Inman got up, folded the stationery, put his hand on the collar and touched the scabbed wound gently. The doctors said that he was recovering quickly, but Inman still felt that a stick would easily pass through from the opposite side with a slight poke from there, and it would not be more powerful than piercing a rotten pumpkin. The wound would still hurt when eating, and it would also hurt when breathing. In general, these injuries made him feel terrible when he fell off his hip in Moerwan a few years ago and it was cloudy. All in all, these injuries made him feel like a healthy person, but on the way back to the hospital, he felt that his legs were strangely listening.
Back to the ward, Inman Ma noticed that barris was not at the table, and his bed was covered with brown goggles on that pile of toilet paper. Inman found out that he had died at noon. barris walked peacefully. He looked blue and left the table and turned over against the wall. When he died, he seemed to be asleep.
Inman casually leafed through the top of barris’s manuscript, a draft with fragments written on the top and three horizontal lines drawn on it. It was a mess. The handwriting was thin, the spider’s legs were twisted and distorted, and there were more scribblings than clear words. Occasionally, it was just a sentence in the east and a sentence in the west. When I finished reading a sentence, I suddenly jumped into Inman’s eyes. We said that one day it was good, and another day it was bad because we didn’t know that every day was the same in quality.
Inman would rather die than agree with this. I can’t help but feel sad at the thought that barris spent the last time of his life studying a fool’s words. But then he saw a line that seemed to compare. The most orderly place on the earth is just a lot of messy garbage. Inman thought he could agree with this point. He picked up messy manuscripts on the edge of the desktop and put them back.
After dinner, Inman checked it, packed it in his bed, packed a blanket and damp-proof cloth in his backpack, and stuffed the small teapot, cup and scabbard knife into it. The food bag was already full of cakes, cornmeal and a large piece of salted pork to buy beef jerky from the hospital staff.
He sat by the window waiting for the end of the day, and the sunset process was disturbing. The horizon was covered with gray clouds, but when the sun was about to sink, he found a gap in the clouds. A light rushed straight into the sky, and the color was like red charcoal. The edge of the cylindrical beam looked like a rifle barrel standing on the horizon for five minutes, and then suddenly disappeared. Inman clearly knew the boundary, and now it seemed to attract people’s attention and explain it. Just now, when he wanted to come, the sky showed the danger and pain of struggle. Suffering from this, he didn’t need to show this spectacular scene. It was really white and painstaking. He lay down on the bed cover and was taken to the city for a day. Inman was very tired and fell asleep after watching it for a while. At this time, it was still dark.
When he woke up, it was already deep in the night, and the room was dark and silent. He heard some breathing and snoring. The patient came in with a faint light outside the bed turning sound window. He could see that Jupiter was shining in the sky. The wind blew in from the window and died. barris’s manuscript was overturned by the wind, and several pieces stood up half-way. The light outside the window passed through their backs like shining little ghosts.
Inman got up in his new clothes, stuffed a roll of bartram travel notes into his backpack belt, tied his bag around his body, and went to the open window to look out. It was a dark new moonlit night, and the mist was in the low floating sky, but Wan Liyun stepped on the windowsill and went away.
Palm land
Ida sat on the porch that now belongs to her door with a portable desk on her lap. She dipped her pen in ink and wrote
You must know that although you have been gone for a long time, everything is still beautiful. I will never hide my thoughts from you. Don’t worry and worry like that. You know, I think it is our common responsibility to communicate with each other in the most frank and sincere manner, so that our hearts will always be open to each other.
She blew the paper dry and looked at it critically again. She just wrote that she was very dissatisfied with her own method. No matter how hard she tried, she never wrote as beautiful as a cloud. On the contrary, her hand was determined to write the words thick and dense. It seemed that Niven was more dissatisfied with her writing style than Fa. She crumpled the letter paper and threw it into the boxwood hedge.
What she said in words was just a set of words, and it was unfair to finish her words.
She looked at the vegetable garden in the courtyard. Although the growing period was full, the beans, pumpkins and tomatoes could hardly catch up with her thumb and vegetables. Many leaves were eaten by insects in the remaining ribs, and weeds flourished and high vegetables grew. Ida could not say their names, but she didn’t have the energy to eradicate the deserted vegetable garden. Next to it, there used to be a cornfield, but now it was occupied by the toxic lacquertree on her shoulders. The morning mist scattered at the end of the farmland grassland, and the mountains just stood pale. She said they were mountains, not to mention mountain ghosts.
Ida sat still and waited for their clear faces. It was always a comfort for her to see something, otherwise she would be depressed because everything else in front of her was depressed. When her father came to the funeral, Ida paid little attention to the farm, but after all, she milked the horse and called the cow Ralph, and the cow was named Waldo by Monroe, regardless of whether she was a bull or not. But she didn’t do any more and didn’t know how to cook the chicken, so she died. One by one, they became thin and hid from everyone. Ida was very angry with the hens because they gave up coming to the chicken coop and flew to the tree to hide their eggs. No matter where they were, they wanted to look for eggs. She had to search every corner of the yard. Recently, she felt that the eggs tasted strange because the hen recipe had changed from leftovers to worms.
Solving the cooking problem has become Ida’s urgent summer. When she is not hungry, except for a little milk, fried egg salad and a few plates of miniature tomatoes, which have never been waited on by anyone, she didn’t eat anything else, and even butter became out of reach. Baby, after stirring by her hand, the milk never condenses to a sufficient concentration, and at most she can get some trickle curd. She really wants to drink a bowl of hot chicken dough soup and eat a peach pie, but in the end, she can do it.
Ida took another look at the distant mountains, which were still hazy and confused. She got up to look for eggs. First, she looked at the weeds growing along the path and along the fence. Then she went to the branches of the peach trees in the side yard to look at a big weed. Then she rummaged through the debris piled up in the backyard and groped for it in the dusty rack in the tool room. She found nothing.
She remembered that a red hen had been in the boxwood trees on both sides of the front steps recently. Ada went to the bush where the letter had just been thrown. She tried to pull out the dense branches and peeped in, but it was dark inside. She wrapped her skirt tightly around her legs and landed on all fours, and squeezed in the branches. The branches scraped the palms of her arms, her face and neck. The land was very dry and scattered with chicken feathers and dried chicken droppings. The leaves crawled inside. The dense leaves outside were like a closed curtain, like a hut.
Ida sat up and looked around the branches around the ground. She saw a broken eggshell with serrated edges, which contained reddish-brown dried egg yolk. She found a block on two branches and sat with her back against a tree to rest. The shade of boxwood was full of dust. The pungent smell of chicken was dim, which reminded her of putting a tablecloth on the table or putting a carpet on the clothesline when she was a child. It was the most fun to play in it. Her cousin Lucy dug deep into the cave in the haystack. In the rainy afternoon, they were all cats whispering in it, dry and comfortable like foxes hiding in the nest.
With the pleasure of familiarity, Ada breathed a rush, and she realized that she was hiding as before. People would never find her hiding here when they walked from the gate to the porch. A devout lady Yu Yi came to inquire about her, so she could sit here motionless, no matter how they knocked on the door and called her name, until the latch of the courtyard snapped for a long time, but it is estimated that no one would come, because of her indifference, the guests have become scarce day by day.
Ida looked up through the gap between the leaves and looked at the slightly pale blue sky. She was a little disappointed. If only it rained, the rustling of leaves would make her feel more secure. Occasionally, a drop or two would fall through the gap to make a small pit in the dust, which would make the contrast even stronger. Although it was raining cats and dogs outside, she was dry and pleasant here. Ida hoped to never leave this lovely haven and recalled her recent experiences. She couldn’t think of anyone who was more educated than her who was less suitable for the hard life of publicity.
Ada grew up in Charlestown, because her father Monroe advocated that her education was beyond recognition. She is a smart girl for women. She is both her blog partner and a lively and well-behaved daughter. She is full of opinions on art and politics and never hesitates to express her ideas. But what can she say to be truly talented? She is familiar with French and Latin, and she knows a little Greek. She is proficient in embroidery and playing the piano, but she can’t accurately describe landscapes and still lives with pencils or watercolors. She is also a rich group.
These are all abilities that are not good for her. No, they don’t seem to help her cope with the grim reality she is facing at present. She has nearly 300 acres of sloping land, a house outside the house and a barn, but she is completely blind. I don’t know what to do with them. Playing the piano can bring happiness, but she is in a dilemma recently. Weeding a row of bean seedlings is accompanied by pulling out half of the seedlings.
At this moment, a little knowledge of grain production and processing is more important to her than a subtle understanding of painting perspective. Every time she thinks about it, her heart hates it. Her father has always spoiled her and refused to let her do a little hard work. As long as she can remember, when her father hired enough helpers, it was the end of liberating blacks, but white people who had no land were slaves. So the salary was paid directly to the slave owner. Monroe hired a white man who was a Cherokee wife. Ida, a supplier, didn’t do anything except design a weekly recipe. She could spend all her time reading embroidery, painting and music as before.
Now that this employee has left, he has never been enthusiastic about leaving the union. In the first few years of the war, he was glad that he was old and didn’t want to join the army. But this spring, with the serious shortage of Virginia troops, he was worried that the conscription would soon fall on him, so that shortly after Monroe’s death, his wife left without saying goodbye and fled across the mountain border to the northern control area to leave Ida for a living.
She was left alone on the farm, and Ada realized that she had terrible skills to make a living. Judging from the way her father managed the farm, she said that her livelihood was not enough, but it was more appropriate to realize some ideas in her heart. Monroe was bored with agriculture and never cultivated any interest. His view was that she could afford to buy feed, grow too much corn, roast enough to eat, but buy bacon pork chops and dirty pigs. Once Ada heard that he appointed helpers to buy more than a dozen sheep and put them on the slope in front of the yard. The helpers disagreed that cows and sheep were not suitable for grazing together. He asked Monroe if you wanted sheep.
Monroe replied that he wanted an atmosphere
But people can’t live by the atmosphere, and this boxwood seems to be the only thing that can give her a sense of security when it is visible. Now she decides to stay here, unless she can think of three reasons to let her leave, but after thinking about it for a few minutes, it is not a special worry to think of a cause to die in boxwood.
I think the red hen rushed in through the branches and leaves, her wings were hanging and dragging in the dust. She jumped to a branch near Ida’s head and giggled excitedly, followed by the big rooster with black and gold feathers. It was fierce and often frightened Ida. The rooster was so intent on chasing the hen that she suddenly saw Ida startled and suddenly stopped. Her eyes were black and shiny, and she stared at Ida and took a step back. She pawed the rooster back and forth on the ground. It was very close to Ida, and she could see the horny scales of the yellow chicken feet. Pieces of dirt accumulate, and long chicken feet prick out like fingers, covering the head with golden feathers, fluffy, shiny and shiny, and rubbing the head oil. It shakes the neck and makes the feathers return to their positions, and the yellow pointed mouth opens and closes.
This guy weighs 150 pounds, and he will definitely kill me on the spot, Ida thought.
She moved her body, knelt down and waved her hands in her mouth to pee, trying to blow it up. She didn’t want the rooster to jump head-on. Ling twisted her body, and the chicken’s feet stuck out in front, while her wings kept flapping. Ida raised one hand to stop it from her wrist, but she slapped it, and the rooster hit the ground, but it immediately slapped its wings and came to the ground again. Ida crawled out like a crab, and the rooster came to stab her. She hooked the skirt pleats and couldn’t shrink back. Ida rolled over and fell down from the bushes and escaped the rooster. Hanging her skirt near the leg bend, she grabbed her calf with her mouth and stabbed her with the other foot repeatedly, but she didn’t idle her wings, slapping Ada fiercely and waving her hand around, and finally knocked off the rooster and ran off to the porch and rushed into the house.
She leaned into the armchair to examine a blood stain on her injured wrist. She wiped the blood dry and was relieved. It was just a scratch on her leather skirt, three holes were broken, and she was dirty and stained with chicken droppings. She lifted her skirt and looked at her legs. There were all kinds of scratches and pecking marks everywhere, but none of them were so deep that she was scratched by branches when she was climbing out. She raised her hand and touched her hair, and her head was a mess. Look at where I have fallen. She thought it was really a new world, even looking for eggs.
She got up from her chair, climbed the stairs, took off her clothes, poured the water in the pitcher into the washbasin of Dashitai, and cleaned herself with a lavender soap towel. She crossed her fingers through the leaves of boxwood in the hair grate, and then let her hair hang freely over her shoulders. At that time, she gave up both hairstyles, whether it was curled up and combed into two curls, hanging over her head like a dog’s ear, or stuck to her scalp and tied it up like a tail. She didn’t need or have the patience to tie it like this, even if she walked upside down like a crazy woman with long hair in a hidden ticket.
She went to the closet to look for clean clothes, but none of them had been washed for a while. She drew some linen clothes from the bottom of the pile of dirty clothes and put them on, thinking that maybe they would become cleaner than the clothes she had just taken off. She put on a slightly cleaner skirt outside and wondered how to sleep in bed. Since when has the world changed? She no longer thinks about making time happy and full, but thinks about how to kill time.
Her desire for action almost disappeared. The only thing she did in the past few months after Monroe’s death was to leave his legacy, which was also a difficult test. Because of her strange fear of her father’s room, she didn’t dare to go in until many days after the funeral. But in those days before that, she often looked at the house at the door like a man who was attracted to the edge of a cliff. The water in the big glass of his father’s washstand remained untouched, and finally it evaporated. Finally, she got up the courage to go into his father’s room and sit in bed, making him work fine, white shirt and black. The colored suit and trousers are folded up and put away, and she cries while picking them up. She opens the door, files, sermons, plant notes and ordinary diaries are classified and packed in boxes. Every small job brings a new round of mourning, and a series of imaginary days have now merged into one person. The only answer is nothing. This is her current situation.