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Chapter 102: Chapter 98 Selling Money
Just past eight o’clock that evening, Wang Dashuan hurried home cloaked in the night.
The pork weighed a total of one hundred seventy-eight pounds, and since it was home-raised with plenty of fat, the price was higher this time. They got one yuan and fifty cents per pound, totaling two hundred sixty-seven yuan.
Shen Yunfang counted out eighty-nine yuan and pushed it to Dashuan’s wife, as agreed. She didn’t care how much the pork sold for; she would only take one yuan per pound, and the rest was for Dashuan and his wife.
But this time, Dashuan’s wife refused to take anything, her reasoning simple. When they sold wild boar meat, it was because the wild boar was found for free that she had the nerve to take so much money. But now, the pig was raised by Shen Yunfang with a year’s hard work. She didn’t have the face to take a third of the earnings for doing nothing; that would be too inhuman, so she insisted on refusing it.
However, Shen Yunfang didn’t see it that way. Without Brother Dashuan’s help in selling, she would have worked hard for a year and, at most, sold one pig for just over one hundred yuan. But now she had sold it for much more, and even kept the pig’s head and offal. So no matter how she calculated it, the deal was fair for her, and the money should belong to Dashuan’s family.
The two women went back and forth, neither willing to take advantage of the other. In the end, Dashuan couldn’t stand it anymore and directly said neither should argue. In his view, they should do as last time, with him taking twenty cents for every pound of pork and the rest going to Shen Yunfang.
After some thought, both women accepted this arrangement. In the end, out of the two hundred sixty-seven yuan, Shen Yunfang took two hundred thirty yuan, and Dashuan’s wife took thirty-seven yuan.
Everyone was happy with the outcome.
Early the next morning, Elder Shen visited Shen Yunfang’s house and went straight to the backyard to check on the remaining pig in the pen. Perhaps it was psychological, but he felt the pig seemed listless.
He observed for a while and then went inside to find Yunfang.
"Yunfang, I think the remaining pig in your house seems listless. It hasn’t caught the infection, has it?" He pondered over this all night. With the pig that died yesterday being so sick, could Yunfang’s remaining pig be alright?
Shen Yunfang was taken aback. She had been thinking about repeating the trick to let the remaining pig fall ill in a few days, but her uncle was more worried.
"That couldn’t be," Shen Yunfang replied instinctively.
"I’m not so sure. How about this: the pig you have isn’t small anymore. Don’t wait any longer. Slaughter it soon and turn it over to the state. If it really gets sick, then you won’t be able to fulfill this year’s pig quota," Elder Shen considered this matter.
Only then did Yunfang remember that pig raising now came with quotas, and she hadn’t thought about the need to sell to the state at all. Ah, she had almost hindered her uncle again.
"Alright, uncle, whatever you say goes. I’ll listen to you."
So, in a flurry, Elder Shen found people to kill the pig. They were busy all morning, and Wang Dashuan helped her deliver one hundred pounds of pork to the foodstuff collection station, fulfilling her pork quota for the year.
There were two ways to deliver the quota pig: one was to take the live pig directly, at fifty cents per pound, just needing to reach one hundred thirty-five pounds. The other was to slaughter it at home and deliver one hundred pounds of pork at sixty-five cents per pound, roughly the same as delivering one hundred thirty-five pounds of a live pig.
For the remaining pork, Elder Shen asked around the village. If someone wanted it, they should quickly come to Shen Yunfang’s place for an exchange. If no one wanted it, the rest of the pork would be sold to the state.
In the village, Yunfang’s pork wasn’t sold for money, but bartered for grain—five pounds of rice or eight pounds of paddy per pound of pork. Flour could be used too—four pounds of flour for one pound of pork, or ten pounds of corn for one pound.
She didn’t lack money temporarily, but grain, mainly because grain was even harder to procure than money.
This year, Gaijiatun had a bumper harvest, and it was rare for any family to slaughter a pig at this time, so there were a few who were willing to barter grain for meat.
The entire pig weighed over two hundred pounds. After slaughtering and trimming the less desirable parts, there were one hundred and sixty pounds of meat left. Selling it to the county’s subsidiary foodstuffs acquisition station netted her sixty-five yuan. The remaining sixty pounds of meat were bartered for thirty-four pounds of meat, and Shen Yunfang got a hundred and seventy pounds of paddy rice, twenty pounds of white flour, and eighty pounds of corn. She took the remaining twenty-six pounds of meat to Elder Shen’s house in exchange for some grain and ten pounds of meat, and asked Elder Shen’s wife to help arrange two tables of food to treat these relatives and friends. It was just a gesture. 𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒑𝒖𝒃.𝙘𝙤𝒎
Of the remaining sixteen pounds of meat, she still gave two pounds to Brother Dashuan’s wife. She couldn’t let them work for nothing after all. The rest she kept for herself; after all, she had put in a lot of effort to raise the pig for a year and naturally wanted to keep some for herself to enjoy.
Anyway, after the pig was slaughtered, it put to rest one of Shen Yunfang’s concerns. Most people in the village felt sorry for her. She had gone to great lengths to raise a pig for a year, and just when she was about to get through it, she had to sell it cheap because of an illness. It seemed like a year’s effort had been wasted. This indirectly caused some people who had been itching to raise more pigs the following year to become hesitant, until several pig-raising households sold their pork normally at the end of the year and things started to look up.
Shen Yunfang wasn’t aware of these things; before winter, she still had a lot of work to do.
First of all, she needed to gather the radishes and cabbages in the back yard. Then, she spent a whole evening pickling a large vat of sauerkraut. After clearing the land next to the house in the back yard, she asked Brother Dashuan and his wife to help set up a plastic greenhouse, which was about the size of one and a half rooms.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to make it larger, but as the weather cools down in winter, it’s hard to keep a large space warm. With a greenhouse this size, Shen Yunfang also installed two stoves inside and built a chimney that connected to the indoor chimney, so the house could be heated both inside and out, making everywhere cozy.
This was a big project, and it took several people half a month to finish.
Afterward, she built a fence about waist-high around the two stoves to keep the chickens from getting too close and accidentally roasting themselves.
Once the initial construction of the greenhouse was finished, she put more than eighty chickens and ducks inside. Of course, this was not the end; Shen Yunfang had already planned to make nests out of straw for each of the hens when she had time, making their lives more comfortable.
After all this work, Shen Yunfang still made sure to gather firewood from the forest during her free time. This time, she needed firewood not only to heat the house but also for the greenhouse, so she required even more and had to work harder.
Then, in the mornings and evenings, she started to butcher chickens and ducks at home.
The chickens and ducks at home had grown quite big. It was wasteful to feed those that couldn’t lay eggs any longer, so it was better to kill them for meat.
There were in total ten roosters at home. She kept two of the young roosters for mating next year and butchered the remaining eight without any hesitation. She plucked them and then tossed them into her space.
She didn’t plan to sell these chickens; they were home-raised and better kept for her own consumption.
The feathers she plucked, she didn’t throw away, but saved the downy ones to make herself a chicken feather mattress for the kang, which would definitely be warm.
She butchered two ducks, not keeping any of the drakes. With the eight female ducks remaining, she hoped to have enough eggs for her own use next year. As for selling them, she thought better of it. They didn’t fetch a good price, and weren’t as popular as chicken eggs.
As for the geese, they were still a bit young, and Shen Yunfang didn’t have the heart to kill them. She decided to keep them over the winter and think about butchering them next spring.
After finishing these tasks, it was nearly November, and Shen Yunfang received another letter from Li Hongjun.
