Zhaojiagou is about 70 to 80 li away from Zhoujia Village. It would take Zhao Yunxiang and her mother half a day to walk there. Zhao Yunxiang was in a hurry, so she had to borrow her father's bicycle first.
Zhao Yunxiang first went to the town to pick up her son Zhou Jiasheng. Today happened to be Saturday, and Zhou Jiasheng had a day and a half off starting in the afternoon.
These days, Zhou Jiasheng and Wen Ziqing have become very familiar with each other. Every week, Zhou Jiasheng would go back to Zhaojiagou with his uncle.
When Wen Ziqing first saw Zhou Jiasheng, he was stunned. He could never have imagined that the ugly Zhou Jiasheng in his previous life had actually been so adorable as a child.
Perhaps there really is fate between people. Despite Wen Ziqing's aloofness, Zhou Jiasheng was quite fond of him, hanging around him whenever he had time. Zhou Jiasheng found Wen Ziqing, while learning martial arts, both cool and impressive. Before long, Wen Ziqing and Zhou Jiasheng became close friends.
Zhao Yunxiang took the children to her brother Zhao Guohui's house for lunch, refused Zhao Guohui's offer to skip work to take them there, and headed straight for Zhoujia Village.
The day before yesterday, Aunt Qiuju sent a message to Zhao Yunxiang, saying that the production team would distribute grain and money this afternoon in the house next to the threshing ground. In those days, the distribution of grain by the production team was a big event, and every household would be there.
Seeing that it was getting late, Zhao Yunxiang didn't bother to go home. She rode her bicycle and took her two children directly to the threshing ground.
Each of Zhoujia Village's six teams has a 500-square-meter threshing ground. During the busy farming season, rice harvested from the fields is threshed and pulled directly to the threshing ground.
In order to facilitate the collection of drying grain, the ground of the threshing yard is very flat, without any potholes.
During the busy farming season, the team leaders would assign two or three women in their fifties to dry the rice. As soon as the sun rose in the morning, the women would spread bamboo mats on the drying ground. When the wet rice, threshed from the fields, arrived, they would pour it onto the mats.
Why wait until the sun rises before spreading the mats? There's a reason for this. In Yuyuan County, dew forms at night in autumn. When the sun comes out, the dew evaporates, preventing the mats from getting wet.
During the busy farming season, the aunties who are responsible for drying the rice in the threshing yard each hold a long-handled wooden claw fence and quickly spread the piles of rice on mats.
The thin layer of wet rice on the mat can be dried in two days under the scorching sun and occasionally turned over by the aunties using wooden claw fences.
Beside the threshing ground of the production team, there are several large and sturdy houses. This is the headquarters of the production team. In that era, hoes, sickles, and insecticide sprayers were all important collective property. The small house next to the threshing ground was the team's tool room, where the production team stored hoes, sickles and other tools, and some unused pesticides were also stored here.
The other large building served as the team's warehouse, where the harvested grain was stored after each season. The warehouse was enormous, and after each harvest, the villagers would fan the rice with a windmill to remove the chaff. The plumpest grains were then taken to the grain management office for public payment, and the remaining grains of lower quality were later distributed to the team members after accounting.
Farmers in that era were very honest. The public grain they gave to the state was of the best quality, and there would never be any fraud.
Zhao Yunxiang's squad was the first, and they had one more room beside the threshing ground than the other squads. Besides the large warehouse and tool room, the remaining room, brightly painted white, served as the Zhoujia Village brigade headquarters office.
Usually, team leader Zhou Chunliang and village accountant Zhou Zhigang work here.
The first team has about forty households, and the old lady Wu Jinfeng of the Zhou family and several brothers of the Zhou family are in this team.
While Zhao Yunxiang was still on the way, the warehouse where the grain was distributed was already in chaos.
The cause of the incident was Wu Jinfeng.
After lunch, the team members came to the threshing ground. Today, in addition to distributing grain, they also distributed money, which made the team members very excited.
Life in the countryside was hard! After a year of toiling in the fields, only to earn a few cents just before the Lunar New Year. The same thing happened with grain: the bulk of it wasn't distributed until the end of the year. If a family didn't have enough food, they would borrow from the production team. The production team leader would determine each family's needs, with the village accountant as a witness, and then lend the team members the food they needed to survive.
The production team leader had great power. If a team member was dishonest or cunning, the team leader had the right to refuse to lend grain or to lend less grain to his or her family. The team leader would also pay more attention to team members who worked diligently and uncomplainingly.
Precisely because the captain has these powers, when arranging team members to work, no one dares to cheat, and no one disobeys orders.
When distributing grain at the end of the year, the accountant would calculate the amount of grain each family should get before distributing the grain, then look at the IOUs from each family and deduct back the grain that the team had borrowed.
Every team always had a few families in dire straits. Some had insufficient labor and many elderly and children; others had sick family members who burdened the entire family. When food was distributed at the end of the year, these families, after deducting the money they had borrowed from the team, were left with nothing. They even had to pay back the team for food or money.
The same thing happened with Team 1. Every year when food was distributed, there would always be a few families complaining about being poor, and the team would take each family's situation into consideration and make some countermeasures.
The first team's food distribution was not smooth at all today.
Qiuxiang's aunt's family was a notoriously poor family in the first squad. Qiuxiang's husband, Zhou Qijia, was a plowman in the first squad.
In rural areas, plowing is done with a combination of oxen and humans. A plow is harnessed to an old ox, and the plowman stands on the plow, holding a whip and occasionally whipping the ox to control its direction.
The black, oily soil slowly spreads out on both sides of the iron plow, which is the most beautiful sight that all rural people like to see.
Not everyone can be a plowman. The fields plowed by Zhou Qijia and his old ox became loose and soft, which saved a lot of trouble in planting the next crop of rice.
Two years ago, during a work trip, the old ox in the team went crazy for some reason.
Zhou Qijia tried to intervene, but was knocked to the ground by the reckless ox. Unfortunately for Zhou Qijia, there happened to be a rock protruding from the ground, and his back hit it, breaking a section of his spine. After over a month of treatment, Zhou Qijia's injuries healed, but he lost feeling in his legs.
Zhou Qijia was the strong laborer in the family. He had been lying in bed for two years. Qiuxiang raised four children aged from three to eight. One person's income was not enough to support a family of six.
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