More than 20 years ago, when the autumn grass turned slightly yellow, I entered the fourth grade of elementary school. One afternoon, during the self-study class, the head teacher brought in a new student and asked him to stand on the podium to introduce himself. He was dressed in white short sleeves, taller than me, thin, with a pointed face covered with freckles under his yellowish curls. In a trembling voice, he said, "My name is ...... Lucky...... Ji Rentai ...... Fourteen years old. With that, the corner of his left mouth twitched upwards a few times, and then a few white teeth appeared, as if he was smiling, but it was very unnatural. A few classmates covered their mouths and laughed, and a girl in front of me secretly stretched out four fingers and whispered to her tablemate, "He's four years older than us!" The table opens, surprised. Amid applause, Ji Rentai sat down in the makeshift seat in the corner, across the aisle from me.
Ji Rentai is silent, and rarely comes out to play and communicate with his classmates between classes. He was always immersed in a book, or stared at a few horses in the school stable. Not only his age and appearance, but also his words and deeds are very different from ours. Naturally, his classmates distanced themselves from him. When the teacher asked him to work on the blackboard or asked him to get up and read the text aloud, his "stuttering" caused by being too nervous would attract ridicule from some of his classmates. At first, I laughed at him and sometimes read texts in imitation of him. His face flushed, and he blocked his eyes with the movement of his hands scratching his head. He never went to the teacher to complain. Seeing that he ignored him, I became more and more emboldened, and shouted at him, "Hey, you are so old, why don't you go to middle school?" My performance drew laughter from his classmates, but he kept scratching his head and didn't say a word.
After a unit test, Jirentai failed all subjects. Maybe it's because he is very serious in class, the teachers don't criticize him, and they all encourage him. A few boys and I used to make fun of him. He didn't show any anger at this. This discouraged us and made us feel that it was meaningless to go on like this, so we didn't continue. We are used to him, I should say, used to him differently. But in fact, we didn't accept him, and he didn't integrate into us. He does his, we do ours. When doing recess exercises, he stood at the back of the line, and every movement was mechanical and rigid, which seemed both uncoordinated and funny. I stumbled upon a flaw he was hiding.
Ji Rentai's left leg is shorter than his right leg. He usually walks slowly, and it is easy to see it, but once he walks in a hurry, or when he runs, his body will lean slightly to the left with his steps. He seemed to be trying to control his balance, as if to tell people that he was a normal person. When he calms down, he will quietly look around the people around him. The more he was like this, the more I thought he was funny and ridiculous. That night, when I was in front of Eji, exaggeratedly imitating the way Yoshirendai walked, Eji dragged me to the wall and said very harshly, "It is extremely bad behavior to make fun of other people's shortcomings!" Don't eat dinner, reflect on it. "I stood late into the night, and an indescribable sense of shame prevented me from looking up. When Eji reheated the meal and told me to eat, I couldn't stop shedding tears.
Soon, several boys also discovered Yoshirentai's flaws. One afternoon in activity class, a boy deliberately walked upside down the aisle next to me. I wanted to give a shout and end this humiliation. But I saw that Ji Rentai was smiling, exactly the same as the expression on his face when he first came to introduce himself. Why is he laughing? Is he a fool? I got up and pushed the boy away, saying, "It's not funny at all. The classroom fell silent in an instant. The boy said, "What does it have to do with you, besides, aren't you more energetic than anyone else?" Another boy said, "People aren't angry themselves, why are you angry!" Ji Rentai was still laughing, and the smile was even more exaggerated. I walked out of the classroom in a fit of rage. In fact, some classmates in the class spoke for Ji Rentai, but Ji Rentai was indifferent to this, and no one was willing to stand up for him anymore.
I walked through the noisy playground, walked under the south wall of the campus, and climbed over the wall into the poplar forest without anyone noticing. I'm angry with myself on the one hand, and I'm angry at Ji Rentai on the other. It seemed like a balloon was in my head, and it was getting bigger and bigger, threatening to explode at any moment. The yellow leaves were falling, and I followed the forest path to the foot of Mount Bilguta. I climbed to the top of the hill and went down the other slope to get home.
The gray cow, which was bought in the spring, was tethered alone in the yard. Its flesh collapsed downward, and its skeleton stood out, as if it had some serious illness. It hung its head and flicked its tail a few times, and the other cows stuck their necks out of the barn wall to watch at it. Eji told me to go to the kitchen and take a couple of tortillas from the cauldron and feed it. I feed them one by one, and it eats slowly. After finishing the work in hand, Eji came over and gently brushed the hair on the cow's back, and said, "Hey, what is the condition of this poor foreigner, who has been squeezed into the cattle of the village at home, how can he survive the winter like this?" The gray cow seemed to understand Eji's words, and even shed tears. For a moment, the aggravated sense of shame made me feel ashamed.
In the next few days, I didn't dare to look at Jirentai anymore, and I didn't fight with those boys anymore. I've always been alone. One weekend, on my way home along the seasonal water, I met three older boys. They sat across the current, each holding a slingshot in their hands. The leading boy shouted at me, "Stop! "For some reason, my legs were like sticks. He pulled out the slingshot, aimed it at my leg, and said, "Don't move, if you run away, you won't necessarily hit me." As soon as he finished speaking, a stone hit my calf, and the pain in my heart instantly spread all over my body. In my cry, the other boy also pulled the slingshot. At this time, Ji Rentai suddenly ran over out of nowhere, picked up a few stones from the ground, threw them at the opposite side one after another, and shouted: "Get out!" His voice was loud and powerful, like that of an adult, like he had when he had read the text aloud. A couple of boys ran away in a daze. He was about to bend down to examine my wound when I shook him off and ran into the aspen forest.
The next day, I reported to my teacher that I couldn't read the words on the blackboard clearly, so I moved my seat forward to the middle row and distanced myself from Yoshihitodai. The boys in the class also stopped making jokes about Jirentai. Perhaps, for boys, silence is the way to preserve the last shred of dignity. We were all silent.
One day, when I was on duty, I saw a small half photo sticking out of a neatly stacked stack of textbooks on Jirentai's desk. The photo is not clear, a young boy is holding a white foal with black spots, and a tall man leans down and touches the boy's head with one hand and the other on the white foal's back. The white foal spread its front legs and stood between them in a slightly mischievous manner. The two were laughing heartily, as if they had met the happiest thing in the world. I put the picture back in its place, feeling inexplicably sad.
In Thursday's PE class, the PE teacher had an urgent matter at home and entrusted half of the class to the new warehouse manager. He was a strong man in his thirties. We were originally free to play, the girls were jumping rope and kicking shuttlecock, and the boys were playing football and bouncing glass balls...... The PE teacher just meant to let the administrator look at us, but the administrator blew the assembly whistle and then began to give the command to let us practice the stop intermittent method. He seemed pleased with his command, and a smug look on his face floated. After a command to turn right, Yoshihitodai turned in the wrong direction and stood face to face with me. The Administrator walked up to him, pointed at him, and asked, "Did you turn the right one?" "Ji Rentai was about to turn back, but was stopped by the administrator. The administrator asked him, "How old are you?" Ji Rentai said, "Fourteen. The administrator raised his right arm and said, "It's so big that you can't even tell the difference between left and right?" Ji Rentai laughed again, and I lowered my head and didn't dare to look at his expression. That's when I saw a pair of open-toed sneakers.
Yoshihitodai was dragged out by the administrator by the hair. He had been slapped several times, but he was still laughing. The administrator kept saying, "You're still smiling, you're still smiling...... Who's kidding you. "He is like a lamb to the slaughter. I suddenly shouted, "It's not right for a teacher to hit a student!" Immediately afterwards, the students also shouted: "The teacher is not ...... hitting the students" The administrator suddenly froze in place, put down Jirentai, and left angrily. Ji Rentai covered his face and walked in the direction of the poplar forest in front of the campus, and I followed.
The bare branches of the poplar trees stood one by one, and the ground was already covered with a thick layer of fallen leaves. I kept a distance of more than ten meters from Jirendae. The rustle of our footsteps pierced the silent air. He kept going west, and I kept following him, but the distance between us was getting longer and longer. His home is in Duqin Engel Village in the west, only a dozen miles away from Xiriga Village. When he walked into a stable on the east side of the village of Duqin Engel, I stood on the top of a small slope not far away, and did not go any further. After a while, he pulled out a white horse with black spots, turned over cleanly, and galloped across the grass. "Woohoo—" he kept shouting, like a teenager chasing the wind.
The next morning, the head teacher called me over to ask about yesterday. In addition to the head teacher, there is also a silver-haired grandfather in the office. I explained the situation truthfully. The head teacher got up, bent over and said, "Grandpa Ji Rentai, the physical education teacher has submitted a review and has been punished, and the administrator has also been dismissed. But I have a regulatory loophole and I apologize to you and your children! The old man also hurriedly got up and said, "Ji Rentai, this kid has a hard life, and he has followed me since he was a child." This kid is honest, please take more effort, even if he can read a few more words, he can understand addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, so that I can be a shepherd in the future, I can also put snacks, otherwise I will die and no one will take care of him. "The head teacher asked me to go back first. I heard a phrase from Grandpa Ji Rentai in the hallway. He said, "This kid has a strange disease, and when he is nervous, the left half of his face spasms...... "It turns out that we all misunderstood Yoshihitodai."
That weekend, I used my pocket money to buy a pair of black and white sneakers. After school on Monday, I led Yoshirendai to the aspen forest, took out the sneakers in a plastic bag from the bottom of my school bag, and said, "One size bigger than mine, you should be able to wear them." The left side of his face began to twitch. I hurriedly said, "Even if you borrow me, pay me back later." His expression returned to normal. The new shoes fit his feet perfectly, and he couldn't see the bumps when he ran back and forth. He said happily: "Wearing these shoes is like riding on my Teohel." ”
Five years ago, Abba of Jirentai brought a white colt Shihoer, a white horse with black spots. Before the white foal could grow up, and before his father could teach him to ride a horse, he was in a car accident with his Eji and passed away forever. There are no tears when Ji Rentai recalls the past, only sighs and calmness that he himself may not be aware of. But when he said the mention of Chaoheer, his eyes lit up instantly. He said, "My Abba said that a speckled horse is also a divine steed. Then he pointed to Bilgu Taishan and said, "My horse Chaohel will soon be able to run up this mountain." "There was a white cloud floating over the Bilgu Tai Mountain, shaped like a horse. In a trance, I thought it was the tide of Jirendae, which not only ran to the top of the mountain, but also flew into the sky......
At the beginning of the next semester, Yoshirendai did not come. Many years have passed, and I have no contact with Jirendae. A few days ago, I overheard a classmate say that he was shepherding sheep in his hometown and had a good life. I saw a young man galloping on horseback, and I wanted to ask my classmates, "Is he riding a Teohel?" But I never asked.