Text: Wang Shihui
This is an old story. It has been more than thirty years ago. At that time, I was only ten years old. After so many years, I have forgotten many big and small things, but I still remember this one clearly - it is a painful memory deep in my heart.
The fourth grandmother I call her is a five-guarantee household in the village. I have no idea what her last name is, what her name is, and where her natal family is from. I have asked many people in the village who are about the same age as me, and they all, like me, do not know the most basic personal information about the fourth grandmother.
The title "Four Old Grannies" has great "universality" in the village. It can be said to be a collective name, because the whole village calls her this, regardless of gender, age or seniority. This makes me feel strange to this day and I don't understand what's going on. I can only say that in a village where seniority is strict, the fourth grandmother is a "special element" and a rare exception.
The fourth grandmother has been childless all her life and is said to be infertile. There are men, but many people in the village have never seen them. Asking those older people, there are different versions of the story: one is that her husband was captured as a young man in his early years, became a soldier of the Kuomintang, and died on the battlefield during the bloody battle in Taierzhuang.
Another theory is that when Chiang Kai-shek was defeated in Taiwan, he followed him there; another theory is that during the Henan famine in 1942, he starved to death on his way to Shaanxi to escape famine. The man of the Fourth Grandma has become an unsolvable mystery. This mystery not only bothers the people in the village, but also bothers the Fourth Grandma. The wait for life or death has made her hair turn gray, and she has spent almost all of her decades in torture.
In my memory, the Fourth Grandma has always been a very old woman, as if she has never been young. She is short and thin, uses a cane and walks unsteadily, which makes me often worry about her - don't let the wind blow her down.
The Fourth Grandma was a powerful character when she was young. She could ride a horse and shoot a gun. She fought against two bandits by herself and subdued the bandits. When Japan entered the Central Plains, she also participated in the women's armed "Red Spear Club". Of course, these are rumors from people in the village. Someone asked the fourth grandmother for confirmation in the early years. It is said that she was vague and refused to say anything clearly or say more. Later I thought, could there be some secret inside?
The fourth grandmother lives in the south end of what the villagers often call "West Hutong". On the west side of the road, there are two low-rise main rooms with no courtyard walls around them. These few short words basically describe the entire scene of the fourth grandmother’s home.
is such a place, but it has become a favorite place for children, because the fourth grandmother is very kind and kind to children. She not only "speaks songs" to the children, but also gives those greedy little cats fruit candies, rice cakes, and snacks that even she can't bear to eat - at that time, these were all rare and good things. In that small courtyard without walls, there are a group of greedy little cats jumping around almost every day - often, I am one of them.
I clearly remember that it was mid-afternoon on an autumn day, and in the small courtyard without walls, a group of people were crowded together, all with dull faces. They rushed over from the fields where the production team was harvesting in the autumn, because they got the news that the house of the fourth grandmother was on fire.
Everyone hurried away in a hurry, but it was still too late. The fourth grandmother had been burned to death in the two low halls. Without witnesses, it is difficult to explain the cause of the fire. Based on the analysis of the scene, it was believed that the fourth grandmother lit firewood to boil water, which caused the firewood piled in the house to turn into a sea of fire... However, this is only an analysis, and analysis is also a guess. The truth was buried in the soil along with the burned, twitching and deformed body of the fourth grandmother.
On the day of the funeral of the fourth grandmother, many adults in the village attended, and everyone’s eyes were red. A large group of children, including me, almost burst into tears.
