returning from demobilization, but the then county organization minister had to arrange for this veteran to learn military skills for three months. This is an "insult" to him in the eyes of his father, a veteran: Lao Tzu has been a soldier for five years, and he doesn't know what military skills.

In a fit of rage, my father went home with a backpack. There was no further question of his placement. A few months later, he walked for two days to the county seat and found out that his position as an officer had been replaced.

There was no hope of jumping out of the "farm gate", so my father had to return to the small mountain village of Wendou.

At that time, there were no teachers in the village primary school, and the cadres of the brigade came to the door at night to mobilize my father to teach.

Since then, my father has become the "enlightenment teacher" of the village. With his academic qualifications and education level, he can only teach first-year students to learn "A, O, E" and "one, two, three", and no matter how complicated it is, I am afraid he will not be able to bear it himself. Therefore, for decades, he has been sitting firmly in the "first grade teacher" "chair", occasionally teaching second grade, and at most teaching a subject to third grade students.

As soon as the children in the village reached school age, the adults handed them over to my father, who became the "head" of the children.

A stubble of students came in and left a few years later. Some of the students my father taught became township and county magistrates, and some graduated from school and returned to the village primary school to become teachers.

His father's students came back to be senior teachers, but his father was still his "doll head".

I have the impression that my father was very strict, and he often held a bamboo stick, and I don't know how many people he had beaten with that stick, which in today's view was "corporal punishment" of students, but the children there did not think so, even their parents, did not think so. The villagers handed over the children to their fathers, invited them to their homes to drink, and repeatedly demanded that the father "discipline them strictly" and that there should be no need to be soft on the beatings.

The whip in his father's hand has made many children and naughty children afraid. His father was notoriously harsh, and his whip had beaten the village for two or three generations, and the children in the village "stayed away" from him.

In fact, in my eyes, my father was kind, and I was also beaten by my father's bamboo whip when I was a child. However, I was a good student when I was a child, and I was always at the top of my class until the fourth and fifth grades. I have the impression that I was only beaten once by my father's bamboo whip.

On that occasion, my father gave homework, presumably copying a text. My classmates were all copying carefully, writing stroke by stroke, but I wrote "cursive" on a whim, and I completed it by dividing it by two, and handed it over to my father to read, but I didn't pass the test. Oh no, my father's surprised expression at the time is still fresh in my memory today. Then, naturally, the bamboo whip landed on my little hand.

There is a child named Long Laosan in the village, who studied in his father's class for a year, but he didn't even know "one, two, three". One day, my father wrote a big "one" on the blackboard and asked Long Laosan how to read it, Long Laosan stood up and moved his mouth for a long time: "I don't know." The father was angry, walked out of the classroom, brought a wooden stick several meters long and put it in his hand, and asked Long Laosan what he should read, but he still couldn't answer. That day, his father didn't beat Long Laosan, and Long Laosan probably knew that he was not born to read and write, so he dropped out of school soon.