The Country Maiden: Fields and Leisure-Chapter 135: Thorns

I had thought that as soon as I made my proposal, Old Granny Zhang would agree.

But to my surprise, Old Granny Zhang let out a cold laugh, "Divide the family? Silly girl, dividing up the family now would just play into their hands. Right now, the medicines at Doctor Ma’s place for Eldest Brother will only need ginseng for a couple more days, and then we can stop. I’ve done the math; thirty taels of silver is all it takes to bring Eldest Brother back home. The compensation from the Li Family is also about to be in our hands—if we divide up the family now, wouldn’t fifty taels of that compensation end up being divided away? Even if Eldest Brother is disabled, his two sons can start working the fields. After raising them to this size, do you think they can just smoothly split away and go off to make money? They haven’t worked honestly for ten or eight years for me, to earn back double the silver I spent on their father, don’t even think about it! Did you think your mother’s silver is that easy to take?"

"Silly girl, your mother knows you worry for her! Rest assured, your mother isn’t old yet. These little bastard children think they can turn heaven and earth under their mother’s watch? Dream on! Don’t worry about these things; just stay with Laosan’s House and learn your embroidery well, save up for your dowry, and everything will be alright. I managed to get through your grandmother, that old witch. Now, you think I can’t contend with these wizened calves that crawled out of my own belly?"

As she spoke, she became more and more spirited.

Wang Yongzhu stared, dumbstruck. She felt she had underestimated Old Granny Zhang’s fighting spirit; her stance was that of someone ready to take on all who opposed her.

Swallowing hard, Wang Yongzhu felt her earlier worries were all for naught.

Seeing her daughter’s relieved expression, Old Granny Zhang couldn’t help but get teary-eyed, feeling a mixture of tenderness and sweetness in her heart. In her lifetime, she had endured hardship and fatigue, given birth and raised five children—yet now it seemed, the only one close to her heart and lungs was her daughter, whom she had not cherished in vain.

Watching Wang Yongzhu walk ahead, Old Granny Zhang’s thoughts returned to the sight of Eldest Brother she had seen earlier at the medical hall.

In just a few days, the Eldest Brother seemed to have aged, with evident white hair on his head, skin both dark and rough, and deep wrinkles between his brows.

How long had it been since she had taken a good look at Eldest Brother?

Old Granny Zhang’s feelings toward her eldest son Wang Yongfu were complex.

The birth of Wang Yongfu had turned her status in the Wang Family around. He was her first child, and it wasn’t that she didn’t love him.

When she had agreed to marry Wang Laozhu as a continuing bride, it was because the Wang Family promised that if she gave birth to a son, she would be the one in charge of the household.

Once Eldest Brother was born, the old witch of a mother-in-law, no matter how reluctant and unwilling, had no choice but to hand over the power to manage the household.

But she also harbored resentment against her.

Right after the month was up, Wang Yongfu was taken to the mother-in-law’s room. Every day except for breastfeeding time, the mother-in-law wouldn’t let her see the child. That old witch, cunning and venomous, claimed she was sparing her the hardship by helping with the child.

In truth, she feared the child developing a deep affection with his own mother—probably, from that time onwards, the mother-in-law had already planned to use her own child to oppose her, the child’s birth mother.

She couldn’t bear to be apart from her child; she cried, made scenes, and even pleaded, but back then she was still too naive to outwit such a cunning mother-in-law, which only resulted in her own period of managing the household becoming extremely unpleasant.

Pining for her child was so intense that she would often wet her pillow with tears late into the night, always trying to find a moment to peek at Eldest Brother. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com

But Eldest Brother was kept closely under the mother-in-law’s watch; even during breastfeeding, she would guard nearby. Once fed, she’d whisk the child away, never allowing for extra time.

The first words the child spoke were ’grandmother,’ then ’father,’ followed by ’grandfather,’ ’sister,’ and only lastly did it come to ’mother,’ his own birth mother.

No matter how great her grievances, they all vanished the moment Eldest Brother called her ’mother.’

Later on, when she had her second son, she was cumbersome with her pregnancy and still had to work in the fields. When she returned, there was cooking, laundry, and household chores waiting, leaving her so exhausted she’d fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. She simply didn’t have the energy to sneak off and chat with her eldest son like before. Because of this, her mother-in-law would badmouth her to her eldest, claiming that since she had the second son, she didn’t care for him anymore.

Especially after discovering that the second son was capable of learning, it was the family patriarch who had decided, while he was still alive, that the second son should be educated with hopes that he might become a scholar or graduate and lift the family from their status as bumpkin farmers to a respected literate household.

But in her mother-in-law’s words, her support for the second son’s education, her wish for him to become an official someday was the reason she skimped on the eldest—making him work hard in the fields and handing over all the money he earned to subsidize his brother’s studies.

She tried hard to secretly explain herself, but the eldest, though honest, had a flaw—he was stubborn and only remembered what his grandmother said, that his own mother didn’t love him.

How could she not love her own flesh and blood?

It was just that one son sought closeness, while the other harbored resentment. As time went by, their mother-son relationship inevitably grew distant.

Old Granny Zhang kept thinking that once the children grew up, things would get better, that they would understand her struggles. But the matter of the marriage arrangement chilled her heart completely.

She had given the Wang Family four sons and a daughter, turning a family that was nearly extinct into one full of descendants.

Yet she had no say in her own sons’ marriages.

Lady Lin’s family was the poorest in the neighboring village, the kind where there was only one pair of pants for the entire household, and whoever went out would wear them—the kind of dilapidated family where a girl in her teens would still share a bed and go bare-legged along with her brothers.

No family would agree to an arranged marriage with such a household, yet her mother-in-law was determined to take Lady Lin as the wife for the eldest grandson of the Wang Family.

The reason her mother-in-law favored Lady Lin was twofold: first, to lift her own family’s status, and second, because Lady Lin was her relative, loyal to her, and marrying into the Wang Family would mean that in a few years, she could find excuses to hand over the family affairs to Lady Lin. What difference would it make whether she or Lady Lin ran the household?

This damned old hag had tormented her for half her life and still wouldn’t leave her son alone, using him to hurt her.

Her son was naive, and though she appeared indifferent on the surface, she didn’t want him to marry a woman who would be the talk of the town behind their backs.

For the first time, she had a big fight with her mother-in-law and was subsequently lectured behind closed doors by the man of the house. Even after facing his cold shoulder for a month, she didn’t give up.

She earnestly analyzed the disadvantages of the proposed marriage for her eldest son, spelling it all out for him, and letting him know that she had already found a suitable match for him. The girl’s family was of good standing, with a brother above her and siblings below; they were an honest family, and the girl herself was steady and capable of managing a household, a perfect match for her eldest son.

But the eldest was adamant about marrying Lady Lin, insisting that his grandmother would never harm him!

Right then, Old Granny Zhang’s heart grew cold. Did the subtext of his words imply that she, his mother, intended to harm him?

After a fierce argument between mother and son, the honest son managed to land some piercing and accurate blows with his words.

The eldest accused her of abandoning him to his grandmother as soon as he turned a month old, of neglecting him, of favoring his younger siblings, of treating him as nothing more than a long-term laborer meant to toil away for the family for life. He listed every small incident to prove just how uncaring she was...

Old Granny Zhang sat in the courtyard all night without sleep, and the following day, she agreed to the marriage, but with one condition.

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