Chapter 1256 - 1129: She Also Wants to Cry!

Chapter 1256: Chapter 1129: She Also Wants to Cry!

Three days passed in the blink of an eye...

In the small hours before dawn, the streetlights were still on. Amid the swirling snowflakes, Zhou Jiao hugged her three sons one by one and watched them salute and leave.

Ever since she came into this world, she had always felt winters were bitterly cold; only this year did she realize there was another kind of cold, unprecedented, that froze all the way down to the depths of her heart.

On this winter dawn, she sent her sons off to war with laughter.

Tears?

Tears are the cornerstone of sorrow.

Even if her nose stung and somewhere inside she wanted to howl and scream to vent it all, she refused to let them carry any extra worry with them, and she found it inauspicious as well.

Her sons would definitely carry her blessings with them and return triumphant!

Zhou Jiao forced herself to throw her energy into the end-of-year bustle, using busyness to smother the anxiety in her heart, but every time the night grew deep and quiet, what she thought of madly were all the little moments from her children’s lives, from the time they were small till now.

Zhou Xiaozheng was busy, and Zhang Guoqing was no less busy than him.

Zhou Jiao no longer remembered how many times she had seen them recently; on the rare nights when they came home late, by the next morning they were gone again, though the number of notes left behind had increased a lot.

On New Year’s Eve this year, the seven members of the family were scattered in different places. Even Miao Lishan was so busy she couldn’t come home at noon. In Aunt Chen’s words, it was fortunate at least that she could keep Zhou Jiao company.

Zhou Jiao didn’t know whether her mother had sensed that the children had gone to the front. She hadn’t said anything, and Zhou Jiao herself had not taken out the letters that the Ping An Brothers had specially prepared for home.

In these days when thousands of households were reunited, the Big Courtyard was quiet as a tomb; it seemed that even the firecrackers set off by little children couldn’t drive away the heavy atmosphere.

On the fifth day of the New Year, Zhang Guoqing, with her instructions in mind, left with the troops in the small hours, just like the Ping An Brothers had done.

The army had issued orders in advance: from the moment first-level combat readiness was enacted, no one was allowed to send letters home, to prevent any leakage of military secrets.

With them gone like this, as a military family member, Zhou Jiao knew that in the days ahead she would probably only be able to get a bit of news from her father’s mouth now and then.

In this city of Beijing, aside from her parents, all the most important people in the world to her had gone to the front. She didn’t know what meaning there was in her staying here.

Right after the Lantern Festival, a commentary titled "What Can Be Tolerated, What Cannot" came out and shook the whole Shen Zhou.

It was also from 4:30 a.m. that very day that our troops massed at the border, from two provinces in the South, formally launched self-defensive counterattacks against the enemy forces that had invaded our national territory.

On this day, the world outside was a hubbub of noise, blood running hot with fervor, while inside, after Miao Lishan came home from work, she could no longer hold up and collapsed on the living room floor.

"I pinched her awake and then she went back to her room. She won’t let me call the hospital. Go and take a look—she won’t say a word and won’t even drink a spoonful of porridge."

"Don’t alarm my dad."

Rushing back in haste, after giving that instruction, Zhou Jiao didn’t bother to say more to Aunt Chen and pushed open the bedroom door. Faced with her mother lying on the bed, the pillow wet, she didn’t know how she should comfort her.

She wanted to cry too!

Zhou Jiao took off her coat and shoes, got onto the bed, and held her tightly, gently patting her mother’s closed eyes. The only words she kept repeating were: "It’s okay, it’s okay..."

She wasn’t just comforting her grieving mother—she was comforting herself even more.

Miao Lishan put her arms around her in return, burying her face in her daughter’s shoulder and letting out wave after wave of stifled sobs.

Droplets of tears slid down into Zhou Jiao’s neck, stinging her eyes red. She must not cry! She absolutely must not cry! Her husband, her sons were still fine!

When she had cried herself out, Miao Lishan drifted into sleep.

Zhou Jiao stared at her mother’s perpetually knitted brows and let out a faint sigh.

Actually, on the day Zhang Guoqing departed, her mother must already have known, right? While she herself was tossing and turning, sleepless all night, what their parents were suffering would hardly be less than what she bore.

What lay ahead was the truly hard battle; she had to hold the line!

Once she collected herself, Zhou Jiao quietly climbed out of bed. After taking her mother’s pulse, she tucked the blanket around her, rubbed her own face hard, and stepped out of the room.

Aunt Chen looked at Zhou Jiao standing dazed in the courtyard, sighed to herself, turned back into the kitchen, and when she came out again she was carrying a bowl of porridge. She gave Zhou Jiao a little nudge.

"Drink some. You still have to hold this family together; only if the rear is stable can you keep Xiao Wu and the others from worrying. Don’t fret—if anything happens to others, nothing will happen to them."

"Whose kids are like ours, starting training when they were tiny, going to the army for drills from childhood? Other kids might get scraped up or hurt a bit, but every time yours come home, aren’t they always perfectly fine?"

Aunt Chen carefully lifted the bowl in one hand and took her hand with the other. "Look at Mr. Cheng—just those one or two moves of his, and back then he could kill plenty of little devils. And hasn’t he come through it all without a scratch?

Then look at Mr. Tan—his eldest son was trained by his own hand, and they all say he’s the heir to some kind of boxing style, yet under Xiao Wu and his father’s hands he can’t even last five moves."

Zhou Jiao tugged at the corner of her mouth and forced out a faint smile.

Aunt Chen set the bowl into her hands and went on, "Good people are rewarded. Over all these years, how many people have you saved, how many people have you helped? Heaven sees it all. Don’t worry, the chief won’t let anything happen to them."

In the past, Aunt Chen had known how many people the Zhou Family had helped and saved over the last twenty years. But starting from the latter half of last year, people had kept coming to the door to express their thanks; as she mulled it over, she gradually put the pieces together.

After Zhou Jiao finished the bowl of rice porridge, she glanced once more toward the South, then, a beat late, nodded: life still had to go on; she still had to keep watch over the rear for them.

When Miao Lishan woke up from that sleep, she was a bit drained in spirit, but after reading the letters the Ping An Brothers had left for her, she at least managed to drink a bowl of porridge.

That night, Zhou Xiaozheng still did not return to Da Hongmen.

In the brief phone call they had, mother and daughter tacitly chose to play deaf and dumb; they no longer wanted to distract him and weigh him down with worries about home.

Although Zhou Xiaozheng had recently been busy with official duties and had had little time to see them, this was the biggest matter at hand, and the pressure he was bearing would not be less than theirs.

During this period, Mr. Zhang and Mother Zhang, back home in the Northeast, called the house with Zhang the Second accompanying them. Apparently, the phone at Zhang Guoqing’s unit couldn’t get through.

Exhausted in body and mind, Zhou Jiao didn’t bother with these details. She no longer had the energy to take care of an elderly couple; she could only choose to conceal the truth.

Sometimes, not knowing and not having to endure the torment is, in its way, a blessing.

On the surface, nothing in this home seemed to have changed, but in truth, everything was different.

Besides going to work, Miao Lishan started spending all her time with several sutra books. Whenever she had a moment she would pray and chant scriptures, and she even decided that until the children came home, she would stick to vegetarian food.

It was said this was a method Old Mrs. Cheng had suggested to her.

Zhou Jiao didn’t stop her.

Though she felt it was a bit odd that her mother, still young, had started seeking out gods and buddhas, having a spiritual anchor to lean on so she could be comforted and not feel at a loss was still better than letting her mind run wild all day long.

A week later, Zhou Jiao took the accumulated days off she had earned, emptied out more than half of the supplies in her "space," stowed them away in two other concealed basement rooms in the old house, and then returned home.

Facing Miao Lishan coming home from work, Zhou Jiao finally said the one sentence she had most wanted to say during this period: "Mom, I’m going to leave for a while."