In the past, junior said
Inman took a step towards Lila when the thought that had been hovering in his mind suddenly became clear. He said that she was married.
In the law, yes, but in my heart, she is not married. Junior said, come here.
Inman Kenai went to Lila’s side.
Oh, it’s beautiful, she said
Her hair just hung in a bun around her neck, almost like wearing it. Her face was powdered, but junior’s palm print on her left cheek was still clearly visible. She was holding a bunch of yellow Vernonia collected from the corn fence in both hands, and her toes hung in front of her abdomen, angrily drawing small circles. junior Weixi was on the side, and the shotgun was against Inman’s coccyx.
You take off your hat and put it at your feet on the rope.
With some dry hair on his head, it seems more suitable to grow on his ass. He posed with a gun rack in his arms and sang a wedding poem in a hoarse voice. It sounded like a reluctant song. The tone was very low, and the rhythm was unusually harsh. The lyrics were to the effect that Inman could listen to it, but he could avoid suffering from death. The little boys seemed to be familiar with and loved the melody of this song.
After singing, junior turned to the ceremony speech. Now the most frequent words are fate, death and disease. Inman looked at the distant hillside and the ghost fire was moving in the trees. He really hoped that the ghost could come here and take him away.
After the ceremony, Lila threw the flowers into the fire and hugged Inman tightly. She put a thigh into his legs and looked him in the eye and said goodbye.
A man walked up behind Inman and put a colt gun to his temple, saying that he missed your bride just now. If I pull the trigger in a little while, she will happily scoop up her husband’s brain napkin from the ground and wrap it up.
I don’t care about you people, Inman said
They tied Inman Weixi and others together and marched their way to the east.
They walked for several days in succession. Inman was in the last row, and there were fifteen people. Their hands were tied to a long rope like ponies in a row. In front of Inman was Weixi. He plodded forward with his head down and had not recovered from his bad luck. Whenever the rope moved or stopped, he was taken with a stumble, his hands were tied and he shrugged forward as if he suddenly wanted to pray. The people in the front row were old men or big children. The charges were petty duty or sympathy. Most of them were farmers in home textile clothes in the north. Inman estimated that everyone went to prison or was sent back to the battlefield. Some people shouted at the militiamen every once in a while to explain that it was not because they wanted to catch that kind of people, but because they were koo. They also cursed and threatened that their hands were not tied and that the axe would definitely split these militiamen into two bloody pieces from head to crotch before they found their way home. Others cried and begged to let them go, calling for some kind power in the imagination that lies in people’s hearts. They saved Du E from danger.
Like most human beings, these prisoners will disappear from the earth, leaving no trace longer than a furrow. You can bury them on a oak board and carve their names into the soil, but the handwriting to be engraved on the board will erase everything about them. They have done bad things or good deeds, they are cowardly or brave, and they fear or hope that their faces will be forgotten. No wonder they have to bend over and trudge forward, as if they are burdened with the life burden of the past that has long been forgotten.
Inman hates being tied together by others and losing his weapon. What he hates most is the direction of progress. His goal runs counter to his own. Every step is full of pain, and he goes back mile after mile. His dream of home is getting farther and farther away. When the sun rises and shines on his face, he hates the sun and has no other way to vent his anger.
In the next few days, the prisoners kept moving forward, hardly saying a word to each other. One afternoon, a guy found some music and knocked everyone’s hat off the ground. Anyone who bent down to pick it up would get a gun butt. They continued on their way, leaving fifteen black hats behind them to witness that they had passed here.
They can’t eat anything, and the water can also be scooped up in one hand when they cross the stream. Several old people in the prisoners are weakened especially by hunger. When they are exhausted, even if the barrel of the gun can’t poke, the militia will give them some cool milk with corn crumbs in it. When they regain their senses, they will continue on their way.
Every one of them has come to this step in the most usual way. One unfortunate thing followed another and ended up in such an unexpected desperate situation. Inman often thinks about this problem. Now, apart from being released, his most desire is to let junior bleed.
Some days, the militiamen drove the prisoners for a day. When they went to bed at night, they slept during the day and got up at the sun mountain to catch the road all night. But for many days, the surrounding scenery has hardly changed. Even the sunshine has penetrated the dense pine forest. The monotonous landscape makes Inman feel as if he has been walking in the dark and the same person is escaping from something terrible in his dreams. The pace is slow, but the weird theory is always not far away.
The arduous journey also tortured him. He felt weak, dizzy and hungry. Every time his heart beat, his neck wound jumped with him. He felt that the wound might crack and vomit like in a hospital. He came to a telescope lens, a plug drill and a small bloody poem.
Inman looked at himself and finally walked westward like a roll of wool. He squatted around his feet and loosened up. It was a mess. A few days later, they stopped for the night. The prisoners were still tied together. There was no food or water to drink. The militiamen didn’t give them a blanket or a fire to keep warm. Exhausted people squeezed each other like a group of sleeping dogs in the cold red land.
Inman has read in the book that some prisoners detained in the castle are marking the day on bricks or stones, which is really a great method. Inman has doubted whether he can calculate the date accurately from memory, but he doesn’t even have a stone, but there is no need to record the day any more. The prisoners who slept lightly in the middle of the night were woken up by a guy who held a lamp in their face to wake them up. Six or seven other guys touched the ground and smoked their pipes together. When the leader said that we had discussed it, it was simply a wave to take you scum with us.
They raised their rifles.
A little boy was twelve years old and knelt down and cried. An old man with white hair said, How can you do this? Are you trying to kill us here?
A man looked at the leader and said that I didn’t become a militia to kill old men and children.
The leader told him to either gun or stay with them.
Inman looked at the dark pine forest across the street. This is the scenery where I sleep, he thought.
They got angry together, adults and children poured down and Vichy stepped forward until he was caught by the rope and shouted in the gun, it’s not too late to give up this despicable act, and then he was punched several times
The bullet that hit Inman had already passed through Vichy’s shoulder, so its momentum was greatly reduced. It passed through the scalp and skull along the hairline on one side of the head and flew behind the ear. He fell to the ground like a flat axe but didn’t lose consciousness. He didn’t even blink and didn’t want to move. He could see the world running outside, but he felt that he was not a part of it. It seemed to mock people’s power. People fell dead around him and were still connected by ropes.
After the gun was released, they didn’t seem to know what to do next. One of them seemed to suddenly lose his mind or be possessed by something. He sang cotton-eyed Joy and danced around until another militia gave him the butt of his gun and finally said it was better to bury them.
They did this work very carelessly, digging a shallow pit and throwing the body into it, covering it with a layer of float thick enough to grow potatoes, and then they rode away.
Inman fell face down in the pit, breathing in his arms, and the soil was very thin. If he died here, it might be hunger rather than suffocation. He lay there dizzy for a while and woke up for a while. The hazy smell of the soil dragged him. He couldn’t find the strength to get himself up. It seems more relaxed and comfortable to die here than to live.
But before dawn, a few wild boars came from the forest with the smell of blood in the air, and their mouths were turning over the bodies in the soil, and their arms and feet were exposed to the ground one after another. Soon Inman was arched, and his eyes were desolate, confused and alert, and the long face of a male wild boar with thick fangs hit a cliff.
Ah, Inman shouted a light.
The wild boar stepped back a few steps, then stopped and blinked his eyes and looked at him in surprise. Inman moved himself from the soil, and he regained the desire to stand up and live well. By the time he struggled to stand up, the wild boar had lost interest in him and came back to arch in the field.
Inman looked up at the moon and stars and found that the sky seemed to have changed. He couldn’t find a familiar constellation, as if the stars were disturbed by people’s sticks, and there was no clue to find. It was a sparse and scattered light spot in the darkness
The head injury is always like this. Inman’s blood injury is disproportionate. His face is covered with blood and covered with mud. It looks like a statue of ochre clay sculpture. It reveals that early humans have begun to take shape. He touched the scalp, two holes, and his fingers dug and found that it had been coagulated. He felt a little numb. His shirt was put on his face and wiped, but it didn’t work. After that, he grabbed the hand rope and pulled Weixi out of the soil, like fishing a big bass from the mire. Weixi’s face was covered with wood, but his eyes were puzzled.
Inman looked at him and was not particularly sad about his death, but he didn’t think it was righteous and evil. Inman saw too many deaths. In his eyes, death has completed a random event. There is nothing to say. He can’t calculate how many people have died in front of his eyes recently, but there is no doubt that there should be thousands of ways of death. You can’t think of it even for a few days. He is used to facing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them and calmly seeing himself as a mysterious thing. He is worried that his heart will be burned by flames for too long and he may never be able to do it again.
Inman looked around and found a sharp stone. He sat down on the stone and tied the ropes for his hands until the sun broke. Inman looked at Weixi again. His eyelids drooped almost perfectly. Inman wanted him to do his best, but he couldn’t even dig a hole and shovel. The only thing he could do was turn his face over.
Then Inman walked to the west with his back to the morning sun for an afternoon. He always felt dizzy, his head swelled and his heart ached, and his skull seemed to break into several pieces at any moment. He picked a feather-like yarrow leaf from a fence, brushed off the leaf stalk and tied them in his head. It is said that yarrow can relieve the pain, and it really played a certain role. The grass leaves shook with his tired feet for an afternoon, so he kept staring at them and threw them into the shadow to move on.
At noon, I came to a fork in the road. Inman’s mind was at a loss. There were three roads in front of him, but he didn’t know which one to choose. The only thing he could do was to exclude the route behind him. He looked up at the sky and wanted to tell the direction, but it was possible that the sun seemed to set in the zenith. He touched the arched tentacles on the side of his hair. It was a solidified blood clot, and soon I was going to be a scar. He wanted to leave a red scar on his neck in Petersburg, and it hurt. As if he wanted to show sympathy to his new brother, he decided to be full of
After a long time of waking up and sleeping, he saw a yellow slave driving a sledge along the road ahead. There was a big difference between the heads of two cows, one red and the other white. The sledge contained many new barrels and a lot of small black watermelons, which were packed neatly like firewood. The man saw Inman drinking the cows.
Oh, my God. He said you look like a clay figurine.
He made a fist and knocked on two or three watermelons. He chose a Yang hand and threw it to Inman Inman. Inman smashed the watermelon into a jagged edge on a stone. Two petals of pink flesh were densely dotted with black melons. He buried his head in half of the watermelon like a bad dog and then turned to the other half.
When he raised his head, there were only two thin slices of watermelon skin with pink juice dripping down his beard and onto the road. Inman looked down at their patterns for a while, hoping to see some sign or revelation from them, because he knew that he needed help too much, no matter what his route was, but he couldn’t see the small mud pits, which were neither totem nor hieroglyphics. It was in vain for him to change his angle. He thought that the invisible spiritual world had abandoned him and left him alone without guidance and direction to walk through a broken world with many hardships.
Inman stopped looking at the ground and looked up and said, thank you, watermelon. The yellow man was wearing a gray wool shirt, and his sleeves were smoothed to his elbows and bare feet. He was thin and lean, but his neck and arms were muscular. His canvas pants were obviously made for a taller man, and his trousers rolled up very high.
Come with me, sledge, he said