You know I’ve done my best for you. Times were hard then.
It’s not hard now, and don’t tell yourself that you have done your best. You haven’t done anything except what is convenient for you, and I won’t tolerate you pretending that we have any more feelings. For me, I have always been nothing. You come and go, and I may not be there when you come back, but anyway, it’s nothing. I died in the mountains. You may think that I will be as sorry as one of the hounds didn’t come when the horn sounded and dusk came. Don’t expect me to stand up at your call now.
But I am an old man, said Stebrod.
You told me that you are not yet fifty years old.
But I feel old.
But I feel old, too, but so what? What’s more, what people say to Ge and his gang is half true, so harboring you will bring us great trouble. This is not my place and it should not be my decision, but even if it is my decision, I will say no.
They all looked at Ida. She was sitting there in a shawl with her hands in her knee skirts to keep warm. From their faces, it could be seen that they regarded her as an arbitrator because of her land status or education or cultural level. However, although she was certain about this land, she felt that being in this position made her very absent. All she could think was that Ruby’s father almost had a narrow escape, and that was a rare opportunity.
So she said that since he is your father, it is your responsibility to take care of him to some extent.
Amestbrod said
Ruby shook her head, that’s why we don’t know each other about her father. She said, I can tell you something about my opinion. I don’t know how old I remember changing my teeth at that time, and then he went to make wine.
She turned to Stebrod and said, Do you remember that you are still cold in Puzler? Do you remember anything?
I remember Stebrod saying
Well, tell me what parts you remember, Ruby said.
So Stebrod told the story of his experience. One of his companions thought that making wine could make a fortune, so they ran to live in a shack made of bark in the mountains. In his eyes, Ruby seemed to be exhausted, which made her pass three months. At that time, she was not yet old. Puzler was not proficient in making wine. They soon finished, and there was not enough teapot material. Moreover, they didn’t put the washed charcoal in the first round of filtrate for trouble. Almost every drop of liquid was muddy green or muddy. Turbid yellow, but it was very strong. They didn’t dilute it by three quarters of pure alcohol concentration, which was not particularly different from the butin brewed by their Celtic ancestors. However, many customers found that the wine they brewed was too irritating to stomach and intestines, and their business failed. They didn’t make any money, because they had to get rid of what they needed to get back the secondary brewing materials. Stebrod stayed there until the bad economic situation and the cold weather drove him to the mountains in November.
When he finished, Ruby told her what she had done in those months when he was away. She foraged in the wild, dug up grass roots, braided willow branches and caught birds by similar methods. In addition to trying to avoid eating fish birds and scavenged birds, she ate the caught birds indiscriminately. By trying and failing, she learned what to eat and what not to catch in an unforgettable week, so she ate some chestnut walnuts. She ground them into powder and baked them into kneeling cakes on the hearth slate to satisfy her hunger. When picking chestnuts in the sky, she accidentally saw a static painting. Stebrod slept in a shack. According to his companion, he had slept for a day. He only moved his toe from time to time before you knew that he was alive. After that, a similar scene seemed to make her happy because she was not a wolf child after all, but Ruby saw that Ada had read Romulus Remus to her. romulus was a god of war. He said that Remus was created in China and Rome as a twin brother, and was raised by wolves.
However, despite these hard and lonely years, Huste Broadruby had to say fairly that he had never slapped her in anger. She didn’t remember being slapped, but conversely, he never patted her head or touched her cheek kindly.
She looked at Ada and said, What’s the matter? Does that meet your responsibility?
Ruby got up and strode into the darkness before Ada could finish her thoughts or say, Oh, my God.
Stebrod didn’t say anything, and Pong seemed to say softly that she was very angry now.
Later, I will send Stebrod Pong away with a hazy hope. After that, Ida strolled along the path leading to the warehouse, and the night gradually became cold. She guessed that it might be frosty in Lebanon, and the full moon hung high, and the moonlight was bright. Every branch cast a blue shadow. Ida wished she could read Adam Bede in her pocket in the month, and the brightest star was shining in the gray night. When she looked at them casually, Ida noticed that the hunter had climbed the eastern sky. Then she saw that the moon was missing, and one of its teeth was an eclipse.
She went back to her room and got three small binoculars made by Monroe. This telescope is made in Italy. Although it is not as accurate as those made in Germany from the light point of view, it has a beautiful appearance. The bronze mirror body is also carved with many spiral patterns. She went to the shed to get a folding chair. When she drew one from the four chairs, she wondered if this was the one where Monroe died. She spread it in the front yard and wrapped herself in the quilt, then looked back at the sky. She adjusted the telescope to focus on her, and although the shadow edge was copper, the top of it was still clearly visible.
Ida looked at the shadow gradually covering the moon’s disk, but even at the worst of the eclipse, the moon was still faintly visible. The color of the old money was as dark brown as a penny, and on the surface, the size was different. When the moon almost disappeared, the milky way appeared. A river of light crossed the sky and raised a dust in the same way. Ida moved the telescope to the milky way and stopped there to stare at its depths. In the telescope, the stars were crisscrossed and woven into light bushes, which seemed to be exhausted until she felt that she was suspended and exposed at the edge of a canyon. At the outer edge of the radius of the planet, she felt that she had experienced the dizziness by the well Esco for a moment, and it seemed that she would be released and helped to fall into the thorn of light.
She opened her eyes and put the telescope aside. The dark wall of Black Valley rose and was fixed on the cup-shaped land. She lay contentedly looking at the night when the moon gradually emerged from the earth’s shadow. She remembered a song with a simple love song by Stebrod in the evening. Its last sentence was, I beg you to come back to me. If it were not a deeper poem among the lovers of Luna, Stebrod might not have sung so much. Ida had to admit that at least occasionally, expressing her heart directly and plainly might be more touching than a thousand John Keats poems.
She went back to her room, took a desk and a lamp, and went back to the chair. After dipping the pen tip in ink, she sat there staring at the paper until it dried. She thought that every sentence seemed ridiculous. She wiped the pen tip with ink and dipped it in ink again and wrote, I beg you to come back to me. She signed her name and folded the letter paper, and then wrote a hospital address in capital letters. She wrapped herself tightly in a quilt and quickly fell asleep. The frost condensed on her, and she was covered with a thin layer of white.
Bear oath
Inman walked along the road through the mountain village and hardly met anyone. His company calculated the distance every day, and the distance was less than half a day. Less than this time, the distance was a short distance, and the mile hour had become his disdain unit, because he measured both.
After he met a little woman who was lying on the fence and her dead child was crying, his trip was delayed. The chimney cap covered her face except for the tip of her nose. However, when she looked up and turned to Inman, tears dripped from her cheeks and glistened in the morning light. Her mouth opened in great pain, which made Inman think that the scabbard mouth had not yet finished rising, and she would have to bury her child in an old quilt because she didn’t know how to make a coffin.
Inman offered to help, and spent the whole day in her backyard nailing the boards removed from the old bacon barrels into a small coffin. They smelled lard and walnut smoke, and the side of the boards became dark and smooth because of years of smoked ham. The woman came to the back door from time to time to check his progress, and every time she would say that two weeks before my daughter died, her stool was as thin as ashes.
Inman laid some pine needles at the bottom of the coffin after finishing his carpenter’s work. He went into the room to hug the girl lying in the bed and wrapped in the quilt. He lifted her, and she was as hard and tight as a pod or a piece of wood. He carried her from the back door, while the mother sat at the kitchen table and looked at him with glasses. He was beaten and put the girl on the lid of the coffin, trying to stay in her wrinkled gray cheeks and pointed nose. He scratched his knife and filled it in the lining of the small coffin. Then she picked up the girl, put her in the coffin and picked up the hammer.
I’d better nail it, he said
The woman came and kissed the girl’s sunken cheeks and forehead, then sat on the porch and watched Inman nail the lid tightly.
They buried her in a nearby hill, where four gravestones were made of shale. The first three were babies, and their birth dates were eleven months apart. The fourth tomb was a mother, Inman, who noticed that she died on the last baby’s birthday. He quickly calculated in his mind that she lived to be twenty years old. After Inman dug a new grave behind this small row of stone tablets, he said, do you want to say something?