Chapter 137 Cotton Quilt
Although it was dark, it was still possible to roughly tell whether the person was male or female.
So when Song Lubai got closer, the girls who were talking about Lu Shuangshuang didn't shut up, they just lowered their voices.
After working in education for a while, Song Lubai now holds a certain position in the company. Everyone in the company, regardless of gender, calls her "Comrade Song".
Song Lubai was squatting to the side washing raisins. She hadn't intended to participate in the discussion and just wanted to eavesdrop quietly, but the women handed the conversation over to her.
"Comrade Song, what do you think will happen if Lu Shuangshuang is really pregnant? How will she live in the future?"
The woman speaking was filled with worry.
Nowadays, almost everyone thinks that if you have a child, you have to give birth to it.
Zhao Aiguo is already dead. If Lu Shuangshuang is really pregnant, it seems only natural for her to leave him with her child.
Song Lubai said, "It's nothing, don't make wild guesses. Maybe she's just in a bad mood and can't eat."
Even if Lu Shuangshuang is pregnant, with her shrewdness, she will find a way out no matter what, so there's no need for others to worry.
The girl said definitively, "She's definitely pregnant. When Zhao Aiguo died, she didn't feel like vomiting whenever she smelled food like she has recently."
Song Lubai said a few more words and then went back.
She will report to the Commercial Department at the end of next month, and will soon be leaving the environment of the 25th Company. The affairs of certain annoying people will have nothing to do with her.
She should think about her future development instead.
By the end of November, all the cotton bolls in the company had been removed, and the cleaned cotton stalks lay piled up like a mountain.
The company commander wanted everyone to harvest more cotton, so he went to other companies, only to find that there was no place left for them to pick cotton bolls. The nearest cotton fields had been cleared clean, as if cotton had never been planted there.
With the route to cotton from other companies cut off, Song Lubai had no choice but to turn to her own people in the company.
Cotton is a good thing, and so is money.
The price of cotton purchased under the unified purchase system was as high as three yuan and fifty cents, which was the price of good cotton.
The cotton petals extracted from unopened cotton bolls are the lowest quality cotton, and while they are not as expensive as good cotton, they are not cheap either.
A pound of meat costs only a little over 70 cents, while the cotton that Song Lubai secretly exchanges costs as much as 1.1 yuan per pound.
At 2.2 yuan per kilogram, she bought eight kilograms in one go, spending 17.6 yuan. Her three months' worth of savings was almost gone.
On her day off, she carried a cotton sack weighing about ten kilograms onto the back of the tractor.
The large amount of cotton naturally attracted attention. When asked about it, Song Lubai said, "The quilts in my hometown have been used for many years. Cotton is hard to come by there, as you all know. Fortunately, we have the means here, so I sent it back home."
Everyone agrees that cotton is hard to get in our hometown.
But everyone only had about two kilograms, so Song Lubai getting more than half a bag was a big deal, which must have cost a lot of money.
Someone in the crowd said sourly, "Song Lubai, what kind of family do you come from? How can you change so many people at once?"
Song Lubai sighed and said, "I used three months' salary to exchange for it. In the company, food was free, and I could save most of my ten yuan a month. Now that I've exchanged it for cotton, there's hardly any savings left."
The person who asked the question finally felt relieved.
Everyone else is struggling on weekdays, but Song Lubai, now a teacher, not only doesn't have to do physical labor anymore, but she also gets to eat delicious food often. While others are starving and thin, she's doing well; her complexion looks rosy and radiant lately, and she doesn't seem to have suffered much.
Song Lubai spoke to everyone with a normal expression.
She spent the money and got the cotton; she should have retorted to that person with a clear conscience, but there was no need to waste her energy.
By offending people who are psychologically unbalanced, she is making trouble for herself at this critical juncture when "private transactions, speculation, profiteering, and profiteering" are prohibited.
Upon arriving at the farm headquarters, Song Lubai first dragged the cotton to the post office.
She originally planned to send five kilograms home, and use the remaining five kilograms to make herself a thick quilt.
However, the postage was too expensive, Xinjiang Province was too far away, and the postage fee per kilogram varied from province to province. There were several provinces between Xinjiang and Henan Province, and the distance was long and the postage was exorbitant. She could only reduce the weight to three kilograms and spent six yuan and sixty cents to send the three kilograms of cotton back.
After finishing with all that cotton, she not only had no money left from three months' salary, but she also had to use up her savings.
She dragged the remaining seven kilograms to the cotton-fluffing shop at the farm headquarters.
The cotton-fluffing machine whirred and roared, and the elderly women who hand-fluffed cotton were never idle, with cotton fluff floating in the air.
An apprentice in the shop came closer and asked, "Making cotton quilts?"
Song Lubai nodded, "Make a five-kilogram quilt, and fluff up the remaining two kilograms. When can you finish making it?"
The apprentice pointed to a pile of bags on the ground and said, "We've been getting a lot of quilts made lately, so it'll be at least half a month. Come back in half a month. Now I'll weigh them for you, give you a receipt, and you can pay."
It weighed six kilograms in total. After weighing it, the apprentice opened the bag, looked at the cotton inside, and said with disdain, "It's all this stuff, sigh!"
Good cotton requires less work to make quilts compared to cotton from unopened cotton bolls, so cotton carders naturally prefer good cotton.
But all the good cotton had been taken away, and most of what people brought was this worst kind of cotton.
"The price for fluffing cotton is 4.5 yuan per kilogram. If it's pounded into cotton wadding, it's cheaper, 0.8 yuan per kilogram. You'll have to pay 24.02 yuan."
Song Lubai was stunned when she heard the price.
She was quickly calculating the costs in her mind.
Cotton costs 2.2 yuan per kilogram, and processing fees are 4.5 yuan per kilogram. The cost of making a 5-kilogram quilt is 33.5 yuan.
Good heavens, she doesn't even earn that much in a month.
Her mother's monthly salary was enough to make a cotton quilt.
No wonder she used the same quilt for ten years back in her hometown without changing it.
Too expensive!
Her expression was so captivating that even the apprentices were amused.
"What's wrong? Don't have that much money? Go to the supply and marketing cooperative and ask if a five-kilogram cotton quilt costs seventy or eighty yuan."
"Cotton is not cheap. With processing fees, it costs nine yuan per kilogram. The cotton you got yourself must be cheaper. You probably didn't spend any money at all. You can get a new quilt for about twenty yuan, which is a great deal."
Song Lubai said, "The cost is nine yuan per kilogram, so the cost of a five-kilogram quilt is only forty-five yuan. How can the store sell it for so much!" That's outrageous!
The apprentice shook his head: "From the ground to becoming a quilt, how many people handle the cotton? Don't they all get paid?"
Song Lubai thought to herself that the most pitiful people were the farmers who worked in the fields. They worked hard, but could only earn five yuan a month. Even after saving for a year, they still couldn't afford a quilt from the supply and marketing cooperative.
She silently took the money out of her pocket, got the ticket, and left the cotton-fluffing shop.
She had originally planned to go to a restaurant for shredded pork noodles today, but thinking about the tens of yuan that had been lost due to the cotton quilt, she silently clutched her pocket tightly.
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