Chapter 361
Guaizai was led along by Fang Zichen. The other children watched him curiously. Seeing him dressed in what seemed like very thick clothes, with clean shoes on his feet, they immediately felt envious.
Guaizai knew that look all too well.
News that a noble guest had come to the village spread like wildfire. Everyone came out of their yards and gathered on the village path, craning their necks to get a look.
Fang Zichen went over and watched for a while.
As it happened, Lao Wang was the village head of Ronghe Village. He invited Fang Zichen to sit for a while at his home.
Lao Wang's place was fairly large. Out front was a spacious yard enclosed by rammed-earth walls. In one corner sat a big chicken coop, and inside a few hens were clucking away.
Guaizai's ears perked up at the sound—as if he'd just found a long-lost brother. His eyes lit up, and he tilted his head up to tell Zhao Ger, "Daddy, Guaizai wants to go see the chickens. Is that okay?"
He absolutely loved watching hens.
Back in Xiaohe Village, the village head had given him one, and he'd been the one to feed it every day. It laid one egg for him each morning, and Guaizai adored it. Later, they took it with them to Yuanzhou, but it probably couldn't adapt to the new environment. It stopped laying eggs often, refused to eat the rice bran they fed it, and kept getting skinnier and skinnier. In the end, Zhao Ger had it slaughtered. He'd expected Guaizai to be sad, but the boy ended up eating it with great relish.
Three kids—Lao Wang's grandsons—were squatting by the coop.
Zhao Ger let him go.
Guaizai dashed over, twisted his fingers together when he got close, and asked in a small voice, "Can I look at your chickens?"
The three kids nodded a little shyly.
Guaizai squatted down with them. The chicken droppings under the coop hadn't been cleaned in days. From farther away he couldn't smell much, but up close the odor hit him. Lao Wang's eldest daughter-in-law had been worried that the smell might make Guaizai feel sick, but the boy didn’t seem to notice it at all.
Shi Ger was holding a yellow vegetable leaf and trying to feed the hens for fun. He'd held it up for a good while, but the two hens wouldn't come over to peck at it. Seeing Guaizai watching him from the side, he grew a bit uneasy. Breathing a little heavily, he said, "They always loved eating vegetable leaves before. I have no idea why they won't eat them today."
Guaizai reached out his hand. "It's 'cause you're holding it wrong. Give it to Guaizai—I'll show you."
Zhang Quan and the others were waiting outside the yard and hadn't gone in. Hearing this, they all found it amusing.
There's a technique to feeding chickens?
Isn't it just tossing a handful of rice bran and a few vegetable leaves?
They leaned against the wall, wanting to see what he would do.
Guaizai took the leaf, slipped it through the gap between the two wooden bars, then stuck his little bottom up toward the sky, wiggled it to the left, and clucked like a hen: "Cluck cluck cluck..." Then he wiggled to the right: "Cluck cluck cluck..."
The two hens actually came over from the other side of the coop.
Zhang Quan stared in utter disbelief.
Zhao Ger and Fang Zichen had followed Lao Wang into the main hall. But Zhao Ger was uneasy—just before stepping through the door, he glanced toward the chicken coop—and saw four round little bottoms stuck up in the air.
The water they were served had sugar in it, but it must have been the coarse brown sugar sold in town—sweet, yet with a bitter edge, as if the cane sugar had been scorched.
For a village head, the household didn't look particularly well-off, but at least it was clean.
Fang Zichen mostly asked about trivial matters. Lao Wang, thinking he enjoyed hearing about such things, chattered on. He said his family had twenty-three mu of land and planted sweet potatoes every year, yielding several thousand jin. If they rationed carefully, it could last them a year—but they had to hand over half to the authorities each year. He had his wife, three sons below him, two daughters-in-law, and four little grandsons. After paying the tax, there wasn't enough to go around.
They'd wash the sweet potatoes, boil them soft, then mix them with wild vegetables. For five or six people, that could fill one big pot each meal.
"My family's still better off—we have more land, and if we work hard, we can scrape by. But Old Qiu's family is in a tough spot—very little land, yet so many people to feed. Last month, his old wife passed away."
Lao Wang sighed and added:
"She starved to death."
That old woman, to save food for her family during winter, ate only a tiny bit at each meal, lying that she'd already eaten in the kitchen right after cooking. Later she fainted from hunger in the kitchen. It was the twelfth lunar month, and the weather was bitterly cold. There was no nourishing food to help her regain her strength. Lao Qiu borrowed silver and went to town to buy half a jin of white rice to make congee for her, but she refused to eat it, saying, "Why waste the silver? I'm old—I can't eat my fill and I have no strength left. I can't do any real work. Living on is just a burden."
If Fang Zichen hadn't made this trip, and someone had told him this, he'd have thought it an exaggeration.
But this didn't only happen in ancient times when farming was inefficient. Even in more recent times, there were people who chewed on tree bark and still starved to death.
"Bones of the frozen dead by the roadside" and "parents exchanging their children for food"—these have never been empty words.
"Every winter, when food gets tight and the cold sets in, there are always deaths in the village," Lao Wang said.
Fang Zichen was silent for a long moment, then asked in a low, heavy voice, "Is it the same in other villages?"
"Our Ronghe Village, Rongxing Village, Xiaping Village, Fangniu Village..." Lao Wang counted off several village names on his fingers. "All of us are in pretty much the same boat. Farther out, I don't know. It used to be a little better—what we grew was barely enough to fill our bellies. But then..." He stopped there, not daring to say more—but the meaning was clear.
Then the prefect had stopped being a decent official. Taxes grew heavier. Half of everything they grew had to be handed over. Before that, if they had been a bit more frugal with their food, they could have taken some of their harvest to town to sell. With the silver they earned, they could buy oil, salt, and when winter came, they could also get some cloth and cotton.
"Before, the county magistrate wanted to make himself look good with impressive achievements. If too many people from our village went to town, we would end up getting fined."
In the year before last, Ronghe Village lost twelve people: three infants under a month old, one grown man, one fulang, two women, and the rest were all elderly.
Not all of them died from hunger. Some caught a cold or fever, but couldn't afford any medicine, and that was what ended up killing them.
The county magistrate flew into a rage. He had the bailiffs summon the village heads of several villages and gave them a thorough scolding.
If you can't eat enough, buy grain!
If you catch a chill, buy medicine!
Don't you understand that?
Of course everyone knew that!
But where was the silver to come from? The fields didn't yield enough to eat. If they went to town to do odd jobs, they might bring back a few copper coins a day—but they didn't dare spend them. They had to save, because the head tax was coming.
Outside, no one knew exactly how things stood elsewhere. In the past, men paid the head tax at fourteen, and women and ge at fifteen. But the current county magistrate changed it within two years of taking office, saying: "A head tax is a head tax—it's counted by heads, regardless of age." On the very day the tax collectors came, if a woman in labor had a baby halfway out—just the head showing from the birth canal—that head counted too. Naturally, that one also had to be paid for.
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