You wouldn’t have done this if you stayed at home. Inman said that the man wanted to turn the pike over and aim it at Inman, but Inman had pulled the trigger and hit him in the chest near here, and the gun fire burned his skirt.
The place where two city youths died was not far from the cave. Inman dragged the body into the cave and placed them on the wall of the cave. Then he took Springfield rifles beside them. He walked along the stream to the hemlock tree and found that the hen had broken free and ran. Its head was stuck in the hole of new york guy’s belly and was pecking at the fried flowers.
Inman rummaged through Yi’s pocket, squatted on the ground and rolled himself a cigarette. Then he smoked and watched the hen busy in Yi’s body. He put out the cigarette stub in his heel and remembered a mass. Although this song is usually arranged in counterpoint and polyphony, he hummed a short paragraph and pondered the lyrics in his heart.
No more fear of graves.
My death is my rebirth.
The soul laughs by the crystal river.
I see that I am reborn.
Hallelujah, I will be reborn
Inman decided to look at what was in front of him in this way, compared with the battlefield in the concave road of Fort fredericks or the corpse mountain at the bottom of the bombing pit. At this time, this scene is not the same thing. The people he killed in those two places may be hundreds of times stronger than this Iraq in all aspects. Although Inman thinks that the story happened today, he may never mention it to people.
He got up, grabbed the chicken leg, dragged it from new york to the stream, and washed it in the stream until its hair turned white again. His federal soldiers tied the chicken’s feet with a piece of string and threw it to the ground. The chicken turned its head and its black eyes seemed to Inman to be a new interest, and looked at the world enthusiastically.
Inman grabbed new york’s feet and dragged him into the cave. His friends put him together. The cave was too small. They almost sat in a circle. It was like a few people were drunk and ready to play a hand. Their faces were full of fear and confusion. It seemed to fall on their heads. Death was like a kind of sadness. Inman picked up a charcoal from the ashes at the mouth of the cave and painted Sarah’s quilt on the wall of the cave. Their shapes reminded Inman of how fragile the human body was in front of all sharp and hard objects. These animals Cherokee or anyone else painted it in front of Inman.
Inman went back to the entrance of the ravine to inspect the horses and found that they were all branded with the seal of the military horse. He was greatly frustrated. He untied the horses and dragged them to the cave in three trips and put them beside their owners. He took the horses to the hillside far away from the cave and shot each horse’s head. It was a last resort. If they didn’t do this, their body marks would definitely bring danger to Sarah. When he returned to the rock, he put the live chickens into the feeding bags and put them on his shoulders. Then he untied the pigs from the trees and led them to the ravine.
When he got back to the cabin, Sarah had already started a big fire in the courtyard with a big black iron pot and steam rushing into the cold. She had washed Inman’s clothes and spread them out in the bushes. Inman looked up and found it was still noon, although he felt that it seemed impossible.
They didn’t wait for lunch to eat the two chickens and then worked for two hours. Before the pigs had been killed, scalded and shaved, an iron hook passed through the tendons of the hind legs and hung on a big branch. All kinds of dirty water were put into a basin, steaming. Sarah was busy beside the pig oil barrel. She picked up an oil catcher and held it in front of her like a lace scarf. She took a look through it, then kneaded it into a ball and threw it into the bucket to boil the oil. Inman cut the pork straight along both sides of his spine with an axe, and then cut it into several pieces along the section.
They worked until it was nearly dark, boiled the lard, washed the small intestine, ground the meat at the edges and corners into sausages, salted the pork leg ribs, and controlled the pig’s blood to prepare pickled pig’s head meat.
They washed their hands and went into the house. Sarah set out for dinner. Inman ate some lard residue that she planned to mix into tortillas. She stewed a pot of pork liver and pork lungs, and because they didn’t live there, they added a lot of onions and peppers to flavor them. They stopped for a while and then ate.
After dinner, Sarah said, I believe you might look better if you shave.
I can try your razor, Inman said
She turned over a razor from the box, took it over a belt with a wide oil and put it on Inman’s leg.
This is John, too, she said
She scooped enough shaving water from the bucket, put it in a black basin, put it on the fire and heated it until it was steaming, then poured it into a gourd ladle and lit a candle inserted in the iron candle holder. Inman put things outside the door and put them on the washboard at one end of the porch.
Inman grinds the razor on the belt, and then the water wets his beard. He raises the razor and notices a little brown blood on the cuff of John’s shirt, either human blood or pig blood. He looks at the metal mirror, puts the razor on his cheek and shaves in the flickering candlelight.
He had a beard since the second year of the war, and now he wants to see his face again after such a long separation. He has been scratching his face and sharpening his belt. He stopped shaving in those years because he didn’t want to see himself for too long. Besides, it was very difficult to keep the blade and boil water in the past two years. It seems that he is doomed to be unable to do it. One thing is missing.
After half a day, he finally scraped his face clean. There were many brown spots on the rusty surface of the mirror. He looked at his pale face. The mirror rust seemed to be a small scar on his face. Byakki Smoker narrowed his eyes and looked at him. His eyes flashed slightly, which made him feel very strange. His facial features tightened their eyes and his cheeks were sunken. Hunger was not caused by lack of food.
Inman wants to look out of the mirror. Her young husband has nothing in common. A murderer’s face occupies the place where young John once stared out. You sit by the winter fire and look up and see a face like this outside the dark window. How will you react when you look at you? He thinks to himself, I don’t know how it will lead to panic and convulsions.
It is commendable that Inman tried his best to say that this is not really his face, and it may change later.
He walked into the room and Sarah smiled at him and said, now you look a little human.
They sat by the fireplace and watched the flames in the hearth. Sarah held the child in her arms and shook it. The child coughed badly. Inman estimated that it would be difficult for him to survive this winter. The child didn’t sleep. In Sarah’s arms, Sarah twisted impatiently and Sarah sang a song for her.
She seems a little shy, not only for her own voice, but also for her own life because of the song. Her voice seems to be blocked by something. The song has to be squeezed in her lungs after hard work, and she is eager to find her way, only to find that her teeth are closed, so she can vent herself through a nasal loss. Listening in loneliness can add more sorrow.
The song pierces the night, and its melody tells of despair, hatred and hidden panic. Inman thinks that her hard singing is the most heroic act she has ever seen, just like witnessing a costly final battle. Her voice belongs to a woman who has lived for two centuries, and she is so old and exhausted, but she is still such a young child. She is an old woman who used to sing tactfully in her early years. Others may say that she really knows how to get the best results, and she can learn from it to face the shortcomings and damages in life and accept them. But Sarah is not an old woman. That song sounds weird and disturbing. You may think that a child will cry when his mother sings such a song, but on the contrary, he falls asleep in Sarah’s arms like listening to a lullaby.
But its lyrics are dreamy lullabies. It tells a terrible story. It is a murder ballad called Beautiful Margaret Gentle William. It is an old song, but Inman has never heard it sing.
I dreamed that my bedroom was crowded with red pigs.
I dreamed that my bride’s bed was full of blood.
In this song, she turned to singing hiking strangers, humming her feet and patting her feet until she finally sang. The root of the song was not like singing, but a cry of sorrow, announcing that the suffering of the soul was a lonely scream, a complete loneliness as pure as the pain after being punched in the nose. After she finished singing, there was a long silence. An owl made a few calls in the dark forest, which was a suitable ending for such a song with a lonely and heavy theme of death and a ghost world atmosphere.
Sarah’s dedication to songs is not supposed to bring comfort to children, not to mention Inman. This heavy gift is full of sadness and sorrow. How can it alleviate the sadness of others? But this is not the case. Although they rarely talked that night, they sat side by side in front of the fire feeling tired, satisfied, relaxed and happy. Later, they fell asleep in the same bed again.
The next morning, before breakfast, Inman cooked the pig’s brain half-boiled, and then put an egg together to fry the laying hens. Yesterday, he pecked at the dirty soldier who came to new york.
Satisfied heart
Ada Ruby spent most of the autumn on apple flour, and had to pick, peel, slice and juice it. It was really a pleasant and clean job to dispose of water in the forest. When the bag was full, it was clear and clean, dry and pleasant, that is, in the afternoon, the sun was finely skewed. Judging from the light, people knew that winter was not far away. Every morning, when the dew was still rolling in the chicken feet, they carried the ladder to climb to the branches of the tree, picked the apples, and put them into the bags. When the bags were full, the branches swayed gently, and they pulled the horses into
Cutting grass is not very tiring. When lying in bed at night, it forms a static picture in Ida’s mind. Red or yellow apples hang on low branches, and the background is dark blue. Her palm reaches out to the apple but doesn’t touch it.
For a long time, Ada Ruby ate apples, fried them, stewed them, made them into pies, or made them into sauces. They sliced the apples and dried them into small pieces, then hung them in a cloth bag on the kitchen ceiling. One day, they made a fire in the courtyard and set up a black saucepan, which was bigger than when they were stirring the mud inside the wooden pole. Ada couldn’t help but think of the scene of witches concocting magic porridge in Macbeth. When the sauce became extremely thick and brown sugar with seasoning flavor in it showed the color of an old saddle, they sealed it with a crock to eat enough.
Now how much juice has been fermented to send a field of apple wine? Ruby was surprised to hear that a man named Adams slaughtered a cow in a river tour. She brought two cans of apple wine to see how much beef they could get. She sent two to Ida to burn the branches they cleared when they reclaimed the forgotten low-lying land earlier, or to chop the trunk of an old black oak tree that had been cut into six sections in wormwood on the edge of the land into firewood according to the method taught by Ruby. This will be an excellent end for the lumberjack soon. Cut down a hickory tree or oak tree, divide it into several sections, and then put it in a grab. The horse drags it home to cut it into pieces and chop it into Chai Aida. I doubt whether they are strong enough to finish the work, but Ruby demonstrates in detail that the sawing doesn’t have to be brute force, and it needs to be urgent and calm. Let go of the sawing and wait for someone at the other end to pull it over and then pull it back, so as to avoid getting stuck. Ruby said that the main thing is not to rush to achieve success, but to control it according to a constant rhythm, and you can continue working in bed the next day. The intensity is neither too much
Ida watched Ruby drift away and decided to chop the pieces of wood into firewood first, and then enjoy the bonfire in the cool afternoon. She came from the vegetable garden to the tool room to get the sledgehammer wedge and took them to the field. She stepped in a circle around the trunk of the oak tree in the waist-deep grass, forming a pile of wood on the construction site. They were more than two feet long. After the tree was cut down by employees two or three years ago, the wood was forgotten and lay there all the time. Ruby warned that the dry wood might not be as easy to split as when it was fresh and wet.
Ada put these cylindrical wood down and then stood them up. She found that the antler beetle about the size of thumb was hidden in the rotten bark. She first looked for a suitable gap in the cross section as Ruby once demonstrated, and then inserted the wedge into it. Take it slowly. Don’t be nervous. You need to lift 7 pounds Tong’s sledgehammer to make it fall to the angle of gravity, and the magic will split the wood. She smashed the wedge into half and stopped to listen to the wood completely burst. A few seconds before the gap expanded, the work was smooth except for the continuous hitting. The weight of the wood’s stubborn toughness hammer added a slow rhythm to this work, except that a section of the trunk became illegible and difficult to dispose of because of the long branches. In more than an hour, Ida chopped each piece of wood into large pieces, and it was estimated that 40 pieces of wood would be dragged back to the fire. She felt a great sense of accomplishment, but later realized that these pieces of firewood were enough to burn for four or five days. She calculated that they needed about the amount of firewood in winter, but soon gave up because it would be too big a number.