There were many aspects involved here, such as Uncle Three’s business in the village and the relationship between our family and the main family, so my father, as the head of this family, naturally had to handle everything carefully. But he was also the kind of person who took an honest approach, had a traditional style of work, and believed in working hard until he died. Naturally, he wasn’t good at dealing with such complicated situations, so I figured he was a little worried about the emergence of such a situation.
I couldn’t help him with this kind of thing. On the one hand, I didn’t know about the situation and couldn’t differentiate between the old men in the family to determine their seniority so I could only pretend to be clueless; on the other hand, even if something embarrassing happened, the Wu family’s ancestral hall couldn’t be sold since it was really the only one that could be managed. So, there was nothing to lose. According to my mother, it was high time to distance myself from these things since they were arduous and thankless tasks.
But this matter was quite fascinating. As they were all smoking and pondering over it while warming up, I was stuck in the middle listening, which was a bit fun.
Biao Gong mentioned a possibility: this coffin was placed on the lowest level, so it was only natural that it was the oldest one. It probably housed someone from our great-great-grandfather’s generation who lived during the Jiaqing period. (1) It may be that this ancestor had a concubine that he doted on, and although she couldn’t be added to the genealogical record on the tombstone, she was secretly buried in the ancestral tomb.
A search of the genealogical record showed that it was impossible. This great-great-grandfather died before his wife and she was the one who had made the funeral arrangements. According to the social ethics at that time, it was unlikely that such a thing would happen. Moreover, once they became rich and wealthy in this line of work, they would desperately search for a wife, afraid that the family line would end with them. My grandmother was from a good family and gave birth to three children. There must have been one brood after another in the village since love was basically not an integral part of life at that time.
Anyways, could the body have been damaged? Maybe something happened during a job and the whole body wasn’t recovered so they buried it first. Later, the rest was dug up and buried in two separate coffins. Uncle Two shook his head at this nonsense, saying that in this kind of situation, it was absolutely necessary to open the coffin and re-bury it. The ancestral grave wasn’t a freezer where you put your head on the top shelf and your bottom on the lower shelf and exchanged them whenever you liked.
After hearing this disturbing analogy, the surrounding people frowned and smoked faster than even incense could burn.
I was thinking about it myself, but the strangest thing to me was that the coffin had no name on it. According to the custom here, it was very humiliating not to inscribe a name on the coffin. Since coffins were qualified for burial in ancestral graves, it was impossible to receive such treatment. In this way, I felt that there may not be a corpse in this extra coffin.
It was meaningless to think about it, however, since there was essentially no basis for reference regarding the situation. I thought this was the case, but then again, I was totally guessing.
At that moment, Uncle Three suddenly raised a possibility, “Everyone knows what our ancestors did. Do you think one of them, for whatever reason, hid something in the ancestral grave?”
When Uncle Three said this, the other people’s faces changed.
Although this statement sounded shocking, it was also a possibility since people in this line of work would definitely be willing to do something out of line. Compared to those who made baseless conjectures, I felt that this possibility was still a little more likely.
Everyone looked at each other, not knowing how to react. Uncle Two clicked his tongue, seemingly wanting to refute it, but Biao Gong suddenly stood up and said to us, “Stop thinking about it, damn it. Just open it up and take a look!”
<Extra 1.5> <Table of Contents><Extra 1.7>
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TN Notes:
(1) Any time from 1760-1820
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Updated 11/21/2021
MereBear's Translation 