Ordinary people's rice bowl

Chapter 1 Tutoring Topics
The calendar turned to the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, and the snowflakes floating in the sky in the afternoon still showed no signs of stopping. They had already covered the open fields, the crisscross roads, and the frozen ponds. The trees, houses, and firewood piles in the park put on white hats early on, and when viewed from a distance, they stood there quietly like night-duty sentries of various shapes.It's the first quarter moon, and the sky is gray. Although Chang'e cannot be seen in the cold palace moon, the white snow on the ground is reflected, and this snowy night is armed with a bright silver world.

When people were immersed in the tranquility brought by the winter day and appreciated that the winter snow had brought another good harvest, Lao Mu was not in the mood to appreciate the scenery of the winter snow night. In front of the old-fashioned broken wooden table supported by legs, he watched intently his son Mu Zhen working out the math exercises that he had done several times.

"It's as simple as that. If you still do something wrong, where is your brain?" Old Mu's deep roar came from the old wooden window lattice with dim red light again.This roar carried three parts of true energy, seven parts of hope, and mixed with a little helplessness. It passed through the snowy night sky outside the window, cut through the snow field that was completely silent, and made the people who heard it feel a little cold.

A few minutes of silence followed.

"Look, what's going on here!" Lao Mu pressed his right thumb to a formula on the paper, and questioned his son, but the son didn't say anything, but just stared blankly at the thumb that didn't move next to the formula on the paper.

"It's not a miscalculation, it's a typo!" Mu Zhen murmured.

"It's okay to be so sloppy!" After finishing speaking, he continued to read the homework below, and the inside and outside of the room fell into silence.

"Make another one." Lao Mu took out a copy of "5000 Primary School Mathematics Questions" from the drawer, and directly turned to the page he had folded yesterday. Although there are 1 reluctances in my heart, I dare not say the first half of it these days.Old Mu stared straight at Mu Zhen, who was lowering her head to do the question. As if suddenly awakened, she took out a cigarette from her coat pocket, sniffed it on her nose, slowly put it in her mouth, and took the cigarette out of her pocket. The other end leaned against the red flame of the kerosene lamp, took a few puffs, and the smoke immediately filled the air. The child smelled the pungent smoke, coughed twice, and continued to calculate what had happened without looking up. Disgusting formula.

Maybe it's because his son is really smart, maybe it's because Mu Zhen has already been familiar with these calculations. Old Mu's cigarette has not been burned out yet, and dozens of questions have been completed.After finishing, Mu Zhen still didn't look up, checking for mistakes.

"Is it over?" Lao Mu saw that it was finished quickly, with a hint of comfort on his face.

"It's over." Mu Zhen responded in a low voice.

Lao Mu picked up the red pen for correcting students' homework and marked "√" after each question. Maybe it was Mu Zhen's carelessness, and another small mistake appeared on the paper, and Lao Mu's face immediately showed a clear change. Yin, "I made the same mistake again, three times in one night! If this goes on, what can I do?" Old Mu's tone became more and more serious, and the more he spoke, the more angry he grabbed the homework book beside him, "Hey, hey " Twice, the book was torn into three halves by Lao Mu's gravity, and then he raised his big slap and "pa, pa" covered Mu Zhen's butt twice. Want to go to university?"

"I don't have the skills, what's the point of getting angry with the child?" Old Mu's wife, who was sitting on the bed and coaxing the child to sleep, argued.

Maybe it was this unintentional defense that aroused old Mu's pain, a vein popped up on his forehead, he pointed at Mu Zhen who was sobbing with her head down, and said angrily, "If you fail the exam, you will die or I will die!"

"The child is only young, and you are forcing the child like this, hoping that there will be no such wormwood on the ancestral grave, and you still want to become someone?" Old Mu's wife retorted.Old Mu wanted to say something, but his throat moved, but he didn't say it. Maybe he knew he was speaking a little too hard, or maybe he felt his wife was right, so he didn't respond.

"Don't pay attention to him, Zhen'er, come and go to bed." The wife jumped out of bed as she said, and took two quick steps to pull Mu Zhen over.

Lao Mu's home is next to the east wall of Xiaowangzhuang School. The school is located in the east of Xiaowangzhuang Village, more than [-] meters away from the village, and there is a drying yard for threshing grain in the middle.In addition to Lao Mu's family living around the school, in front of his courtyard, the village built two adobe thatched cottages, where the village schoolkeeper Wang Sanyuan lived.Wang Sanyuan was already familiar with the voice of this tutor. Hearing the yelling, Sanyuan had already become commonplace, so he didn't bother to listen.However, today is different. From the very beginning, Sanyuan pricked up his ears and heard the truth.

Wang Sanyuan studied in a private school for two years and is a bit educated. The villagers respect him very much. Since his wife died of illness early and his two children are married and living alone, he has become the best candidate for the schoolkeeper in the village.Every winter, he often set up the roots he dug by the river in the middle of the house, and lit a fire to keep warm, and often attracted several idle old people in the village to warm up and chat with the fire.Today, because the heavy snow has not stopped, the old people chatting in the village fell asleep prematurely, so no one in the village came to warm up with them, but welcomed a guest from afar.This guest was a peddler, who was forced to stay in the village because the journey was too far back in the snow. He struck up a conversation with Sanyuan and stayed here. Come out to have a meal.The two were around the fire, chatting about the interesting things in the villages far and near, when they were interrupted by Lao Mu's muffled growls, the shopkeeper listened carefully, and Sanyuan didn't speak until the old Mu's house became silent, the shopkeeper responded to this Showing curiosity, he chatted about the reason for the sound.

"This is my neighbor, Lao Mu, who is educating children. Speaking of this old Mu, his name is Mu Kegui. In fact, he is not very old. He is only 35 this year, but he is also a cultural person in the village. When he graduated from high school, due to his physical condition Not so good, I failed to get into university, I never thought that this person has a stubborn temper, because I didn’t get into school, I felt a pimple in my heart, and then I became a little dazed, sitting in my yard all day facing the pomegranate tree It took me a long time to see the pomegranate. Old Mu's father died early due to illness, and his mother married to the Yellow River North. There is no news of her going there, and it is estimated that her life will not be very satisfactory. Old Mu also has an older sister named Mu Yingzi, who married Our commune is about ten miles away from Zhang’s family, and they usually come to take care of this dazed old Mu.” Sanyuan said slowly.

"The team didn't arrange for him to do anything at that time, did he?" the salesman asked with a newly lit stick in his hand, facing the fire with his dry pipe.

"What else is there to arrange? People are stupid, and Lao Mu's dementia has not improved, and it is getting worse. In the middle of winter, it is also such a snowy morning, and Lao Mu jumped into the pond next to the village by himself. , was just seen by the horse boy who got up early in the same village to pick up dung, and pulled him up by force, which was regarded as saving his life."

"Alas!" Wang Sanyuan sighed, and continued, "The next day, Lao Mu's sister Mu Yingzi sent him to a mental hospital for a month before allowing Lao Mu to live a normal life again. A year later , the school in the village lacked substitute teachers, the brigade arranged for him to enter the school as a private teacher, and then married a daughter-in-law."

Sanyuan took a puff of dry cigarette, and continued to babble: "The daughter-in-law is Xiuhua, the daughter of the surname Yang in Yangliu Village." After speaking, he pointed to the southeast direction, "Even the village you came to today, the Yang family's family is not very good. , but this daughter-in-law is good, she is diligent and thrifty in managing the family, and she is very popular. In the second year, she gave birth to a son named Mu Zhen. She was very smart and cute since she was a child. Faster than adults. So Lao Mu pinned all his hopes on the children!"

"How old is this child now?" the shopkeeper interrupted and asked.

"12 years old, in fifth grade!" Sanyuan replied casually.

"Study must be good." The shopkeeper said with affirmative tone, "The child is so smart, how can he not study well with this kind of education?" The shopkeeper said to himself without waiting for Sanyuan's answer.

"Because it's close to the school, the teachers all praised this kid for his future." Sanyuan said with a little pride, taking two puffs of dry cigarette.

"Speaking of the people from our village, there are quite enough to count. Although it is called Xiaowangzhuang, it has a total of about [-] people, but it is a well-known village. Some of the predecessors of the Mu family passed the Juren examination. , and achieved Daotai in the Qing Dynasty, and later returned to the countryside and became a squire. Although he was a squire, he was friendly with his neighbors in the same village. He proposed to donate money to build the school, and took out his life savings. The current school is the place where they built the school at that time. The four rooms at the end of the school were built in those years. After several repairs, although they can still be used, they are no longer good. Last year, the team said they were going to tear him down, but someone stopped him, but he was not demolished. The village asked me to look after the school, so I built these two rooms next to the school. When Lao Mu got married, with the help of the villagers, I Three rooms were built behind this to make a new house." Sanyuan said, stretching his hand to the fire from time to time to roast, the shopkeeper was fascinated by it, and did not interrupt Sanyuan's words.

The two dry pipes were facing each other, facing the red flames, wisps of white smoke came out from time to time, the fire gradually weakened, and the two of them did not speak for a long time.In addition to the occasional "cracking" sound of burning wood in the fire, it was the sound of the two smoking and panting each other.

Seeing that the flames had been extinguished, Sanyuan stood up, went to the door, took some chopped tree roots, and gently put them on the fire.The shopkeeper looked up at Sanyuan, then looked down at the tree roots that had just been placed, and said to himself: "There are so many scholars in the village, and there are also those who work outside!"

"That's natural. Because of this school in our village, one or two students in the village pass the exam every year. The eldest brother of Uncle Mu's family passed the exam at that time. I heard that it is a university in BJ. Later, he was assigned to a university in Gansu. They teach in the university, and their whole family has moved there!" Said the three-yuan voice obviously much higher.

The salesman listened with gusto, and asked, "Are there any of these people who are doing well outside?"

"Because people outside rarely come back, I really haven't heard of anyone with a name!"

Sanyuan said, stood up and yawned, "It's getting late, let's go to bed for the first time!"

After speaking, he opened the door, and the two walked outside the house one after the other. The snow outside stopped at some point, and the ground was covered with a thick blanket of snow. Turning the corner of the room and looking at the windows of Lao Mu's house, there was no light on, knowing that Lao Mu's family had already fallen asleep, so he pulled down his pants at the corner, and then there was the sound of "swish, swish, swish" urinating.The shopkeeper also followed suit, and then returned to the house one after another, briefly cleaned up the fire, and the two of them got into the bed one after another, and soon there was the sound of two people snoring unhurriedly, breaking the silence. night sky.

(End of this chapter)