After breakfast the next morning, Li Long went with the others to haul bricks from the brickworks. It was farther away than the sandpit, and the road was rougher. Plenty of handcarts, animal-drawn carts, and tractors came here for bricks, churning up the dirt road until a thick layer of fine dust lay loose on its surface. Whenever a tractor passed, it left what looked like a sandstorm behind it. Li Long was better off up front, but the men riding in the trailer to load bricks suffered. Dust coated their heads and faces. By the time they reached the brickworks, they looked as if they had stepped out of the Terracotta Army-figures made of dirt.
"Ptooey! Ptooey!" Several laborers climbed down and vigorously slapped the dust off themselves. One went to find the person in charge while still brushing himself off. Quite a few handcarts and animal-drawn carts were already waiting to load, so someone needed to coordinate things. More people were arriving behind them, too. Taking their place in line was one thing; seeing whether they could jump the queue was another.
The work was no longer paid on a flat, all-inclusive basis. Loading more earned them bonuses.
Sitting on the tractor, Li Long looked around. The brickworks had two kilns, both long and rectangular. Each firing looked capable of producing plenty of bricks. When he had bought bricks to build his house and pave the floor, his eldest older brother, Li Jianguo, had told him that brick prices depended on coal prices at this time. The main raw materials were coal and earth. Earth needed no explanation: scrape away the unsuitable surface soil, impurities, and Gobi stones, and everything underneath could be used.
But coal had to be bought. Although the kilns mainly burned coal fines, those