In this way, the old carpenter did not hurry and hammered at my house for half a month before the coffin was made, and my mother really lay in bed for three years, and at the age of forty-three she really died.

There is a custom in our hometown of Shonan, which is passed down by our ancestors, and after a person dies, he must be parked in the mourning hall for seven days before being buried. On the first day of my mother's death, all the relatives and friends in the family, as well as the villagers in the production team, came to my house to help with the funeral, put my mother's body in the coffin, and everyone left the mourning hall to go home, and waited until the seventh day to have a big pot of rice-style funeral feast. Later, my father took me and my two younger brothers to hold a vigil for my mother, and in the first half of the next night, it was my turn to go to bed first, and then to sleep with my two younger brothers at midnight, and I went to work in shifts.

I remember that after falling asleep in the first half of the night, I fell asleep, and I didn't feel that I was in a dream, but I saw a bald old man with white hair fluttering in the village, walking towards me with a seven-star cane, and said with a smile, Gu Weixing, congratulations.

My boss was unhappy and asked, "Congratulations to me?" My mother is dead, old man, where are you from, how can you be disrespectful to the old? Don't you know that my family is having a funeral? Do you have a problem with your brain?

The old man was not angry, he stomped the seven-star cane on the ground and said, I congratulate your mother, your mother is not dead, see if it is tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, there will be a god who will come down and carry your mother to the sky in a sedan chair to be a fairy.

I said, you're talking nonsense again, where the hell are you, how can you talk about things that don't exist? Maybe after my mother died, the souls of the dead went to Huangquan Road, do you still tell me these jokes?

The old man said seriously, there is no joke, it is true, I listened to the city god in the city god temple, he said that your mother has cultivated ten good karma in this life very piously, and moved the Jade Emperor in the sky, and the Jade Emperor will send the god down and carry her to the sky in a sedan chair to be a fairy.

I said, "You've said this twice, and I don't want to hear it." When you talk about the City God Temple, are you the old man in the City God Temple?

The old man said, I am not from the City God Temple, I am from the countryside of Xiangnan, that is, the land god in your He production team, and I am under the jurisdiction of the City God Temple.

I glared at him carefully, my attitude was a little better, and asked, I have heard of the city god, and I have also heard of the land god, but I have never seen it before, and today I have seen you, the land god.

The land god stomped the seven-star crutch again, and said, "Then I'll tell you!" If you wake up, you won't be able to see me, because I belong to the Yin people, the beings of the underworld, you belong to the Yang people, you are the beings of the Yang world, and you are not in the same time and space dimension, so you can't see me when you're awake, let alone the City God.

I didn't seem to believe it, and said, God of the land, don't go far, how can you be sure that the Jade Emperor will take my mother to the sky to be a fairy?

The land god said, I also heard from the city god last time, and I also heard that your mother should have been taken to heaven three years ago to enjoy the blessings of heaven, because she cultivated the ten virtues! It seems that he started to cultivate at the age of 30, and he has been practicing for more than ten years, and he has generally cultivated for more than three years, and it has become a house of goodness, and there will be more than a celebration.

I retorted again, then you are wrong, my mother was in the countryside one day three years ago to hunt pigweed, suddenly fainted and became ill, lying in bed for three years before dying, I know that my mother has long cultivated good karma, but now it seems that my family has no Yu Qing, and she has suffered, you see that my mother died at the age of forty-three, this is not a disaster? Heaven is unfair, scourge lives for a thousand years, and good people don't live long.

The land god said, your point of view is wrong, on the surface it seems to be right, but in fact, behind the surface, there are many situations, and the yang people, including you, are not clear, and they are all confused.

I said, "God of the land, then you can explain!" How can we Yang people be confused?

The land god said, Gu Weixing, listen, take your mother as an example, he cultivates good karma is good, but in the process of cultivating good karma, he also unknowingly promotes killing karma. Take pig raising as an example, your family raises two pigs a year, one completes the task of handing over to the state, and the other is used by your own family for the New Year, that is to say, both pigs are killed, although your mother did not kill them with her own hands, but your mother raised pigs to kill pigs, so she contributed to killing karma, and she also had to bear part of the sin of killing karma.

Heaven punishes the crime clearly, thinks that your mother is good, and plans to use the sedan chair to carry your mother to heaven, first let her eliminate that part of the karma sin in the world, and the way to eliminate that part of the karma is to let her be sick in the hospital bed for three years, that is, to use the suffering of torturing her for three years to offset her karma sin. If your mother didn't have this sin of killing karma, then three years ago, she would have gone to heaven to become a fairy. So I still congratulate you, now that the three years are over, your mother will be a fairy in the sky!

Although I believe it a little, the duck is dead and hard-mouthed, deliberately saying, it can't be! It's all made up by you, or it's a coincidence. Besides, people die like a lamp going out, and there is nothing left, where is it as mysterious as you say? I now know that I was dreaming, that the dreams were all fake, and that I woke up and there was nothing. If I wake up and can still see you, I will believe you a little, and I will not fully believe you, of course, you can't talk nonsense, if you talk nonsense, I will report to the head of the poor association (the head of the poor middle peasant association), he will immediately arrest you and hang a black card to criticize you, do you believe it or not?

As soon as the land god heard it, it was on fire, he picked up the seven-star cane, and poked it over, I endured the pain, and was poked awake at once, it turned out that I was sleeping on the bed, and the lights in the room were also on, it was my younger brother Gu Weimin who was calling me: Brother Viaxing, don't get up yet, it's 12 o'clock in the night, it's close to the early morning, you quickly change us to wake the wake for my mother. You're sleeping so deeply! I'm poking you so hard with my fingers that you can't wake up.

As soon as I heard it, I understood that the dreams I had just now were all false, how could there be any land god? In the dream, the land god poked me with a seven-star crutch, but it turned out that it was not the seven-star crutch, but my younger brother Weimin poked me with his finger and woke up. When I think about it, I really don't believe in the kind of absurd things that the land god told me in my dreams, and I won't tell anyone about it.

At that moment, I will say, Weimin, wait a minute, let me get dressed, and immediately go to my mother's coffin to change your wake.

During the wake, I kept unconsciously recalling the scene in the dream, especially the words of the land god in the dream, who said that my mother was cultivating the ten good karmas, although I don't know which ones they were. But I know that it must be that when my mother was alive, she had good intentions, said good things, and did good deeds. It's true, my mother is not only good to people, but also good to animals.

One year, the production team Gu Taiyan's whole family went out to have something, and did not come back for a few days, his family tied a cow under the willow tree in front of the village, one did not give forage, and the other did not give water to drink.

When my mother found out, she immediately untied the cow's leash, first led it to drink, and then told me to lead it to the grassy fields to graze the grass. At night, we were told to lead the cow to the cattle pen behind our house and lock it up, and put a pile of hay for the cow to supper.