I grew up with the partial company of a friend named Gensheng. This is his nickname and his full name is not known to me though I know we share the same family name.
When I was about 11, I started to work in the mountains with my parents. Chestnut trees were then the only economic plant besides rice. People cut all the bushes among the chestnut trees in the burning days of summer and when autumn arrives in September, chestnuts started to ripen. It was the most significant source of income for the destitute farmers; they therefore gave top priority to those chestnuts. They build thatched huts on the mountain slopes and slept there during night after working a whole day, so that thieves dared not steal their harvest. The small village never lacked petty thieves because poverty bred bachelors who more often than not end up in theft or other mean dealings.
But Gensheng was an exception. I called him Brother Gensheng because he was about ten years older than me. Our chestnut gardens bordered so we guarded those trees together and we saw each other a lot. He was a light stammerer which made him seem more honest than funny. He was born in a family as poor as a church mouse. Like a literati said, the rich get richer and the poor get more children. He had two brothers and two sisters. I did not know much about his sisters because only men went to do the strenuous labour in mountains except for a few women like my mother. But I knew his other two brothers pretty well: the elder one was short and plain in both appearance and character; the younger one was also short but much more articulate than the other two brothers. Until now, my opinion about the three brothers is still that Gensheng is the most amiable, more friendly and more respectable one. However, he was also the most tragic one.
It was said that when he was a very young boy he was driven by his rough father to work outside and he was once hurt in an accident. He caught tetanus that time and had been suffering from lockjaw since then. But the family was too poor to do anything rather than continue driving the cubs to work. In needy families, children were not born to be loved and protected, but to help and to labour. Poor children actually do not have childhood for it is filled with hardships. Days full of hard labour could not be called childhood, let alone short of parental love and protection.
But Gensheng growed up into a quite handsome young man, a merry and lovely soul. He worked hard in the mountains; he ate a lot and he treated most people around with friendliness and sincerity. Though I don't remember the content of our numerous chats during those years, yet I do remember the sweetness of the fresh mornings and crisp evenings of the late summer days. We sometimes would get some chestnuts in the shells and buried them under a campfire. When the fire died, we dug the chestnuts out and all needles on the shells were removed and the shells could be crushed easily. The nuts were exceptionally delicious for its freshness and naturalness. I never ate any chestnut like that until now. We saw the carefree floating clouds in sunny days and listened to the burst of thunder in stormy days. Another very thrilling thing was that sometimes some neighbours would brought their homemade guns and let us try a couple of shot. It was the most scaring but most exciting experience in life.
I spent five or six summers like that and then went to college that was far from my mountainous home village. I saw Gensheng a couple of times since my college years. In a year, during the Spring Festival, I happened to ask my parents where was Brother Gensheng, for I hadn't seen him for long. My parents said that he suffered a lot from tetanus and bothered his parents much; before the winter his father handed him some money and asked him to leave the family. He henceforth disappeared.
Brother Gensheng has been gone for some place for over two decades. His father passed away more than a decade ago. His younger brother went to work in the South and settled there after marrying and local woman. His elder brother married another woman from the West and had a son, yet probably due to the poverty she left the family one day and never returned, leaving the 5 year old son with the mediocre husband. The boy now is about ten and is as mute and as plain as his father. The boy's grandma, Brother Gensheng's mama passed away two days ago.
Every family would eventually reunite sooner or latter, in this or next world.
